Julie's Story: The Rushing River With No Bridge

She had built a thirty-year marriage on commitment, love, and the belief that if she just tried hard enough, things would get better.

They didn't.

What Julie Lamphear couldn't have known — not yet — was that the hardest thing she would ever do wasn't leaving. It was learning that she couldn't fix what she couldn't control. That needing a sober environment wasn't weakness. That her emotions weren't broken. They were accurate.

In this episode of the Tiny Brave Steps Podcast, Julie tells the story of walking away from a marriage ravaged by addiction — not in one brave moment, but in a million small steps. 

House-sitting for strangers who opened their doors at exactly the right time. 

Walking into an Al-Anon room convinced she'd never find the nerve to ask anyone for help. 

Buying a condo she could actually afford. 

Building a life, piece by piece, on the other side of the river.

And the river metaphor Julie uses to describe that crossing you will carry with you long after this episode ends.

This is a story about what courage really looks like - not dramatic, not clean, not finished all at once - but faithful. 

Step by step. Rock by rock. Until you get to the other shore.

Find Julie at julielanphear.com.

Find your next Tiny Brave Step at tinybravesteps.com.

Tiny Brave Steps is hosted by Bernice McDonald - Creator of the Tiny Brave Steps Methodology and Author of the Little Books of Courage. Shift your identity from “not enough” to “brave enough" to keep becoming - no matter what shows up in your life.

Have a courage story? Know a woman whose story needs to be heard? Reach out at bernice@bernicemcdonald.com.

Learn more at www.tinybravesteps.com.
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernicemcdonald/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

What do you do when the life you built, 30 years of it, starts to unravel, and you're the only one who can see it happening? What do you do when the person you love most is being pulled under by something that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with you?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

It had become unsafe emotionally and physically, and I didn't want to leave this marriage. I was not ready to leave it. Yet the situation forced a decision. Sometimes situations force action that you don't want to take, and that was the case here. I'm Bernice McDonald.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

And this is Julie's courage story. And if you have ever found yourself strong arming reality, in other words, trying to will something into being different than it is. This one is for you. Act one. Before we get to the heart of the story, you need to know what was at stake. Julie was a woman who honored her word. That's not a small thing. In a world that treats commitment as negotiable, she treated it as sacred. She had built a 30-year marriage with a man who traveled for work, two daughters, a life they had figured out together. By her account, they had a strong way of relating, a strong way of doing things. And then so slowly she almost didn't see it. Things began to change.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

And I that would just be the pattern every week.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Maybe the stress. No work travel to blame, no quick exit from the situation, just the undeniable reality of what was happening to the man she had chosen. She came home and told herself it was the travel, the stress. Who knows? This is Fred, our name for the fear voice, at his most subtle, not the loud warning, but the soft reassurance, the voice that helps you look away and calls it hope. So she looked away for a while. A couple of years passed. Their daughters finished high school, left for college. Then her husband lost his job. His department dissolved, and suddenly he was home all the time for months.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

I just remember thinking, My gosh, you drink a lot. Like I just can't imagine you being happy without four or five drinks in you, which is scary to me.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

Then came the anti-anxiety medication. The combination of that with the alcohol took something already unmanageable and made it unrecognizable. She knew now what she was dealing with. So she did what she had always done.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

She tried to fix it. Strong-arming reality for me meant me trying to get him to do what I would do if I were in his shoes.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Get help, see someone, do something, anything. This is what love looks like when it doesn't yet understand what it cannot do. She wasn't controlling, she was capable, and she cared. And she was throwing every bit of both at a problem that had a lock she didn't hold the key to.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Stuck. And still she stayed. Because she had made a promise. I thought I need to make this marriage work at all costs. I said I would stay, I'd tell death to us part, and I meant it. She meant it.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

This was not a woman who walked away when things got hard. She stayed because her word mattered. She stayed because she loved him. She stayed because somewhere underneath everything, she kept hoping.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

But here is what that staying cost her. The closer I got to home, the more anxious I would become, so that when I was pulling into my neighborhood, I would begin to cry uncontrollably. And I would think, What's wrong with me? My emotions are all broken.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

