Addicted To Looking Away: What Happens When You Finally Get Quiet

On this episode of the I Love Being Sober podcast, recorded live in front of a client audience at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Scottsdale, Arizona, host Tim Westbrook sits down with master life coach, speaker, and labyrinth designer Elaine Glass, author of the bestselling book Get Quiet: 7 Simple Paths to the Truth of Who You Are, published by Hay House and endorsed by Dr. Mark Hyman and Stanford behavioral scientist BJ Fogg.Elaine spent three decades as a dental hygienist, sitting one-on-one with more than 40,000 patients, while living what looked from the outside like a perfect life: a house in Paradise Valley, a surgeon husband, two sons in private school. Inside, she was waking up alone and afraid, getting physically sick, and, in her words, becoming a shell of a human being. She describes the moment she finally asked for a divorce, what it cost, and how she rebuilt from nothing.The turning point came from a stranger at a Phoenix coffee shop, a man in addiction recovery who told her to visit the Franciscan Renewal Center. There, in the desert behind the property, she found a labyrinth: a 4,000-year-old meditative walking path with one way in and one way out. She almost turned around at the gate. What she heard when she finally walked it changed the direction of her life.Elaine is clear that she never had a substance addiction. What she had was a behavioral addiction to looking away from the truth of her own life, a pattern she calls close to universal. The conversation digs into why we are so afraid to sit alone in a quiet room, what rushes in to fill the space when a substance is finally gone, how to tell the calm voice of the soul from the racing voice of fear, and why she believes abandoning yourself is a slow death of the soul. She also shares the twelve-month experiment that rebuilt her confidence after her divorce, starting with a single Toastmasters meeting, and walks the room through her seven paths and the body-centered energy points behind them.For anyone in Phoenix, Scottsdale, or beyond who is navigating addiction recovery, sobriety, grief, burnout, or the quiet work of finding out who you are without the noise, this episode is a practical and deeply human roadmap to getting quiet.Camelback Recovery is a leading sober living and outpatient addiction treatment provider serving Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona.