0:00
Oh, good to see all I thought it's been a little while. And I know I've got quite a few new people in here
0:09
that I haven't necessarily, I don't necessarily know very well, that doesn't necessarily. I don't necessarily know my story. So I thought I would spend this half an hour. Hello. Welcome, welcome. If you're here, say hi. But it's not it's been this half an hour talking a little bit about my story. And how I ended up being a counselor, psychotherapist and alcohol coach.
0:42
And it's yeah, it's probably a not an unfamiliar one I would imagine. Many of us
0:48
could see you.
0:50
Hi, Haley. Hi, Joan. Hi, empower her sober. Good to see you. Thank you for coming. Um, yeah, so I thought I'd just talk a little bit about my story. I'm sure many of you, many of you do know it, but some of you don't. And what I love about stories is and it was interesting, actually, I got an email from somebody on my email list
1:12
this week, and, you know, bless her soul. She said to me, Oh, you need to stop telling your story. Because it's, you know, you don't, you know, she was saying, well, like I've, you know, had this terrible,
1:25
horrible life. And, you know, your story doesn't really compare. And I was thinking, Well, you know, I've number one, I think that's, it's, I'm terribly sorry about that. And hello, it again, how are you?
1:42
But really, I thought, goodness, that's interesting, isn't it, that we would stop other people from telling their stories, because they weren't, you know, traumatic enough. And I think that's one of the things that was interesting. I was watching.
1:59
There's a lady who started was one of the sort of forerunners in this in this movement. I remember what her name is now feel really bad about that. So but something or other I'm sorry about that. She's really lovely. And if I remember, I'll put the I'll put her name in the chat. But she was talking about how an actress
2:20
who are really beautiful actress had been sober for five years. I sober, it's not words, I use a bit. I'm prefer to use alcohol free myself.
2:31
But everyone, you know, everyone uses their own words and their own names and whatever fits fits for you.
2:38
But she was talking about how the fact that she had been alcohol free for five years, and that
2:48
she was getting a heap of comments in the
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post to say,
2:56
Oh, my goodness, I didn't know you had a problem. Anne Hathaway it is that was the actress. She said, Oh, my goodness, we didn't know you had a problem. And I found this, it's that that we didn't know you have a problem thing really gets to me. Because I was asking my group recently, my membership group be the lighthouse.
3:16
Different reasons why we find it difficult to take a break from cut down from stop, reduce our drinking. And one of the things that people came out with was other people's reactions.
3:30
And I have come across it so many times in business circles, whereby there's an assumption that people would only stop or cut down their drinking, if they were, what one might consider to be somebody who was had had a problem, right? And I really hate that terminology. Because it's,
3:56
it's kind of an eye takes ticket and I've talked about this before, but it's kind of victim blaming, it's very much like those people over there. There's the other ring side of things. There's this, you know, if it's not us, it's it means at all. You know, we're okay. And I was talking recently about this concept of a just world is something called a just world theory. And basically what it is, is it kind of allows people to victim blame. And what happens is, people go about their business and I found this with the stuff that's been happening in my family. So my both my kids, autistic, some of them some one of them, has been struggling with bullying. The other one has been struggling with not being able to go to school because she's had autistic burnout. And
4:51
we just don't want to waste our lives boring time from tomorrow. Absolutely. Absolutely, Joe. It's exactly. It's so interesting, isn't it? It's like this
5:00
This idea that we, you have to have a problem. And by that they mean the problems with you, right? And this is what really gets to me, the problems with you.
5:10
And the problems not with the human ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
5:17
The human is not the problem. But this whole idea of the just world.
5:24
Theory, basically what it what it means is people don't want to believe that the world can be horrible. And bad things happen to good people. And your people don't want to believe that. So for example, for us, when I tell my story, sometimes people like, oh, you know, how are you? And I'll be like, oh, you know, actually, things are quite tough in our world. Right now, this is happening that's happening, this is happening. And of course, you know, knowing that I'm coming from a very privileged position i acknowledging everything that's happening in the world at the moment. And but I still believe
6:01
that whatever is happening in the world, we as human beings get to have our experience.
6:08
Regardless, and I think one of the things that keeps us stuck drinking often, is this idea that we are not allowed to have our experience, because our experience is not hard enough. Our experience is not tough enough. Yeah. And I think that that is very, very harmful.
6:28
And, and plays into a lot of
6:33
sort of cultural
6:36
suppression of self, which is what often needs to drinking. Because what will happen is, we suppress ourselves, we suppress ourselves, we suppress ourselves. And eventually, we can't do it anymore.
6:49
Thank you. Thank you. That's so nice of you to say that.
6:57
It's, it's just this really interesting thing. And I think at the moment, what's happening a lot in social media, is people are almost gagging, other people from talking about things outside of,
7:09
you know, Palestine, and what's happening in Gaza, and I 100% get that this is a terrible situation. It's awful. I, you know, I totally oppose it.
7:23
I also think that we get to have our experiences.
7:28
It's that and situation we were talking about this last night in group, there's, you know,
7:35
two things can be happening at the same time. Yeah. So we were talking about this in terms of looking back into our personal history, and, you know, a lot of the time the work that I've done with gabble marteau a lot of
7:51
the time with that when we're working with emotions, and and feeling our emotions, learning to feel our emotions as humans, which is something we all need to learn to do when we cut down on or reduced or stopped drinking.
8:06
Often, the situations that lead us to be triggered
8:14
come from our childhood interpretations of events. And
8:19
so for example, I'll give you this is a really silly example. But let's say you Hi, physio for women, nice to see you glad you're here.
8:32
So let's say you're a mum, and your little child is crying and you haven't slept. And you've got another little child, and they really want some attention. But at the moment, your first priority is to pick up the one who is crying and in distress, and you're a bit exhausted, and you don't give the child, the other child the attention that perhaps they need.
8:56
So that has to happen a couple of times, and then children start to feel like
9:02
why, you know, then it can't be that the world is bad, it can't be that my mom's not able to look after me, it can't be all of these things. So we make this childish interpretation of the world. That is, there's something wrong with me.
9:19
I'm bad.
9:22
I'm unlovable, you know, all of these inner deep beliefs that we have about ourselves. They're not true.
9:29
But they're an interpretation that we make about the world based on the fact that
9:35
we don't want to believe
9:39
say, let's say our Mom's having a mental illness my mom was was incapable of of looking after us for that particular time or whatever reason. There's a millions of different reasons why, why things happen in the world.
9:51
And one of the things that go looking back in some of this history in order to understand why we feel the way we do because for a lot of us who train
10:00
are very sensitive human beings, we go into the world, and we feel things very deeply. Or we close ourselves off. So we don't feel things at all.
10:10
And many of us are neurodivergent, or would consider themselves to be highly sensitive, or empathetic.
10:18
So we have a big experience of the world, it has a big impact on us. And our internal landscape can be very, very overwhelming as well.
10:26
And so as a small people, we make interpretations of the world. And what what the easiest thing for us to do, which is, which relates very much to this concept of the just world scenario, which is whereby we can't, we don't want to believe that bad things happen, we can't believe it. And so what we do instead, is we make ourselves bad. Because if we make ourselves bad, we feel that that's something we can have control over. Whereas the world outside of us what's happening in the world, we don't have any control over. And we've, you know, one of the things is quite scary, and a lot of, you know, loss of time when we're drinking, it's because we're trying to have control over stuff, we're trying to have control over our emotions.
11:12
So the reason I'm talking about this is like I'm trying to remember so when I was coming into my story, so my story is, I'm just a regular Joe. Hi, Jen, good to see you. So regular Joe, who I'm autistic, I also have ADHD, I've only found that out relatively recently. And it's interesting. Now looking back at the way I camouflage myself, in order to fit into this world, and in the neurodivergent terminology, we would call that masking.
11:44
But I also think that most of us as human beings do that,
11:49
in order to fit in, and so much of drinking is about how we are perceived in the world, and how we perceive ourselves. And a lot of this is really unconscious. And really until we stopped drinking, we take alcohol out of the equation for a bit, it's really difficult to work stuff out. Because while it's still in there, it's kind of muddying the waters. But when you take a break from alcohol, you take an extended break, or you stop drinking, you get to work on some of this stuff.
12:22
Which is really interesting. We were talking last night, but sort of
12:27
concept of healing, right. And you know, healing can be quite a triggering word for some of us. Because it implies if you know, healing often means, you know, to some of us that it might imply that we were broken in the first place. And I think probably the most important piece in anything to do when I say to people come on, if you come and work with me, the most important thing you need to know is that you are not broken.
12:51
That there is nothing wrong with you that you are not to blame. Yeah, yes, we take responsibility for ourselves and our situation. But this is not an us problem. Drinking more than you want to drink is not an us problem. Yeah.
13:09
It is a alcohol. Number one is an addictive substance, it's an addictive substance to anybody who drinks it.
