#01 - Midlife AF Podcast - How The Hell Did I Get Here?
INTRO:
Welcome to midlife AF. I am going to introduce you to the one and only me in this episode. And I hope it's not too long winded but I'm basically going to take you through how I got from being a corporate marketing mom of two kids working full time to a broken wreck on the floor, having to build herself up again from square one. And, and then what happened for me and what's changed and how I ended up becoming a counsellor and alcohol coach. And I hope that through this process, you will see how universal all our struggles and concerns and worries are.
Because I know we're all individually wonderfully magical. But when we talk about issues with midlife, when we talk about issues with alcohol, when we talk about struggles with neurodiversity, and we talk about worrying about our teens and what they're going through, and our relationships with our partners and what it means when we stopped drinking. We realise we're all the same, and that's where the strength comes. And so I hope you enjoy this first session.
If you've got any questions, we're going to have a question in the show notes and I would love it if you want any topics for me to cover on this podcast.
I'm definitely going to do one on teenagers and drinking. You know what we should do and how we should be behaving around our teenagers with alcohol based on research.
But for now, sit back, enjoy and I hope you relate. Alright, my love's take care.
MAIN EPISODE:
In this episode of midlife AF, we're going to ask the question, How the hell did I get here?
So, I was a 20 year plus corporate marketing manager. And now I am a counsellor, psychotherapist and Grey Area Drinking & This Naked Mind Alcohol coach. Changing career happened over between 2019 and now. The last three years. And stopping drinking has been a big part of that for me.
What I wanted to do is just take you back to the last sort of year that I was drinking and a couple of things that happened. That led me on the path to deciding that I was going to take a break from alcohol. And then a little bit about my background, and my journey to the place where I decided to stop drinking and where we are now. So I'm sure you will relate to much of this story.
As I say to all of my clients, although we are magically a wonderfully individual, our stories are universal. And this is really important because there's so much shame and stigma around seeking help with problematic alcohol use. But there shouldn't be, because 90% of people have problematic alcohol use.
And particularly for women in midlife.
I could list for you the reasons people drink on a hand, they would all be the same. And there would be nothing to do with alcohol, it would be everything to do with the stuff that's going on for a middle aged woman in midlife. So here we go.
Picture this. We were having a beautiful party, we were a massive party household. And this would have been in 2019. So we're having a very big party, and we had DJ sets, we would have invited all our friends, everybody in Williamstown would have come there. And there would have been lots of alcohol and other things. And we would have been having a great time. And so it kind of got to the end, generally our parties because we had young kids. So generally our parties were during the day, because that meant as our kids were growing up that we could bring the kids along and they could play and do whatever, while the parents got smashed and danced and sung and let their hair down, generally.
But anyway, on this particular day, I knew I was coming to the end of my drinking, and I'll give you the backstory to that in a minute. I'd already had a lot of thought that alcohol wasn't serving me. It was making me feel crap! And I've done a lot over the years. I'd been doing Dry July, Feb Fast, Sober October. But I'd always found them to be absolutely horrendous. And I resented every second that I was doing them.
On this particular day, it was late afternoon, early evening, and I was putting my kids to bed. My eldest child was 11 at that time, and I went into his bed and he said, “Mum, can you please leave that glass of wine at the door? Because it's making me anxious when you bring alcohol into the bedroom when you're putting us to sleep”. And I registered it. It hit me, you know? Physically hit me.
But I was quite drunk and so I carried on putting them to bed and it sat there in my soul. Like so many of these things do and you push them away and you try to make them not mean anything But they do, you know, you know in your soul and that makes you sad. So that had happened.
Earlier in that year. I had gone camping with some friends and we always used to go camping, that was kind of what we did to socialise and go on holiday with our friends, it was very much part of our family dynamic. And we'd go often with groups of 10 other families, and everyone would get quite drunk, the kids would play together. And we'd have a really nice time. But it was definitely alcohol focused. For me, and I think most of the people who were there as well.
And on this particular occasion, I had just been through some quite dramatic stuff, which I'll go into in a bit more detail as we go along. And I didn't want to go, I didn't want to go because I was feeling ashamed of what had happened to me. And this was about the end of my career and the breakdown that I had, which I like to copy Brene Brown, I like to call it my ‘spiritual awakening’. But in reality, it was just this deep feeling of loss, depression, shame, so many things. And I didn't want to go, because I didn't want to speak to people about it. And I was forcing myself to go.
I think it was a big, funnily enough, I say it was a big wake up call. But this was an incident, probably April May time. And I didn't actually stop drinking, finally, until the following January the following year. But anyway, I noticed this, because it was a change in behaviour for me. And we were packing up to go and I always found camping stressful, my husband would get stressed, there's always been this big competition between the guys as to who would get their tents up first, and who would leave first and my husband would get quite cranky. And I found that I felt that. Like so many people who drink I felt that in my nervous system. So I felt very porous, and I was feeling very vulnerable. And on that morning, in order to get me through, I went and drunk some gin, chugged some gin. And then I thought “mmm that’s interesting”.
And anyway, that night, we'd sat around drinking in the evening, it hadn’t been too big a night or anything. But I was taking a few meds at that stage because I was going through a bit of a mental health period, really low mental health. And I had some sleeping pills. And so I took a sleeping pill that night, and I went to bed, and I slept soundly until the morning.
Then in the morning, I got up and I went about the campsite to say ‘hi’ to everyone. And my friend said to me, ‘Oh my god, I can't believe that you slept through all that last night”. And I was like “Slept through what?” and she said “Well your kids were screaming in the tent, they thought there was a spider” Now my kids are neurodiverse and things that they are frightened off. They have very high anxiety and spiders are a very big phobia for them. And she was like “I had to go in and help them and settle them down and you were just completely zonked” and I remember that feeling of shame. And I just brushed it off. You know like you do, even though you know in your soul that your soul is hurting and you don't feel in line with how you feel like. How you want to be as a human being. And I remember thinking, oh that one, she always has to mention my drinking, so instead of taking on what she said I sort of made her some sort of bad guy. But i think that is very common and I think we deflect off stuff we don't want to hear.
And then probably the last of the sort of incidents as such, you know, obviously there were incidents throughout my life. But in the lead up to my taking a year off, which was what I did in June. During 2020 I had been around a friend's house and it was a very chilled out event. There's some who weren't drinking, some people were watching the aptly named wine country. And if we had maybe I probably had a bottle of wine maybe a bit more. My friend who wasn't drinking was driving me home.
And I had my oldest child with me. And he was hanging out with my friend's kid. So they were going to just hang out together. Whilel, the mums watched the movie, had a few drinks, and went home. And unfortunately for me, what happened was as I was walking out of their house to go get my friend's car, I stumbled and fell straight into their rosebush, now their rose bush had, it was you know, when they cut back roses ready for, you know, kind of the next bloom or whatever it is. So it wasn't all covered in roses and like leaves and stuff. It was sort of gnarly, very old, sort of old woods, but kind of stumps of a branch. And that was what I fell into, and I fell into that in a way that it stuck in my throat, and it was right next to my jugular.
And being, you know, a bit drunk. I was like, Oh, I'm fine, and my child was there and he was like, Mum, you're bleeding. We need to go to the hospital. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's fine. It's fine. Luckily, my friend was a nurse, she was there. And she said, no, Emma, we need to go to the hospital, because you can't have a piece of branch stuck in your neck. Because it's very dangerous, particularly where it is, but just also being a piece of branch sticking. And so my kid had to stay at my friend's house while we went to the emergency place, and it was quite late at night. And I was really quite drunk, I realised how drunk I was when I was sort of there. Because I was coming in and out of consciousness.
And my husband showed up, he was so angry at me. We had planned to have a family weekend away. And so we had to cancel that. And then he and I had to go in an ambulance to another hospital. And they had to keep me in for the whole weekend because of the proximity to my jugular. So they got all the, you know, debree out and all of that. And eventually, at the end of the weekend, I got discharged. And on my notes, it said, pissed, which for those of you who are not from Australia, or the UK, means drunk. Fell into a rose bush, which was pretty unprofessional, but also incredibly mortifying.
And at this stage, I would have been, I don't know 47. Something like that. And it was just another one of those little, you know, those little things. That's why it was noticed, there was like no massive rock bottom, it's like, these little tiny cuts on your soul that just say, something's not right here. This isn't how things should be. There's something going on. This doesn't feel right. So, a whole heap of those things went on for me for a very long period of time.