She would be fine when she was away. Fine running errands, fine with a friend, fine in almost every other part of her life. But the moment she turned into her neighborhood, the place that was supposed to be safe, the place she had spent 30 years building, her body started telling the truth. Her mind was fighting.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Because I didn't know what I was gonna find. Might be fine, and it might not be fine. And you just don't know. Her emotions weren't broken. They were accurate. And still she held on. And they're gonna blame you for whatever it is that comes up. You're the one that's it to blame, and you can't figure out what you did. But the unhealthy behavior on my part was thinking I needed to go home to that. Like it was my responsibility to go home to that.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

The shift didn't arrive with drama. It came the way most shifts do through exhaustion and honesty and the terrifying moment when the right question finally surfaced. She had been asking, how do I get him to change?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

And then slowly a different answer arrived. It took me a really long time to realize I wanted him to change so I could be happy. And it took a long time for me to discover that I needed to change so I could be happy. That's the wake up.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Not because the marriage is saved, not because he gets sober, but because Julie stops trying to manage what she cannot control and turns for the first time, really, toward what she can. I'm the one who needs help. I'm the one who gets to decide what I do next. I'm the one who can change. This is what waking up your courage looks like from the inside. Not a declaration, a devastating, freeing truth arriving in the middle of an ordinary day. And she was willing. Act two. Embrace who you are. Here is the strange thing about waking up. Once you see clearly, your eyes are wide open. She had been trying to pour herself into a container that had a hole in the bottom. She couldn't fix what she could not control. She never could. And the moment she accepted that, something changed.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

And I answered, I don't know how to get help. You know, you're gonna have to if you want me to get help, you're gonna have to bring help to me. She didn't know how.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

She just became willing. And then in a way she still marvels at, help came. People offered her their homes, house sitting opportunities, six to eight weeks at a time, that appeared just when she needed them. A neighbor, a friend of a friend. She would stay for a stretch, breathe in the quiet, and think, maybe I can go back now.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

And she would go back and within 24 hours. And then I'd think, I'm doing pretty good. I can go home now. And within 24 hours, I'd be a basket case again.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Not because her emotions were broken, because they were telling the truth. And somewhere inside one of those house sitting days in a home that was calm and ordinary and safe, Julie had an experience she didn't have a name for yet.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Not realizing how dragged down by the situation I was until I got to live by myself for a while and realized, oh, this is what stability feels like. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

That was the whole sentence. No drama, no revelation, just a quiet recognition. This is what I've been living without. She knew then what she needed.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

I need a sober environment. Not everybody needs that. Some people can live with alcoholics and they do it for years, but I just don't happen to be one of those people. So I had to accept that about myself. Like I kept trying to show up and have the result be different.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

I had to accept that about myself. This is what embracing who you are looks like when you've spent years trying to be someone who could simply adapt, simply endure, simply love hard enough to make it work. It's not defeat.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

It's the opposite. If I'm around an allergen, I'm gonna sneeze. That's just how it works. And so if I'm around a person who's actively pursuing an addiction, I react.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

This is truth telling at its most honest and most courageous. Not something is wrong with me, but this is how I am made and I get to act accordingly. And then came the people. She walked into her first Al-Anon meeting.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

I walked into that 12-step room and I thought I will never, I will never have the courage to ask any of these people to be my sponsor. And then in walks this old friend of mine from 20 years earlier.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

A woman she hadn't seen in two decades. Someone who had worked the steps herself and never quite found the courage to sponsor anyone. They looked at each other and made a deal.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

And so I just said, Well, if you want to cut your teeth at being a sponsor with me, I would love to work the steps with you. And we did. And she was an excellent sponsor. We met every other Thursday for a solid year, and we did the work. Not catching up, not busy time, the work.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

And through that work, through the honest reckoning the steps require, something she had buried under decades of caregiving and erasing herself began to come back online. She began to discover who she actually was. Her sponsor points to one thing in particular.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Well, what my sponsor pointed out today, you see life in metaphors, and she said your ability to use metaphors has helped me so much, but you'll often take an experience and turn it into a metaphor to illustrate what the experience is like.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

She had been doing this her whole life, had probably been told at some point that it was strange or maybe too much or beside the point. But Julie wasn't on discovering herself yet. This is who I am. This is what I need.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

For a woman just to get in touch with who I am and what I need and not poo-poo that and not gaslight that, but just say this is who I am, this is what I need.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