13:15
And the world is has not been created for us to thrive, particularly as female assigned at birth. Women. What however you choose to
13:28
talk about your gender
13:30
is not been designed for us to thrive. It's been designed for us to keep masking, keep pretending to be a certain thing in order for us to be accepted in the world. So the terrifying thing of the other thing, the you know,
13:51
those sort of questions, so I didn't know you had a problem, or Well, I don't have a problem. I would if I had a problem. There's only a slight problem. It's like the problem sets with sits with yours. It drives me nuts, I get really angry about it. Because I was definitely not somebody that you would consider to have had a problem, right.
14:10
And I know that there is there are different levels of
14:14
struggles with alcohol.
14:17
But I think this idea that there are some people who can drink and some people who can't drink this other ring this binary, anything that's binary, it just tends to be a bit bullshit, in my opinion, tends to be oversimplified. Nothing is black and white.
14:38
Everything is Misty,
14:40
and nuanced. And none of us know Right? There's no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. It's like that and maybe that
14:50
work it through.
14:54
But so this problem so the reason I'm talking about my story was
15:00
Young now I know myself to be autistic kid who shapeshifted. And, you know, you speak to people who've been drinking, who have found managing their alcohol consumption difficult.
15:15
Most people are shapeshifters camouflage, as people would say, I always remember thinking my dad used to say, Oh, he was, you know, he could be anybody to anybody, you know, he could walk Hello Hullabaloo, that's a great name. He could walk into a pub, and be sat with a bunch of tradies. And he will be exactly the same with them, as he would be. If he met a bunch of Lords and Ladies, he could be whoever he needed to be in order to fit in very good at that my dad. And I was the same.
15:51
And I think a lot of drinkers are similar. And this is what we'd call masking. So I remember being a little girl
15:59
under five, liking my alone time enjoying reading my book. Now, this is why for me, when COVID struck, it was you know, to me being ice, I felt such relief that I didn't have to perform Emma anymore, out in the world is performative.
16:20
And I know we talked about this a lot in our group, but it's performing self. Because what happens is we're born into the world, and all these different things happen. And, you know, we make a mistake. So for example, for me, my mom would invite people around to our house, I wouldn't play with them, I'd be off in my bedroom, reading my book, my sister be left to play with them. And that would and even though my mom loves me to death, and is a beautiful human being, and we talked about this in group as well. This is why Hey, Jenny's lounge, nice to see you glad you're here. This is why it's so important that we can look at our histories without feeling the need to because I noticed one thing that comes up a lot in neurodivergent circles because
17:08
particularly for moms, we find we get blamed for a lot of stuff. You know, particularly medical professionals. Hello, Miss Henny Penny, that's a cute question. Everyone's got cute names hullabaloo Denise lounge, Miss Henny Penny, lovely names.
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But we find that we'll take our children to doctors, and they'd be like, Well, you're not feeding them properly, or you need to get them out or you need to do this, you need to do that. The blame is always on the month, right? Or the parents
17:38
and on the children. Yeah, so it's never about the society, the situation, the pressure, the the you know, the the unfit for purpose nests of our modern world. Similarly, with what's going on with women in the world at the moment, you know, the blame is never on the perpetrators, it's always on the onus of the victim, to prove that the bullier or the abuser did the thing, not the other way around. And this is the way our society works. It's really fucked up. It's really fucked up.
18:16
And the reason I'm talking about this is because we, we get people are unpleasant to us, they make us responsible for things. And so we shape shift, we change ourselves. And we this is why personalities, personality, and I talk about this a lot in my work is absolute construct. 100% construct, personality, yes, we have traits and things that come from genes and stuff like that. But most of all, I mean, even when we talk about our values, you know, our values to a certain extent, that, you know, are something that we have constructed because they work well for us, you know,
18:56
and again, that's a great such a great conversation to have. And please if anyone fancies, you know, has something to say or wants to contribute, please feel free to comment. I would love that.
19:09
But so for me, I was a shapeshifter camouflage.
19:14
And I remember lots of different we most most people who drink you find, there's a couple of times they've broken up with friends, they've got our stupid they were on the outer, we always felt like we were on the outer we never quite fit in. A lot of the time we drink because it makes us feel like you know, we lose some of that anxiety. We feel like we can be the thing that society wants us to be the extrovert the sociable human being, we can manage our emotions when they get really feels like we can manage our emotions when they get really big.
19:47
And so I started drinking at quite a young age.
19:51
I remember getting really, really drunk when I was about I'd say probably 12 or 13 My parents route. I drank a bottle of Malibu
20:00
That's gross, right?
20:02
But I was tasting it was sweet. I was young. And I was I was bored. Basically, I had nothing to do. And I was like, I enjoyed the feeling. And then I got so I was, I was so ill. And my poor mom and dad were they were, they were going somewhere. So they had to leave me with a friend.
20:19
And I was not at all well. But I remember then as I went through school, I broke up with a young a friend when I was very young, we were 11 or 12. And I loved her, like she was my best friend. And we used to play with very young, too, as I think neurodivergent kids have now. And we're a lot younger than our sort of
20:40
neurotypical friends.
20:43
And I wish we'd still play, play, make believe games and all this kind of stuff.
20:50
And then she broke up with me, she preferred to be with somebody else, but her best friend sounds so pathetic, but really hurt me. I was really I was devastated was like breaking up with a boyfriend. And I remember thinking I Okay, so I'm not this is this knee isn't okay. This meat doesn't keep friends. I needed to evolve this, like this evolve evolution of this performance of creating the human being that we supposed to be in as well. And I remember creating emerged to be a rebel,
21:24
to be a smoker drinker. And there was various other different things that happened in life, you know.
21:30
But I think I remember being a teenager, and I remember, like, I look back at photos of myself. And I think, gosh, she was beautiful. She was incredible.
21:40
But
21:42
I didn't know what to do with all of that. I didn't know what to do with myself. And so I drink.
21:49
I remember being, you know, sick form at school and getting really, really drunk on my 18th birthday, passing out
21:58
and then having to go to a party. And I look back and I say, Well, why wasn't that bad? You know, it wasn't that you know, that person. But actually, there was so many different indications that I had problems. I had problems, like I and I wasn't like I had a problem with alcohol. I think I had a problem with being a human being
22:15
in the world, I didn't know what to do with myself. And I'd sabotage things like I remember going and getting drinking. I was at art college. And I was going up to Central Saint Martins for an interview to go on to do their degree in Central Saint Martins Lingams, like the best, the probably the best. Hey, Marcia, good to see you. Probably not the best art school. And I remember drinking a bottle of wine on the way. And so when I got there, I was absolutely shit faced. And obviously, I didn't get in. But it's almost like I couldn't manage the power, the possibility that, you know, I couldn't manage the possibility of me, the potential of me was I didn't have the strength to harness that extraordinary nests. And I often think that I read this beautiful piece, which I see if I can find it, I read this beautiful piece. And I want to talk about this a bit more, at some point
23:12
from a writer, so find a quote, that was really beautiful. I shared it with my book club recently.
23:22
Let me see if I get it.
23:26
Here we go.
23:28
I thought this was really brilliant. He said, This is a lady called Marianne Williamson, her books called a return to love. I haven't read it. But I just found this quote. And he said, Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I? To be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous. Actually, who are you not to be? You're playing small, doesn't serve the world. And I just thought that was just so beautiful. And in so true of us. Because when we drink, we dilute ourselves, we become this person, that society wants us to be this cookie cutter, you know, perfectionism trying to be like everybody else, have all the stuff be on Instagram, this all so performative and exhausting, because it's not real.
24:34
And I think that's one of the things that for me, has been transformational, and I still have so much learning and growth to do. And we talk about healing and I would say you know, from make duck circling back to that word for me, it's not about healing something that was broken. For me. It's about growing into the human being that we were put on this earth to be.
24:55
And so my story is I
24:58
drunk it
25:00
In
25:01
my 20s, my 30s, my 40s, I appeared like a very, very regular human being, I had a great job in London and city, moved to Australia with two young kids bought a beautiful house, work for some super cool companies, I never needed to explain what I did, because everyone was always like, Wow, it's amazing. And I was very proud of that. It's very proud because I fat into the shape I was supposed to be in order to be accepted in the world. And
25:34
you know, that took time. So for me, you know, I reflect back. And I always used to have to work a lot harder than most other people. Same at university, I've ended up getting three degrees. At first, my first degree was in
25:51
fine art and drama. Then I did a master's degree in art in psychoanalysis, and then I did my
25:57
postgraduate diploma in
26:01
counseling and psychotherapy.
26:04
But I always felt like I had to work twice as hard as everybody else because of the way now I've had my autism diagnosis, I understand that my brain my processing skills are different to other people. And so, you know, often like we were reading a book in, in group called presents process, and is absolutely phenomenal. I recommend it to anybody, if you want to understand more about emotions, about processing emotions, about how our past impacts on our future, and how we can move to a place where we're less triggered, triggered, and less of in our unconscious behavior. So therefore, you know, pouring ourselves a glass of wine, when we don't
26:48
you know, when we don't really know why, or because we're just trying to get away from ourselves or because we think that suddenly that's gonna give us control over something, all the other reasons why we why we drink.
27:00
And so for me, this journey through reducing drinking, for me, my personal decision was to stop drinking. Because the work I did around myself around alcohol meant that, that I, I don't have any desire to drink, which is very surprising, because I loved drinking. And I was thinking to myself this morning, I was talking about the decision that I made.
27:31
I remember, I had, I was bullied at work, I left my job
27:37
went and had to go through a law case. And I'm not really allowed to talk about that much. Yes, yes, as Marcia saying, so interesting, isn't it? I and I,
27:53
and I broke a little bit, I broke, because my identities shattered. My identity was this I was his capable,
28:02
constructed human being I was an extrovert, I had a great job I was, you know, like, you know, I ran three times a week, 10 kilometers, I did half marathons, I looked on the surface, like, everything was perfect. But it was so far away from that.
28:23
Oh, the book that I'm talking about Gen is called the presents process by Michael Brown. It's my favorite book and in my group,
28:34
be the lighthouse, we have done it now. It's the actual process of doing it. So you can actually do it as an experience as well. And it's
28:44
10 weeks of breath work. So you do 15 minutes breath work in the morning, 15 minutes breath in the afternoon reading in read a little bit of the book, but you don't have to do that at all. And just reading the book in and of itself is mind blowing. And the reason I got into it was because, you know, I studied with Gabor Ma Tei last year, for a year. And this was one of the books that he recommended. And you can see how influential it has been on his work.
29:11
And it's massively influential for me around this thing of processing our emotions, integrating our emotions, learning the reasons why we react to things in the way we do, and why it feels so unmanageable for us and why we reached for drinks, it feels safer to drink than to be with the experience that we're having.
29:33
And for me, a lot of that was like I was not I was having not in a good place my relationship with my husband at all. And I drank to sort of suppress that pretend it wasn't happening. pretend everything was okay. But I remember after I left that job, and you know, I could tell you millions of other little stories, but after I left that job, I decided I started to build myself back up as a human being from scratch and
30:00
Did you know I started doing yoga and meditation, I left my job, I knew I couldn't go back to work in marketing, corporate marketing, I just didn't feel like I could, I felt like I'd have to lie about who I was. And there's something really important to me about authenticity and integrity. And I, and the reason I love the work that I do in the working space is because I think authenticity, and integrity is absolutely fundamental
30:27
to
30:29
cutting down or stopping, reducing, drinking,
30:34
because it's about being you.
30:37
And not being all this other affectation is performance, this, how we want to perceive be perceived in the world. And it's this masking of self, that causes us so much distress because it's trying, right, we're trying to be something we're not.
30:54
We're trying to be something that's accepted, so we can be loved.
31:01
Without realizing that, that's, that's, that comes from us from our, from our special essence of self, you know, we were born with the ability to nurture ourselves.
31:12
It's a, it's a, it's an innate for us.
31:16
And this is one of the most beautiful things about doing this work, if you're interested in going further
31:23
than taking a break and actually getting into being more long term, which again, you know, totally up to everybody. That's not my bag, I'd you know, for me, it's like, do whatever you want to do anything is great anyway, of reducing your drinking is amazing. And that's why the programs that I run,
31:42
apart from my membership group, which is called be the lighthouse that is about if you want to have a longer term.
31:51
If you want to live alcohol free and longer term, like a year, six months, you know, forever, but the rest of my programs are not about that at all. Because that if I had, I would never have joined a program. If someone has said to me, you have to stop drinking, I would never have
32:11
and you know, everything like this, we have to learn ourselves, we have to go on our own journey. It has to be a journey of discovery. And it has to be a journey of trial and error. No one can tell you
32:23
to do something, you have to work out yourself. And I don't know what there was this little part of me my intuition, tap tap tapping on my shoulder and it kept saying to me, there's something not right here, Emma.
32:35
When I'd wake up my throat would be disgusting. My mouth had felt like crap. And again, you know, I like I say I wasn't somebody that you would pick out and say she's got problem. I definitely probably drunk. I was on the heftier line hefty aside the most of my, in my group, everyone drank.
32:58
And apart from about once or twice, towards the end, I never drank during the day.
33:06
I was just, I had a good job, I didn't drink during the day, I ran untoward, intensive purposes, I looked like
33:14
you know, regular Joe.
33:19
But I was feeling shitty about myself. I was waking up at three o'clock in the morning. And I was being mean to myself.
33:29
And, you know, this is one of the biggest issues that we have is that we go into battle with ourselves.
33:35
And that is often the reason why we ended up drinking, we end up drinking because we're at war with ourselves. And it's so unpleasant. It's so awful for us. Because we've got one part of us who's trying to save us from feeling bad. By getting us to drink and another part of us who's saying, You're a loser, you need to not be drinking, because we know it's bad for you.