I'll give you some background now. So those are kind of the three things that sort of really culminated. And all during this time, I was taking, you know, doing Febfast, Dry July, Sober October, and so on. And in addition, I just needed a few different things to happen. When you start to notice. And I think the other thing that was happening for me at the time was. And we'll go into the whys and wherefores of this. But every time I drank, which you know, sometimes I'd only be drinking during the week, you know, not during the weekdays or weekends, I'd go for long periods of time or just drink on weekends. And then occasionally I just fall off the bend and, you know, go rogue for a few weeks and drink after work. But generally, you know, I had a really good job. I wasn't you know, no one of my work colleagues would have realised. And really, it wasn't so much what other people thought about me or the level of what I drank. I mean, what I would drink would probably be considered normal drinking, and we drank a lot at the weekend like absolutely heaps. And the aim was to get obliterated. But we also thought we really enjoyed the drinking.
But it wasn't that sort of. And this is the problem with alcohol. It's never, It’s very rarely in most people's lives. It's not, I've lost my home, I've lost my family, I'm on the streets. It's, I'm holding down a great job. I run three times a week, to everybody else my drinking is completely normal. But I'm waking up at three o'clock in the morning. And I'm full of shame. And I'm hating myself. And this does not feel like how life should feel. And that was where I was.
And so just to give you a bit of background about me. I was born to suit two lovely, beautiful parents. And I had a sister, a little sister. My dad grew up in Africa, his dad worked at the post office. And we were based in the UK. And when we were seven years old, I was lucky enough that my parents moved to Zambia in Africa. And so I did my primary school years in Zambia, Botswana. And then when I turned 11, my mum and dad moved to Nigeria, and I went to boarding school in England, which I thought was the best thing since sliced bread. Because I thought it was gonna be like Mallory Towers. And it pretty much was like Mallory Towers and so we used to go visit my parents for the holidays in Africa. And there was pretty wild social life for the teenagers, the expatriate teenagers. We had a very good time.
And to give you some background, my family are drinkers but nothing that you would consider to be excessive except, of course, totally is. My grandparents would come around to them. You'd get a gin and tonic or a gin and ginzano at 10 / 11 o'clock in the morning to start the weekend off. And everybody drank, in a, it was all sophisticated drinking. Aperitifs wine, liquors. Everybody was drinking much more than would be considered the recommended amount of alcohol.
And we were also brought up in a family that loved travelling. And so when we were little, before we moved to Africa, we used to go to France every year for our holidays. And we would always have, you know, a little bit of wine for the kids. So like a tiny bit of wine or so it was part of my part of that generation, which was all about, you know, if we give our kids a taste of alcohol early, they're much less likely to be silly with it when they're older, because it won't be like a forbidden fruit, which makes total sense, except that now the research shows that that's absolutely not the right thing at all.
And actually, all the research now shows that the later kids get their hands on or get introduced to alcohol, the better it is for their long term well being with alcohol. And there's loads of studies on that which we can put in the notes. But yeah, the less we can introduce our kids not having at home, not giving them it to take with is all much better thing to do with our teenagers and we should actually do another episode on the research on what it says It's about how we should be with our kids around alcohol.Because that's a really important one, I'm going to make a note of that.
But anyhow, that was the way I was brought up. And my parents drank every night. I don't ever remember there being a night where they didn't drink. But I don't remember it really being excessive. But I do remember them having parties and lots of silliness. And that was definitely what being a grown up was. And as a teenager, for me, I remember starting drinking, and I remember starting drinking when I was. My first drink was lots of cool stuff, Malibu. My parents had gone out for the day. I think they had gone to something and there was me and my sister at home, we were watching something on TV and I just went into my parents' bar, we had a bar, in the eighties, in the eighties people had bars. And I drank a bottle of Malibu, and I was qwsick as a dog. And it was my parents who were really angry with me, because they were going out somewhere afterwards. So I had to go around someone else's house and everyone had to be on like vomit watch.
And anyway, that was my first splash with alcohol. But when I decided - and I made a very conscious decision - to start changing my persona, from someone who was introverted and shy. Because as a child, I was very bookish. And Mum would invite people around to play with me. And I'd go off and read my book. And in the nicest possible way, it was made very clear to me from an early age, that going off and reading your book when people came around wasn't the right thing to do. And I always remember being disorganised. And I was always getting into trouble for being late, forgetting things and not having the right things. And that now I know is part of my ADHD. And we can come back, we'll come back to that later.
But it was, I knew that I, as a human being, I was loved. But I didn't fit in. And I think this is something that people often feel, people who drink and often people with ADHD. I was always in the outer. I had friends, I was happy enough, you know, but I knew there were certain things about me that didn't quite fit the mould, and weren't quite how everybody else was. And then it particularly came to light for me. So I went off to this gorgeous Mallory Towers boarding school and I met this lovely little friend in my first year and we were having so much fun. Everyone else was probably a bit more mature. There was the odd person smoking and that that and the other.
I know, smoking in Mallory towers! But I was, I was young, and I was playing with my friend. And we used to just hang out every lunchtime and would go and sit in the grass and make up things. And it was very young, very sweet, very naive. And then out of the blue, she dropped me as a friend and went off with another girl. And it was heartbreaking. And it sounds like such a strange thing for it to be heartbreaking because, you know we have breakups all the time. But it was heartbreaking to me. And I didn't know what to do then. And I was like, Oh, I have no idea what to do. And so I decided to reinvent myself. And I decided to reinvent myself very consciously is a bit of a rebel. A bit wild, a bit impulsive. And I was friends with everybody. Trying to be friends with everybody.
And look, I had a great time. The people I hang out with we mainly smoked and we mainly drank. We'd go around to one of the day girls' houses and be able to hang out there. Watch Freddy Krueger and Amityville and scare ourselves stupid while smoking Marlboro lights and, and drinking God knows what probably something horrendous I imaginr. And that was it. And then I moved up through into school. I had lots of attention and boyfriends and I drank a lot. We were basically allowed to spend most of our free time drinking and hanging out. There was really nobody looking after us at all. Funnily enough, of course, I didn't do very well on my exams because I'd spent all my time having boyfriends and, and getting drunk.
So that was how I spent 16/17. And much to the dismay of my parents, as I then ended up getting very bad grades. And so I decided to take a year and go and do a foundation course in art and design which I absolutely loved. And then I went on to uni. And uni was good. I didn't drink at uni at all, actually. But I did start having very disordered eating. So I had disordered eating, I had bulimia in high school, some high school.
And that was a control thing. I think, for me, trying to have some control over things. I was trying to study really hard. And yeah, it was something I was doing with another girl as well. And I will come into this much more as we go through because I have done a lot of work on around eating disorders, disordered eating, and body acceptance, and so on.
But yeah, when I went to uni, it was the first time I really had control over the food I ate, and I started to heavily restrict my food. I think I was eating one sandwich and one apple a day. And, gosh, I got complimented for how I looked and how I changed. So by the end of the first term at uni, I had dropped a lot of weight. I was studying art, film and TV. And we didn't drink at all, we might have smoked a bit of the you know. And we went partying as well, I started to party for the first time, but that was only really at the end of uni, we started to go and get onto the rave scene. Mainly nightclubs, actually in Leeds, and that was where we had the first introduction to drugs.
And that was kind of really different. And again, but again, no drinking, no drinking at all. And then I came out of uni. And I moved up to London. Oh, no, I went to another. But I didn’t tell the whole story. But I went did my masters. And in fine art and psychoanalysis, which is a tenuous link with where I've ended up studying the mind. And then I moved up to London, and I got a job working for Warner Brothers. And I was so happy I was in SOHO. I'd walk to work every day from my shared house, and I just be like, Oh, my God, Emma you have totally made it.
This is the dog's bollocks. And we just love walking through Chinatown. And just everything was there was a lot of substances, and there was a lot of alcohol. And there was a lot of fun. And we worked really hard. And it was sexy, because it was movies and to get the premieres. And it was just wonderful. We were in Leicester Square, and it was London, it was the 90s. And it was amazing. And I met my husband-to-be in a house share when I was there, and we got into the rave scene in a big way. So we used to go on holidays to festivals, we'd go to the Greek islands and go to festivals, five day festivals, things like that, we'd get absolutely off our heads. And we'd have a great time. And I had a senior job. So did he, so did all our friends. But in between, you know, we'd go on our holidays with the party holidays, you know, we'd go to Thailand, we go to Costa Copan Yang. And we would have the most amazing times, but we would be completely inebriated all the time.
And I remember for millennia me and my husband turning up at my friend's place in Thailand in Copan Yang and it was completely full, completely full. And we turned up and we ended up sleeping in her little house in Thai village that she lived in with her boyfriend. And it was just a crazy time, crazy time. And in between all of this, I was going to work and loving my job and getting better and better and doing more and more. I'm getting promoted.
You know, but every night we'd be before we have kids, we'd be out drinking beers after work. And that was what we did. And all our gang did that and then we can just hanging out in the pub. So it was all about drinking. And it's interesting. Now I think back on it as well. And I talked about this a lot. I had a lot of anxiety as a kid. I didn't realize it was anxiety at the time.
But I think because we lived in quite dangerous countries and there was quite a lot of stories that used to go around about things that used to happen to people when they kept up. I was little bit fearful of not at night I'd always been fearful at night. Now funnily enough, both my kids are very, very fearful. At night, scared of the dark and have a lot of anxiety.
And I remember being so scared of the dark that in my teens, when we lived in Brazil for one year, just before my dad got made redundant when I was about 16. And I remember lying on the floor, in the bathroom, sleeping there with the door locked.
But anywho to cut a long story short, we decided to have kids. And I think that the reason I decided that I could never quite get my foot where I wanted to get my career getting promoted. And I was in middle management but I could never get where I wanted to be - I wanted to be a director and I couldn't get there.
So I decided, and this is literally how it went - I decided to have children. I thought, “If I can't do this, then let’s have children.” I hadn't really thought about having children at all. I wasn't really my game plan.
But anyhow, then I became a mum.
And at this time, it was the global financial crisis. And it was the first time all my friends had gone back to work. And they’d got three days a week were able to work from home one of those days. And I went back and they went, No, it's a global financial crisis.
If you want to come back to work, you have to come back to work full time. So there I am at 35 or 36 with a new baby, working full time, I had to put my new baby into a nursery. And there was quite a lot of you know, it was quite logistics around that and then getting into work in the morning. And then, you know, the expectation of work and so on. But it was fine. It was great.
And I think at this time, me and Damien decided we wanted to move to Australia. So we had to start at the process of trying to get our visas to get to Australia, because we decided we didn't want to keep living in London. And we didn't want to move to anywhere else in England. So we were like, should we learn Spanish and then we had tried that we couldn't progress. We didn't progress, usually because we got so drunk before the lesson. But we did end up getting our visa to Australia, which was fantastic.
So we were about to go. And then we couldn't sell our house because of the global financial crisis. So we ended up staying for another year having our second baby. And in retrospect, it was really a good thing because we packed up all the house and we stayed in a lovely house.
And I also spent a lot of time with my mom and dad, which was really helpful because as we flew out here via Thailand, my dad passed away from a stroke, and very suddenly, and I love that I'd got to spend all this lovely time with him. While we were packing up the house, and the bait who we'd had the babies spend plenty of time with him as well.
And so here we were in Australia. And we started I took a year off to settle the kids into school. And Damien got a job straight away. And we got a nice house in Williamstown. And we were ready. We were having a lovely time. And I was trying to meet all the people and do all the things so I could make some new friends. And then a year in we decided it was time for me to go back to work.
And I couldn't find anything part time. And I actually found it really hard to find work here because I hadn't been in Australia. And because the type of marketing I did was sort of retail marketing. There was an expectation that people would have had experience working in Australia and retail.
So I ended up getting contracts, six month contracts, one year contracts, which were wonderful. But for someone like me who seeks my validation externally, my job had been hugely important in the UK. I loved it so much. I put it before everything. I felt like I was always on trial in these jobs and I was always trying to get the permanent position. And I very rarely did. So it was quite stressful like having to be on show every day trying to get the role that may or may not have been there and trying to get kids into nursery school before you left for work. And at that time I was holding myself up to much higher standards than I do now. I’d try to leave the kitchen deck cleer, get my kids into school. And at this time, I didn't know my kids were neurodiverse. And so things got quite tricky in terms of, of that. And it also because I was working for big global companies, even though I was in contract roles, I was still had, you know, reasonably senior roles where I had to be talking to people in the US and UK, constantly.
So I was having calls all through the night. And I'd have to sort of almost pretend that I wasn't a woman with a family and children. And to be honest with you about the time I wished I wasn’t a woman with a family and children so I could be one or the other, because I felt so torn between the two.
And then you know, the things, things got tougher, you know, trying to get out the house and stuff. We didn't realize at the time, that the reasons that we had to go through so many routines and rituals with my youngest child was because she's autistic, but at the time was like, What's wrong with me? Why can everybody else get that it's all good. Why? Why am I always missing the train, being late to work.
You know, by the time you get into work in the morning, you're just like, Oh, my God, I have three of the people sitting next to me. But anyhoo, I loved my jobs. And I love what I did, I was so lucky to work both companies that I worked for, until I had a couple of toxic bosses.
And at that time, it became obvious to me how fragile I was how brittle I was from the running.
Because that's the other thing like three years earlier, just before I turned 40, I started running. And I'd run with a group of friends. And we’d do half marathons. And once I ran a half marathon, by mistake - I was supposed to do a 10k and I stayed on until 21. But I was pretty fit. So I was pretty fit. And I was drinking. I was getting smashed at the weekend.
But so were all my friends, we'd go around to people's houses or we'd go to a, you know, some sort of place that had an outside, and the kids would run around and have a drink. And I had no idea how how brittle I was becoming from living in this state of high anxiety, looking at work for someone to pick me always trying to be perfect or was trying to be the best always trying to, you know, and just always feeling on the outer again, that's an ADHD thing, but just the stress of it all just feeling like you couldn't do it all and you had to pretend kept pretending that you were a different person than who you were.
And the other part of it was that everything we did revolved around alcohol, there was nothing if somebody had said to me, “do you want to do something that didn't involve alcohol?” I'd be like, No, I don't want to do that.
So alcohol became my hobby. And I wasn't unique in this, this I wasn’t alone in this at all.
And then I had two toxic bosses. One and you say like, you know, one might be a coincidence, too. But, you know, I don't believe that. I think there's a lot of toxic people in workplaces. And if you're a person whose validation pumps externally and how you're perceived at work is incredibly important to you. It is devastating.
And for an externally validated, you know, someone who thrived on external validation. It was crippling, and the first one, it was okay, I managed to get through it. I was ashamed. I tried. I had to leave and I had to start again at another job that I also hated. And then I finally managed to get myself back into a job and in the line of work that I really enjoyed, and it was all going so well again, and I got the job of my dreams and I was up for promotion. Everything was wonderful.
And then a new boss came in.
And I think I must have been a threat to her or something. But yeah, she made my life hell. And she just did everything, all the classic things that people do. She sort of ostracize me. She questioned everything. She made me feel like a child. She wouldn't let me do anything, it was horrendous and with a really short period of time she'd alienated me from the rest of the team because they were all terrified that she'd do the same to them.
And also, I'm older. And I thought that it was very difficult for me to put up with this kind of thing. I think when you're younger, sometimes she can do it. But I was just like, I'm not putting up with this. It's not acceptable when she's speaking to me. You know, she'd be hammering, hammering her hand on the desk. And I would be thinking: “does this need to be so aggressive?”
And so anyway, I won't go into the detail of it. But it all got too much. I couldn't believe it, because I've never given up on anything before. I've always been: if I keep trying, if I keep striving, I'll get there. But in this case, that wasn't the case. And that was a big learning curve for me.
It's not always to keep striving to keep pushing through. And I found in both those situations, the more that you do that, the worse it gets. And I ended up going to my doctor, I was pumped full of Valium, just to be able to get in the door. And in the end, I just couldn't do it. And I remember saying to my husband, I can't do it. Because the first time I'd had something like that, and it was a few years before I said to him, and he said no, you can't. And it broke my heart was just I had to stay there. And it was so awful and then this time I said to him, Listen, I have to leave. And it's going to have a massive impact on my career.
Because Melbourne is such a small place, the companies that I work for, everyone knows everybody and I used to, if anyone came for an interview for me from a company or somebody I knew I phoned them up and say, “what was this person like?” And if you had two people at an interview, and one of them was someone who hadn't left, which one would you pick.
So I knew that leaving that building that day having a panic attack, and making up my mind that I wasn't going to go was the end of my corporate life.
And I also went into a lot, we went into kind of battle with them legally, and it was just really unpleasant. And I was broken.
I was so lucky. I had a friend who shared a beautiful friend that she had, who was able to support ,e through the process, because otherwise I would never have done what I what I did, and stood up to them. And luckily I did because it worked out really well for me.
But it was a it was a really unpleasant, unpleasant process. And I was very, very broken after it a bit like when you stop drinking, and you're like, “well, who am I now that I'm not drinking?” It was very similar. It was like “who am I now that I'm not this person that I've been striving to be on my life?”. This is everything I've been striving to be. And now I'm not that person. I don't even know what that means. I don't even know what it means to be something else.
