Speaker 1 0:00
Yay, it's working. Okay, let's see. I don't quite sure what that is. Let me just see if I can close that. Hello everybody. Let me make sure got some yay. Hi Cat, Hi Sharon, Hi Helen, hi, hi Tanya, Hi Chris. Lovely to meet you all. Welcome, welcome, welcome. And just trying to make sure that I've got it going live in in Facebook as well. Hopefully that's working. It's a kind of new technology that I'm not as familiar with.
Unknown Speaker 0:38
Let's see. Hopefully that's working. Yay.
Speaker 1 0:42
It's working. I can see it is Yay. I'm so excited. Okay, I'm just gonna put my clock on as well
Unknown Speaker 0:47
so I can keep an eye on the time, and then we'll do a proper
Speaker 1 0:50
Hi, beautiful. Welcome so much everybody. It's so lovely to see you. Thank you so much for being here today for our hour together for the second part of the recess, I'm just going to make sure that I've got the chat
Unknown Speaker 1:07
and that could you just let me know you guys, if you can hear
Speaker 1 1:19
Me, hello. Thank you. Lovely to see you. Hi Therese, thank you. Thanks so much. Lovely. That's wonderful. All right, yeah, thanks. Kim, brilliant. Thanks. Sharon, amazing. You guys are the best now, just so you guys, know some of you are when you're commenting, you're commenting to host and panelist, which means the rest of the group can't see what you say. So if you want to see each other's Thanks, Helen, if you want to see each other's comments, and nobody can see our comments apart from us,
Speaker 2 1:54
just make sure when you are posting that you're posting to everyone equally. You can keep them to post and purpose whatever you want to do anyway. I just thought I'd make you aware of that, because I've had someone going, I can't know, I can't see what anyone's posting. Alright, lovely job. Well done, everybody. Here we are today. We are doing this is our second day, two of our three day, January, alcohol reset, the three day opportunity for us to take a bit of time, take a moment to reflect on where we are not sort of like end of January, beginning. I don't know how many of you had kids starting school today for the new year. I did. It was a very anxious time in our household, but yeah, just an opportunity before we get back into, you know, business as usual, so to speak. And I know, like for most of us, I mean, I know, for me personally, I've been working all the way through January, but you know, there's a different feel to it. And I think January has its own stresses for those of us in the Australian market, because it's the kind of the equivalent to the sort of European big holiday of of the July, August, kind of big holiday. So I think it's an important time, and a lot of us feel like we can't really commit to anything until kind of after the end of January. And so I thought this is a really good time to just take a moment, and get a bit intentional about what we're doing before the world comes along and kind of sweeps us off our feet, as it always does. So today, we if you haven't seen day two, and I have, and I will put the links in the I don't know if you guys can see I posted some links when I started. They're right at the top. Can you guys see them? Because I've got all the links there that I need to talk to you about today, but if not, I'll repost them further down. Let me know.
Speaker 2 4:01
So she's retired as a teacher. Jolly good. Yes, that must be you'll probably still like feel it in your bones. Yeah, you can't see them. Okay? No worries. No, that's fine. I will. I put them there first so I knew where they were. And what I'll just do here is, if you've missed any of it. Bear with me. I'm just going to post the hub link, which is the link where all the replays are. So if anyone hasn't got that, that's coming now. Can you guys see that? So that's where all the replays will be, and the links to the podcast, because I've recorded as a podcast as well. So if anyone hasn't been on there, that's where you can watch all the replays and download all the resources as well. So I just thought I'd put that in there now and then. The other place, if any of you aren't aware, is the midlife AF Facebook group, which I'll just post in there as well, which is where we're also going live tonight. I. That's where I the community for this reset is happening, and I will be
Unknown Speaker 5:08
I have posted
Unknown Speaker 5:12
sorry. She says,
Speaker 2 5:16
Where have I got it? There we go. And I have posted some journaling questions for you guys in there as well. The questions are also in your workbook, which is in the reset the rehab as well. So that's the admin stuff done. So let me just make sure that you guys have got that Facebook group, and then we've got everything. Yeah, we're cooking on gas. Welcome everybody. Lovely to be with you. Thank you for joining. Let's begin. That's the very last slide. That's no good. We don't want that right back to the beginning. Close your eyes. Close your eyes. Can't wait. All right, let's, let's go Next slide. So celebrating you, you know, I think I was talking to my group last night and saying, you know, it's only a very small amount of people who take the time to look at their behaviors and their patterns and, you know, really kind of do a bit of deep dive and