Hello and welcome to the intro episode of ‘Midlife AF’. I wanted to give you a bit of a taste of what's to come and why I felt called to bring this podcast to life.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Emma Gilmour. I am a counsellor, psychotherapist, This Naked Mind and Grey Area Drinking coach and back in January 2020. I stopped drinking using This Naked Mind’s alcohol experiment. I'll go into my backstory in the next episode. So stay tuned for that glorious mess!
For this trailer episode, I just wanted to let you know what this podcast is all about and why I set it up. I work with hundreds of women across the globe in This Naked Minds alcohol programmes, in other local providers programs and I run my own programs. And I find that whilst every one of us is uniquely wonderful, most of our problems are universal.
This morning I was lying on my bathroom floor massaging my precious tween. She was full of anxiety and unable to regulate herself enough to go to school.
If I had been in this situation three years ago. I would have been stressed, frustrated, angry, I would have been wishing that it would stop and that she could just move forward. I would be worrying about how we were going to get to school and what we were going to do. I'd be angry because my time was being eaten up. I'd be annoyed with her, annoyed at myself and annoyed with my husband.
And it would be exhausting. I would be exhausted.
When I stopped drinking. One of the things I learned was how to regulate myself when I was being triggered. Or activated.
How to manage my anxiety without alcohol and how to be in a world without using alcohol to numb or escape from my life.
I learned how to comfort and validate my feelings by asking myself
“What would I do in this situation if I was behaving like somebody who loves me?”
Not in a Chardonnay, a mani/ pedi, girl chats way, but in a deeply nourishing soul filled way, like my guardian angel wrapped their arms around me and was guiding me to the next right step.
She would be comforting and honouring my very valid feelings. Understanding that the pain comes from wishing things were different to how they are and whilst acknowledging that pain, still being able to be the grown up and be present.
And calm.
Knowing that the way to regulate a dysregulated nervous system - our body and soul in distress - is through the body and not through thought work. And certainly not through thought work in the time of crisis or activation.
The reason I wanted to start this podcast was because, I stopped drinking when I was 46 and a half years old. And I'll go through my story, but I was a massive party animal. And drinking was 100% part of my persona. And I listen now to the reasons why the women I work with drink and none of the reasons why they drink have anything to do with alcohol. Alcohol is a symptom of an underlying issue and underlying pain that someone is going through. And so I wanted to talk about that. Generationally, and through patriarchal culture there are so many things that we've been indoctrinated to believe are true.
The amount of anxiety that's happening for women in midlife is unbearable.
We have a lot on our plates, women's lives are hard and our limiting beliefs about the way things should be make them even harder. And I wanted to talk about that. I wanted this to be a place where people could feel safe. People could feel acknowledged, validated, seen. I wanted to talk about the menopause and perimenopause and about how that affects our mental and physical bodies. And how that mixing with alcohol isn't absolute shitshow.
I wanted to talk about how exactly to regulate your nervous system, both in the moment of activation, and in preparation - in practice for the moment of activation. I wanted to bring some brilliant guests like the ones I've got on the next few weeks. Natalie Battaglia from The Mindful Mocktail Jolene Park from Grey Area Drinking, Faye Lawrence from Untoxicated and Jay Fields, one of my favourite coaches from ‘Yours Truly’.
And also want to bring on some of my beautiful clients like Lou Coates to come and share their stories.
I wanted just to share all the knowledge that I've gained and continue to gain because I'm always training and learning different modalities to help me cope with this thing called midlife.
I wanted to share with you the things that I've learned that have enabled me to lie on the floor in the bathroom, stroking my tweens skin and holding her until she's ready to put her clothes on and go to school. I am by no means perfect at any of this stuff. And I'm struggling so hard, so many things. And I wanted to share that with you guys. So you know we're all imperfect human’s humaning.
And I wanted to tell you the things that I'm, like things like, sorry things like - I'm training to be an intuitive eating counsellor and I'm passionate about Intuitive Eating even though I'm not ready to coach on this yet, as I'm still not 100% there within myself. I love all the research into it and the science behind it. But most of all, I love the social justice and the feminist part of it.
And I passionately believe that we need to stop talking about women's bodies and looks in terms of good and bad. We are worth much more than the size of our bodies. And the last thing women need is additional pressure to starve, exercise themselves to death in this time of life, only to be told as they're doing so, that they look really great or at any time in their life.
