After having her two boys, Laura Cathcart Robbins wasn’t sleeping. An innocent prescription for Ambien turned into an addiction that almost robbed her of her children. Laura is the author of the best selling book Stash: My Life In Hiding. In this episode, Lauren and Laura go beyond the book and dive into everything postpartum mental health, healing, life as a black woman in Hollywood and motherhood.
Disclaimer: This podcast does not constitute medical advice. You should always speak to your doctor before changing your nutrition or exercise habits.
Continue the Conversation – Rock Your Wellness Podcast Official Facebook Group
Work With Me: Your Daily Journal – Wellness Reborn Intensive
Buy Stash: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Stash/Laura-Cathcart-Robbins/9781668005330
Laura’s Podcast: theonlyonepod.com
Addiction and Motherhood, with Laura Cathcart Robbins – Episode Transcript
Lauren Chante 0:09
Hello rockstars! Welcome back to the show. I am extra excited about this episode today with our special guest. I first heard about her through my bestie, Ally. You guys all know Ally. She was talking about this amazing book about addiction and motherhood called ‘Stash – My Llife in Hiding’ and I am a chronic reader, I can go through like two books a week so I made sure to pick it up immediately and I could not put this book down. Literally I was sending my kids to watch TV and going on a total book binge because I needed to read this book.
Lauren Chante 0:42
I think ‘Stash’ is labeled as a drug or addiction memoir. As I read the book, and I was going through it, a couple of things kind of struck me and there were a couple reasons that I really wanted the author, Laura, to come on the show.
I was really struck by the feeling that she could have been any of us. Like any of the moms, the young moms who have gone through a challenging season with their kids. Like we could be in this drug (or addiction) memoir. And then secondarily, I just realized that even though this is in the drug (or addiction) memoir category, it really is a story about healing.
I think it’s so valuable for us to be understanding other people’s healing stories because we all have healing to do and it’s so beautiful when someone takes their rock bottom addiction healing experience and opens up that wound for the world. So I would like to introduce the amazing author of that book, Laura Cathcart Robbins, I hope I’m saying that right.
She is the best selling author of the Atria [Publishing Group] Simon and Schuster drug addiction memoir, ‘Stash – My Life in Hiding’, which is the book I was just talking about. Host of the popular podcast ‘The Only One in the Room’. You guys are probably going to want to go subscribe so you can pause and do that and she has been active for many years as a speaker and school trustee. Laura’s credited for creating the Buckley School’s nationally recognized Committee on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice. Going to pause to applaud you there, that’s a big one!
Her recent articles on subjects of race, recovery and divorce have garnered her worldwide acclaim. She’s a 2022 TEDx speaker, and LA Moth StorySlam winner and currently she sits on the advisory boards of the San Diego Writers Festival and the Outliers HQ podcast festival. You can find out more about her on her website, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok or Twitter. All of which I will make sure are in our show notes. So, without further introduction, welcome to the show, Lauren! So happy to have you.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 2:29
Thank you so much. I love that introduction. And I want to give a shout out to Ali for connecting us. That was an amazing experience & it’s so cool that you guys are besties that’s just so that’s great. I love that.
Lauren Chante 2:43
It’s amazing and funny enough, I’m going to be doing like a weekly segment on her show. So our listeners are getting like a lot of each other this season. So that’s great.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 2:53
Nice. Yeah, nice. I love when the friends can do stuff like that together.
Lauren Chante 2:57
Besties for the win, right?
Laura Cathcart Robbins 3:00
Yes.
Lauren Chante 3:01
So I don’t want to give too many spoilers from your book, because people really should just go and get it, like literally guys, pause right now. Go buy it, go to Barnes and Noble and grab the book because it is an addiction memoir worth reading. What I really wanted to do on this episode is dive deeper into some things that I read and have questions about. Things that I saw myself in. And just for everybody who’s listening, maybe you could give like a quick, higher level overview of your story just from, you know, beginning and addiction to recovery and then we’ll go from there.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 3:34
Yeah. Thank you again for having me! I wrote ‘Stash – My Life in Hiding’ about a 10 month period of my life in the year 2008. During which I ended a marriage, entered into treatment for drug addiction and alcohol addiction, and I met someone with whom I later started a relationship. The through line of the whole thing is I’m fighting to be in my children’s lives. I want to make sure I get to continue being their mom. And eventually be a better mother but at that time, I just didn’t want to lose that connection with them. My kids are my motivation throughout the book.