examine, kind of why we do the things we do. Most people don't do that. And so I know that many of us, particularly if we've got a sort of interesting relationship with alcohol, we can be very hard on ourselves. And I just want to take a moment to congratulate you for being here, congratulate you for showing up, congratulating you to making the decision, and even those of you as well watching on the replay, but I congratulate you for taking this time for yourself. Because I think one of the big pieces to changing your relationship with alcohol is beginning to matter to yourself and for a lot of us, particularly female, assigned at birth humans, we have very much been conditioned not to matter. You know, it's almost like if we care about ourselves, it's a little bit selfish, and so we're kind of being a little bit revolutionary by being here. And I just want to celebrate you for that. And before we get started, we'll just take a moment to land here together. In my programs, I do a grounding at the end at the start of every session, and we do that because one of the reasons that a lot of us drink is because we are very much up in our heads, up in our our thoughts, our busy brains, and the busy brains have an impact on our emotional state. And it's, you know, there's so much about kind of what's happening in our thoughts that creates difficulties around, you know, drinking more than we wanted to, or drinking when we'd set out not to. And so the reason, I think grounding is very important. There's a million different ways to skin a cat with grounding. It doesn't have to be anything specific, but the main thing is that we're connecting with present moment and and us in a us in our space, and a lot of work in the work that I do is around connecting to our bodies, which we can find very difficult. Me, I find it very difficult. So if you guys do as well, just know that you're in good company, because for many of us, we naturally have pretty low connection to our bodies, but if we've been part of our culture at all, you know, if we dieted, if we've, you know, if we've been suppressing our needs, you know, suppressing our emotions. If, growing up, we were, you know, made to feel that we weren't really allowed to have emotions. We were allowed to cry, we weren't allowed to get upset, we weren't allowed to complain. So we've spent our whole life suppressing our emotions, which means it can be very difficult for us to get in touch with what's happening inside our body. But one of the greatest ways of reconnecting with self and staying present, so out of head is coming down into body, and so we just take a moment to land together. And again, everything I do with you, please know, is an invitation. You don't have to do anything. I am not directing you. Look after yourselves. Do what feels good for you, leave what doesn't now we're just going to take a moment to take a couple of breaths.
Unknown Speaker 9:33
So I invite you to breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth,
Unknown Speaker 9:43
in through your nose, out through your mouth, in through your nose, out through your mouth, and
Speaker 2 9:55
then let your breath return to normal. And I just invite you to notice your.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Feet, notice whether they're warm or cold,
Unknown Speaker 10:05
notice the surface they're on or in. And
Unknown Speaker 10:09
I invite you to wriggle your toes
Unknown Speaker 10:13
and notice how they move. And I
Speaker 2 10:21
invite you to imagine that you have a root growing out at the base of your spine, or the bottom of your foot, going down through the building that you're in and connecting you to the earth, so burrowing down those lovely roots, connecting you, but not restricting you, and reminding you that you are not your thoughts. You're the thinker of your thoughts, and reminding you that you are nature, and so you are ultimately connected with nature, because you are it, right? And as we talk about nature, just taking a moment to acknowledge the lands that we're all on tonight, for me, the lands of the Bunurong people of the Kulan nation, and pay my respects to the elders, past, present, emerging and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and honoring the lands where you are tonight as well. Beautiful work, everyone. Let's get started. So last night, we talked about the pause. We talked about the concept of taking a break from taking a break. And this is really about getting out of resistance and into curiosity. And today, we're going to talk about why everything we believe about ourselves and alcohol is a lie, and this is really where we're going to do some rewiring of belief patterns. And then tomorrow we're going to do essential information what to do next. And I mentioned to you before that I will talk a little bit at the very end about my program that's starting on the second of Feb. Those of you who are here last night said that was fine. I was saying that, you know, I will give so much great content for you. There's a beautiful workbook, there's loads of meditations. So I hope that you feel that that is a reciprocity kind of thing, you know, and that that's okay with you. So, you know, again, I appreciate you allowing me to do that. So we talked about why quitting, quitting can be helpful. So I'll give you example. Last night, I was on an alcohol experiment call with one of my clients, and one of my clients was very, she was, she was very, very heightened. She was having a really bad time. And we were talking about, you know, what if there was this whole kind of, like, real resistance, I quite can, but I can't have a drink. I can't have a drink because, you know, if I have a drink, you know, you know, it's all going to go wrong. And so what she was getting very, very she was having a really horrible time, but she was getting very heightened, because there was this kind of this idea that I can't have this thing. And therefore, when we can't have something like our natural kind of desire for freedom, our desire to be independent people and not be contained and not be contained and not be controlled, kind of comes through, and we sort of, like start fighting with ourselves. And, you know, I was having a conversation with her, you know, with is like, you know, what if it's okay for you? What if you can have a drink? What if that is actually fine? And what if, what if we can, instead of bracing against and being in resistance to we can release the resistance and be with what is and that's really where we start to use these kind of tools like present moment awareness and grounding and so on. But and this, when I talk about why quitting, quitting can be helpful, because we're in resistance, and we get stuck in these cycles of self hatred because we, you know, we're having a gay old time on, you know, Friday night and in the morning, we're full of regret because we drank more than we wanted to, or we drunk when we didn't want to, and so on and so forth. And so that cycle is very harmful to us. So number one, we're in resistance, and resistance takes energy. Willpower takes energy, and of course, when we use our energy, we have less resources to be able to make great decisions, right? So really, you know, primarily when I talk about my methodology, which I call the third way, which is, you know, the it's not being miserably sober, and it's not being drinking more than you want and feeling bad about yourself. Those are those are not the two options that we have available to us. There's a third way, and that third way is that sort of take it or leave it relationship with alcohol. And the way we get a take it or leave it. Relationship with alcohol is we stop giving it all this power, we stop fighting it. And we have this belief it's conditioned, our societal conditioning, that if we're not fighting something, then we must be allowing it. But it actually doesn't mean that at all, quite the quite the contrary. It's very interesting. Yeah, so that was a little bit about what we talked about yesterday. And we talked about, you know, that it builds our self trust, and when we stop quitting quitting, we can stop being so judgmental, and we can start understanding what's happening and why we're doing the things we're doing, instead of beating ourselves up for it, then getting heightened because it's not nice to beat ourselves up about things, and we feel triggered because we're being horrible to ourselves, and then sort of developing this kind of attitude of self compassion, which, again, you know, can be fear. Self Compassion isn't anything like, you know, kind of condoning bad behavior, or any of that stuff. That's not what it's about at all. But it really does come from the principle that humans, in and of themselves, are good, and humans do well when they can. So if we're not doing well as a human, there's usually a very good reason why. And so when we stop getting in this, in this whole cycle, this drama of quitting, we can start looking at what that reason might be, because we can only see it when we get out of judgment and self criticism. I hope that makes sense.
Unknown Speaker 16:35
All right, so that was a bit of a recap.
Speaker 2 16:39
So this is probably one of the most important questions, and in fact, I might say it is the most important question to ask yourself around drinking. Because, you know, I, those of you who I spoke to yesterday will know I trained for a year under Gabor Mate, and the most, the thing that I learned most from him, around working with coping mechanisms like drinking or like, you know, can be any coping mechanism that we use to escape ourselves is that what the information we need to know is without judgment, and that's just the difficulty. People always criticize themselves for this, and it's like, let judgment stand aside for a minute. And if we can answer in the chat the question without judgment, without Oh, you know, and I shouldn't, and, you know, I should know better, but if we can just actually look at why we like to drink, that is going to give us so much information about the beliefs that we hold about alcohol and society and the world, and then we can start working on them. So out of the drama of judgment self criticism and into the facts and the data and the information and our nervous system feels a bit calmer with that. So So I encourage you to write in the chat all the reasons that we like to drink. And I'll just have a quick sip of my Drink.
Speaker 2 18:11
Celebration, commiseration, relaxation, yeah, absolutely brilliant.
Unknown Speaker 18:20
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
Speaker 2 18:23
Anyone else relax. Favorite thing to do is open a bottle of wine while cooking and listening to music. Yeah, absolutely drinking and food. Very much associated. 100% it's a treat at the end of the day. I like the flavors. Yep, absolutely company yet 100% Helen says, When I finish the daily chores, I can reward, a reward, brilliant, moderate emotions, absolutely, especially anger, yes, Therese brilliant, and sadness. And Tanya says, The Buzz. Oh, I love the buzz, as in, I don't love the buzz, but I love the subject of the buzz. It's such a good belief. Yeah, well done. And actually, I don't know if you guys have listened to my podcast, but I've got a couple of episodes on the buzz, which is worth, worth a listen to. But, yeah, brilliant. Okay, these are all fantastic, great. I don't think we're missing much there at all. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. And I would say that I was exactly the same. I mean, I in that food and cheese thing I've talked to my group is about this, because at the moment, I'm running the alcohol experiment in January as well, at the same time, and some of the guys who are on this for their from there as well. But I had this like, I was like, What the What the hell is the point of cheese now, how am I ever gonna have a steak, right? Without, yeah, he says Happy pleasure. But also when I'm sad, I think it may be comforting. Comfort, yeah, that's great. Well done. Comfort, brilliant. Yeah, well, can. Them coming, because this is, this is really important information, and I encourage you to make a note of what you've written. Yeah. Okay, so everything we believe about booze, and most of what we believe about ourselves is a lie. And I just find this so fascinating. I mean, this is, I encourage you to go on this journey with me over the next three days, in the spirit that I kind of go into it, and I think it's such an important one, because we've all been led to believe that, you know, having an a relationship with alcohol that doesn't feel very good is like this, this kind of heavy weight that we have to bear, this kind of slightly shameful thing, that's, you know, we have this idea that we're the only people who, you know, can't stop at one or, you know, drink more than we want to, or we're the only people to drink at home. Or we, you know, we have all this idea because we don't talk to each other. So we all think that that's the situation, and we think of it as such a heavy thing. And with the way I would really encourage and always say this at the beginning of my groups, you just start thinking about this. Is less about alcohol and more about this is like such an interesting experiment as such an interesting data gathering piece of information. You know, this is like us as human beings, and how human beings work, and how we work as a human being, and the things that matter to us and the things that don't matter to us and our conditioning. And it's like, if you start to like, I'm always thinking like, you guys might not know him, but in England, there was a geologist, probably a bit like Richard Attenborough, or someone like that. Or David Attenborough. Can't remember which one, but you know, it's like, oh, this is Oh, this is interesting. It's like, think of self a bit like that. So we take all the judgment away. We start looking at the data. I really encourage you to kind of enter this three days with
Unknown Speaker 21:43
that sort of attitude as well. Okay, so first of all,
Speaker 2 21:46
going to start with beliefs. Then we're going to talk about we didn't make ourselves and then we're going to talk about dopamine part two, I did very brief introduction to dopamine yesterday. Okay, so beliefs, beliefs are the they shape the way we see the world, right? So when I was first learning about thoughts and beliefs, when I was first starting off this journey, back in 2020 I think the definition that I was given, and I think it's still a pretty good one, is kind of beliefs are the lens through which you see the world, and thoughts are the words that you have in your head that makes sense, like the narrative in your head, if you have a narrative in your head, yeah, yeah. I was just reading, I agree here, as it does seem like something to hide. Yeah, exactly. We're all kind of slightly ashamed of it, isn't it? But that's what society makes us feel like, because it's a very good ploy by the alcohol companies to kind of put on all of the point of sale all around, kind of the bottle shops, the ads around, ads, you know, Drink responsibly, which is really interesting because it's created by a company called Drink aware, which is actually paid for and 100% owned and sponsored and and managed by the big alcohol companies. And the reason that they do that is because they put the onus on the people so that if you can't drink responsibly, this addictive substance that we're giving you, you're the problem. And then what it also does is it makes everyone feel slightly shame, or if I can't drink responsibly, then I must be, you know, we have all these kind of like narrative in our society, don't we? Like, you know, oh, there's those that can and those that can't, you know, there's and, you know, all that kind of, oh, you know, well, if you've got a problem, and it's all said in such a horrible way. And so, you know, half the people are like, you know, we don't want to have a problem. We don't want to be seen as different to normal, and then half the other people are like, well, we're going to hate on the people who are having a problem, because we don't want anyone to look too closely at us. It's just like this whole kind of created scenario that is very beneficial to a lot of people, but it keeps us in shame, and shame keeps us silent, and silent means we're alone, and alone is lonely, and when we're lonely, we drink. Yeah. So I want you to know first and foremost, that, and I hope, as we go through this three days, that you will understand more and more that having a problem stopping drinking, stopping at one or having drinking more than you want to, or drinking when you didn't set out to, is not a moral failing. It's not a sign of weakness, like everyone says, It's not at all. It's biology, it's chemistry, it's a whole load of other stuff. But it's not what we think it is at all, and willpower and strength have absolutely nothing to do with it. Yeah, so that's why I say My way is completely different. It's not harsh, it's not mean. It's about understanding, getting curious and being kind to ourselves, because for me as a neurodivergent human being, I. I do not do well when people are being mean to me. I don't do well with that situation. It doesn't work for me. And also, as a person who has, like, a really strong social justice drive, a real rebellious side, I was never going to be satisfied with a method of changing my relationship with alcohol. That meant I was in the kind of loser group who wasn't found to have the thing, or also in the group where people kind of look down on me like I had this problem, yeah? So know that I come from that space, and that's where my where my work is, what my work is all about, and the people who work with me, it's very much a different approach. So let's talk about beliefs. So in this space, we talk about there being three levels of belief, beliefs at the level of substance, beliefs at the level of society and beliefs at the level of self. Now beliefs at the level of substance are pretty easy to shift, so I can do some work and explain to you how when we drink alcohol, we might say, Oh, I've had a bad day, oh, I'm really stressed, and and we have a drink, and we get some endorphins, and we get Some dopamine, and we get some euphoric feelings, and it's quite an extreme amount. So the amount of dopamine that's made when we drink alcohol very much similar to first person shooter games. And I'll talk about this more as we go through but the level is very, very high, and our body is always trying to keep us in homeostasis, so balance and so what happens? We drink, we get that sort of very quick initial high, and then our body starts to flood with cortisol, stress hormones, adrenaline and a very nasty substance called dinorphine. And those things are basically kind of canceling out. And so that's when we then want to drink another drink to get back to that feeling. And then they come up, come back again. And so it's very chemical. And so people are like, Oh, what's wrong with me? It's like, well, it's not wrong. There's nothing wrong with you. This is science. This is how it works. It's how the body works. It's how alcohol works in our body. It's not a I'm a bad person. I have a poor moral character. Isn't that at all? It's just science. But once we can understand things like that, we can see why. Perhaps the belief of I use Apple to relax when we you know what? What we find that, what the research shows is that actually alcohol makes us more stressed than we started with. That makes sense, because it's putting all the stress hormones into our bodies. So bodies, so things like that, we can transform fairly easily, you know, and we can do like we can play around with a little bit, and we do have to do, I mean, the way we do the work in the alcohol experiment is we do a particular type of process where we kind of challenge the belief, and then we look at science, and then we come up together. And this is really important, with this chink of possibility, it's not the opposite. And I'll give you an example of how this worked for me. And actually it's, it still blows my mind, because I am a really big somatic I'm a book counselor and psychotherapist, as many of you know, and I am very heavily into, you know, the kind of somatic side of therapy, trauma informed and and this is really quite thought led this particular process. And so it surprises me, the change that it made for me. And I'll give you an example. So I absolutely loved the taste of wine. I loved it. It was like part of my identity, thinking of myself as a bit of a, kind of, like a bit a bit fancier than my husband in terms of my wine choices. And, you know, really kind of like it was very much my, very my identity. And so one of the reasons I wrote down when I was writing the same list as you guys have just done, is, you know, one of my reasons that I like strings, because I love the taste of wine. There was a couple of other ones. One of my was like, I'm fun, and fun people drink. That's another interesting one, and then a load more. But so I've been learning about dopamine, and this is like I was in I did the experiment back in January 2020, and I was probably a weekend, and I've been learning about dopamine, and I understood that what dopamine makes us do, and this is one of the reasons that the awareness worksheets that I put in the in the hub are really useful as well, and I really encourage you to do them, especially if you're thinking of doing therapy. Thinking of doing Feb fast. It's a really, really good process to go through. But I was understanding how Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, and