Top Lines, Bottom Lines, Boundaries & Choosing Top Line Recovery w/ Jonathan L

Narrator: This is Pathway to Recovery, an SA Lifeline Foundation podcast featuring hosts Tara McCausland, who is the SA Lifeline Executive Director, and Justin B., a sex addict living in long-term recovery. We have conversations with experts and individuals who understand the pathway to healing from sexual addiction and betrayal trauma because we believe that recovering individuals leads to the healing of families.

Tara McCausland: of families. Welcome to the Pathway to Recovery Podcast. I am your host, Tara McCausland, and we have a special episode for you today because guess what? I have my counterpart here, Jonathan L., as our guest. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan L: Thanks. I don't know if you classify it as special, but I, I feel special. So thank you for that.

Tara McCausland: We thought actually that it would be good for you to learn a little bit more about the man behind the mic. Jonathan has his own story, of course, and I think a lot of wisdom to share from that perspective. So we'll hear more about your story, Jonathan. But before we get into that, I actually wanted to just do a quick shout out to Pathway to Recovery Podcast. Now, first of all, I want to thank Jonathan and also Justin for making this happen, because this hasn't been a solo act for me, but we are nearing 3 years this May of Pathway to Recovery Podcast and 100 episodes.

So that's a huge deal. And so thank you, Jonathan, for helping us hit these milestones. It's been amazing. One of my favorite things that I get to do is to meet Pathway to Recovery Podcast listeners. And just this last week at the 12-step conference, I had the opportunity to meet some of our listeners and I do a lot of like not fun stuff as an administrator of a nonprofit, but one of my favorite things is to meet people whose lives are being blessed by this effort.

And so I just wanted to give a shout out to those people that were at the SAL 12-Step Conference that came and, and spoke with me. And to you as a listener, if this has blessed your life, if this has made a difference, I'm going to invite you again to rate and review this podcast. It makes a difference. It helps people find it. And I won't tell you how many times people have come to me and said, I heard the podcast and it brought me to a meeting.

So, this makes a difference. Rate and review help make it more visible, and thanks in advance. So, okay. Today, we're going to be talking about bottom lines and boundaries and top lines for safety. But before we delve into that, I wanted Jonathan to share his story and shed some light on how bottom lines and boundaries have been important for your safety. So with that, Jonathan, go ahead.

Jonathan L: Yeah, no, I, I'm in a weird space now because I'm not usually on this side of it. So now I have to think differently, which I'm fine to do. But I grew up in that generation that we're seeing a lot of folks kind of come up out of the woodwork now, this generation that we started off on bicycles in the neighborhood and we had one landline and internet wasn't really much of a thing. to being the generation as teenagers who had smartphones.

I mean, we, the full spectrum now, right? And those technological advances, those changes are really a big part of what happened in my story where really great childhood. I grew up in a fantastic home, loving parents. Things were going really well. And at some point in kind of my adolescent years, I accessed the internet and discovered that there were a lot of things on there. And I had lots of questions and was raised under the impression that Any questions you asked, you could, you could find an answer for them on the internet.

And my dad, who, I mean, he was an IT specialist, he was someone who understood a lot of these technologies, but what he didn't understand was just what was accessible on the internet at that time. And we started experiencing, I started experiencing a lot of personal turmoil in those adolescent years that really just pushed this rhetoric forward. So I started to search up sexual content and information on the internet. And that led into me being exposed to not productive education resources, but rather destructive ones, which started this cycle of addiction.

And so it began as this, this almost an educational curiosity for me that then invoked feelings, a physical response. And then in a few years into this kind of process of learning about this, and when I had questions, I'd go here intermittently. I experienced a very difficult thing in my family, which was that my mother passed away from sickness. And I used this feeling that I got from looking at images or watching videos or what have you into a way to cope, a mechanism to help me cope with this.

And it's one of those things that I look back and I think, well, there was a younger me who was just trying to figure out a way to process this information. Now, that directly conflicted with what I was taught was divine identity or my connection to God, who God was, what was justice, what was mercy, what was right, what was wrong. was directly in conflict with what I had become and what I was doing. And I struggled with that so hard that I decided that the best way to avoid it was to suppress and compartmentalize these 2 aspects of my identity and become a different person when I was at church and around other people versus when I was in private.

And those should never cross. So that began this cycle of lying and hiding and shame-driven behaviors to block off part of myself and keep that Quote unquote safe, right? So that I could find safety in that. And that progressed into later years. I decided that for the religious group that I'm a part of, I wanted to serve an ecclesiastical mission. So I wanted to go serve and preach my religion to other people in foreign countries. And in order to do that, one of the primary requirements is that you can't be engaged in this behavior.