This is who I am. This is what I need. For a woman who had spent thirty years trying to fit herself around someone else's chaos, trying to need less and give more and hold it together. Those words were nothing short of revolutionary. Fear Fred still had plenty to say. You're being selfish. You made a promise. Who do you think you are? But Julie was learning to answer him. Act three Stand Up for You There is a thing that happens when one person in a marriage starts to get healthy and the other doesn't. Julie had read about it in Al Anon literature. The average marriage, they said, lasts about two and a half years past the point where one partner gets help and the other doesn't. Not because the healthy one gives up, but because health has its own gravity. You cannot unfeel what stability feels like. She stayed as long as she could. She turned over every stone.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

And honestly, what finally triggered me making the decision is I saw I was losing my kids. And I was like, I've already lost my husband. But if I stay with him, I'm gonna lose them because they're pulling away and I don't want to lose them. I'm not willing. That's where the line finally fell.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Not for her sake, not yet, but for her daughters. She had already lost so much. This she would not lose. Her father drove her to file the papers himself. When she told him the truth about where things stood, his response was not what she anticipated.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

He said, What if he decides to get sober today? Are do you have enough energy left over after all of this to say that yes, that five to ten year battle that we're going to be facing, uh that uphill battle, do you have it in you to navigate that? And I was like, No. And he said, Okay, call it quits, just be done. So she did.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

She called it quits. She had wanted to tell her husband herself. She had wanted to find the words, to have the conversation, to do it with the grace and honesty she had tried to bring into every hard thing in their marriage. But the courage for that one final act she couldn't find. Papers were delivered to the house. He had known it was coming. She had not been there in two years, not really. But she still carries the wish that she had been able to say it face to face. She had done something else though, something quieter and harder to name. And it came from something she had learned in Alan, a single sentence that had reoriented everything.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

She was not leaving to punish him.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

She was doing something much harder, taking care of herself without making him the enemy. Holding love and grief and self-preservation in the same two hands. This is the warrior's voice. Not loud, not aggressive, but just steady. The next two years were what she would call the crossing. And when she tries to describe what that crossing felt like, what it's like to leave a 30-year life and not know where the path is going, she does not reach for facts or timelines. She reaches for a river.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

And what you're gonna do is you're just gonna stand there, and pretty soon a foothold is gonna appear. And it'll be like a little rock that you can stand on. And so just go stand on that one and just stand there until a new one appears.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

This is Julie's strange jewel, fully alive, the rushing river, the footholds that appear. And the footholds that did appear, the homes that opened to her, the friend from twenty years ago who walked into that Al Anon room, the mortgage broker who went to bat for her, who found a lender willing to take a chance on a woman who hadn't drawn a paycheck in two decades. The part-time job that appeared without an application. The full-time job that grew from it, she just kept moving toward the next rock she could stand on.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

You start leaving the shore step by step until you're about midway through, and then you realize I'm not going back. I'm not going back. I thought I was just standing here in the river to get away from a tumultuous situation, but actually I'm going somewhere. But actually, I'm going somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

That shift from escaping to arriving is the whole arc of courage in a single sentence. She had waited in just to survive, and somewhere in the middle of the water, she looked up and realized she was crossing. Not running, crossing.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

And you're gonna get to the other shore shore and you're gonna be exhausted and you're gonna be soaking wet. And it's okay to sit on the other shore and just dry off for a while. It's okay. Take as long as you need. That was tumultuous, and it's okay. But eventually you're gonna pick yourself up and you're gonna dust your knees off and you're gonna go explore the new shore. And that's exciting. And that's really, really exciting.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

It's okay to sit on the other shore and dry off for a while. This is not toxic positivity. This is a woman who crossed something genuinely impossible, who earned the right to sit down, who knows that rest is not defeat. She had a condominium now, she had a job, she had a sponsor, she had her daughters. The other shore was real. Act four, create your impact. She had told herself she would never be able to earn an income again. Twenty years out of the workforce, no recent employment history, nothing on paper that looked like what a lender or an employer expected to see. And then one by one, the things she believed were impossible simply happened.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

As long as I have a job that earns this amount, I can live the rest of my days in this little condominium. And I haven't overextended myself. That's not resignation.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

That's a woman who has learned the difference between what she wants and what she needs and found genuine peace in the gap between them. She kept working the steps, not because the crisis was still acute, but because the work had become something else.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