its purpose is to get us to do something. So even though we're like, oh yeah, we get the reward of dopamine. But the dopamine. Means actual job is it's a doing thing. It wants us to do something, and it wants us to do, like explained last time. It wants us to do something because it wants us to. It believes that if we get dopamine from something, it's something we need to survive. And I talked about this a little bit yesterday. You know, the kind of raspberries in the bushes for cavemen looking for food, and you get the dopamine hit, and then you remember where to go back sex. If we were hunting a deer, for example, back in caveman days, we get a dopamine if we climb something that we got to the top and we were trying to get somewhere, we get a hit of dopamine. And these things are there. They're survival things. So our body and our brain thinks that we need dopamine to survive, and so why it wants us to, it gets us to do the searching for dopamine. That's kind of what dopamine is. It's like the doing. It's almost like the mosquito bite that you itch and it never feels satiated. So it's like a, it's kind of like a pleasure seeking, pleasure seeking, pleasure seeking. And what was really interesting about that was I found that, so I'm from a tangent. I found out that what the way it does that is it kind of gives whatever it is that we're trying to seek. We see it through rose tinted glasses, so it always appears kind of slightly better than it actually is. And so we, you know, it's a bit like childbirth, sticking it as one example, where you do it, and then you'll sort of like, forget. And you're like, oh, so love What are you talking about? But it's kind of similar with with alcohol right now. So I was hearing that was thinking, well, it's applied to me, I love alcohol anyway. So I was running down the beach, and I've been doing this work, and I've been writing things out, and I was thinking about this belief that I had, that I love the taste of wine, and it
Speaker 2 31:42
suddenly occurred to me, and I think it was, this was in January, and I think I remembered the last really good bottle of wine that I'd had, and it was, if my memory says me, right, I try to remember, I think it was a Pinot Gris. It was in a pub, and I was with my friend, and it was sensational, and I loved it. And then I was like, well, that's really interesting, because I've been drinking every day. So because I've been drinking every day since then, and that was the last time I really enjoyed a glass of wine. Every other glass of wine I'd had since then were a bit was a bit meh, a bit disappointing. I'm not saying I didn't drink them, you know, cause I did, but I'm saying they were a bit disappointed. They didn't live up to their expectations. However, that did not change my belief. So my belief was that I love the taste of wine. And then I was thinking, well, when was the last time then? And then I was thinking it was probably about two weeks before then. I kind of remember then, and it was just a really interesting piece of information for me. And it was suddenly like, okay, so I don't love the taste of every glass of wine, so it's not necessarily true what I'm saying. And so what the turnaround for me was is and turnarounds on beliefs are never the opposite, because we don't believe the opposite. If someone says, you well, you know, you don't like the taste of wine, I would say, well, that's bullshit. I do like the taste of wine. How dare you have very rude. It's part of my identity. I'm a wine blacker. But what I did begin to do was, actually, I don't like the taste of every single glass of wine, and in fact, some glasses of wine are a bit of a struggle to get through. Does anyone relate to this? By the way? Because this was for me, this is when this chink of possibility started in my head, that not everything that I've been telling myself or believing about myself in relation to wine was true. And this is what the work that we do. It's not about opposites, it's not about pretending. It's not about like, affirmations. It's really about opening up your brain to the possibility that there might just not be 111 reality. You know, there's more than one reality. Yeah, so I hope that was a clear so beliefs at the level of substance are pretty easy to shift. Beliefs at the level society can be a bit more tricky for us. So that might be to do with friendships, to do with it could be that to do a celebration like celebration is not a celebration without alcohol, for example. And that would be a belief that we'd go through in my group, my alcohol group, and we go through in the Apple experiment, every night. We go through, well, not every night, but most nights. We go through a belief, one of these ones that we hold, and we pick it apart as a group, and it's really fun, and then we come up with a kind of turnaround that's not that feels believable. It's got to feel believable, because you cannot bullshit your unconscious and in order to shift unconscious programming, we have to believe what we're saying. I hope that makes sense. Any questions. Let me know the beliefs that are tougher and often, I find people who just have beliefs around alcohol that are just related to the substance. They are usually pretty it can pretty quickly get their relationship with alcohol back to where they want it to be. When it comes to society, that can be a little bit deeper, because sometimes that's built on some wounds that we might have about ourselves and our belonging and wanting to be normal, and that then kind of then leans into beliefs at the level of self. And