Speaker 1 0:02
Hello and welcome. We are talking about the phenomenon, which is that most people who start working with me, when they start working with me, I ask one question, what do you want your relationship with alcohol to be? And nine times out of 10 person will say, I want to be able to and everyone thinks they're individuals. They're the only one who wants this. They'll be like, you know, I've got this really strange request. What I want is to be able to drink two glasses of wine and stop at two. Want to be able to moderate. And it's a really, really interesting one, because, and I, no, I don't think I would went into this with that in mind, because when I went into stopping drinking, the time that it worked for me, I had decided I want to take a year off, and that was because I'd done all these different months, right? And I found that I couldn't maintain them, and I wanted to see what it would be like to experience all of the seasons without alcohol being part of it. So experience birthdays, Easter, Christmas celebrations, going to music festivals, going camping. But it was really interesting because it's for me, and I'd love to get your feedback on this, and I will also put the link to my it's kind of like a, you know, what could I have done? Better question, because I've been working on the launch for the great hours of the alcohol experiments since July this year, I first of all, I did a webinar called not that bad, but bad enough. Then I did the alcohol reset program, which was really good. I really enjoyed doing that. Then I really started to kind of reshape my work a little bit. And I did a webinar called busy brain alchemy, which was about because a lot of people drink because of busy brain and wanting to escape from busy brain. So it's about, how do you how do you have busy brain and work with busy brain without using alcohol to to stop busy brain? And then we went on and we did in September, the five day virtual retreat, which was really different to the one I've done before. And we did on cravings, craving alchemy, which was very much about, you know, the way that I work with people. We did some parts work, but it was primarily, you know, my work is so different to a lot of the work that's out there in the in the alcohol relationship, changing world, because it's very much about leaning in as opposed to leaning out. So instead of, you know, going into fight the white wine, which we're making friends with her, instead of, you know, so it's so instead of being in resistance and willpower, we're leaning in trying to understand why we did things, why that thing happened, and get the data from it. And instead of being mean and hard with ourselves, we're being soft and gentle with ourselves, whilst we also can be very fierce in our protection of self. So I have a very different methodology than a lot of you know, places like AA and stuff like that. Mine's not fear based. So it's not about being afraid of the hangover tomorrow. It's about making decision in the moment, because it's the decision that feels right for you, as opposed to making it because you're afraid of how you're going to feel tomorrow, and it's very much, and this is part of the question I think around the I'd like to be able to drink two glasses of wine like normal people. And one of the things that I produced a long time ago and has been one of my best performing opt ins, was a little document called, I want to drink like normal people so, and I'm just trying to write this down, so I want to remember to put it in the notes. So I want to drink like normal people.
Unknown Speaker 4:12
What else did I say?
Unknown Speaker 4:19
Lighthouse. And one time,
Speaker 1 4:25
because there's so much to that, right? And I think the it was very interesting, because last night in the alcohol experiment, we were talking about the kind of like the buzz, or these concepts that alcohol is the sparkle that we add to our experience of life, and it makes it better. So there's very, very strongly held belief by many of us that alcohol makes everything better, shinier, sparklier, and, you know, everything else. And it kind of fit. Into this idea. I think that you know if you said, and I wonder if you're listening to this, and you would love to be able to drink two glasses of wine
Unknown Speaker 5:12
and no more.
Unknown Speaker 5:15
And you asked yourself, why?
Speaker 1 5:18
And you might start off with my health, yeah, you might start off with Yeah, because I don't want to have a hangover. Yeah. But then you if we get into our questioning around why, it's often because we believe that is what we should be able to do because the alcohol industry have done such a great job, and the governments as well, because they get such huge amounts of funding from the alcohol industry, it's tax for tax money, have done such a good job of convincing us that to be an acceptable human being, we should be able to drink two glasses of wine at a sitting no more, and only do that when we want to, so on a Friday and a Saturday night, for example, or if we go out for dinner. And it's very, very interesting, because we know, and again, I'm not fear based. But I do think it's really important that we talk about the facts. You know, very recently, I, I was, I think it was, might have been in the alcohol reset, actually, I was looking to and I'm going to explain them, and it's not because I want people to be afraid of I of alcohol, right?
Unknown Speaker 6:46
But I just think it's very interesting
Unknown Speaker 6:48
that
Unknown Speaker 6:50
the World Health the
Speaker 1 6:53
World Health Federation, has said there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink. The counter Council of Australia has also said there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink, right? The Heart Foundation has said there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink. We know that the increase for all cancers from drinking one bottle of wine per week has been estimated as being the same as smoking 10 cigarettes a week, with breast cancer accounting for the meat the most, sorry, the biggest part of that increase, right? So we know that it causes seven types of cancer, including breast cancer, and we know that it increases our our likelihood of having breast cancer by quite a significant amount, and yet we have been convinced that we should be drinking, because the alcohol industry, with their drink responsibility campaign, have managed to convince us, and they preyed on Our insecurity, and our insecurity is about being different, being rejected, being alone, not being enough, not being acceptable, all those core, you know, there's 13 core beliefs that all human beings throughout the world have. A number of I was trying to see if there was that stat anywhere that I could see that's like, because I think it's Hold on a second, let me just have a look.
Speaker 1 8:57
Yeah, so like tobacco and our asbestos, alcohol is a group one carcinogen, which means there's strong evidence that it causes cancer, yeah, but it's the breast cancer bit particularly, that I think is really a big deal,
Unknown Speaker 9:14
because it's something like, you Know,
Speaker 1 9:18
there is a stat around the percentage of increase. I think it's here. So overall, alcohol is a significant risk for pre menopausal women, around 6.6% cases and around 6.6% of cases in postmenopausal women. So trying to think if there's, but there is a particular one which says that, no, there's certain potential. Anyway, I won't, I won't dwell on that, but I just find it fascinating that, you know, we'll be eating healthily, eating clean, you know, doing all this exercise. Is looking after ourselves, and yet we'll be putting alcohol in our body because we don't want to be different, because we don't want to be judged as faulty, and being judged as faulty because the alcohol companies have managed to convince us and and, you know, places like the AI and in the recovery movement benefits from this idea that people think that the problem is, then, instead of the fact that alcohol is an addictive substance to everybody given a certain set of circumstances, right? But instead of, you know, seeing that for what it is and understanding how alcohol works as an addictive substance, we chastise ourselves for drinking more than we meant to, even you know, and often even when we know the facts around exactly how it works in our body and our brain, because it, you know, 100% takes over everything. But it's just a fascinating thing to me that we want to do the two glasses, and why do we want to do it? And once we start getting into a bit more of the, you know, real work around it, it's usually because we're afraid of something. We're afraid of, like I said, we're afraid of being rejected. We're afraid of, you know, it can often be, you know, if so, you know, you hear this kind of phrases like, you know you've either got the people who can drink and the people who can't, and that's just not true again, like, it's such a black and white way of thinking. But the way that the, you know, with the drink, drink responsibility campaign has managed to convince us, because it says your drink response, says, Do you drink responsibly? Onus is on you, despite the fact that we're selling you a very, very dangerous, addictive substance, onus is on you. And as a society, we still because there's shame around it, because, you know, from a very young age, we have tended to blame ourselves for things that we think that we should be able to control, like, you know, there's things we've all got coping mechanisms, right, and there's some that are condoned by society, and there's some that are not, you know, eating too much tends to be something that's not condoned. You know, technically, getting addicted to drugs is something that's not condoned. Drinking too much alcohol, drinking more than we wanted, is not condoned, however, workaholism, productivity, you know, there's, there's other stuff that's really, that really is condoned. And often, you know, obsessive dieting and exercising can be condoned as well, up until the point where it hospitalizes you. And I think that's the point like, I think the point is, what that allows us to do is it allows us to think that if, as long as we keep thinking the problems with us, and we keep going after this two glasses of wine, we keep on the merry go round of alcohol, because we have this idea that moderation is possible. Now moderation is possible, but it requires a level of fastidious self control and constant awareness in order to keep it at the level, because of the way that alcohol works, biologically, chemically in our bodies, it's always going to be wanting to make you, wanting you to have more so, unless you drink because of less than I think hooverman has something like one glass every every week, or one glass Every two weeks you're putting your the amount of alcohol that you're putting in your body is going to mean that your body is trying to get more. So you're constantly being in a situation where you're at war with your body because it's trying to get more. And for me, the question becomes very apparent longer that you're in it, and the more you understand about alcohol is like you're desperately trying to justify putting this substance that's so harmful to you into your body. Something's going on there, right? There's something all right? Something up. And I always find it really interesting. And I know Glennon Doyle has this, you know, phrase that she says, you know, people who don't have a problem with alcohol aren't Googling, do I have a problem with alcohol? And I often say, you know, if you're following me, you know either you've stopped drinking and you're still following me because you want to, you know, learn more things about how to stay not drinking, which is often the big, you know, the hardest thing. And you want to learn more things about staying, not drinking and not wanting to drink because you don't want to be, you don't want to be in that push and pull anymore. Or because you are, you are considering that you have a problem with alcohol. And if you're considering that you have a problem with alcohol, it's very likely that you do have a problem with alcohol. And yes, absolutely, the alcohol experiment is aimed at people, wherever they are and their relationship with alcohol. So you can come in, you can do the alcohol experiment. No one's going to try. And convince you to stop drinking. I will always be very clear, and I will teach, though, the chemistry around alcohol and how it works with the body. And many people join the alcohol experiment, the Great Aussie alcohol experiment, and they leave and they go off, and they go back to moderating and drinking. Usually, though, I find, you know, people will either go and just go, Okay, well, this is how it's going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to wait. I'm going to spend the rest of my life like this. I'm either going to make the decision that I want to be that controlled, and I'm going to be thinking about alcohol all the time, and whether or not I'm going to have it and watching as it creeps up, and then bringing myself back in line and and personally, for me, that wasn't how I wanted to live my life. I didn't. I found that I'm not very good with restriction. I don't think it works very well for me. It makes me really tired. Makes me really tired, makes most people really tired. And also, because I think the biggest piece, and this is what people don't get until you get to this space, is the work that I do with people, and the work that I learned myself is that you no longer see it as something that you want to have, and so that, and then what you know, there's no wanting, right? So you don't want it, so there's no desire, because you don't see it as anything that you'd want to have in your life. It's not a benefit to you in any way, right? And there's so much involved in this, right? Because we know it's not just, it's never about the alcohol. Alcohol's solution to the problem, and we know as well that we may not be ready to work on the problem that is actually underneath the reason why we're drinking. And there will always be a problem. There will always be a reason, and it will very rarely have anything to do with alcohol, primarily, or be something about how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves in relation to other people. It will be about our busy brains. It will be about our trauma. It will be about numbing the pain. It will be generally about escaping our experience of being us because it's unsatisfactory in some way. And whether or not we know that yet or not, is often, because often we are in total Borgen and we're totally unaware, until we start to consider, you know, whether or not this is working for us, we might start beating ourselves up about it, and then things start to change a little bit. And awareness can be really painful. I think it's really important to acknowledge that, and acknowledge that, you know, being stuck a little bit for a while is actually a, really not a bad thing, because being stuck means that we are starting to change. So being stuck means we've realized there's a problem, and being stuck is very hopeful, because it leads us to the other side. But I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, I do work with people around, you know, we do work on and there are strategies for moderating. But I always say to people, you know, you are making life so much harder for yourself. It is so much easier to stop drinking than to moderate, especially, you know, and people will say to me, but this person does it, and I'm like, Yeah, but they probably have a sex addiction. Or, you know, everybody has a thing. They're probably cleaning their grout with a toothbrush every time they have an argument. Because everybody has a thing, yes, in a way that we escape being with our experience of ourselves. Now, what we tend to do as well as we come to this whole idea of we're coming to working with ourselves on alcohol, because we come from a place that we're broken, and we need to fix ourselves, as in, this is a problem. I want to fix it. When I fix it, then I'll be okay. Then I can work on the next thing, then I can work on the next thing, then I can work on the next thing. And you know, this comes up so much in my programs, because, and I work very differently to other people in this. Because I always say this is not a one and done, right? We are constantly when we are constantly looking for the next thing, the next thing, next thing, when I get this, then I'll be okay. When I get this, then I'll be okay. The wanting brain, you know, and trying to keep ourselves looking at the surface level, trying to make it all about habits, trying so my cat's sneezing in the background, Tina, trying to make it all about habit, trying to make it all about, you know, behavior. We stopped looking at what's underneath that. It will only last for so long, yeah, because we're not working on the root cause, we're just working on the symptoms. We're working on the surface. And so
Speaker 1 19:20
the reason I wanted to talk about it was because I'm not sure it's really difficult, because I feel like I don't I don't feel like it's very honest to not be straightforward about how difficult That is and also how fascinating it is. And I think one of the things about us holding on to this idea, and we do for you know, we can't rush people. We don't seem to be able to rush people through. I wish we could. I wish we could rush people through this stage, because it's a trial and error, and you have to come to a point where it's almost so fucking awful that you have to choose something else. And it's such a shame. And this is what I wanted to talk about, because I think we wait too long to go because we and it's because of our sense of lack. It's like I have this hole and and I need to be accepted by other people. I need to be able to mask I need to be able to and there's, there's, there's often very good reasons for it. You know, people don't give up drinking often for very good reasons, because they need that numbing. They need that because the experience of life might be absolutely horrendous, right? And so and so, you know, sometimes that is, it is, you know, that feels like the safer decision, and sometimes it is right. So let's not, let's not pussyfoot around that, especially for women. Now, if you're in an abusive relationship, drinking alcohol might be a way that you can make the hurt and pain of that go away. The difficulty is that it doesn't change anything. And this is the you know, the biggest con of alcohol is that nothing changes when we stay in alcohol, because all we're doing is suppressing our experience. Of the world, and we're looking for something outside of ourselves to say, you can rest. Now you can have peace. Now you can stop Borgen brain. Now it's all about giving us permission from and again, often we think we're rebellious and we're cool for drinking, and we think when we're stopping drinking, it's the opposite of that. But actually, you know, the opposite is true, because, in reality, something that's really, you know, causing you to behave in ways that are, you know, not feeling out of alignment, and you're feeling like you've got two parts of yourself, and you're at battle with yourself and all that kind of stuff. It's so harmful to your nervous system, so harmful to your health. And you know, for those of us who are parents and grandparents, we're also, you know, there's future generation watching us, only being able to soothe ourselves with alcohol. Because, you know, this is our you know, our conditioning is that we shouldn't be having, you know, the feelings that are on the back, on the negative side of the feeling wheel, because as as children, we weren't. We were not, we were not allowed to have those, and nobody's ever shown us how to have them safely. And that's part of the work that I do as well. So I think often we're waiting for too long, because what we then do is we make it a necessity, and we make it I've have to, and I have to because I'm trying to fix myself. And what I'm really trying to emphasize to you guys is that if we're coming from a place of fixing when I've done this, then I'll get this done then, and people get so frustrated. Well, like, why am I not told Happy, happy, joy, joy, because we're looking after destination, happiness. I was talking to one of my clients. She was like, I want, because I want to live my best life. It's like, what's the best life? You know, wait it. What about it? I know Laura McCowan wrote about this in her book, we are the luckiest. I think it was, we are the luckiest. Oh, I can't remember anyway, but she writes about this, sort of like, let me see if I can find it, actually. So you guys, one,
Unknown Speaker 22:59
bear with me a second, I'll just
Speaker 1 23:03
get it up. It's lovely. It's because we have this idea that everything's got to be this perfect. It's all perfection. It's all got to be this because this is how we're going to be perceived by the people. And you know, we need to be masking, we need to be presenting this best life where we're uncluttered, where we're we're thin, and we're fit, and we're a year when we managing to achieve all the things, and we've got the job, and we feel deep shame if we don't have that. And so it's, it's, it's kind of part of that whole masking process and so and you know, so for me, this work is really isn't about alcohol at all. It's about unmasking. It's about finding out the human that we are underneath, about the human we were put on this earth to be, who got knocked around a bit. Put a load of protective personality traits in place that they we call our characteristics, but are actually not at all, you know, things like busyness, things like life, I get tidy her thing, you know, all of these kind of things, you know. And the last chapter that I was talking about was a nice little life. She talks about a nice little life. And she talks about it in, you know, she used to think that was such a sad, pathetic thing to up to want. But rather than my very best life, best life, a top life, you know, sounds like Trump, doesn't it, it's like this. And I don't mean that some in mocking way, please don't take it that way. But it's, it's that sort of like this, idea that we have to be these, you know, everything has to be a certain way in order for us to be okay. And you know, a lot of the work that we do in my groups is about trying to find the choice in the now and trying to be the present and being okay with who we are where we are now, and also learning to love ourselves as the infallible messes that we all are and that part of us that makes us so very charming. And so my invitation is to, you know, I invite you if you haven't listened to my
Unknown Speaker 25:07
my webinar,
Speaker 1 25:10
not that bad, but bad enough. I'll put that link into the show notes as well, because it talks about, you know, it's bad enough for me. You know, it was bad enough for me and and I think it's so important that we, if we can, if the sooner you get to this, the better. Don't keep waiting. It's not, you know, another Christmas is a Christmas that you go by being disconnected from your family, being disconnected from yourself and feeling shit about yourself in order to what, in order to what. Because I promise you, if you do the work on alcohol, you will not feel like you're missing out on anything at all. In fact, you will look at the other people drinking and think, I'm so sorry that that you're missing up everything that's going on. And we might go, Well, you know what? I want to miss my mother in law being a bitch, and I want to miss the fact that I have to and yet, and then. And then it's like, yeah, but we're choosing for self harm in order to do that. And what we you know? What could a different decision be? How could we make the situation? Because I often have, I don't have any choice. I have to do these things. It's like, No, you don't. We have choice, and so much, so much more than we think we get to choose. You know, how do I construct my Christmas Who do I have there for how long? How is that going to be the best thing for me and my family, so that I don't have to use a dangerous addictive substance in order for me to stay in that scenario. So I you know, I welcome your feedback. I welcome your thoughts. Please email Emma at Hope rising.co hoperising coaching, Comm, hope rising coaching, yeah. So please, please do. I would love to hear from you. I'm I know some of my the things I say are controversial and not what everybody wants to hear, but that's why I think I'm good at what I do, because I do work deeper and because I say very clearly what what I'm about and what the work that I'm doing is about. That's it for me today, and have a good rest of your day. Take care. Thanks for listening. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