I was still highly reactive, and so let's let's do the step work again so that you can process some of these feelings and emotions that all this stuff stirred up.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Julie kept showing up to do that work, and somewhere in the doing of it, something shifted again. Come into Al-Anon to get help. She stayed to give it.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Now I'm a sponsor. I sponsor other people. I help other people work through this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

She knows what it's like to cry in your own driveway. She knows what it's like to feel your emotions and believe that you are broken. She knows what it's like to strong arm reality for years. And then, exhausted and humbled, to finally stop. She knows what it's like to stand at the brink of a rushing river with no boat and no bridge. And when a woman walks into that room, terrified and certain she will never find the nerve to ask anyone for help. Julie is one of the people who can look her in the eye and say, I know. I've stood exactly where you are standing.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Keep going. I used a sponsor the first time to get me out of a tumultuous situation, but now I need a sponsor to get the tumultuous situation out of me.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

That sentence took years to earn. The difference between being extracted from something painful and being genuinely free of it, that is the whole long middle of a courage story that nobody posts about. And the ripples of that work went further than even she expected.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

But uh the ripple effect that my sponsor pointed out to me this morning that I had forgotten about is the way it opened a relationship with my daughters. It really opened a good relationship with my adult daughters, opened conversations with them about hard things that come up in adult relationships. And I've I've become able to not be afraid of those things and to let them live those things.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

The daughters she had nearly lost by staying. The daughters she finally chose herself for. They are closer now than they were before any of this happened. Not in spite of the hard years, because of who their mother became inside them. A woman who no longer needs to fix things to prove she loves.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

We can be uh so helpful just by showing up with people. Like I don't have to fix anything for them. And honestly, the people who tried to fix things for me, that wasn't helpful. But the people that just came alongside and said we're here, that was helpful.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

Just showing up, just saying, I'm here, I don't have to fix it, I don't have to have a plan, I just have to stay. That is the gift courage gives back, not just to the woman who built it, but to everyone who sure she now stands on while they cross. And there is one more thing. Julie Lanfair, the woman who cried in her own driveway, who house sat her way through two years of uncertainty, is different now in ways that matter.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

I am much less likely to try to control situations. I'm I'm likely to pay attention to situations and find out what they might tell me. And if I'm confused about what they're telling me, best just to find out. Best just to ask and get information that you need. She pays attention now.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

She asks instead of assumes. She lets the other person be who they are. These are not small things, these are the hard won fruits of a woman who did the work, all of it, the steps and the sponsors, and the grief, and the honest reckoning, and came out with the other side with something she didn't have before.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

When you work through a hard situation, what you bring with you is a stronger you. You bring with you a stronger person who is capable and isn't as fragile.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

A stronger person who isn't as fragile. That is the gain, not the loss of 30 years, not the failure of a marriage, but the woman who stands on the other shore, soaking wet, knees a little dusty, still here, and knows something about herself she could not have known any other way. She had what it took all along. If you're in the middle of a river right now, if you're standing somewhere between the shore you left and the shore you cannot yet see, Julie has something to say to you.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

You are enough, you have what it takes, take it one day at a time, the right people with the right expertise are gonna show up at the right time. You can rely on help outside yourself. There are many good people out there that are ready to help you. It's okay to trust, but but learn how to trust trustworthy people.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

You don't need to see the whole crossing from here. You don't need a boat, you don't need a bridge, you just need the next rock. Stand on that one. Wait, the next one will surface. And one day, exhausted, soaking wet, further than you ever thought you'd get, you will look up and realize you're not escaping anymore. You are arriving. I'm Bernice McDonald. Thank you for listening to this courage story. If Julie's story found you today, if you were standing somewhere between the shore you left and the one you can't see yet, I want you to know that Julie now walks alongside women in exactly that place as a life transition coach. Her work is faith-centered and quietly powerful, helping you release what is ending and step with confidence into what is already beginning. That is the other shore, and she knows how to help you get there. You can find her at julylandfear.com. And if you are ready to find your very next step, the small, honest, doable step that begins the crossing, come find it at tinybravesteps.com. Because courage doesn't wait until you feel ready. It starts with one rod. One step. One tiny brave step in the right direction. Remember, no matter what, you are brave enough for this. You always have been.