I'd like to talk about how important that is, because the hurt that it causes people, regardless of their size. Is extraordinary.
So I want to talk about issues around body size.
I've had eating disorders and I still have disordered eating and many of the people I come in contact with have disordered eating. And by disordered eating, I don't necessarily mean eating disorders but they have a very dysfunctional, I guess relationship with food, relationship with their bodies. And what I want to do in this podcast is I want to talk about the joy that comes from understanding some of this stuff that's going on for us even if we don't necessarily know how to change it yet. I don't want to talk about how being quiet as women is keeping us stuck in shame.
Being quiet about the fact that alcohol is a substance is highly addictive, and being quiet about the fact that we might have a problem with it because we're using it to take us away from ourselves. Because our lives are too bloody hard.
We never prioritise our needs before anyone else’s, our ‘to do’ list is never ending. We can't do all the things that patriarchal culture has told us that being an acceptable woman is.
We think we've failed when it was never acceptable, and should never have been our goal in the first place.
But that's what we learned. And our subconscious believes that, and how we've adapted ourselves from when we were born to try and fit the mould and we’ve used whatever coping mechanisms we can to manage our feelings where we've not been able to live up to these impossible goals that we've been conditioned to believe that our precious selves should need alcohol in order to cope with reality. The amount of harm that's doing to ourselves both mentally and physically, even in small amounts, is extraordinary. It's just something we really need to be aware of whether or not we're ready to take a break, whether we're just thinking about our relationship with alcohol, whether we’re mindfully drinking or whether we decide to take a longer break. Or we’ve decided to quit for good. All of those places are valid and fine because we take risks every day with things but many of us don't really know the risks with alcohol.
And it serves a lot of big companies and government taxes to keep it like that. So I want to talk about that.
But I also really, really want to talk about how freaking good life is without booze and I want to keep changing the narrative that it's a sad place to be when you're not drinking because it certainly isn't.
But I feel so lucky that the methodology that I use to stop drinking and the methodology that I teach, is that we want to get to a place where our goal is small and irrelevant in our lives. It's a non issue. And there's so many little different parts about that. I also want to talk about, you know, being in our generation, being the sandwich generation, our parents are getting older, our teenage kids - what's happening with them - so much mental health issues.
So many, you know, kids are being diagnosed with neurodiversity all over the shop and adults are too. I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD. And now I realise we are a completely neurodiverse family. And so I'd like to talk about that too. Normalise that.
And so I think that the ‘everything’ that I'm wanting to talk about feels really universal. And the more voices that we have out there normalising problematic drinking, menopause, mental health issues neurodiversity talking about what menopause symptoms are, and why the medical professional doesn't really know anything about it that it's massively underfunded because older women are not exciting or lucrative.
I also want to talk about vaginas and crystal wands and cervical orgasms as they’re great ways to calm the nervous system. But also conversely, how can we get to that when our libidos are in the toilet and our joints are aching to buggary? I also want to have a laugh, I want to have a giggle, midlife and alcohol-free life is so damn funny. That's part of my way. We can intersperse the funny and sad, as our joy and despair exists together. As a part of this amazing human experience.
I hope to create a safe space where you guys can post questions through a link in the show notes or by sending me emails and I'll come back to you in podcast episodes.
So really I think being in midlife is a disruptive time of our lives. And I don't mean that as it's disrupting, which of course it is, our hormones are changing in a way, even greater that we're in adolescence. What I'm talking about is it's the time for disruption. For us to come into our power own our true selves, and get rid of all the things that keep us tied to doing things the way we always have. Biologically we'd be grandmas now, and most of us are parents of teenagers, and we've got the same hormonal stuff going on as they have. We're at a time in our lives when we are stepping into the next section. And we about to sculpt it and create it, and we get to choose what it's going to be like, we get to choose how we want to show up for it. We get to model behaviour in our families, and what we accept to be the narrative by which we live our lives and by which we show our kids lives could be lived.
To me removing alcohol from my life was the beginning of creating a life that I actually wanted to live and a life where I started to like myself in all my awkward silliness, making mistakes, not knowing what to say forgetting all the words, making friends with the part of me that I started to hide as I grew up. Until eventually she was nowhere to be seen at all. But she was still there behind the curtains, waiting for the time that she could trust me enough to love and nurture her. And I hope that I can bring some support and some of that childlike joy and wonder to your journey with alcohol. And I hope we can walk side by side as we find our groove without booze.