You couldn't be engaged in it. You couldn't be looking at pornography or masturbating or doing any of this stuff. And so I approached one of our ecclesiastical leaders and discussed this with him, and he helped me get what we call white-knuckle sobriety. And from there, I went out on a mission and maintained that for a while. I came home and was not prepared to deal with the world at large of how the world is again. Same pressures, same stresses, only magnified 100 times, because now I'm in college and trying to figure this out, and started slipping back into it.

Met a great girl, and she asked me, when we were dating if I had a problem with it. And at the time, I told her I did, and it was something I was working on and getting better at. And so when I told her that, I then retroactively decided I had better be working on this and getting better at it. So more white-knuckle sobriety initiated from there into our married years. And then the books tell us this, a lot of experience I've had with other brothers tells about this, but It turns out that marriage does not solve all of the problems in sexual relationships.

And in fact, when you bring baggage in, it actually conflates, confuses, and breaks things. So I had not fixed what I needed to in order to have a healthy relationship. And quite frankly, that takes practice anyways without the negative hiding, lying, and bad things that were honestly just churning up on the back end for me. A few years into our marriage, I could not mentally take that segregation or separation of identities and still have a good relationship with my wife.

And I know that she knows and felt more than she let on to. But I came and self-disclosed about 3, 4 years into our marriage, after the birth of our first kid and coming into kind of this idea of the second kid. Yeah. Um, I self-disclosed and it was, it was crushing for her. It changed her whole perspective, her world, absolutely betrayed her trust and was just a crippling event. It put such a wedge between us and put so much fear in me and in her that I came to the conclusion that I need to change and I cannot go back.

That conclusion was held by little to nothing. There was no boundary. There was no backbone to that. There was nothing that supported that. And so obviously, as anyone who's listening and is dealing with betrayal trauma and with addiction knows, there was nothing to keep that in place. And so time went on, and of course I went back into acting out behaviors. And this then I doubled back on and said, well, based on what happened, there's no way I can ever talk about this with her again, because if I do, it's going to be the same event, only magnified.

And it's going to break her. It's going to break me. It's going to destroy our family. I can't talk about it anymore. Move forward to, and this is kind of where I'm going to get into more of the sensitive part of my story. And there may be folks who relate to this. There may be folks who this is difficult for them to hear. So hopefully, you know, take some time if you need to after hearing me talk about it to process.

But a few years later, I was standing at a window in a warehouse where I was working, looking out kind of a rainy day and thinking about how much easier it would be If I wasn't alive anymore, if I, if I ended my life, that would remove the barriers that my wife had to happiness that I was blocking, that she didn't even maybe know about. I mean, she'd said that she didn't, uh, when I disclosed. And so I'm standing there looking out of this window and I'm thinking about the possibility of ending my life.

And I said a prayer looking out this window saying, if there's anything that can make things right, And not hurt anyone else. What can I do? And in that moment, I know that some higher power—I my higher power—I believe heard this prayer, and the God of my understanding gave my wife a feeling. And so she messaged me on my phone moments after I had this prayer, saying she knew something was wrong. she didn't know what, and I needed to tell her what it was so that we could fix it.

Um, so I responded, and I— we talked, and I, I came to self-disclose again, but prompted gently by my wife, under this, this almost a warmth of this spiritual enlightenment that we both had. And as a consequence of this higher power responding to us, this was different. This time was entirely different. My wife had a cousin who had recently told her story, and her husband, uh, was, was an addict and, uh, was in recovery for 7 years prior to this event.

And so we made time to go and talk with them. It was hard. It was not easy for me because I lived with so much fear, and my wife also, so much fear for her. She wasn't sure what could be done with this. All she knew is that there was a God and he was looking out for us. And this cousin and her husband got me into SAL programs. And I began, I began recovery, which I took wholeheartedly in stride because I knew that in that prayer I had asked for an opportunity to do things right.

And I dove with both feet in. We got a therapist, we got everything. We didn't have the money, but we said, this is going to be worth it. We're going to figure it out. And I have been in the rooms of recovery since 2021 now. Um, and it has been incredible. Everything about giving myself to this program and that higher power prompting Has made me into a different, entirely different person than I was before. I am grateful for the journey that I've been on.

I am. Some people think this is crazy. I am grateful for the mistakes that I made in the sense that it brought me closer to a higher power, to my God and to my wife, and made us be able to trust each other again in a way that I don't think we could have if we hadn't both been working to overcome this. It was. in the end, this work was the glue that brought us closer together than we were before all of this had happened.

So anyway, I went from a window in a foggy day considering if I was going to go end my life and thinking of plans of how to sitting in this room with you and talking and having absolutely no reason to ever want to leave this because this is, I mean, life is beautiful. It's wonderful. So here we are.

Tara McCausland: That is a tender experience. Thank you for sharing all of that. And for those who are listening, I hope that while it can feel triggering to hear a story where there's been addiction and that's led to suicidal ideation, first of all, we can acknowledge that this is a hard reality, that it is not uncommon for many people who struggle with addictive behaviors to experience suicidal ideation. In addition to that, people who are struggling with trauma, betrayal trauma may also experience suicidal ideation as well as a desire to self-harm, because all of this is hard to hold.

It's incredibly painful. So I just want to acknowledge that that's hard, but also, um, help people understand this is not an uncommon thing. I want to say right now, because Jonathan is sitting across from me virtually, but sitting across from me, and I see the light in him and the goodness and what he's done with his story, So if you're in a really dark space, choose life and choose recovery. There is hope and light ahead. So anyway, thank you, Jonathan.

Yeah. But I wanna go back to some pieces of your story that I think ought to be underlined. For a lot of people, where they start might be a little bit different, right? It could be curiosity, which was your story, and naivety. You had no idea what you were really getting yourself into. You probably understood early on, and maybe you can confirm this, this probably isn't the right thing, but you didn't realize, oh, hello porn, you're here to ruin my life.

Probably never processed, right?

Jonathan L: No, absolutely not. I mean, this, this is something that it, it lures the user in, the addict in under the pretense of being a friend. Yeah, it, it did for me, at least in the beginning. And the only thing I had were kind of vague warnings in the beginning of like, this'll be kind of bad. for your life. But it wasn't until I was in it and far along that I could start seeing like, oh, this is where this is going.

Or even worse, sometimes I would look over what felt like a black pit and be like, I don't know that there's an actual bottom to how bad this could get, if that makes sense.

Tara McCausland: So I just wanted to highlight that simply because sometimes we think like, what brought me here? And maybe that's helpful to look back at the breadcrumb story of like, beginning point to where I am now. There's a beginning point, but maybe what's more important is, is what are you doing right now with that story and that experience? And are you willing to do something different if what you have done isn't working? And I— and that was something else that stood out to me, that for you, you know, you knew how to white-knuckle.

You could be white-knuckle sober for how long?

Jonathan L: I mean, from the course of almost 2 and a half years at one point.

Tara McCausland: Yeah, that is a drum that we beat really hard here at SA Lifeline and SAL 12-Step because white-knuckle abstinence is not recovery living.

Jonathan L: It's not, no. And you highlight something really important here, Tara, which is, which is this, is that a therapist once told this to me, and I've really latched on to it, was he once told me, separate this identity in you, look at your 13, 14-year-old self who began in this addictive behavior and understand him, recognize him, look at him in the eyes and say, you were trying to get away from scary, hard things. You were a kid.

You only had so much you could do. And mentally, emotionally, give that, that younger you a hug and say, and it's okay. We don't have to do that anymore because we're a grownup and we can now drive responsibly. But then that was all you knew. So I'm sorry. That's all you knew. I'm sorry. This is what you had to go through, but now I'm here to be the you, you always hoped you could be. Right? You're saying, what do I do with that story?

Here's where I go, right? I think that's so critically important for people to give that mercy and love to who they were and their story so that they can move on to love who they are.

Tara McCausland: Yeah, I love that. And I think that acknowledgement is freeing. I was doing the best that I could as a 14-year-old kid. And how old were you when your mom passed?

Jonathan L: Uh, 14. Yeah.

Tara McCausland: You were 14. Okay. So That is a traumatic event, losing your mom. That is, that's hard business. So I can see that, that, that could have been one of the driving experiences that led you deeper into the behavior.

Jonathan L: Yeah, it became the place I could go to get a high and then a numbness, right? Because ultimately, I realized later as I went through therapy that my goal actually, for a lot of time, was not the high. The goal was numb. To be emotionally numb as much as possible all the time, which that led to the darkness that I felt throughout my pre-recovery life was I was in a numb place. And why live if you're always numb?

Does that make sense?

Tara McCausland: So I, I love that you're talking about how that therapist was like, you know, you look at that 14-year-old kid in the eyes and say, you were doing the best you could. Acknowledge, be compassionate to 14-year-old Jonathan. Yeah. And now as an adult, you get to choose accountability. So I think sometimes it's easy to get stuck in that victim, like, I didn't have any other choice. I was in this really hard spot. And you were. Yeah.

But now you know better, and now you know about tools and opportunities. And so I think that acknowledgement is freeing and that accountability will serve you well now.

Jonathan L: Absolutely. That's, that's the point of coming into these rooms is to say, yes, you give that compassion, that love to the younger you, right? You say, I'm sorry, this is what you went through. And I'm sorry, that's all you had to work with. We're past that now though. The ability to say that was wrong. That's not the right way to do it. I still love you, but we have to do it differently. And let's get the tools and the skills and the, the emotional maturity we need now to live as an adult, right?

Yeah. 100%. Now we're moving out of that space, and I have to accept I have to have— be responsible for these things and accountable, right?

Tara McCausland: Yeah. Okay, so we're gonna kind of zero in on now this idea that we do need to have a plan, right? You put this so well in the sharing of your story. Like, you had said, never again, after your first disclosure to your wife, correct? Never going to turn back to this. But that is a very hard promise to keep when you have no plan in place, no boundaries, no safety net, right? Because that's what you knew before, and that's how you coped.

It's really important for people to recognize white-knuckle sober is not recovery. This is a different way of life, a different way of being. So tell me about that transition. You started SAL 12-step, you started therapy. What did the new life look like in terms of top lines, bottom lines, and boundaries? And should we first define these for people, Jonathan?

Jonathan L: Yeah, maybe. Yeah, give them, give them the definitions from the book, Tara.

Tara McCausland: Okay, so, um, if you have an SAL book, our second edition, and if you don't, I would encourage you to get one, but, um, there is a glossary in the back. And so this is where I'm getting these definitions. But let's start off with top lines. So top lines are positive affirming behaviors we choose to include in our lives. Top lines support healthy living physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. And we know, if you, if you're familiar with the circle models, that someone that's in the thick of addiction physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, they're all dysregulated, all out of whack, out of balance.

And so these top lines are going to help you be more intentional and caring for these important aspects of yourself. Jonathan, do you have your book where you could read a A definition?

Jonathan L: Let me pull my book up really quickly. Okay, so bottom lines. Bottom lines, like guardrails, define certain behaviors we choose to abstain from for our own safety and growth. When strictly adhered to, bottom lines help sex addicts and betrayed partners maintain their own recovery and protect their own emotional well-being. For sex addicts, bottom lines are certain behaviors that they must avoid, such as compulsive sexual activities, in order to prevent lapse or relapse. Now, for betrayed partners, bottom lines may also include certain behaviors to avoid, such as behaviors that trigger hypervigilance.

Bottom lines also include certain boundaries betrayed partners will not tolerate, such as dishonesty or infidelity, to ensure that their own safety and trust is kind of upheld in that relationship. Bottom lines are set by an individual for himself or herself and not by someone else.

Tara McCausland: So So for our listeners, top lines are things we do for healthy living. Bottom lines are things we abstain from or avoid for protection, for safety. And then boundaries come alongside bottom lines. So boundaries support and enforce established bottom lines. Boundaries may include an if-then statement that describes certain actions or consequences when a bottom line is broken. Okay. So with that in mind, for context listeners, Jonathan, tell me a little bit about how you got started with top lines, bottom lines, boundaries, and how those have provided a guardrail and safety so that you could work recovery from a place of confidence, not just, I'm gonna hold on tight today and I'm gonna see if I can make it.

Jonathan L: Yeah. Aside from usually what a lot of people will talk about, which is, you know, we have disclosure, Boundaries that are tied to these things. So like, if I am dishonest or if I act out, then I have 24 hours to tell my wife. She specifically asked for me to do disclosures in a text format on the phone so that we have space between each other for her to process that information before she sees me in person, right?

It gives this kind of safety barrier. Now, these boundaries, right? The bottom line here is that I'm going to avoid, I'm not going to act out. However, if that happens, boundary here, Uh, I have to disclose that in 24 hours. Here's the format she wants it done in. And I also need to come with the full acknowledgement that I own all of that, right? I'm not allowed to be defensive. Uh, if I get defensive, the boundary here is that we disengage.

There's this normal dynamic kind of thing that if you're with a therapist, that's kind of a good standard baseline. They'll give you something similar to that. What I want to talk about here is an experience I had where we moved into a top-line behavior based on this dynamic. We had all that in the baseline of here's the bottom line. And what would be the biggest thing I'd run into is whenever my wife would plan to go on trips or leave, even for a night, there was a gloom, like a darkness in the air around our house of like, is tonight going to be the night where something wrong happens?

Because she's out of the house. I have free rein, right? And I looked at those with like this feeling of terror of like, I'm going to be alone with myself. And I did not have a lot of trust in me, especially in that first year of recovery. It was very hard. But something happened. I had a sponsor who really got me onto this, this idea of what can you do to change that behavior from a fear to an opportunity for success?

And so this is the way it changed. I looked at when my wife leaves the house, I have an opportunity to do something really, really special, which is I earn trust with myself and I earn trust with my wife. And while I can't control the scale or the proportion to which I earn trust with my wife, and it's a lot of her side of the street to decide like what she How she's going to interpret it and what she'll do with that.

It's still there. It's a trust that's built. Now I can celebrate those things. I can be excited. I can, you know, like when she comes home, I can say, I made a treat. I wanted to celebrate the fact that like I kept boundaries. Things went really well. I'm excited about it. And so I'm going to have this treat and I have something for you too. Welcome back home. I'm so glad you're here. Right. Or I found opportunities to say when she was leaving, I would say there's a project around the house that needs to be done.

If I can get this project done, I'm going to celebrate with you because it's something you want done too. But in the background of that, there was this really cool thing that would happen where I would earn trust with myself and my wife again, that I would use that time productively. And I found so much joy and light in the fact that this now was what once was a boundary that we looked at and we were afraid of that was tied to, well, it was a bottom line with a boundary and put a lot of fear and gloom in the air.

I could actually approach it as if it was a top-line behavior and it did become a top-line behavior. It built a lot of security in our home knowing there was a pattern we could follow where I could say, I'm going to do this project, or I'm going to, here's what I'll be doing. Here's my plan. And then following through on that. And even little things that started out, I was just, I felt so much energy and excitement about it.

And that kickstarted a lot of positive recovery in our household for both of us, actually.

Tara McCausland: I love that, Jonathan. And I think very often people can look at boundaries particularly as bad, scary, 'cause that's the consequence if I mess up, or bottom lines like, oh, those are the things I have to avoid, and I'm just trying not to look at it or think about it. Right. Yeah. But I like how you kind of turned that on its head by looking at it like, okay, how can I add a top line to this?

So this doesn't evoke fear. It becomes an opportunity actually to build trust with yourself and with your wife. So it's like you're killing two birds with one stone. This is a win-win opportunity. Yeah. An opportunity to— that you could even look forward to in an odd sort of way. Whereas before it was a scary, hard thing. So for our listeners, I hope that you'll consider this experience that Jonathan has just shared. First of all, do you have any top lines, bottom lines, and boundaries?

And is there anything that's particularly hard for you that you could kind of flip on its head and create a top line and get really creative? Can you share more about what, what are your top lines, the things that you do on a day-to-day basis or strive to do to help you stay in a healthy place mentally, physically, spiritually, et cetera?

Jonathan L: I, I've had this talk with a couple of brothers in recovery. When I first started, my sponsor did something incredible for me. He took the Vision for You and he said, this is a great bit, but it's not personalized. A lot of these things are great and you will get these promises, but there's so much more that could come from a Promise for You if you just did one for yourself. What does recovery look like for you when it's actually in full swing?

What kind of person do you want to be? And Boy, I've done that with all my sponsees now because it just, it changes everything. My perspective, it changed everything. Another reframing way to look at this is in recovery, I spent almost all of my emotional energy and time finding ways to lie, keep my lies hidden, find ways to justify all of my behaviors. And there was so much time and energy spent on that. And then back to the suicidal ideation, I spent a lot of time focusing on that near the end as well.

When I came into recovery, I first, obviously, I was very sad. Like, I was very shameful and afraid, and I had a lot of these negative feelings. And one day something clicked in me where I realized something when I did this exercise with my sponsor, that now all of that energy that I was expending on the addiction is free and available. I can use this for something. And so I, instead of telling myself, oh, we have young kids and you know, I'm in this fatherhood phase and I can't really do much.

I instead went, sky's the limit. What am I going to do? What am I going to do with me? Who can I become? And I started researching exercise routines. I started looking into how to play the piano more. I started looking at doodling and drawing nature and pictures and things like that, learning about computers and like following kind of my dad's, the aspirations I got from him, improving my career, improving my relationship, right? Like I found out that I can live a life that's driven by top lines.