beliefs at the level of self can also be a bit more difficult to shift. And so I would suggest that if your beliefs around alcohol are just at the level of substance, you could. Probably get a handle on that, if there's things to do with, you know, you know, I'm drinking because I'm lonely, or I'm drinking because, you know, I don't, you know, I lots of different reasons that we might be drinking around like I'm drinking because I, you know, I don't like how I am socially without drinking, or these are getting a bit more sensitive, a bit more tender, and that we might need to do a little bit more work, and that might be something that you need somebody to work with you, you might want to work in a group. So these are kind of like the three levels of belief, but they're all transformable, and it's very important because, and it's very important to remember all humans have beliefs about themselves and the world that are unhelpful and are keeping us stuck looking at the world through a certain lens. And so I, you know me, it's the greatest privilege of our lives, in my opinion, to be able to sort of sit and see if we can change some of these so that we're less stuck and we're less controlled and we're less triggered by things, you know what I mean. All right, how am I doing for time? Okay, great. Any questions, by the way, please feel free to ask so again. Now, I've gone through quite a lot of this already, but I am. The problem is, until we start looking at this stuff. And I, you know, I refer, I think this is really, you know, when Brene Brown talks about the midlife unraveling, it's one of those beautiful pieces of prose, and it's so true. And she sort of says, you know, this is the time when the world kind of takes you by the shoulders and shakes you and says, you know, I'm not buggering around now, I'm not, I'm not mucking around now, you know, this is your, your chance all these protective mechanisms that have been keeping you safe for this long, they're no longer serving you. Yeah, you know, it's not, it's no longer, you know what it was like in the 20s. Is not like that anymore. They're starting to harm you. And so this is the time to kind of take, take, take stock. Have a look, you know, look under the look under the rug. So I am. It's like we believe that all these, as far as we're concerned, the unconscious, is working away and really kind of determining how we live our life, the way we think about things. And, you know, we have an experience, let's say, for example, that we are, you know, we're we're lonely, for example, or I'm lonely, or I'm sad or I'm depressed or I'm, you know, whatever, when we say I am, it's like we're in the eye of the storm with the experience that we're having. And a lot of the work that we do in my groups and in my one to one work is about starting to separate ourselves out a little bit from some of those things. So noticing, I am noticing that I am feeling sad, I'm having, you know, an experience of so rather than I am, it's starting, and this is awareness, like I'm starting to notice so I can get a little bit of distance from it, that that's what's happening that makes sense. And the problem that we have is we believe that there to us from drinking. You know, I always say alcohol is a wanting problem. If you don't want it, it's not a problem. And that's kind of what part of my work is. And it's not about saying, oh, you know, we don't want to have alcohol, but it's about taking away the longing, the desire, the grasping, the I must have. You know, it's like taking that. It's getting to that. So you feel about, and I always say this, but you feel about alcohol as you would achieve sandwich. It's got that much pull. So you can take it or leave it right, because it's not about this kind of like inner longing. And if I get this thing, then I'll be okay. It's it's divorced from that. We can separate ourselves from that, and that's kind of the work that we do. So we believe there's a benefit to us from drinking when this is what we're doing. So when we say, Why do I drink? It's like these, all these things, we think they're benefits to us. And so part of this work is exposing some of those things that we believe to be true as for what they really are, and replacing them with beliefs that actually serve us. So our beliefs are founded on adaptations our brain has made to keep us safe in the world, right? You know, I had this belief that my I was an extroverted I was an entgj. I'm sure some of you will know what that is, but on the Myers Briggs profile, so it's like, extroverted kind of leader, really, you know, kind of
Unknown Speaker 39:24
probably quite an obnoxious person,
Speaker 2 39:27
and I performed that mask. I performed that role in, you know, in all my corporate work. And it was only really when I took a break from drinking that I started to discover who I really was, and that was quite different to that. And it's a very interesting you know, there's a reason why I behaved in that way, and there's a reason why I loved my drinking self, and I love those things because those are the things that we're told by society that we should be in order to be acceptable. Or and so a lot of us, you know, use, use alcohol in that way. But it's, it's, it's really interesting when you start to kind of realize that these things, like being really busy, being really, you know, being a workaholic, being, you know, obsessed with our what we put into our body, being, you know, all of these things are adaptations to keep us safe. They're not necessarily personality traits like we might think they are.
