Empowered Sobriety: Transform Your Life with Expert Coaching
This might surprise you, but the reason you can’t quit drinking might have little to do with alcohol. Yes, it’s a highly addictive substance that is hard to move away from, but if you are like me, you have seen some success by gritting it out for 30 days, alcohol-free. After that, you may no longer have a physical dependence on alcohol that is keeping you stuck. Maybe you never did. If you are a middle-of-the-lane drinker who secretly fears you’re imbibing a little too much, I invite you to consider some powerful questions. This is a little preview of what it is like to work with me as a coach.
Many of my clients have been stuck in a purgatory of drinking/not drinking for years, and so have I. Women come to me and finally make the worthy investment of my one-on-one coaching because they’ve already done other programs They’ve tried the other things, and although they were good stepping stones in making progress towards change, they were not getting to the heart and the depth of healing from the inside out.
Sure, you can learn some quick tips, like replacing an alcoholic drink with a mocktail, to immediately feel better, but that might not equate to the lasting change you are seeking. To really quit drinking, we know you need to lose the desire to drink at all. If you want to make change, you need to create a desire for change.
How do you get there? Through powerful questioning with a certified coach who can help you unlock your unconscious thoughts regarding making this type of personal transformation,. As a coach, I have a series of questions that can lead you to awareness about your desire to change.
Your own thinking that you got into overdrinking is not going to get you out of overdrinking. You’ve been doing that, and it’s not getting you the results you want. Coaching is an effective modality, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to create change. This is a hill I am willing to die on. Here’s a glimpse at some questions you can ask yourself, most effectively done in the presence of a qualified coach.
Do you want to quit?
Yes, of course. Why would I be here if I didn’t? You say. I get it. I was there too, but the truth is, I didn’t want to quit drinking. Not at all. I loved drinking, or so I thought. I wanted to stop suffering the consequences of drinking too much, but I did not want to quit.
For years, I tried to moderate, manage, and be mindful about my drinking with varying degrees of success. I didn’t ultimately want a life without alcohol; I wanted a life with less alcohol. I wanted alcohol to be backstage, not center stage.
It was through powerful questioning that I could recognize that keeping alcohol in my life was holding me back from everything I really wanted.
Thinking that drinking was relaxing was actually an illusion, but it was also my sign of permission to sit down and relax. With a drink in my hand, I allowed myself to be done with carpooling, responsibilities, and caregiving. A space to not be tied to my roles as parent, partner, and professional. Author Eve Rodsky calls this Unicorn Space in her latest book, Find Your Unicorn Space. I think a lot of women use alcohol as a substitute for unicorn space, which is defined as endeavors that connect us to the creative expression of ourselves. Many of us can’t sit alone with our thoughts for a minute, much less create actual time and space for exploration. Staying in motion and running on the wheel of our robotic lives seems to be the only way to keep the ship running. We use alcohol to fuel us up when we need to step on the gas, and then we use alcohol to slam the brakes when we have a minute to rest.
Alcohol is not only about our relationship to ourselves; however, consuming alcohol was also the social glue in my relationships, driving me farther away from intimacy. I didn’t notice that it was creating distance between me and others, but I could see that it kept me in the same room with people. Alcohol helped me further ignore the discomfort of admitting when relationships weren’t working for me. This felt like friendship. It’s all I knew. Alcohol allowed me to numb my instincts about what healthy relationships were and deny my own needs. As one client put it, “alcohol took me out of the equation,” and sad as that is, it seems to be the goal for many women to deny their own needs in order to keep the peace in relationships. Friendships that were not reciprocal felt better than having no friends at all. I was wrong about this too. It wasn’t just friendship; I thought alcohol enhanced my marriage, and I wanted to be a good wife. Being under the influence of my husband blurred my insecurities about showing myself fully in all ways. It felt liberating to care less about being perfect in every way, even though it was dulling all my senses and making for a much less intimate experience of togetherness, whether we were sitting across the table from each other or between the sheets.
I was finally and painfully able to let alcohol go, but in order to do so, I had to prioritize it. I had to make staying sober my top priority. This was not something I was willing to do in my sober, curious days. At first, it felt like a punishment. I wanted to quit drinking, but I also wanted to have a drink.
I wanted to quit drinking, but not enough to feel like I was making a scene at dinner by not accepting that glass of wine that was just poured for me.
I wanted to quit drinking, but I didn’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable. I still don’t, if I am being honest.
I didn’t want to wake up hungover, but I couldn’t say no to the wine tasting I had already committed to and purchased a ticket for.
I wanted to make alcohol small and irreverent, but there was no way I was not drinking on holidays. I was always going to drink on vacation; who doesn’t? I had no other ideas for celebration, and I didn’t want to live a sad life, so kind of no.
