Sobriety, Complex PTSD, and Learning to Believe Your Own Story with Lindsay Sparks

Morgan sits down with Lindsay Sparks — Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, sobriety mentor, mom of two, backyard chicken keeper, and self-described chronic over-sharer — for a conversation that wastes absolutely no time getting to the good stuff.Lindsay shares her story growing up in a military family, moving every four years, and being a deeply shy, highly sensitive kid trying to find her footing. She opens up about falling into disordered eating as a teenager, growing up in a home shaped by a toxic parental dynamic and emotional neglect, and how, by 16, she was using cocaine as what she describes as a form of self-medication — something her late ADHD diagnosis helped her eventually make sense of. Lindsay talks about the shame of performing "good girl" on the outside while balancing a dangerous habit behind closed doors, and how a missed AOL Instant Messenger conversation was the one moment her behavior almost came to light — only to be swept under the rug and never spoken of again.Morgan and Lindsay dig into the complicated terrain of complex PTSD: what it actually is, why it's so easy to gaslight yourself out of believing your own experiences were "bad enough," and why the body often holds the truth when the mind refuses to. They find a lot of common ground here — both grew up learning to read the emotional temperature of a room, both married to steady, uncomplicated men who they still sometimes treat like ticking time bombs out of old habit.Lindsay traces her relationship with alcohol from college drinking culture through pandemic-era binge drinking while navigating the challenges of early parenthood — to the moment she found out she was pregnant with her second and felt mad that she couldn't drink that night. That moment of clarity, she says, is what finally sent her to therapy.They talk about gray area drinking, the spectrum of alcohol use disorder, and why learning the actual neuroscience of alcohol — serotonin, dopamine, GABA, the gut — changed everything for Lindsay in a way that none of her dietetics training ever had. Lindsay shares what eventually led her to quit, what her first year of sobriety felt like (lonely, identity-shaking, genuinely hard), how THC briefly became a transfer addiction, and how she's now approaching 1,000 days alcohol-free.Morgan, in turn, is refreshingly honest about where she is on her own journey with alcohol — still in the gray area, still grappling with the part of her that finds the feeling of release elicited by drinking hard to replicate , and not yet ready to say she's done. It's one of those rare podcast conversations where the host doesn't have it all figured out either, and it's better for it.They close with a conversation about reframing discipline as devotion, gentle self-parenting, all-or-nothing thinking, and what it means to stay curious about yourself — even when the answers are uncomfortable.Resources mentioned in the episode:This Naked Mind by Annie GraceReframe AppShe RecoversHOP WTR (adaptogens, Lindsay's current go-to)Recess (adaptogenic sparkling water)You can find Lindsay and her work at the intersection of alcohol-free living and intuitive eating on Instagram at @sobernourished.Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.