33:54
And it's that exact dynamic that keeps so many of us stuck in the drinking cycle. And that's what we try to unpick in the work that I do with people because for me,
34:06
and I think for most people, but nobody likes being told what to do, do they you know, none of us like someone coming in and being like, yes, you should do this. That's like the voice in our head. We'd have already got enough of that. We don't need people coming in telling us what to do. What we need is somebody showing us that
34:29
there's another way to be in this world.
34:33
And it's bloody brilliant. It's not what we think at all.
34:38
And so this is why I've got this stuff coming up.
34:42
I've got a masterclass on the 22nd of May,
34:46
which is called How to Drink less the easy way, which is all about the question or what if it was easy, and we're going to talk about all the reasons why we think stopping drinking or taking a break from drinking or cutting down our drinking is hard.
35:00
and how to mitigate them. So we've got that coming up on 22nd of May. And then we've got my five day alcohol reset program, which is on the 27th to 31st of May. That is beautiful a program that I created. When I first started out in this, it's really good quality. It's like early juice of learning everything and putting it all into a little program. So we do the programs, you get a video, you get
35:29
some journaling prompts, we're in a Facebook group together, and then we have evening coaching as well. And in that evening coaching, this is going to be all about drinking less the easy way and drinking less and feeling fabulous. And it's nothing to net, there's gonna be no pushing anything. It's like, if you don't, if you want to go back to drinking normally afterwards, that is totally fine. Because like with all of my programs, like the great Ozzie ALCL experiments, she has my 30 Day version.
35:59
Hello, hello, one minute adventures. Nice to meet you. Hello, hello, Alicia home, nice to meet you. Lovely, I'm really glad you're here.
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Just talking about the Great Aussie alkyl experiment, which is my 30 Day program. Now that is totally an experiment. And it is for you wherever you are with your relationship with alcohol. And I'm not you know I am. There's no judgement here for me most of my friends drink, I don't care whether people drink or not. What I want people to be able to do is open their minds and have what I had, which was my I had this. It's amazing. I joined a program. And I started questioning all the different reasons why I drank why I liked why I thought I like to drink. And this is part of what I do in my work with people as well.
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And one of my main reasons was I love the taste of wine. They love it. Love it so much. It's the best part of my identity.
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It's part of being the person I think I am.
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And hello, Karen. Nice to meet you. And
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I was walking on the beach. And I think I was running actually because I think it was a time of my life when I was still running. I don't run anymore. My menopausal knees.
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We walk, we walk and swim, we do yoga, and we do a bit of doom as well.
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But I used to run a lot. And I remember running and I was thinking about this. And I was thinking about the
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I was thinking about this question. And one of my answers was I love the taste of wine, this reason why I drink.
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And I started picking it apart.
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And I realized this was January 2020. And I realized that the last time I'd enjoyed a drink of wine, which I thought was my favorite drink was about the eighth of December, and I've been in the pub with my friend and we bought a bottle of wine. And it was absolutely fantastic. And I loved it.
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And then it made me think that because I'd been drinking between that
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putting this room when I was running,
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and nothing else really had been that great.
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And it opened up this tiny little sliver in my brain where I was like, Well, you say you love the taste of wine. But actually, when you look at it, it's only like, one once a month, maybe maybe twice a month that I actually loved the taste of wine, the rest of the time, it was kind of mere, never written not really living up to its expectations, right. And this makes total sense because that's how dopamine works. Her Dopamine is a reward. neurotransmitter hormone, it's a it's
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it tells us it gets us to do stuff, it's a doing thing. So gets us to make to do things and we get a reward at the end of it. And so one of the things that one of the ways it does excuse me
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by convincing us that something is better than it actually is.
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Which is why often you'll find that people will stop drinking and they start romanticizing
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alcohol
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to be this like amazing panacea of all amazing things.
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But I started and it was this was amazing. Like it was this tiny little chink for me. It's tiny little
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trying to get the right word for like a shard
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a shard of possibility
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that the things that I was telling myself in my head, the identity that I had created for myself
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wasn't 100% True.
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It wasn't 100% Real because I've been telling myself that I love the taste of wine and no sounds really silly.
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But just that possibility that actually let's say most of the time I do
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You didn't. Most of the time, I was just drinking because I'd had the drink. I'd be looking forward to it. I got it. It wasn't all that. But I finished the bottle anyway, right? How many times we've all done that, I mean, the amount of times that I used to do like dried to die sober October. And I remember trying to do it in this two year period, I think it's really trying to stop drinking probably one year probably where I'd you know, try and do I do a month, I could probably do a month. And then sometimes I try to do six weeks, I'm trying to eight weeks, I couldn't do it. And I'd always end up going back to drinking because I felt deprived. And I'd end up drinking this really disgusting wine, whatever bridge left in the house. And I still finished the bottle.