I didn’t want to quit drinking, and I think that’s where most of my clients land. Its ok to want to drink less and eventually drink none. That’s how it works for many people. Not drinking at all can feel like a huge commitment, and you might not be ready to declare that yet, even to yourself.
I invite you to get really honest with yourself. Do you want to quit drinking? No, you maybe don’t. That’s ok. Many of my clients come to me after they’ve done 30-day programs, courses, or email-type sequence resources with another coach. I have my own powerful Digital Jumpstart Course created exactly for people in the contemplation stage about their relationship to alcohol.
When these women start our discovery call with their heads hung low, they feel like complete failures.
I say, “Wait a minute, what is going on here? How did you do when you were in that program?” The response is usually something like they drank 2 of the 30 days. I confirm they were drinking almost daily prior to that. Yes.
“So this is like a 90+% success rate, right?” Yes.
“And you’re calling it a failure? Why?” Because I started drinking again when the program ended.
"Oh, did you have a plan or a goal that this program was going to help you stop drinking for the rest of your life?” No.
“What was your goal with the program?” To go 30 days without alcohol.
“And you basically did that?” Yes.
“And now you are calling yourself a failure over it?” Well, I’ve done other programs too. Same results.
“Okay, why are you here with me?” Because I want to quit drinking.
“For good?” Yes.
“Have you ever had that goal before?” No.
“Well, there you have it. You are judging your failure on something that was never a goal to begin with. Congratulations! I say you went 28–30 days alcohol-free. That’s a great improvement, and it sounds effective.“ I never thought of it that way, but they respond.
It can be a process. It can be a journey. Most of my clients honestly don’t want to quit for good, but after working with me, they feel so good they never want to go back. It is okay to embark on sober coaching even if you are not sure you want to quit for good. You are not the same person after a few coaching sessions because it changes you. You will have a new mindset. You will see alcohol for what it is. You will start addressing the things that alcohol is buffering or blocking. Your confidence grows. Your health improves. Your headspace becomes a nicer place to live. You start to see that alcohol isn’t giving you anything you want. You buff up your other tools and learn new coping skills, and it feels better. Feeling better and staying connected with me become the fuel that keeps the momentum going. You can join my Insider Community and see others thriving alcohol-free. Your pride grows. The light returns to your eyes. You start celebrating milestones. Its contagious in the insider community. We start to behave like the people around us. Soon, alcohol is so far in the rearview mirror that it becomes effortless. You no longer desire it. Do you really want to quit? Yes, you do. There is no other option for you.
Once you really want to quit, you can quit and stay quit. Before then, you will see pockets of success, but you won’t sustain change. Once your perception of alcohol changes, you no longer want it, and you don't’ feel like you are missing out. You start to hold your head high. You want to let it go. It doesn’t feel like something you have to do, which is maybe the way it started. It feels like something you want to do. Something you get to do. Something you are so grateful to be here for, especially when you recognize that not everyone gets an opportunity for this kind of freedom and awakening, but you do. You are here. You are doing it. There’s nothing you’d rather do. Get sober and live a life of sobriety. Yes, please, and thank you!
Do you believe you can?
This is a key question for anyone who is evaluating their relationship with alcohol. You have to believe you can get free from it. If you don’t believe you can, then you won’t. There is nothing I can do as a coach other than ask powerful questions to remove any blocks and get you closer to believing in yourself. There has to be a part of you, even if it is small and buried deep inside, that has a glimmer of belief that you can really ditch it, even without any prior proof of doing it. You have to believe you can. If you’ve already done a 30-day program, you’ve already seen some success. Go with it. If you’ve ever gone a day, you can go another day. If you had joy in your childhood without alcohol, you might start to believe its possible to have joy as an adult without it too. As a coach, I have to believe in my clients. It has to be the right match for a successful client-coach relationship. This is one reason I offer a complimentary discovery call. We both have to see if there is the right chemistry between us and if I am the right resource for you. I want to be confident that we will see success and grow and heal together. If not, I will refer you to other resources.
If I accept you as a client, you better believe that I believe in you 100%. I have limited coaching spots available, and I only want to work with people that I can make progress with. This is a win for my clients, and its a win for me. You can trust that I believe in you when we work together. I am not giving up on you. You have to have the same faith in yourself too. You have to dig deep to find that speck of hope within, and together we grow that light until it is shining so bright. You start to see your own wins. Sometimes that’s in the form of a day count tracker of freedom from alcohol, but other times it is by showing up for your calls, checking in at certain times during the day as part of your homework assignments, setting a new boundary, or taking a new route home from work that doesn’t pass a wine shop or liquor store. It is often allowing yourself to rest once in a while; it’s declining an invitation to go drinking with friends; and it's often creating new journal habits or practices to check in with yourself. Your little wins start to grow your own confidence in yourself. You start to feel empowered by keeping your promises and becoming the person you set out to be. Of course, I shine this light on you during every call. I point out your strengths and your wins even when you haven’t noticed them; even when you’re focused only on imperfections, I see the progress, and when I start to show you, you start to see it too. You start to notice it first. You start our calls by sharing your wins. Calling them out. “What has gone well this week?” I say, and from our first call, nothing. You tell me all the ways you’ve failed. After a few sessions, the wins start to add up. You have a whole list of things that have gone well. You can’t wait to share your wins with me. We celebrate together. You start to think differently and see differently, and this makes all the difference. This is the stuff you can’t do with your own cycle of thinking inside your own head. You need new thoughts, and I can help nudge you into thinking new thoughts, like, what if I actually can do this? What if I do ditch the drink? What if all of this is proof of progress? Even with my missteps, I am right here smack dab in my ditch the drink journey, and I am actually ditching the drink right now. Each of my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is more proof that I am doing it and not failing at it.
Reimagine your life without alcohol; is that what you want?
What does a life without alcohol look like to you? Being labeled a weirdo, a prude, or an alcoholic? Standing in the corner with your back to the party? A lifelong commitment to recovery means feeling sad and missing out, being handcuffed to an office chair, attending meetings that you don’t like with strangers you would never choose to hang out with,? Are you imagining leaving these meetings feeling worse than when you walked in? Following someone else's rules or something else risks relapse and throwing your life away by not following a plan someone else has set up for you. Living on guard with the fear that your addiction is doing push-ups in the parking lot? Losing your marriage? Your job? Your friends? Your social life? Your sexual life? Your hot-party-girl-fun-time personality that you’ve built yourself on? Giving up your top survival technique? If this is what you see when you look into a future without alcohol, it sounds pretty grim. No wonder you don’t want to run towards that future. Neither did I.
You have to see a happy, sober life in your mind’s eye first. And accept that things are going to change. They are going to look different than they do right now. You will change. You can’t change yourself and expect everything else to remain exactly the same. That’s not how change works. That’s the scary part, I suppose, but if you are being honest with yourself, things might not be working out as well as they should if tolerating your life requires you to overdrink consistently. That’s the hard truth: I didn’t want to see myself. Things would have to change, and it might not be a bad thing. I had to admit that maybe I wasn’t doing well. Maybe things weren’t as perfect as I portrayed them to be and wanted them to be. My denial was a good protector for a long time. I had to thank it and then release it for my new era coming around the bend. My husband understood this more than me at first. We had built our whole lives around drinkers and drinking. That’s what we knew, and that’s what we did. He said everything was going to change. He knew what that meant, and he was willing to do it alongside me. I had no idea what I was in for. I didn’t fully grasp this concept at first. I was just trying to get more alcohol-free days under my belt.
It is a gradual change, but eventually our whole lives will be different. Better. But even though it's better, that doesn't mean there wasn’t a lot of grief in letting go of our old life. We had to learn so much. We had to relearn or discover what we liked to do for fun. Which friends would remain when we no longer drank? What we drank when we weren’t drinking alcohol. What environments we wanted to be in and which ones were no longer for us. Our value system changed. At first, we were bored, confused, and left out before we figured it out. It was painful. We didn’t belong anymore in situations where, as drinkers, we would have been most popular. Ugh. I wanted to quit drinking quietly on the side and let my whole life stay the same, but that’s not how it worked.
In order to sustain long-term sobriety, my whole life had to change. I was desperately clinging to what I knew. I had to let it go. I had to let it all go. Friends, traditions, other people’s opinions, my fragile ego, my big secret—I poured it all out. I shed my skin. I was left completely exposed. People rejected and denied me. In my transformation, many of my long-term loved ones did not support me, and they did not want to come along for my ride on the sober wagon. I had to leave them behind and keep marching forward. I had to exclude myself from things. I had to be uncomfortable and not jump ship on my own pain. I had to get rid of my social pacifier and stand with nothing to soothe me—completely sober, fragile, in full reveal. It was really hard, but it brought me to where I wanted to be. It brought me closer to myself. I don’t need alcohol for any experience, and honestly, knowing what I know now, I feel bad for anyone who does. I think to myself, “You need to slow your thinking and dumb yourself down to sit around a table and enjoy food with friends. How sad. You have to numb out and not feel when you finally get alone time with your partner. Wow. You need to suck down poison to watch your kids play soccer. No. You want to plan a vacation around where you are going to drink? You’re missing out on everything. You’re missing out on being alive.” This is no longer the life I want.
So what does my life look like now? I am no longer hijacked by thinking about drinking. I am at peace with myself. There is no inner war. I can sit in peace with myself. I stand behind my actions and can more easily make amends and apologize. I recognize when I’ve gone wrong. I can change my mind. I can hold relationships with an open hand and not a death grip.
What will a sober life look like for you? Let’s ask some questions and find out. Schedule your Complimentary Call.