I can live positive sobriety or a positive recovery, something that actually builds something on top of it. And the weight of the addiction coming off was just this eye-opening thing. Now, I recognize that people still make mistakes, and there was probably an inevitable point. It was hard in the beginning. I told myself, I'm never going to relapse. I'm never going to make another mistake. But I finally realized something, that mistakes just shouldn't stop me from seeking top lines anymore.

I follow the boundaries. They're there for safety and keeping everyone good. And, you know, They're hard. I don't want to devalue that, but I can live my life now directed at getting as much top-line living as possible and letting the boundaries be there for when things go wrong and work through it and grow and learn from them. Right. The same sponsor told me every time you have a mistake or an issue or something that needs to be polished up, like fixed, right, in your recovery, take these issues and use them as stepping stones to move forward.

Move towards more positive sobriety, more positive recovery. And that's why I tell people, if you feel the bug to be a sponsor, if you feel like you want to be a moderator, if you want to give back to the group, do it. That 12th step is there because it enlarges you and makes you reach for top-line living. I cannot stress how much that is the shift from a— I call it with my sponsees a negative sobriety, which is I'm sober but for all the wrong reasons, and I'm looking at everything I have to take out of my life.

Whereas live in a positive recovery, which is what now can I add to my life because I've got all this space? Does that make sense?

Tara McCausland: Oh yeah. Well, and I've said this before, but I think what you just expressed is like the negative sobriety is pulling weeds, right? And that is a heck of a lot of no fun. But when it's Saturday at my house and we have to weed the garden, my kids are like, oh. And I'm like, I know, I hate pulling weeds, but the alternative is to plant flowers, right? And the more flowers we're planting, the less space there is for those weeds to grow.

And so I love that perspective, that reframing, which can be so powerful. So this top line living, so cool. So let's delve a little bit more into the bottom lines, even though that's the less fun space. These are the guardrails. This is what provides the safety So what are some of those that you'd be willing to share for us?

Jonathan L: Absolutely. So obviously, I've shared a little bit of the very baseline bottom line stuff, which is we don't, we don't view pornography, we don't masturbate, we don't look for sexual explicit content, right? In our house, my wife has this phrase that I love that I don't remember where she got it from. So I'm not going to credit the right person. But it's if it turns you on, turn it off, right? Like, that's kind of a phrase we have in our house.

And there's a lot of other things in that space, that there are bottom lines. But the thing I kind of want to talk about here is that if you're living in positive recovery, you can actually raise your bottom lines from that space. That's my base bottom line, the very bottom. But I found opportunities to be like, but where could I— where's a higher place I could live? And I don't mean this to be overzealous or anything like that.

But there's, there's been things where I go, my wife and I did this, we got into recovery, we looked at Facebook, and we said, Do we need Facebook? Like, it drains our energy. We spend so much time scrolling. It actually has a lot of explicit content on it or suggestive content on it. Do we need this? We decided we didn't. So we raised the bottom line and said, we're not going to have Facebook anymore. And we cut it out.

It was gone. That was a bottom line for both of us. No more Facebook, no more Instagram. We started getting rid of things. I mean, left and right that didn't serve us anymore. We started changing diets. We started like, we built new bottom lines, but they were bottom lines that were no longer like I avoid this because it's made someone else sad. We realized that you could almost interlock your higher, your top lines with your bottom lines.

Like you could, you could push your bottom up so that your highs could be higher, if that makes sense. Like you could reach higher because you were stepping up from where you were. We realized that I can avoid more things in my life that just don't serve me and live better so I can reach higher. Another good example of this is, um, My wife has some dietary stuff, and so we had to change the way that we eat.

And so I decided that my top line is I'm going to learn more about cooking. And so I learned more about cooking. I cook all our meals, and now I also cook them in a way that meets her dietary restrictions most of the time. And that was unifying for us. So we have bottom lines of things we don't eat, and we're looking for new dishes to create that meet the criteria that we need. It's again, this thing of like, You live in a boundary zone where it's, there's a bottom line and there's a top line and the boundaries keep you kind of in this space, but you're free to adjust that upward as much as you want to, like live the life you want to live.

That's real positive recovery. Again, move your bottoms up.

Tara McCausland: Oh, this is so good, Jonathan. And I love again, how you're reframing this for people and for me as a part of the addictive pattern, a cycle. Everyone, if they've really examined their patterns, they had rituals that would lead them into acting out behaviors. That probably looks a little bit different for everyone, but, you know, maybe taking the phone into the bathroom or scrolling on Facebook or whatever. And so I like this idea of raising your bottom lines so that The way of life and the habits that you're developing are keeping you closer to your top lines.