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But it wasn't that great. Like it wasn't that great to drink. And bought this opened up, they still shared a possibility opened up for me was the possibility that everything else that I believe to be true about myself and about alcohol
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wasn't necessarily true.
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And that is the work that I do with people in my programs. So we do a couple of different things. We work on being with big emotions, we work on being with the discomfort of our emotional experience of the world, work on that. And then we also work on
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the mindset piece, which is the belief system. And so this, you know, the two big pieces of work I'm doing in the lead up to my great OCR called experiment are all about what if this was easy, because it's all about mindset. It's all about perception. It's all about the lens through which we see the world. We sit if we think something's going to be hard, it will be really bloody hard. We get what we expect. Yeah.
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Get what we expect, what if it was easy?
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And I know Tim Ferriss asked a question in his can't remember what it was in. But he said something like, what would this look like if it was easy? And that's how he approaches business things? And I think
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his question what if it was easy because this we've been so conditioned to believe everything has to be hard, and all four and grind and you know, good things, you know, only come when you really knuckle down was totally the wrong approach.
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That we're restricted that we can't have something that implies that we're wanting to have something great. And actually alcohol is innocuous substance, like it's an innocuous substance, but
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it's not what so as in alcohol doesn't have a moral value. It's neither good nor bad. It just is a substance. But it's only innocuous substance. You know, it is it is it causes great problems. For us. It's like one of the most addictive drugs in the world. But it's really interesting because Gabor talks, for example, Marty talks about this, and he says, you know,
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it's not necessary. In fact, I'll read you the quote is another really good one, sorry, I'm
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sure weren't as it's probably a bit of a waste of time. But there's a there's a quote that he has where he talks about, and I think this is so true, it's like, I was reading the myth of normal and I came across it and it was like, it's not actually about,
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you know, having an addiction to whatever sex food, social media, the it's not about that. It's about what we're doing that thing to escape from. So you know, being with the feeling. So we work on mindset in my work,
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which is, you know, the things that we believe to be true, like, alcohol relaxes me, alcohol makes me more fun. I'm better at socializing with alcohol, alcohol is better for connection. And we unpick every single one of those, we literally unravel it, we use this tried and tested method that I got trained in, when I took my break for my first successful break, which was when I had that chink moment, I was running down the beach. It came into my brain that I didn't actually love the taste of wine. Sometimes I did but most of the time I didn't. Everything else started to come. Just came tumbling down. It was like you know, I started to learn about how alcohol affects my body how it affects the brain Hello simply happy organization Nice to see you glad you're here.
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And and, and it's like,
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the way we approach stopping drinking, cutting down drinking is so
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flawed, because we start with the behavior. We like right I'm gonna knuckle down I'm not gonna drink and I'm gonna only have this much. And of course as soon as you know we have a situation happen that activates our nervous system.
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Demo triggers us like, you know, our kid stopped doing what they're supposed to do. Or
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being rude to us being disrespectful, a work colleague being a dick management being, you know, whatever.
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Suddenly, our internal reactive system takes over. And we cannot keep up the willpower game. And the reason why we're always going to fail when we do things the willpower away is because it only lasts for so long, it's a muscle and we expend it, the more we use it, and we use willpower for everything in this world. And you know, the, it comes out of the same pot as the willpower to keep going and doing our working or ironing or whatever it is all comes out of the same pot. It's finite pot.
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I've lost track of my arm, like why are you talking about this or menopause brain.
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But it's such a different way, the way that I work with people. This is why in the 30 day alcohol experiments we've got coming up on the third of June, I work with people every day, we do 30 days worth of video, we do 30 days of journaling prompts and we do and it's good. It's optional, you don't have to. But if you come into the groups, we have the option to come on Zoom. And every single night at seven o'clock, we do a grounding, where we learn to be with our big emotions to identify how we're feeling to learn how to sit with it. We then go through every single
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Eros yet so like you darlin, we go through every single
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limiting belief that we might have about alcohol. So, you know, it makes us funny, helps us sleep, you know all those different things, and we unpick them, and we pull them apart and we show them for the lies that they are.
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And we rebuild the belief system in our brain so that we are coming to Algol from a completely different perspective, which changes you. And then we put in a scaffolding to support ourselves through that. So that might be a breathwork practice, it might be going for a walk in nature, it might be whatever it might be, we put that around the edges. And there you are, you've got community, you're with other people, you're not feeling alone. You're discussing all of this stuff and realizing that you're not the only one. And it's not those people over there in the corner with a problem. It's every bloody Joe, it's all of us. Everybody drinks more than they want to right? It's very, like of course we do because it's an addictive substance. That's what it does, it makes us want to drink more. That's how it works chemically. And yet we make ourselves bad and wrong because of it. I mean, not bad and wrong. We're just human beings having a go in what's actually quite a tough world.
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It's quite a difficult world out there. You know, it's a lot going on. And for us who feel a lot.
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You know, we've got everything going on in Palestine we've got the world is just is really, really, really tough at the moment. And the amount of hate, you know, just have to go on social media, and it was nasty. People say nasty things to people. It's just, it's depressing.
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Of course we drink makes total sense. And half the women I know in relationships with other human beings that, you know, it's not as it's not as rosy as we will make out. It's not as evolved as we all make out. And a lot of the time we're having to suppress these sort of feelings that we were born into this world with so much hope and excitement, and then we wake up as middle aged 50 year old women going Hello, Christina, good to see you on
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what the what the hell, you know, what the hell, what the hell happened to that amazing woman with so much potential that,
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you know,
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left home and started to build this life and thought she was going to be all these things and all this stuff happens to us, life happens to us. And it's hard. Of course we drink. And it's about that it's about building this loving relationship with ourselves. It's about mothering ourselves, back to the human being that we put on this earth to be has incredible potential, this incredible source of
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so much
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about that. And we can only really do that
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when we start to take away some of these coping mechanisms, and I always refer to Brene Brown when she wrote that beautiful piece on midlife and talking about how you know this is the time when all of this pretense all these coping mechanisms, everything we use to keep ourselves safe.
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is harming us, not helping us.
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And it's when we need to make a change. When we make a choice we, we can carry on doing things the way we've always been doing them. And that has its own price to pay. Or we can look at what we're doing, and change areas of our lives. And it might be I think changing relationship with alcohol is probably one of the best things you can possibly do to help your growth, to help you be able to see things for what they really are.
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And be able to start loving yourself for what you really are. You know, we a lot of the time with people when we stopped drinking, or we take a break from drinking. It's like, I wish I could be that fun person again, I wish I was that person down in the pub. I wish I was. And it's like, we're wishing that we were being about former.
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That was never who we were here to be. We were never here to be like everybody else.
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We were born to be extraordinary. And by that I don't mean ruling the world being presidents.
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I mean, being us, not being anyone else being us,
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and loving ourselves and showing our children that they can of us themselves to
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they don't have to be anything other than who they are. They don't have to perform themselves.
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So that was my story. I mean, there's loads of bumps in the night. I had my young, my, my younger, my older child, you know, say things like oh, you know, Mum, you when you bring wine into the bedroom, it makes me feel anxious. And that was definitely a nail in the coffin for me.
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There was other things I fell over I got a bit of rosebush caught in my neck. And my discharge notes said
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piste, fell into a rosebush. You know.
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But I know that those things in isolation can sound perhaps a little bit confronting, but in reality, everyone's got stories like this, you know, I was watching something on social media and that was poor girl and a young 18 fella firm. And she was dancing on the pool steps and she fell off. And she, I mean, she lucky she was she was alive i friend who.
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And I know a lot of us know people who've, you know, dived into pools and
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become very, very hurt or passed away. You know, so many things can happen to us when we drink because we're not ourselves. But I'm not here really to be like, you know, all drinking is really bad or anything like that. So, you know, you can work that stuff out by yourself. We all take risks in life. You know, I chose to not drink after I had taken a year off drinking. Because I worked through it, I read through all the things about it. And it became clear to me that it had absolutely nothing for me.
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I no longer wanted to escape from myself. If I was having a bad time, I wanted to be there. If I was having a good time I wanted to be there.
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And that was how this how it changed for me.
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But you know, again, you know doesn't matter doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing.
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I just think the opposite giving ourselves the opportunity to take a break to be able to look at
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are drinking the reasons why we're drinking the reasons why we're using coping mechanisms is so helpful.
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That's all for me. I think has anyone got any questions anything they want to ask me at all before I finish off
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feel free to I'm here
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otherwise, I will jump off
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and say it's good delicious being with you today. Thank you for listening to me sharing. Some of my story changes every time I tell it. There's always different bits that you've emphasized over busy talk about, isn't it? But I just think there's so much commonality and I think sharing our stories is so important. And everybody's story is worth talking about.
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Stories that hate their precious
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stories are how we change things.
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How we connect with each other.
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How we get rid of shame and stigma.
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Thank you, my friends. Thank you for sparing your time to be with me.
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I really appreciate you
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lots of love. Take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
