Gigi Langer

Worry Less Now!

 Love More Now!

ACCEPTANCE IS THE ANSWER TO ALL OUR PROBLEMS

Let’s consider the idea of acceptance. How well has trying to control things worked for you? Do you believe you can change your loved ones? Or the fix world? 

You might be suffering with incessant regrets about the past, wishing you could change or fix it. Even worse, are you living in the wreckage of your future, constantly imagining how to avoid things like illness, poverty or loneliness?

All these pitfalls involve non-acceptance: the refusal to acknowledge how little control we have over other people, places, or things. In non-acceptance, we resist reality by immersing ourselves in fantasies, addictions, and other habits that shield us from the facts. This constant negative thinking keeps us in a loop of misery when our expectations aren’t met.

Acceptance

The only solution is acceptance: honestly admitting our own personal lack of power. As stated in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition, page 417,

“Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. . . . Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.”

An Example of Acceptance

Recently, my friend, Kayla, described her awakening to acceptance as “being hit by a pile of bricks.” Kayla had spent most of her adult years in a horrible, abusive relationship that was finally ending. She was struggling with codependency and began attending Twelve-Step meetings. Recently she began to work with a sponsor on Step One, admitting that a) we are powerless over the addiction of codependency, and that b) our lives have become unmanageable.

Reading about Step One and pondering the questions in her study guide, Kayla quickly came to see the truth: Her relationship was really over now, and her efforts to guarantee her happiness had failed. But it was not a happy insight; in fact, she had a few days of depression. Then she arose from her bed, free of the false illusions that had kept her trapped.

In short, with great courage, she threw in the towel and surrendered the fight. She was then ready to proceed to a new way of life with healthy others and a power greater than her codependence.

My Favorite Ways of Avoiding Acceptance

We all struggle with denial and non-acceptance from time to time. It helps to know the signs, so I can notice my shitty attitude and choose instead to accept life on life’s terms. Here are a few of my favorite avoidance strategies. My book, 50 Ways to Worry Less Now, offers many tools to come to acceptance and move on with our healing.

1. Trying to Figure It Out: “Why?” Is Not a Spiritual Question

Often my first defense against something I don’t like is to try to figure it out. For example, I try to analyze what I did, or what I should have done about the situation, with the (unrealistic) goal that I can change the past or manipulate the future. This is playing God, thinking that I should know why everything happens–totally impossible!

2. Judging and Resisting Things as They Are

Non-acceptance whispers to me that I know exactly how things should turn out, because other people are screwing up. If only they would listen to me, everything would be okay! Worse, my resistance tells me I can’t be happy unless I see this specific result. A sure dead-end.

3. Isolating in Denial

It’s only too easy to remain isolated without the care and guidance of healthy, honest friends. All alone, I can stay in denial, using my favorite ways of feelings-avoidance: food, TV, sex, or substances. When I open up honestly to another, I can find help to accept the truth and move on–hopefully with a structured program that builds in me a new way of living.  

What’s Your Experience with Acceptance?

Acceptance boils down to a humble admission that our thoughts and actions–especially those based on the desire to control–don’t always lead to the best results. It’s trusting that a power wiser than our own fearful mind might lead us to the best outcomes. We can then approach life without fighting it, judging it, or needing to control it. 

This step leaves us ready to find the solutions we’ve been seeking through a power greater than ourselves–the purpose of the remaining Twelve Steps.

I would love to hear from you! Please reply to glanger2202@gmail.com

gigi langer worry less now

Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.

worry less now gigi langer

Gigi’s award-winning book, 50 Ways to Worry Less Now, describes how to correct the faulty thinking leading to addiction, dysfunctional relationships, perfectionism, and worry about loved ones. Check out the practical directions, personal stories, and other helpful growth tools. Amazon: 4.8 stars (Buy Discounted, personally signed Paperback with free Workbook PDF HERE)

JOE VAN WIE AND GIGI LANGER: IN OUR OWN WORDS

joe van wie gigi langer worry less now podcast

I met Joe Wie last month when we planned his interview with me on the All Better podcast. I must say I was a bit smitten! Especially after hearing all the complimentary things he said about “Worry Less Now.”

He actually read it very carefully and said he had been rushing home to read it; and now his wife is reading it. Just what any author wants to hear!

Below I’m sharing our podcast audio, plus Joe’s story as told in his blog at Avenues Recovery Center “In Our Own Words.” I think you’ll find both fascinating!

NOT YOUR TYPICAL INTERVIEW: Joe Wie and Gigi Langer on the All Better Podcast, March 2022

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST

OR YOU MAY PREFER THIS LINK TO IHEART RADIO

STOPPING TO RUN AND FACING OUR DEMONS by Joe Van Wie

Halloween morning, 2019. I woke up alone, soaked in sweat, and suicidal, in the attic of my 9-bedroom Georgian mansion. It was the tail end of a years-long bender and had taken to a bunch of different stops. Passing out in different rooms of the house after spending a day or more drinking, using drugs, dosing psychedelics, and smoking cigarettes.  

And then my body shut down. By this time, I was living mostly alone. Partiers who would come through to my place to crash or to sell drugs or to smoke and drink at all hours of the night. It worked for them. No one ever told them they needed to go to home.

I didn’t know it then, but my life had long been barreling toward that day. I was too numb, by both ego and substances, to think anything serious could happen to me. By mid-morning I was sitting across from a sober friend, my sponsor, and my attorney, faced with a clear ultimatum: die alone or get help.

Why it took me 41 years to fully surrender, I don’t truly know. My alcoholism had led me into the darkest, loneliest, and most hopeless rooms inside my mind, and I was trapped there, suffering without end, and completely unable to help myself.

Call it luck or chance or miracle or any other word that works for you, but that day, a small crack in my disdain for myself and my disinterest in life appeared. In a rare moment of pure vulnerability, I did it. I admitted to my friends, and more importantly to myself, the thing, the realization of the obvious truth I had spent so much energy running away from. 

I needed help. My final run came to an anti-climactic end. But even as I accepted help that day, I didn’t fully trust that I’d stay sober.  I’d been sober before, for two separate stints that lasted years.  I was 16 years old the first time. Even when I was young, I lost all control when I took booze and drugs. I was sent away to a military reformatory school and spent nearly a year in long-term treatment.

After I was released, I stayed sober for 6 years before I got complacent and went out to try my hand at being a normal drinker. 22, and I was almost immediately controlled by an insatiable want to be drunk or high all the time. It wasn’t more than a few months until I couldn’t function as an adult. I was thrown out of NYU, fired from a 6-figure position at a company I respected, and, for a bit, I committed myself to the tragedy my life was becoming.

It took just two years for me to find AA again. This time I got a sponsor and went all in with a sober community. Looking back on it now, I realize how pivotal my 7-month stay at a recovery house was to my next 13 years of sobriety. That long-term treatment center helped me establish a routine and normal habits. I had a framework to live without booze.

I learned how to do regular things for the first time, like how to take care of myself, how to hang out with people and build relationships without doing drugs, and how to go to meetings and drink coffee around the clock.

Over the next 13 years, and largely thanks to support from my sober community in Scranton, lifelong friends, and my sponsor, I created a life. I built a multi-million-dollar business, won 12 international film awards for three feature films. I became a homeowner for the first time. I was politically active, and I contributed to organizations I believed in. Things seemed to be working and I was impressed with my life for over a decade.

Complacency bit me in the rear again. My life was without intention, my ambitions designed around ego. I felt disillusioned with AA and lost grip of what the alcoholic condition was and always will be for me; a desperate attempt to deal with fear. I ended my 13 years of sobriety and fell into full-blown addiction within a matter of months, despite my every effort to “only” drink, smoke, and use drugs occasionally.

The last years of that run were, without question, the darkest of my life.  My business collapsed, my house was in foreclosure, and my life was in shambles. Worst of all, the drugs and booze, and even brief stints without them, couldn’t keep me from questioning the worth of my life. I couldn’t stop harming the people around me—especially my family and life-long friends—and I couldn’t find a door back to meaningful sobriety.  Even a reprieve that lasted more than a week was beyond me.

Surrendering was a year-long process. It started when I woke up from a 19-day medically induced coma with double-pneumonia and a wrecked immune system. I was terrified and desperate to find a solution, but it would be almost a year before I was openminded enough to consider the most daunting possibility of all.  The possibility that maybe, just maybe, I’d been wrong my entire life.

Sobriety wasn’t going to happen for me the same way it had in the past. My spiritual connection to myself had long disappeared, and I was looking for shortcuts to skip all the important steps. I didn’t stop drinking even after consciously acknowledging that I was hurting myself by consuming alcohol. If anything, my drinking and drug usage got worse. I didn’t know it then, but I was treating depression with psychedelics and cocaine.

I found myself stuck in the place all alcoholics find themselves, that torturous chamber of the mind in which two total paradoxes are allowed to co-exist. I wanted to stop using but I couldn’t. I wanted to take a break from booze, but no matter how strong my willpower, I ended up blacked out on my bathroom floor.

I was kept alive by booze and drugs, but I was also disgusted by those things. I was living in a repeating loop of sameness. When my sponsor and lawyer knocked on my door on Halloween day, I answered the door as a shell of myself. I was cynical, hopeless, and I knew my end was close.

So did they. It was in sitting across from them listening to them repeat my irrational, dangerous, and delusional actions back to me for the thousandth time that something in me broke. I wanted a new purpose, and I was desperate enough to admit that out loud.

My last drink was on Halloween 2019. Now, at 43 years old, I have a life that defies what I thought was possible. I’ve been sober 2 years, re-met the love of my life and got married. My baby girl was born on Halloween 2020, exactly one year since I surrendered.