And so I did a course with the lovely Lisa Cordoff called ready for change. And we did some values work, which is something that I use very heavily in my work as well. And it became clear to me that actually my corporate marketing roles had been working in objection to or the opposite of my values, and this is a time I think when I started to build myself back up again.
So I started a practice, I wasn't working. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I was very lucky that I got some money from my insurance company and that was able to keep us OK. So I very much recommend having that insurance cover for if something goes terribly wrong like this, which it did for me.
And then I started following my values. I started trying to work out what I wanted to do, I couldn't quite work it out. And I ended up deciding that I wanted to be a counselor. First of all I wanted to counsel youth because my kids were youth. My kids were young people and I thought that would be a really good thing to get into because everybody's kids, you know, plenty of mental health issues for kids.
And then as I got along, I decided that it wasn't actually kids that I wanted to help hopeless parents. So I continued to my counseling and I was building myself up. And I was feeling pretty good. Apart from the fact that I was still drinking. And I was running and I was, I was well, but I wasn't well, because I was still not sleeping properly. And I was still not liking myself.
And my relationship wasn't very good at all. And that was making me really unhappy, too. And I knew in my soul somewhere, I knew that stopping drinking was going to be the thing that needed to happen for me.
And so I stopped drinking on January 22, 2020. I had been reading this naked mind and I had been listening to this naked mind podcast and I took probably three months off from trying to stop drinking. And I just listened to podcasts and ran every day. And listen to podcasts and ran every day. So I had all this through my mind.
And then in January 2020, I decided I was going to take a year off after new years eve. And I joined the this naked mind live alcohol experiment.
And about two weeks in, I had an absolute mind shift.
And I decided that I wanted to become a this naked mind coach. Because and I'll tell you about the details of my mindset and stuff in another episode. But I decided I want to become a this naked mind coach and study that alongside my counseling degree that I was studying at the same time.
So I did that.
I was lucky I got in there, it was very expensive to do the coach training and all my friends were like, I don’t knoe, this seems really bad. But I started to listen to my intuition. And this is everything to me. And this is what I hope this podcast is going to be about.
And what this, what I hope to share with you guys about my experience of being a part of it, is that I started to listen to my intuition. My intuition tells me something's wrong. Something's not right. We need to change something. And I think it's going to be this and my husband was great.
We took some money out of our mortgage, and I paid for the course and I paid for my counseling course as well. And that really is I set myself up as a business in September 2020. But I didn't really start coaching until the end of that year.
And I've been coaching for three years since then, I’m coaching in this naked minds, PATH program, and their alcohol experiment. And I'm a registered and certified coach with them. I'm a senior coach, actually.
I have trained as well with the wonderful Jolene Park, who will be on one of the next podcasts, so that I also have the body part of working with people who are drinking, because their nervous systems are dysregulated, their lives are hard, they feel stressed, they've got so many thoughts going on in their heads, the only way that they can sit down and stop the thoughts is to have a drink. And that's what they think. And that's what I thought, until I learned a different way.
And the work that I do now is very much about the unconscious. And it's very much about bringing the mind and the body together to learn to regulate our nervous systems reaching to our inner childs, looking at our shadows, trying to understand why things trigger us, basically trying to understand the reasons why we drink because it's never about the booze. It's never about the booze.
We drink to regulate our nervous systems. And our nervous systems are dysregulated for a whole heap of reasons. Some we know about some we don't know about. And there's so much cultural conditioning in there as well. But I think I should stop now as I've been talking for 50 minutes but I just wanted to share with you my journey so that you understood the lived experience that I've had and got to know a little bit about me and my family and you’ll know more as I go through because my purpose is to remove the shame and stigma around seeking help for alcohol.
It's also to support women in midlife, wherever they may be, and to shine lights on neurodiversity, and also I have kids who are neurodiverse. But I also have kids who are gender diverse. And so that's something that will come up in the conversations as well.
And so I wanted to introduce myself to you and hope you wanted to be part of my crew.
And I hope that I can help you find some of the amazing moments that come about, on this journey. Once you take off that place that's keeping you stuck, that thing that's stopping you from dealing with the things that are really the problem, which are often things in our lives that, you know, we may feel that we don't have very much control over. But let's work through this together.
All right, my loves thanks so much for listening. And I'm looking forward to spending more time with you over the next few episodes. Bye
