On this week's episode of Midlife AF we are going to talk about the connection between alcohol free living, reducing your alcohol intake and even taking a break from drinking and our human potential. Over to me!
If you’re a woman in midlife because intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move, then Midlife AF is the podcast for you. Join me as a psychotherapist, this naked mind and gray area drinking alcohol coach for weekly natter about parenting quirky teens, menopause relationships and navigating this thing called midlife alcohol free. If you're feeling like this so much more that you're sick and tired of doing all the things everyone else is waving her arms manically at you're saying it could all be so much easier. We didn't have to keep drinking. Come with me. Together we'll find our groove without booze.
Everybody welcome to this week's episode of Midlife AF. I'm your host, Emma Gilmour. And this week we are going to be talking about the connection between being alcohol free, taking an extended break from alcohol or reducing our alcohol consumption and tapping into our human potential. And I don't often talk about this but I think I'm about to run into three days of virtual retreat, which I'm really looking forward to, which is all going to be about how to change your relationship with alcohol, even from a place where you're not actually stopping drinking at all.
And then we're going to be taking in my next group by the great Aussie Alcohol Experiment live. And I'm so excited to do this. The reason I get up every morning so full of drive and passion to do this work is because I genuinely believe that if we take alcohol out of our lives, or at least reduce it significantly or take extended breaks, I think this is for everybody, particularly for women. We open ourselves up to our magic, and I know it's probably gonna sound a little bit funny because I am not saying that being alcohol free is all happy, happy. I'm not saying that we are perfect, that we don't get triggered, that things don't upset us, that we don't deal with you know the life stuff of life, right. But what I do genuinely believe is I could not if somebody had told me there back in January 2020. What would open up for me in terms of my potential and getting to know myself and being able to trust my intuition and knowing and coming from a place of abundance rather than fear and scarcity. If someone had told me that stopping drinking would allow me to harness everything I could be I would not have believed them.
And this is the thing. We stop drinking. We think it's about the drink. And you know, I say this all the time. It's never about alcohol. It is always about the reasons why we drink. And it's been amazing, the synchronicity this week I was presenting last weekend where I was doing a workshop for my lovely friend Molly Benjamin, who runs the latest finance club and I was doing a presentation on saving money and reducing your potential by taking a break from drinking or reducing drinking. And I went out and I asked some of my alcohol free friends and my clients people I work with in my groups. What they would just say in one sentence, what had opened up for them in stopping drinking. It was astonishing. And absolutely none of it was to do with alcohol. Or if none of it was really focused on that freedom is a big motivator for me. But it was about the messages I kept getting was that we stopped playing small, I'm sick of playing small. I can access my intuition and my inner knowing. And I know that I am meant for this huge stuff, you know. And this is what for me, it's about authenticity. We drive for authenticity. And you'll find if you are wanting to journey you've got a little part of your intuition that's knocking on your heart, saying there's something not right here. I think something really cool might happen if we stopped drinking for a little while. And I urge you to listen to that voice. Because that voice is your essence. And we have all these ideas of what our personality is. But really our personality is just a construct. We construct a personality to keep us safe in the world. We construct a personality as we grow up to help us fit in. And we do that in a number of ways. You know we might be excellent at organization, we might keep a very tidy house. We might excel academically. We might be a really effective salesperson. We might have a vivacious personality. We might be whatever it is. We have constructed that in order for us to fit in.
I think the midlife unraveling that Brene Brown talks about in her beautiful essay on the subject, if you don't know what to do, look it up otherwise I'll put a link in the show notes to amazing and she basically says that midlife is the time when all of the adaptations (I’m not quoting her word for word) that we have used to help us in our lives are no longer working for us. And we can either choose to grit our teeth and carry on as we are keeping our heads down suppressing our needs. Ignoring the things that we don't want to pay attention to that are too scary for us to deal with. And play small.
Or we can say I wasn't put on this Earth to play small. I was put on this to let my freaky light shine and to achieve my human potential. Now human potential doesn't have to mean I'm going to go and be the president of whatever. It could mean that I'm going to stop beating myself up over not having a clean house and I'm going to be able to be present with my family without needing alcohol to stop my judgmental brain from telling me that I am about to cry.
It might mean I'm going to have the conversation that I've not been having with my partner about how I'm feeling in our relationship at the moment and how when they behave in this way. how that impacts my personality and actually causes me to drink in order to suppress how off center it feels with who I think I am.
It might mean like I did, following my urge and deciding to train as an alcohol coach. Because even though everybody around me thought that spending the money that I spent to join to This Naked Minds coaching program was that I was mad and I remember asking Scott at the beginning of it all if it was a pyramid scheme. And I had to ask my husband, can I use just money? Luckily, he was behind me 100% But I still at that time I hadn't yet harnessed my intuition. So I was going around and asking everybody what they think? Canvassing people's opinions? Before I took the next step, I don't do that anymore.
I knew that paying for the Gabor Marte course that I did at the beginning of this year was the right thing to do because I knew I felt this tingling in my body and my fingers. I was attracted to this course because it was giving me the framework that was missing from my coaching. So similarly when I finished training with This Naked Mind, and I was doing my counseling postgrad I wanted to do Joleen parks course and that was because her stuff was all about not just changing the mind from a psychological perspective. But also how do we change our body because our body and our mind are part of the same thing. They're not separate, and you know stuff around the gut that we learn. And similarly for me following my intuition with doing the intuitive eating coat counseling course that I've been doing, because I know in my soul that I'm gonna have to get a drink of water, put an incense stick on to burn and it's sticking in my throat.
But if I can manage it, I don't have to run off and come back but knowing that you're going to make an investment in something and again, coming from a place of privilege 100% A place of privilege but for me, it's been this year has been about a case of what can I do to earn the money to be able to pay for things that I want to do that are going to enhance my offering to my clients because they've worked for me, because these things have worked for me. And because I know that for me understanding why I'm triggered by things and going back into my history and finding out what the reason is that I'm making such a big deal about whatever it might be. And working to be the soft place to land for myself has been very much part of this journey.
I've never spoken to a single person who stopped drinking the way that I stopped drinking, which isn't coming from a place of deprivation, which isn't the AA route. Whilst power to that because I know that for many people that I know that has been a really helpful way to do things, but it wasn't for me because for me it implied there was something there was something to be had in alcohol. There was some benefit to me whereas the work that I do, how I coach around alcohol is there's no benefit to me in drinking, which is why it's such an amazing transformation.
And when I was in the UK, I went to a wedding and I was talking to my friends and they were like, I cannot believe all the people in the world who've decided to become an alcohol coach and train in this area. You're the person because you are such a party animal.
But it just completely changed everything for me. And it's allowed me to understand what's going on with my kids to really be open and you know all those things that when we're kids especially, I find a lot of people who drink and I know I always say this but a very sensitive people be that because when you were divergent be that because they've experienced trauma, that because they're high sensory, whatever the reason might be we feel things very deeply.
And that can be really hard and exhausting. And that's why a lot of us drink as well to push through that exhaustion and also to start sort of, you know, the awkwardness that we're not quite right and you know, that whole idea of “I'm too much” and I was always like around too much, I always want to go. I get really agitated if I can't speak, you know, all these classic ADHD kinds of behaviors.
Or you know, if something upsets me I'll speak very quickly. But what's been wonderful about this process for me, it's being able to be open to my impetus and see the strengths in that and also be kind to myself when I don't get it right, because we don't get things right all the time. We make mistakes from learning. Yeah, but I'm always learning.
But what I see so often and women have witnessed absolutely my experience as well as I was drinking. I was not happy even though I thought I was. At my job, I felt very vulnerable there. I felt like it was so competitive. And I felt like people were trying to grasp what I was trying to grasp, people trying to grasp and it felt very graspy and I've never enjoyed competition. I've always had difficulty with competition. I'd actually genuinely avoid that. Okay, thanks. Competition. I'd rather not play because I don't want to compete with everybody.
There were people because I don't believe there's only one place that was taught. I believe there's space for all of us because of this abundant world. There is absolutely room for all of us. To shine our fucking freaky light and achieve our potential and go for it. Whatever dream we have, whatever. You know, just being it just being able to be open to a passion and pursue them to believe in ourselves and to come from a place of expansion. And again, huge huge privilege. Yeah.
Because you've worked enough on yourself, which I genuinely don't think you can do unless you take a break from drinking because drinking always takes you away from yourself. It’s always about escaping where you are, abandoning what's going on for you and you know, people may agree or disagree with me, but for me one of my strongest and I know a lot of the women I work with feel the same way.