Yes, Halloween has been kind of important day in my life.  I have a new career that makes helping others the centerpiece of my days. I’m in the process of opening an extended-living sober house for men in the Scranton area, to help other alcoholics rebuild their lives one day at a time. 

Adventure and irony and happiness and, as sappy and trite as it sounds, love has returned to my life. Or maybe it has appeared there for the very first time. I’m aware, awake, and intentional, and I’m as present as I’ve ever been.

As imperfect and as ridiculously as my journey to meaningful sobriety has been, I don’t regret it. I’m awed by how my suffering led me to what I have today—a daily mediation practice, a secular practice of the 12 Steps, a community in Refuge Recovery, and, most meaningful of all, a family, a purpose. 

The whiskey, the cocaine, the marijuana, the LSD, DMT, extasy, the psilocybin, the Ketamine, the Xanax, the cigarettes—all of it. While it very nearly had me dispatched, it moved me closer little by little, to the life I have now.

I am grateful. Joe

Listen to Joe on the Rubber Bands Podcast episode. Fascinating!

gigi langer worry less now

Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.

worry less now gigi langer

Gigi’s award-winning book, 50 Ways to Worry Less Now, describes how to correct the faulty thinking leading to addiction, dysfunctional relationships, perfectionism, and worry about loved ones. Check out the practical directions, personal stories, and other helpful growth tools. Amazon: 4.8 stars (Buy Discounted, personally signed Paperback with free Workbook PDF HERE)

[

Fabulous New Magazine: HOLA SOBER!

I just LOVE this new FREE full-feature e-magazine–Hola Sober–for sober folks. 

And SURPRISE! The December edition includes Karen Laird’s interview with me! I met Karen last spring in my Worry Less Study Group, and she wrote this fabulous article about it. Thank you, Karen! 

Hola Sober is a fresh, colorful magazine focused on alcohol-free in a drink-drenched world, showcasing sober gold moments, offering inspirational stories, and motivating healthy wellness lifestyle choices.  It is a FREE magazine as the editor believes no one should have to pay for sober inspiration in 2021. 

Here’s the link to the December issue: Click HERE  (If it doesn’t work, you may need to subscribe, but it’s FREE!) Please subscribe HERE.

gigi langer worry less now

Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.

worry less now gigi langer

Gigi’s award-winning book, 50 Ways to Worry Less Now, describes how to correct the faulty thinking leading to addiction, dysfunctional relationships, perfectionism, and worry about loved ones. Check out the practical directions, personal stories, and other helpful growth tools. Amazon: 4.8 stars (Buy Discounted Paperback, e-book, OR audiobook HERE)


THE DIVINE SPARK!

Happiness comes from the divine spark within each of us.

“Many of us mistakenly think happiness comes from outside ourselves. For example, when other people shower us with love, we’re happy . . . On the other hand, relying on our inner wisdom to tell us we’re worthy and believing we are worthy . . . [require] only a simple change in perspective. It’s looking within, not without, for knowledge of our worth. There’s no mystery to it. “  from A Life of My Own by Karen Casey


Karen Casey is one of my favorite writers. When I got sober, her daily meditation book, Each Day a New Beginning (Hazelden), saved my life by putting healthy, hopeful thoughts into my mind. And, did I ever need them!

I had grown up totally unaware of the pure goodness that I had inside me. It was covered up by sadness, feeling less than others, a sense of insecurity, guilt from my crazy home-life, and shame over my sexual behavior.

Looking in All the Wrong Places

I was constantly seeking something outside of myself to fill up the hole of insecurity gnawing inside me. Unaware of my true worth, I tried to imitate others who seemed happy. I copied their “outsides,” hoping I could fix my “insides.” I pretended to be to be smart, well-mannered, friendly, and happy–I was willing to do anything for love and acceptance. 

But none of it really worked; it left me frustrated, alone, and enraged (even though it took years to admit it). When I discovered that booze and marijuana could erase the pain of life, I was quite relieved–but only temporarily.

Eventually, even that didn’t work. My failed relationships and divorces piled up at the same rate as my degrees. When I realized how broken I was, I finally sought help. 

The Solutions

As I walked through the doors of my first 12-step meeting, I could feel people responding to me as if I was already worthy of love. Although I couldn’t really believe it, I clung desperately to that possibility.

Over time, I followed their suggestions, found a sponsor who loved and guided me, and awoke to the divine spark of love within (and surrounding me). It’s now been over 35 years since I walked into that first meeting, and it has given me everything I have ever wanted. 

Worry Less Now; Gigi Langer

Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.

Worry Less Now Cover

Gigi’s award-winning book, 50 Ways to Worry Less Now, describes how to correct the faulty thinking leading to addiction, dysfunctional relationships, perfectionism, and worry about loved ones. Check out the practical directions, personal stories, and other helpful growth tools. Amazon: 4.8 stars (Buy Discounted Paperback, e-book, OR audiobook HERE)