The book is categorized in the genre QuitLit. That’s QUIT and then new word LIT. It’s a genre that has been around for a while but it has a name now. And it’s a genre for people who want to look at their relationship with drugs and alcohol, whether it’s addiction or whatever that looks like. I’m fine that it’s categorized that way but, I agree with you that I think that it is about healing and not just addiction. It’s about the journey from me living inauthentically to, not only discovering who I am authentically, but embracing that. And so I think that that’s really what I wrote about even though there’s addiction and all this other stuff happened during that time.
Lauren Chante 5:11
I love that. And one of the things that’s so special about your story is that I don’t think we hear about drug addiction stories from moms a lot. And when I was reading through your book, I really literally felt like it could have been me because you were going through this season where you had two boys who were pretty close together right? How far apart were they?
Laura Cathcart Robbins 5:32
1998 & 1999, They were born.
Lauren Chante 5:34
So your boys are close together and they are grown now. I know that not everybody can see you on the screen but you don’t look a day older than 25! So you’re very much on the other side of the whole drug thing as well as being on the other side of motherhood compared to a lot of my listeners. You have a lot of sage advice for us.
You talk in the book about how you just couldn’t sleep at night because you were so worried about your babies. I remember none of my kids slept through the night until they were after two. I have three kids that are 4, 7 and 11. So I just remember all those sleepless nights of worrying of did they wake up and I didn’t hear them?
The phantom cries, like I would wake up thinking I was hearing them crying and I wasn’t right it was literally in my head. Or when we lived in a house where the bedroom was too far away. Would I be able to hear them w, would the monitor go off? Or when you’re still in the season where you’re worrying about SIDS and you’re like oh my god is my baby still breathing like that and making sure there’s some breathing and it doesn’t seem that far fetched in my head to need to go and get a prescription for a sleep pill because of that. And that is ultimately what you did. You’re like, I need to sleep! Your mom came and helped with the kids. And you started with Ambien, which ended up being the addiction drug right?
Laura Cathcart Robbins 6:51
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean I think and then adding to what you just said, because it’s everything that you just said. We lived in, in in an 11,000 square foot house. My kids were all the way down at the end of the hallway. And even with monitors, I would hear those phantom cries. I was always listening. There’s this hyper vigilance.
I was even like anticipating the next wake up. I put them both back to sleep. But I can’t go back to sleep because I know that one of them’s gonna wake up in an hour or whatever. And so I’m just awake and it was it you know, it was it was very far away. I remember it because it’s imprinted on me even though my oldest is 25. Like it was yesterday. I remember all those feelings and then not just exhaustion but it was kind of bewilderment.
This bewilderment about how I was going to make it through the day after a night like this? And, is everybody going through this and you know my that was the beginning of my isolation because I wasn’t asking. I was looking and it didn’t look like everybody was going through that. But I wasn’t going that extra step to probe and say, you know, Lauren, are you getting, are you getting any sleep and what are you doing when you’re not? I didn’t say those things to my friends.
I just assumed that I was the only one. So going from that to feeling like I was having a breakdown, and I also like to just mention that I had undiagnosed postpartum anxiety during that time. This was something that there wasn’t much language for in the late 90s. Postpartum depression was discussed back then. But I wasn’t exhibiting those symptoms. I didn’t feel depressed.
I felt like I had an alarm bell in my head that wouldn’t shut off and interfered with everything. When I brought it up to my OBGYN, he told me that I didn’t have postpartum depression, and I didn’t push because I was embarrassed. I was ashamed because I wanted to uphold this image that he had of me. He thought I was just so great. I pushed out two babies back to back and I was slim again. I was doing my thing and throwing dinner parties. And you know, I wanted to maintain that image. So I didn’t push and I wish I had because if I had pushed, perhaps I wouldn’t have needed to medicate myself with the Ambien that I later was prescribed and my addiction wouldn’t have started.
Lauren Chante 9:50
You knew intuitively that something was going on with you with postpartum anxiety.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 9:56
Yes. But I didn’t know, like, does it go away after a month? You know, will it just level out? Maybe this is just because I’m not sleeping. You know, like I didn’t know and my doctor, not my OBGYN, but my regular doctor, he was like, let’s get you sleeping. And then we can kind of sort out what’s going on because it’s impossible while you’re not sleeping to diagnose you with anything.
Lauren Chante 10:25
Which is not wrong.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 10:26
No, it was not wrong and he was he was great. And you know, once I got the the Ambien I was just like, oh, okay! I wasn’t able to be the kind of mom I wanted to be. I was exhausted, short tempered and I wasn’t very fun. And now I can be fun mom, because I’ve got this blissful night’s sleep. I have energy, I am joyful. So it became very clear to me right away that I needed these pills in order to show up for my family. In order to be the kind of mom that I saw around me that I never asked anyone about. I needed these pills.
Lauren Chante 11:04
If you were going to write a book two about motherhood, what would you want moms to know that you’ve learned from your experience being so far on the other side?
Laura Cathcart Robbins 11:10
I think, for me, there was so much shame attached to anything that I perceived as failure. So the idea that I was failing as a mom because I was tired, it’s ridiculous and preposterous, right? It’s outrageous, but that’s still the narrative. I told myself the story that that I was failing.
So had I had a confidant or someone who was further along in my life with motherhood. Someone who I would have trusted to tell the truth to and been willing to receive their counsel, that also might have changed the course of my motherhood and prevented my addiction. Shame needs to be secreted in order to survive. Shame can’t survive if it’s out in the open. It just doesn’t work like that. So, you know, there’s that analogy of like, how we’re driving a car and each time we’re ashamed of something or we make a mistake, it’s like a little ball of paper that we throw in the back. Then one day we stop short and it all comes flying forward and we’re covered in it.
And so it’s not just the big things, but the little things to let somebody know what’s going on with you. You know, if I wasn’t able to advocate for myself at my doctor, I wish I brought someone with me who was who was like, oh, no, this is not this is not a glass of wine a night and she’s going to be okay. She is struggling. You know?
I did that for a friend of mine. I have friends ranging from their 20s to their 70s. Like, real friends. I have one that is in her 40s and when she was in her 30s she came back after having her second child and I took one look at her and was like, oh, no, we’re going to see your OBGYN right now. And we’re gonna get you the help you need. Whatever this is, is not okay.
Lauren Chante 13:26
And it’s hard when you don’t know and I love what you’re talking about with all of your intergenerational friendships. I feel like, in my life, my friendships have very much been dictated by what grade my kids are in school, right? Like when they were little and we were doing all the the playground runs and stuff. It was like all of my friends were just elementary. moms. There were really no moms of older kids, grandma types.
Now we’ve moved since all my kids started elementary school. So now most of the moms are working. So it’s very different because it’s like how do you get in and create relationships now and everyone’s so busy with their work lives and trying to balance the kids lives that there’s hardly any relationship at all, let alone that multigenerational. It’s so valuable because, you know, even though I can commiserate with someone who has kids the same age as me, there’s only so much that commiserating and venting is going to help. You need somebody who can come in with a perspective to create a solution.
I just think this is a really good time to highlight the fact that you’re black and you’re in Hollywood. And I’m imagining that this somehow also was a big part in why you felt like you couldn’t vent to the people around you. I want to give you a platform to talk about that. And to just share your experiences with that. Because I think it’s important.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 14:43
Thank you. It is important. The Hollywood thing, it really was just a fish out of water thing for me in a way because I had grown up so differently. I was in Hollywood when I owned my own PR company. Then I got married and it was like I was the director’s wife. And, instead of just making the guestlist for a premiere I was walking the red carpet on someone’s arm. Having people shout my name at me. It went from zero to sixy and I wasn’t comfortable with the transition.
So I did what I talked about, like I always said, I looked around and I imitated and I made their face my face. And I kept that face in place the whole time until the event was over. And I asked the right questions, and I gave the right answers. But each time I did one of those events or had one of those nights, I’m taking myself further and further away from my authentic self. I’m practicing being this other person more often than I’m practicing being me. And so there’s that difference. So that was, for me, that was what my experience was like in the Hollywood Life. It was always kind of me looking around and trying to figure out how to blend in and not stand out.
Which, just really quickly, is from my childhood. I had a stepfather who I rubbed the wrong way. So in my home I would try to blend in and not stand out. Whatever that looked like and I carried that with me out into my life. I have always, since I can remember, been either the only black person or one of two or three black people in white spaces.
I was really, really poor growing up but I went to private schools and we lived in a middle class black neighborhood. So there was this juxtaposition of the inside and outside. It wasn’t a hardship. I didn’t feel like “Oh my god, I’m the only black woman”. I had a really fun time in school and I felt like I blended in even though I was black. But there was a way I needed to act there that I didn’t act in my home and in my middle class black neighborhood. It was a code switch but I didn’t have the language for that then either.
There were just certain things that I wouldn’t say at school, certain ways I wouldn’t act or move my head that I would fall into naturally at home and in my neighborhood with the other kids there. I didn’t feel like it came at a cost to me at the time. So I’ve navigated these white spaces all my life and when my kids were little and they were in their elementary school, which is a K through 12, they were the only black kids in their classrooms and I was one of a handful of black parents at the time.
And when I got named PTA president as most people call it, we called it just parent association president, which was a big deal at this school. It was very unexpected for me. I wasn’t vying for it. I didn’t have it in my sight. That was not something I wanted to do. I was not ambitious that way. But you know what happened was I was the first black pa president since 1974 or 1973, it’s in the book but I forgot what year it was.
Some other black parent reminded me of this, in a way that I didn’t appreciate, but I was then representing all black parents becuase of that. And not just like what I do matters because it’ll be how they’re thought of. Like, if I have a drug addiction then they’ll think all black parents have a drug addiction. If I succeed, they think all black women are capable of succeeding this way. There is that layer.
The other layer is black parents, in that school, hadn’t had a representative at the table where decisions were being made since 1974. Like there had not been a black board member. I was the first in a very long time when I was asked to join the board. And so that also came that year. So there was this representation. It would be like, you know, if California had never had a black congressperson, and then finally, you know, we got a seat at the table and we were representing the people of California.
So I’m very aware of my the burden or the responsibility that I carried, which is both burden and responsibility. I am aware of my blackness almost in all situations, because I have to because it’s not reflected back at me anywhere I go. And then I’m also aware of the shame I will bring. I don’t know how true this is. I don’t know that me having a drug addiction brought shame to the entire black community. But in my head, that was the stakes. Like if I’m found out this is going to change forever. The perception about black families will change forever.
Lauren Chante 20:09
That’s a lot. That’s really a lot. I can’t imagine being in that position. And just everything that you have gone through it makes sense that you were really living in a perfect storm of things that just created this addiction.
Kind of to switch gears, something else I was curious about. When people are living in a traumatic state or they go through a trauma. A lot of times we tend to dissociate from our bodies, right? Like we have difficulty feeling our own feelings, health and wellness. As a health and wellness expert. Something that I’ve seen is that taking care of your body again can really help you come home your body, reconnect to your feelings, reconnect to your emotions. I’m just curious, is there anything that you did in the Health and Wellness Department that has helped you to maintain your sobriety.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 21:03
I’ve been sober for 15 years this summer. Yeah, so sobriety can just be abstinence from substances. I identify as someone who’s in recovery because of what you’re talking about. I am constantly working on those things and staying in my body and being present and feeling my feelings. And those things didn’t come naturally to me after just putting substances down. Those are the things I have to work on.
I have to tell you, I’m pretty disciplined with work, but I’m still super resistant to this work. I’m tired of it. Like I don’t want to continue to do it. And I have days where I’m more tired of it than others rather. At first it was, in 2008, when I got sober and when I got out of addiction treatment, it was enough just to stay away from substances and be with my kids. Like that’s all I could do.