It's like, why would we just hurt ourselves in our hour of need? And that's what we do time and time again, we leave ourselves. And what happens is we don't deal with what's happening. We don't deal with horrible things and we don't deal with what's going on because we escape it instead of understanding it. And it might be a whole load of judgment, right that's coming from us internally. Our inner critic, because we haven't done this, we haven't done that, our house is a mess. We're not managing everything perfectly. You know, because that's just a big fat lie. There's no perfect view. The whole productivity thing is completely made up. You know, we cannot do the impossible. And we're all down on Instagram pretending that it's possible. It's not possible. And everybody who says it is, is lying.
What I love about this movement for me is the authenticity. The greatest thing that happened to me in the last couple of weeks was doing some work on myself around body image and you guys know that this is an ongoing place of work for me. And I was going to see my beautiful friend Ellie and I was a little bit nervous because I have not met her in real life and I'm pretty silly, right? But I was feeling nervous because I'm in a bigger body than I was even a year ago. I've not dieted - I had a little slip up about a year ago, where I went back to following a diet - but other than that have not weighed myself I've not dieted and I'm learning to make peace with and start to love myself as I am now, I'm always going to be a work in progress because there's so much internalized fat phobia for me, and just intergenerationally as well. Mum and I were talking about this when I was at home. You know, she was saying she judged people who were eating too much, and judging people in bigger bodies. And what we've worked through with that judgment was a form of protection.
She grew up with fat phobia. She was a bigger body peripheral kid and she got bullied and then when she lost weight she got accepted. And so for her it's pretty interesting that these judgments and why they're there and we get really hard with ourselves over our judgment. But most of the time, they’re there for a reason. They're there to keep us safe. And we can shine a light on them, but you can do all this stuff.
When you stop drinking, you notice. And you can start working on it. So it's such a big breakthrough for me. I spoke to my Intuitive Eating coach about it as well. Because I've been doing this work in preparation for meeting Ellie and not wanting to bring that shit with me to Ellie because I love her. She's my friend, but she's 10 years younger than me. She’s got a slender body, very fit and everything, and I was conscious about myself. And I did some work on it and I just went through where it came from, and some of my family stuff around weight and shed a light on it.
And one of the big things came from me was this whole belief that the idea that people think less of people with bigger bodies, right? And so I for ages have been struggling with it. I've often been coming out of the beach, walking up and I walk up behind somebody who's got a great figure and everything. And then I started thinking about the people that joined us and how relevant it is to whether it was a smaller or bigger body as to how I care. It started to dawn on me that if that's how I feel about other people, that's probably how people feel about me was just a really big moment. All of this stuff. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.
And so when I met Ellie, I was able to sit around in hardly any clothes on to this thing called cryotherapy, which was like this amazing thing where we went in like a really cold storage. It's like minus 140 or something like that, and we went in each I think you do 4 minutes or something, and during that time we have the really cool music that we're choosing because we both really cheesy 90s like silly songs and bathing in our undies.
And it was just so lovely and so natural, and I was having so much fun, and we videoed each other doing it. And afterwards, the first time was like because I've always not liked that, you know, people posting pictures showing everything. And I was so proud of myself because I was there so full of joy and so full of love. Another breakthrough has come from this journey of discovering, learning to love ourselves. And you know, as always with me, I'm always a work in progress and I'll get things wrong. It's just that I mean that in and of itself is to be able to and also just demonstrating that in the spaces that I'm in the other women get the chance to, to see the same do the same with the alcohol free stuff and it's the same with you know, standing up and calling bullshit on the alcoholism straight. And calling bullshit on the other hand is struggling with an addictive substance. When the fault is with the substance, not the human being. We're not just going to sit down and just keep having the same way. So much energy for me depends how many years you were drinking to push through.
So many of us who are neurodivergent felt exhausted because we've been drinking to push through when our nervous systems dysregulated; it's almost like having a bit burnt out. And it takes a while to bring that back.
The reason why I love things like intuitive eating is because it's not about diet foods you can't. It's about you knowing everything is okay. Just giving yourself permission to eat food because we're a human being. Giving yourself permission to have what you want to feel amazing. Because all these rules and regulations are kept because we're not questioning them. Maybe we don't have to work. Maybe we don't have to train. Maybe we don't have to play. Maybe we don't have to agree to everything. And maybe we don't have to keep the client from saying something and maybe we don't have to put up with our kids getting the help that they need for their mental health.
Like there is a world out there. And I firmly believe that stopping drinking is your first step. Exploration of human potential is what I'm so excited about the next few weeks before my 50th birthday.
Alright, my lovelies have a brilliant, brilliant week.