So if your bottom lines are really low, like I'm not going to look at porn versus I'm not going to have Facebook because I know that's a gateway for me, um, you're going to be that much safer. And for some people who are just entering this world, you might be feeling completely overwhelmed, like I am not ready to make this many changes in my life, and that feels like total deprivation. But what would you say to somebody who's, who's feeling like this sounds overwhelming, this sounds like an ideal I can't reach?

What advice would you give them?

Jonathan L: Yeah, so we had this therapist that we went to for 2 years. We loved him. He was an incredible guy. Our youngest son's middle name is named after this therapist. He changed our lives. Um, and I remember him, I remember expressing this exact idea to him. I said, I'm never going to be good enough. For this ideal. And he looked me square in the eyes and said, I know, and you know, you only have to be as good as you are right now today.

And I know that sounds maybe a little amorphous or a little like not quite on the nose, but he helped me realize I can't be anything different than I am at this moment in this moment. So I accept that. I say, here's where I am. Then he said, but you can always take 1%. And this is a very famous concept, 1% better every day, right? Yeah. But for me, I look at it and say, I say, that sounds good.

That sounds like a good thing. Things are either good or bad when you put them into your life. Hard does not make something good or bad. Hard is just hard. Easy is just easy. But I look at it and say, is that good? And then I say to myself, am I ready for that good? And if I'm not ready for that good, I say, what is a small good I can do today that gets me closer to that good?

There's an objectivity we lose with our emotions when we're hit with a change. When I'm told you need to step outside your comfort zone, I have to say, well, what is the need? And if the need is for me to become a better person that will make my life better and other people around me, I say that's a necessary step. How big of a step can I take today or tomorrow? And taking that step, the beauty of it with boundaries is I can go, when I take that step, what is the boundary that keeps me in this new circle?

When it does get uncomfortable, what's going to keep me right here? Until that feels comfortable. And then I can take one more step the next day. It's a step-by-step process. So when people come to me and they say, I don't know that I can ever be that good, I go, I didn't know I could ever be good in the first place. Honestly, I thought that I was pretty much messed up forever. I have been working on this for 4 or 5 years now, and I've been taking little steps for 4 or 5 years.

If I started learning the guitar today, I would be bad today, but 40 years from now, I would be really good at the guitar for practicing it every single day. It's the same thing every day. Little steps. You don't have to be a master of it today. You just have to have that trajectory of I'm going to get there.

Tara McCausland: Yeah. 1% better. And even if it was 1% better one day or one week, and then the next week you kind of fall back, but then you get back on the wagon the next week, that's still progress, right? And so the getting rid of this perfectionist mindset of I have to hold myself to this standard perfectly or I'm no good, I'm not lovable, I'm not acceptable. You know, that, that is the antithesis of a recovery mindset. Mm-hmm. But recognizing I can set that top line, I can set that bottom line, and I can keep reaching for more, 1% each week or whatever.

With compassion and acknowledging that not every day or any day is going to be perfect. But if it's the striving, if that's the intention and we're, and we're doing it with compassion and intention, we'll get there.

Jonathan L: Yeah. And something I'll say, and I'm going to say this in complete honesty, I don't want this to sound like hyperbole. I did not do anything to deserve the goodness my wife has shown me in this process. I deserve from her only, honestly, like a lot of pushback, a lot of repel from her because I betrayed her. I did something that hurt her, and I did many things that hurt her in lots of different ways. But something happened in this, this acceptance of both of us in recovery.

We've chosen to realize that everyone we meet is going to be broken. Something is going to be wrong with everyone. Yeah. Her father gave me, uh, in our faith tradition we give blessings, and so he, he gave me this blessing. And at the end of it, he looked at me and he said, everyone has an addiction these days to something. The thing that not everyone has is the willingness to change, and that matters more than anything.

And we took that, and now we became cheerleaders for each other, even though we were hurting because of something the other person said, or we felt defensive because of things we had done. We decided that when one of the— one of us had a victory, we were going to celebrate it. And when one of us had a failure, we were going to look at it and accept it for what it was, recognize it was wrong, and be ready to move forward and acknowledge that would hurt.

We decided we were going to do that together. That is not the case that everyone gets. And I want to recognize that fully. Like my situation, my wife and I have been led by a higher power in a place that just— it worked for us. It's not always going to be the case for everyone that it's working from both sides. But if both sides are willing to work on it, something amazing can happen in this. And boundaries work, and top lines work, and bottom lines work.

All of it works. Um, but ultimately, you can only do the work that's in your boat, to quote a really great book. You can only do what's on your side of the street. At the end of the day, I think that everyone who's working recovery and really doing it should still celebrate their victories and they should recognize and acknowledge the failures and give that space to say, I'm a human and I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm also going to call them out and be accountable for them.

And I'm a human. And when I do things right, I should celebrate that. I tell my sponsees this all the time. When we hit 30 days, you go to your favorite restaurant. Like you go take your wife with you if she's willing to go have a great time. Uh, celebrate this. When you get a new chip, celebrate it. Tell her about it. Be excited about it. Engage and show your successes. When things go wrong, talk about what went wrong and why you think you need to change a bottom line or whatever.

Engage together in this. My wife will also talk to me about times where she feels angry and she needs to process those feelings. But that space to co-collaborate and build together, like, that's top-line living right there. If you can get there, that's the goal. So get with a therapist, get with a sponsor. work the program, get to that space. 'Cause that, it didn't work for me until I was doing all of 'em together.

Tara McCausland: Yeah. And I wanna just maybe give a shout out in the SAL 12-step conference, someone brought this up. Maybe it was Stephen Crosha, co-founder of SA Lifeline. I, I'm trying to remember, but it sounds to me like you've done a lot of very intentional work that your recovery didn't simply look like, I'm going to a meeting once a week, or I'll call my sponsor every once in a while when I'm feeling Like, I just need a little bit of a boost.

This sounds very, very intentional. And Stephen said, if you're going to meetings, that is not working recovery. That is a part of it. But so much of what you're talking about is happening in the quiet moments in your personal time, right? So I wanna point out for our listeners that if you're willing to do the work, as Jonathan said, May not look quite as pretty and packaged as Jonathan's situation, but there will be recovery. There will be healing.

I can't say what's going to happen with your marriage. I've seen plenty of people whose marriages fell apart even while they were making, it appeared, really honest efforts in their recovery work. So we can't make any guarantees there. But for you as an individual, we can say if you will live recovery in a very intentional way beyond just going to a meeting, there is hope for a very rich, happy life. And I think it was Josh Walpole at the conference that said, addiction is hard.

Recovery is hard. Which hard are you going to choose and which one will give you the most positive dividends?

Jonathan L: Right. Yeah. There's a really famous quote that I love. It was Jim Rohn who said this, and I love this. I have it down in our gym in our house, and it's, we all have to suffer from one of two pains. The pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces and regret weighs tons. And I, all the time, I quote this with my wife where we have to do a hard thing and we've got to do it consistently.

We've got to exercise every day or else, you know, we start to lose the fitness and we've got, we've got young children who we need to keep up with. And if we can't keep up with them, we're sunk. So we have this ideology and it's in the recovery program too. And I think everyone should subscribe to this is Especially people who feel like it's just too much. At some point, you're going to look back on your life and you're going to say, what did I do with all this?

All this time I was given. And that discipline, that daily action is actually very small every day, but it amounts to something incredible over time. But regret, as much as discipline can grow into something, your regret is a compounding interest issue. And when you get to the end of your life and you look at it and you have regrets, I know those are going to weigh the most. My discipline though is going to create who I am.

Tara McCausland: Great quote, Jonathan. This has been so good. So helpful. We have to ask our bookend question. What would you tell someone who's just starting off on their pathway to recovery? And what would you tell the person that's been doing this work for a while and they're getting a little fatigued?

Jonathan L: Yep. I almost feel like I'd say the same thing to both of them, but for the one coming in, I would definitely say, I know this is hard. And yeah, it's hard. It's super hard. And it's so worth it. Every step of recovery is worth it. Because as hard as this is, what was before is so much harder. Living in addiction is so much harder. You're not going to think that at first. But it is. It just is.

It's the ultimate weight of being bound in addiction. To someone who is getting a little fatigued and has been around for a while, I would say something very similar. Of go and reread your step 1 and think about that life for a moment. I do it often. I even have a letter that my wife wrote to me at the very beginning to explain all of the feelings that she had. And I look at these things, my step 1 and this letter that my wife gave me, and I think that cannot be easier than staying here, right?

Like, it is so much easier to be here and doing this, and it's so much more worthwhile. Yeah. So that's probably what I'd say.

Tara McCausland: I love that. Grateful for your strength, hope, and experience that you shared today. Appreciate you.

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