That meant that I was in recovery meetings, 12 step recovery meetings, three times a day. I was seeing a therapist for the first time. I was 44 at this point, 43 turning 44, so I was seeing a therapist for the first time. In the past I had seen psychiatrists but just really to get drugs to feed my addiction, right, not because I actually wanted to go.
And in therapy, she actually did EMDR with me, which I was also very resistant to and I just felt like she was going to try and hypnotize me and people who tried to hypnotize me before it never worked. I was always kind of one eye open, like watching.
Lauren Chante 22:57
And I just want to pause and tell the listeners who may not be familiar with it. EMDR is a somatic technique that therapists use to help people to recover from trauma in the brain and specifically to help your brain heal. I think it stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and retraining or something like that.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 23:15
Yeah, I want to say it’s like restoration, but I don’t know if that’s it.
Lauren Chante 23:20
You guys can Google it!
Laura Cathcart Robbins 23:21
You can do it several ways. The way she did it with me was, I had an eye mask on, and I followed this, it was a like a metronome light, inside the mask. And so my eyes would move back and forth following the light and she’s talking to me the whole time. And mainly what we worked on was this thing from my childhood, where I have this stepfather who I rubbed him the wrong way which resulted in violence in my home. Not physical violence toward me, but it was a very loud, violent, verbally abusive home.
This was coming from him. None of the rest of us in the home are like that. And so, I had built all these defense mechanisms or survival techniques around the person I needed to be then. And I carried those survival techniques and coping mechanisms into my adulthood. So she wanted to get to the root of that with this EMDR and allow me to let some of that go.
The theory was, as this 44-45 year old woman, I no longer needed to protect myself the way I did when I was 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 year old. And that I didn’t need adults to do that now for me. I was the person who could protect myself and so as skeptical as I was, and I can’t say like I came out of a session and I was free. It didn’t work for me like that. It was several sessions over a period of a year.
But what I found was that my my responses to things, my reactions to things could be more like responses. I could consider a response instead of just reacting was the difference. I think between my instinct and my intuition, you know, my instinct being like a ball is thrown at my head, I’m gonna catch it. The intuition is different and it allows me to feel energy throughout the room and see where someone might not be a safe place for me just energetically. I blocked my intuition previously. So these things started coming into focus and I started to be able to rely more on my intuition after engaging in these and EMDR sessions.
Lauren Chante 26:10
Yeah, I love that and I I’ve done EMDR myself as well. And the interesting thing that I experienced similar to you, it’s not like an overnight fix, right, but I didn’t realize that I wasn’t sleeping well until I did EMDR. I went home, and I had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in years and it’s funny because you never go into someone else’s body to sleep, right? You only ever know what sleeping is like in your body and I felt so rested. I struggle with my energy level and I never realized that it could be correlated to sleep. I didn’t realize that sleep could be so affected by trauma in the brain. It really is incredible how our experiences dictate our body’s behavior. It’s really, really interesting.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 26:58
Yeah, so much of that. Our body stores these things. Like scars almost from all these wounds and struggles and experiences I’ve had over the year and this is kind of like a balm for them and it releases that and then yeah, you can sleep again. You know, I found that I stopped getting sick. Like I would catch like every cold. A lot of that was because my kids were little.
Lauren Chante 27:30
We had strep three times this year. It’s like yeah, it’s one of those things.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 27:34
But I was very susceptible to getting sick. And after I started this healing work, I found out I didn’t realize it like in the moment, but it was like, I haven’t had a cold this year. I didn’t get the flu like this is 365 days without being sick. That was a really big deal. And I I know it was a cocktail of things for me. But I know that was part of the cocktail.
Lauren Chante 28:00
Yeah, that’s so beautiful. My last question, yes, I’m sure that a lot of people who read your book found you through your path, right? Maybe they listened to your podcast, or found you on Instagram. A lot of people who are finding you now through other people’s podcasts, so this is our first experience with you. We really get to know who you were in 2008. I would love for you to let us know in 2023. Who are you? Who is Laura? What are you doing? What are you passionate about? Who have you become on the other side of all of these things and addictions?
Laura Cathcart Robbins 28:31
So just briefly, after I received treatment for my addiction and I got sober, I lost the ability to read and write for pleasure. It was gone for years and around five years sober, after my addiction treatment, I started taking writing classes, and I had this very quiet desperation. I was terrified that I lost it forever. That’s how I’ve always navigated the world is through books and through writing. I don’t know how to do it any other way. And slowly, slowly, I kind of force fed myself, you know, reading and writing until I got hungry for it again.
And that was 2016 before I started writing for pleasure again. I read Gone Girl that year and that was like the first book I read for pleasure, cover to cover, in a short period of time. And it wasn’t a one and done. I had to keep feeding myself and then finally I broke through a barrier somewhere around 2018 where I was devouring books again. I was writing like in my head all the time. Sometimes I can’t sleep because there’s a story in there, and I have to write it down.
So where I am now, in 2023, is I’m a published author. I am working on my second book. I have all the things in place that I’d hoped to have. Not like, at my age ,because I just didn’t imagine what my life was going to look like at this age. Or maybe I did, I don’t know, but not for a long time!
I have a badass literary agent who is really looking out for me and she made an amazing deal for me for that book and she’s going to get me a great deal for the second book. I have an editor that I love working with and I have all these author friends who came out to support this book. And just I can’t believe the generosity of this community.
My kids are 25 and 23. They both live near me. I see them both everyday. They both called me twice during the taping of this podcast!
Lauren Chante 28:31
They know when you’re on a podcast everyone calls!
Laura Cathcart Robbins 28:31
We talk like, I know it’s very unusual for this age, for boys to call their mom everyday. Like maybe a text but they call every day and we’re friends. Like they seek my counsel. And it’s really amazing. My older one is a chef. My younger one is a screenwriter. He’s in the writers room right now, well, not right now because of the strike. But he’s in the Netflix writers room with the pilot that he wrote. And so they’re just like these amazing young men with long term relationships. They’ve been with their girlfriends for four and then one for five years. So at that age, and that’s in Hollywood too.
Lauren Chante 28:31
It’s like I’m a boy mom, too. So this makes me so happy!
Laura Cathcart Robbins 28:31
And Scott, his girls are grown too. One of them’s actually here with us right now. She’s visiting from UC Berkeley where she goes to school. Scott and I are just are really happy that our kids are grown up!
Lauren Chante 28:31
I love that you said that because it needs to be said right?
Laura Cathcart Robbins 28:31
It’s like we can go to the movies whenever we want to. We can take a vacation just the two of us without the guilt. Because I was so guilty when they were growing up when I was away from them. I think I cut almost every vacation short where they weren’t with me, because I just couldn’t stand it and I still feel a little guilty leaving them. But it’s not the same. It’s not the same pull on my soul that it used to be and you know.
I write almost all the time. He’s an outdoors guy. So he’s outside doing his thing. And then we have dinner and we go to the movies, we go to plays. We have this very rich, sober life. He’s sober as well. He’s been sober almost as long as I have. And it’s just, it’s joyful and fulfilling and drama free! And that’s that’s where I am right now.
Lauren Chante 28:34
That is like a miracle – drama free! I think everyone’s taking notes right now like, a drama free life is possible! I mean, yeah, it’s a dream. Laura,I could talk to you forever. Like we could do like three more podcast episode. There’s like so much I’d like to ask you but I’m gonna call it because this was beautiful and perfect. I know that so many listeners are really having life poured into them from this conversation.
I just want to encourage everybody go by ‘Stash – My Life in Hiding’ because this book about addiction and healing needs to be supported. Pass it out to your friends. Make sure you go subscribe to Laura’s podcast, ‘The Only One In the Room’ podcast. I know that I am subscribing to it as well. And Laura, thank you again for sharing your story about addiction recovery and for being with us.
Laura Cathcart Robbins 28:34
Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.
To see all of my blog posts, go to: BLOG • Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Strategist