Hitting Rock Bottom with Joe and Teresa

Welcome to rock bottom. We hit it hard in this episode, and it was NOT a soft landing, believe me.

 
I was expecting the castle in Lake George to remind me of a Disney World or Camelot, but what it really reminded me of was the scary hotel in The Shining. Not a good vibe to have going on. I was nervous and on edge. We all were. Joe and I were skeptical about the retreat from the start. I know that everyone wanted us to walk in, put on a happy face and say that everything would be okay, but that’s just not reality. There have been too many times when we put a band-aid on our issues with Teresa, and we would always fall back to the same negative place. We decided if we were going to go to this retreat, we weren’t going to be fake. We didn’t want to throw a blanket on the problems that were hurting our family.

It may have seemed harsh, but we were being real and we truly wanted to get to the bottom of the problem. That was obviously not going to be easy. When people don’t want to be honest and pretend they want to fix things you can never really move forward. There were so many ugly things being said about us and we just wanted it to stop.

 
I expected Lake George to be another round of the usual. Our whole crew had doubts about how productive the weekend would go. Well, I was wrong about one thing. It wasn’t the same old, same old. It was much worse.
 
We started off awkward, got angry, and then furious, and spiraled down until we were at the lowest of the low. While we were in Lake George, we were as mean and petty and disrespectful as we’d ever been in the ten years we’ve known each other. They say you have to hit rock bottom before you can climb your way out. You’ll find out if “they” are right.
 
Didn’t you feel sorry for our team builders Opie (aka Steve) and Little Miss Sunshine (Stephanie)? They were like two little bunnies hopping into the wolf’s den. When you’re in that pit of raw, extreme emotion, you lash out. In the next episode, you’ll see the verbal filter most of us keep in place just dissolved. There was no holding back. No boundaries. Nothing was off limits. The cork on ten-years’ worth of anger popped. All that bottled-up ugliness exploded all over the castle. We said and did things that, under any other circumstances, wouldn’t have happened. In Lake George, it all came out. Taking our relationships out of New Jersey and putting them this alternate reality made us all go nuts.

 
I’m not proud of some of the things I said. I certainly don’t enjoy watching us at our worst. We do eventually figure out a way to climb up from rock bottom.
 
Keeping watching.
 
XO,
Melissa
 
You can preorder my book Love Italian Style and also check out my website for all my appearances and my performance schedule. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram.