Emma
Oh, hope you're doing well. I'm going to start off with my poor, slightly dilapidated pom poms and welcome you. Welcome to this last in the series of lives that I have been putting on, and I hope that you guys have got lots of value from.
So this is the last in our series of I think we've done five lives all together, and I just want to say thanks to everybody. I know, it's been a lot this last two weeks. But I really wanted to get this message out there that this program is coming, because it's so precious to me. And it's been so life changing for me. So that's why I do what I do and why you will hear a lot from me in the lead up to my launches. This is the first time I've launched this year, I’ve had a lot of pent up launch energy.
So I was just just explaining that I had a lot of pent up energy in terms of my lives, and hadn't done a launch for over a year. So it's really nice to be back in launch mode. And I'm looking forward to a bit of a rest tomorrow when we come to the end.
So today is the last day of the Aussie alcohol experiment towards being open. And this particular live is for me to just tell you a little bit about what it's like to be in the Aussie alcohol experiment program. If you've got any questions, ask away, because I'm happy to answer them.
And just to give a little bit of background, for those of you who don't know me, I am a psychotherapist, a counselor. And I am a This Naked Mind and Master Gray Area Drinking coach.
And I began my journey with alcohol probably about four or five years ago. It started to feel like it wasn't quite right. Before that I was kind of cruising along thinking everything was fine. I was really living on pretty high alert, high fight or flight adrenaline kind of place. I'd had my kids, I'd moved to Australia, I was working for big corporate companies and everything seemed to be good on the outside.
And then I think, you know, years and years of doing that started to take its toll. And I started to feel crappy about myself, my anxiety was going through the roof. I'd had some issues with work and some toxic stuff going on there. And that had a bit of an impact on my ability to kind of bounce back. And I think alcohol made me feel really brittle. There wasn't much give.
And when I finally had a situation happen in my work, which meant that I left my job. I was really, really broken. And I didn't know who I was without that corporate marketing career. And so I rebuilt myself up and started to understand my values. But all that time I was still drinking. And I got to a point where my kids had started to notice and started to say something to me. My eldest asked me to stop bringing wine into the bedroom at bedtime because it was making her feel anxious. And I'd really done Dry July, Sober October, Feb Fast and I was like, Why do I feel so awful during these. Why do I feel so deprived? And yet at the same time, I really enjoyed the freedom of thought of not drinking. And so that was really a bonus or something that kept me keeping on trying to investigate and try to understand how I could change my relationship with alcohol and if I could change my relationship with alcohol to one that I felt good with.
Because I had you know a number of different things happened particularly in the last year with drinking. You know, I fell into a rosebush after a friend's party and I got a rose thorn stuck in my jugular. I ended up going to hospital and the doctor signed my discharge note saying “pissed fell into a rosebush”. And I was just kind of mortified, and we had to change our family weekend plans because of my situation.
Anyway, this went on. But every time I gave up, and I use the word “gave up”, every time I gave up, I found it really hard.
And then in January 2020, I found the alcohol experiment, which is the program that I'm talking about here. And the reason why I'm so passionate about it is because it worked for me. And you will have met the different women that I've brought in to talk over this live launch period. But there's a lot of women who have also worked for you know, Natalie Battaglia from the mindful mocktail, Amy from Dry But Wet, and we're all living proof, that finding freedom from alcohol is really, really powerful.
And the powerful part about it, isn't it that you stopped drinking, because that's actually not the objective for the alcohol experiment. The objective for the alcohol experiment is that you grow awareness. So you gain awareness of what's happening with you, and what your relationship with alcohol is. The objective is not for you to stop drinking, that's up to you, you're a grown up. And that's very much how I come to this model with: you can choose however you want to live your life with alcohol, there's wrong or right about whatever choice you make.
It's literally, let's understand the risks and make a grown up decision. And it's a bit like what I talked about during the alcohol experiment: we are the adults in our own lives and we don't realise this, like, I was behaving like such a teenager, I was nearly 50. But I was like rebelling, I felt like if I stopped drinking, I was suddenly not going to be cool. Not going to be fun. And I wasn't going to be the cool, you know, rebel.
And like For God's sake, Emma, you’re 49.
And, you know, there's a lot of reframing that we do in the alcohol experiment, you know, around what's actually being rebellious, and who are we rebelling against. And so, I'll talk to you a little bit about the structure of the program and how it works on a practical level. And then we can talk a bit about the ethos behind it, the type of women that we have in the group and the type of the women that are already in the group, because we've got a really cool gang in there. And they're all women. A couple that I know, well, and I know, really add brilliant conversation and do the work and are totally in there too to chat.
So the way the program works is, it's a 30 day program. And if you join today, which is the last day for joining, you will get access to my class space, and in the class space there’s loads of cool resources in there, from the different times that I've run this program before. There's all sorts of tools and tactics. But the most important thing is there's three preview videos. So there's a video welcoming you. And then there's two videos, which are about, you know, preparing yourself for taking a 30 day break.
And they go into the detail around that, we've also got a Facebook group, which you join. And that's where we will have daily lives. So every day, what will happen is, you will get an email to your inbox, I think I've set them up to arrive at six, because I know people get up at different times. But and this would be the commitment that I would ask for you to make to yourself is being part of this program because you pay your $450 bucks and you want to get something out at the end, you want to transform, you want to change your relationship with alcohol to one where you can take it or leave it, and then you make the choice which you want to do right.
And you might decide that you want to carry on not drinking, you might decide you want to moderate, you might decide that this wasn't for you and you're not interested in changing. All of those things are totally fine. Okay, so what will happen is you'll get your daily email. In your daily email, there'll be a link to the class space, and you watch your first video of the day. Each day will have a subject and we will get into the details of this right.
So there will also be a journaling prompt. I encourage you to buy yourself a nice notebook or get into the Facebook group and do your journaling with the other guys, the other ladies that are on there. Because it's such an amazing In practice putting pen to paper typing, get things out of your head and onto the screen is part of the transformation.
I encourage you to share in the groups to tell the group a bit about your story. The attitude within the alcohol experiment is, there is nothing wrong with us for seeking help. Because alcohol has become problematic for us, we're seeking help because alcohol is an addictive substance, anyone made of blood, skin and bone will potentially have an addictive reaction to alcohol because it's an addictive substance. So what it does chemically, and we'll get into that in the group is it, it does things to our physiology, that means that it's difficult to stop at one wine glass. Once we've been drinking for a set period of time, it becomes you know, there's certain things that it does, that means that we crave it. Our body actually thinks that we need it in order to survive.
And the reason that some of us can drink reasonably, although it's the minority, not the majority, which is different to how we're led to believe some of us can have that one glass or two glasses. The reason why some of us can have that one to one glass or that two glasses is because we have guardrails based on something that we've experienced growing up, or our wish to not lose control. There's all sorts of reasons.
But generally, the way that alcohol works in our body is it works to keep us wanting more. And the minute we start to associate elevating, changing our mood, the relief of pain. And so many women find that that's things like you know, having to push through and get everything ready for the kids. I was talking to another client this morning, we were talking about how in midlife, your estrogen starts to reduce, right. So our estrogen starts to reduce, and alcohol actually has a bigger effect on us. And I can again, talk about the science of that. But what happens when our body drinks, it's trying to get rid of alcohol because it's a toxic substance. And so instead of processing things in our body like estrogen, it doesn't do that, because it's focusing on getting the alcohol out of our body. So we end up with our body full of, like, old estrogen. It's yucky, but there's so many other things in there.
But as women, we our nurturing hormones are reducing. And so you know, looking after and loving and nurturing everybody, it becomes harder. And so on top of that we've got our nurturing hormones reducing. And we've got the sort of expectation I don't know about you guys. But so many women that I work with, we are on high alert, we are in fight or flight, that is our home. Our women's work is never done, the to do list is never ending. And alcohol feels to us like the Elixa, it's the thing that we can take in it makes it feels like it makes us all go away, it all goes away.
Because when dopamine comes into our body it goes “aaaaahhhh”. And what that is, is our nervous system relaxing. Yeah, and we'll learn all about this during the experiment. But basically, we'll get into these kinds of subjects in the group, there'll be daily journaling, and then there'll be a live on each of the subjects.
So for example, day one might be “why we think we like to drink”. I've made that up. That might not be it. But why do we think we like to drink? So we get into all of the reasons why we think we like to drink. And then we get to understand which of those are conditioned beliefs that we have inherited and picked up over our life. And the difference with This Naked Mind, methodology and The Alcohol Experiment is that we don't just stop with a behavior. It's not about stopping drinking. It's about getting to a place where you are happily choosing not to drink or choosing to drink but it's and it's something that if you're not drinking, you're able to be around people who are drinking, you are able to have a alcohol free alternative without the wheels falling off.
That is the aim of this program, because what we work on is mindset and we work on all of the beliefs, thoughts and beliefs are so common ones. I think there's about seven or 10 specific ones that I will teach you the technique. And you can use this without any other area of your life, I will teach you the technique and go through, literally, in your case with each of your personal beliefs in a coaching session.
So we'll go through each of the most common ones. And we'll go through your version of that. And we'll turn around the mindset. So it might be “I need alcohol to relax”, “I need alcohol to sit down”. “I need alcohol to….”, you know, whatever it might be.
Because every single person, and if you guys watched my masterclass, you’ll know that everything that we've been taught about booze is a lie. But we can't believe that we might know that on a conscious level. But we can't believe that in our unconscious in our nervous system. Because we have been taught, since we were knee high to a grasshopper, that alcohol is a relief from stress, saying we do to hang out with people, it's something we do to connect, so on and so forth. All of that is not true. And we'll work through that. And so what you'll be given is this amazing research, pieces of information that Annie Grace has pulled and I've gone through and resource checked was when I was training as a counselor, I went through and I'm so surprised how much of the This Naked Mind work was out of the big counseling. training that I did.
But the big difference, and the big piece about working with me, and working in the alcohol experiment is it's about gentle loving kindness. It's about awareness first, and then learning to love and understand and accept ourselves. Know that we are doing the very best that we can. Know that our body has a reaction to alcohol, and that we have to learn a different way. And the way that we do that is not by beating ourselves up, not by being mean to ourselves. It's about saying, “I understand why you're doing that”.
It's hard being a woman in midlife, it's hard when you've got all this to do list. I understand why you want to reach for that. Yeah. And then we get into what is that?
So number one, what are we running away from? Number two, what are we running towards? So we want something that gives us a high. We want something to take us away from everything. Why? Why do we need that? So we'll go into that.
And we'll be like, you know, is it that you just needed to have a break, you need some space you need to cut? What do we need to cultivate in our life, to create a life where we don't need to turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism? And how do we retrain ourselves to manage our nervous systems, so that we can find another source of dopamine, find another way that moves us towards our goals of being an integrated person who's not at war with themselves, not, you know, waking up in the morning thinking, I don't want to drink and then by five o'clock at night, pouring yourself a drink thinking, what the hell Who the hell's driving this bus? Yeah. And that's how I felt the reason I know this. And the reason I'm so passionate about this program is because that was my experience.
And so in the, in the Aussie alcohol experiment, part of my role is to demonstrate to you to talk you through to coach and to encourage you to start being the adult in your life, but also to start loving and nurturing the inner child with you who used alcohol as the only way it knew how, in what was much earlier times, to manage a dysregulated nervous system. And we'll talk all about that now.
I also offer some bonuses as well, which is orienting, and centering, and my favorite - grounding. And we'll talk a lot about different ways we can manage our nervous system and how you know that it's not just about our thoughts. It's not just about mindset, and yet that is hugely important. And yes, that is the This Naked Mind difference. Yeah, the mindset piece, the deep, deep work on why we think we like to drink and what we think the benefit is to us. And it's unpicking some of that stuff. You know, we've got beliefs at a level of society, we've got beliefs at the level of substance and we've got beliefs at the level of self and you know, those can be the really, really tough tricky ones. And so it's creating a place of safety for you guys to explore what's going on with you and your relationships with alcohol. We are going in as scientists we are discovering, we are examining the data. And we are not being mean to ourselves, we are being so super kind to ourselves. And we are understanding that we are learning something new. And it's not always going to be the easiest. But we're in a beautiful group of women and we can just, we can feed off each other, the energy is tremendous. I love group work so much, it just fills my cup. So look, if any of you are in two minds about it…
I just checked it actually, I've gone through everything. So we'll do the mindset work. There's daily lives. If you're not on Facebook, that's okay. Because we'll load the lives into the class space as well. So you can access them there if you want to.
My advice is to join up, you won't regret it. I'm giving this my absolute, this is my top priority, you will have lives with me every day at 6:30. Except for Wednesdays when we're doing a 12:30.
And then we're doing 5pm, and 5pm on Saturday and Sunday. And I'm doing that because I want to make sure because that's usually a struggle for people. And I want to make sure that everybody's got somewhere to go, and where to learn, and then just be in the group communicate with each other. It's such a powerful part of changing your relationship with alcohol.
And I promise you, we're going to have so much fun there. Because I love a giggle. I get things wrong, I'll get words around the wrong way it will be, you know, it will be an interesting journey. But I own that because I'm a woman, I am an ADHD woman and I'm a woman in midlife. And so my words do get muddled up. So that's something I'm very, very keen to, to promote and to and to normalize in our world where it can be sort of not necessarily treated with the most kindness.
But I am here to support, love, hold you, and hold hope for you.
Because I have been through this program, I was at the place where I did not like myself at all. I was at the place where I had no trust in myself. I was at the place where my kids were commenting, I was at the place where I was I was screwing up. Yeah, I was high functioning. Yeah, I had a great job. Yeah, I was, you know, doing all the things for years. But really, from when I had my babies back in 2008. That was my brain ‘ting’ back there. I was on high alert.
And that's how many of us are and alcohol exacerbates that it does the absolute opposite of what we think it does. So we think it helps us relax. No, it floods our bodies with hormones, adrenaline, cortisol. It makes it makes life so much harder for us. So to me, this program is a program of gift to give yourself, it's a gift for women, we so rarely take time for ourselves, we so rarely put our needs first. And this is a journey of self discovery. This is a journey into what does it mean if you loved yourself? What would it mean, if you were to make the decision based on you parenting yourself, as if you were somebody who loved you? If you were somebody who loved you so much, they had no ulterior motive, other than to keep you well, other than to keep you safe.
And this is my mission with this program is that if we go into this experiment with a spirit of gentle loving kindness, loving ourselves, prioritizing ourselves, that is the way that we can prioritize those around us because it's only when we take some of this coping mechanism out of our daily habit and routines. And we start to be able to process what's going on in our environment, the things that we're unhappy with, the things that need to change, we might have to have some difficult conversations.
Alcohol is just like, it's like the tiniest tip. It's the beginning. It's the journey back to ourselves. And you know, whatever happens to you over these 30 days with me, you will transform your relationship with alcohol. Wherever that ends up being for you. And wherever that ends up being for you. That is totally fine. There's no pressure at all to go one way or the other. It's all about learning and you will never unlearn what you learn in this experiment.
I’m just going to take a sip of my tea and see if anyone's got any questions for me?
Though I think I did a lot of talking then. But if you do have Any questions and you want to ask me anything, just send me a DM I’m around all day to day. And I've got in my, in my bio as well, I've got a link to put in a 15 minute chat with me because I know, you know, it's a big deal making the decision to take a break from alcohol, especially if you've been thinking about it for a while. So feel free to pop it pop and pop a meeting in my diary as well. I'm happy to chat. I think I've left my diary open till nine o'clock tonight. So I'm really happy to do that.
I just wish everybody could come and do this program. It's the best. It's, you know, people ask me what was the best money I've ever spent on myself. This is the best money I've ever spent on myself. Everything in my life changed since this. My relationship with my kids, my relationship with my husband, and oh my goodness, we've had so much going on this year, plus a couple of years with COVID, kids turning into teenagers, mental health staff, you know, just being able to just be calm and peaceful and create that little bit of moment between, you know, us, you know, reacting in the moment to respond rather than react.
That's what taking a break from alcohol givesy. And you can then enhance that in lots of different ways to make that stronger, but it just takes away that reactivity a little bit. And it allows you to be present.
But look, this is a month of fun as well. Fun and learning support and gentle loving kindness. I hope you can join me in the link to join is also in my bio. We've got a few more hours left. I think we're going to close at midnight tonight. But I really really hope you join. It's going to be awesome and I will support you and give you, you won't be disappointed by this course. I promise you. All right. Take care. Reach out if you need anything. And I hope you join. Alright my lovelies.