Unknown Speaker 40:26
They're safety, safety mechanisms.
Speaker 2 40:29
Again, any questions, the second part of this is to start to wake up to our conditioning. Now, people can get really funny about this, and I think, you know, I know the reason why is because in society, in our society, we have been taught not to tell tales out of school, not to speak badly about, you know, our upbringing, not to blame people, you know. And there's a sort of attitude of, you know, like, you know, you know, I don't want to talk badly about my family, or how I was brought up or and again, I remember Brene Brown saying, you know, she lives in the street, and she talks about, in Atlas of the heart that, you know, every family is dysfunctional. You know, in one family there's somebody who has a drinking problem. In another family there's somebody who's one of the parents is abusive. In another family, there's, you know, what? There's all these different issues that people have got another family, someone's struggling with mental health, you know, there's all these different issues, and because we all kept stomach, she said, you know, it would have helped so much as a little girl if we had had a conversation about some of these things, so that we didn't feel so alone. Because there's no, you know, like we're all kind of putting on this mask that everything's fine and most people aren't fine. Most of the time, it's just we have to seem to pretend that we that we are. But it's really important, like, so taking responsibility for your conditioning isn't about blaming anybody else for it. Like we understand our parents generation, our grandparents generation and so on and so forth. They were doing what they were doing for the best intentions and because that's how they were brought up, and they had their own trauma. But also because, you know, those were the things like, for example, when parents with, if you had a parent like mine, who was constantly talking about weight and diet, you know, she was doing that because she was bullied and she knew that people who were in thinner bodies got treated better. So, you know, it's protective as well. It might not have been necessarily the best thing for me, but you know what I mean? So, so it isn't this isn't about blaming people, but what it is about is something that as children many of us weren't allowed to have, which is our experience. Yeah, so understanding our experience, waking up to our conditioning, not just our parents, but society, our media, teachers, everything. And we know that we form, you know, the most of the beliefs that we form about ourselves we form under the age of seven, and then they govern us for the rest of the world. And we talked about last night, when we were talking about reconnection, is like, the deepest, saddest thing is that the minute somebody criticizes us, and it doesn't even have to be words, you know, like as a child, if we're not picked up when we're crying, if we're made to feel like we're bad, if we're not held and looked at as if we had a value by our caregivers, you know, these we then start to kind of form beliefs about ourselves. Now, the really important thing about this is that none of these beliefs are true. Like, if anyone, we all have these, like, there's 13 or 17, I can't remember how many beliefs, and the whole world has two or three of them, right? And they are not true, but they are our disconnection from self and there and they and I talked a bit, a little bit about this last time, but they're built on the idea that we have shame, and we have shame about behaving in a way that somebody told us wasn't good, or that we weren't good, and so we hold that little piece of shame, and we create this little belief, and then suddenly we disconnected from himself, and we're starting to perform these kind of like protective roles in order to keep us safe. So this is what we didn't make ourselves believe we need. It's time to wake up to wake up to our conditioning, right? We need to understand why we believe the things that we do, so that we can stop believing, you know, so we can sit and say, well, what could another perspective be if it wasn't that I was a total asshole, you know, and I didn't work on my myself all the time, you know, both somatically, but on myself. And I have a lot of negative self beliefs. And the other day I was working on one, and it's like, you know, okay, so if I formed the belief that I was unacceptable because this happened, well, what could have the other what could, like, 25 other perspectives on that be? And it's like starting to work through some of that stuff. So we didn't make ourselves. Our cultural conditioning shapes our perspective. The problem is that we think rest is lazy and self care is selfish, and we think thinking about ourselves, and we think taking up space is bad because we were made to feel bad about it, and we think complaining, and we think being in a sad mood or in a bad mood is bad because we were not allowed to have our experience as children. And those children had to be convenient. And so we need to understand that some of this stuff, like, for example, many, many people, the minute we're in a bad mood or we're upset or angry, we need to drink because we weren't allowed to be. And so we were shamed a little bit for being and so when we absorb shame, it's like, this is a horrible experience, but we know that shame sounds like a horrible thing to talk about, but actually, you know, the shame is there because we want to be loved. Yeah, it's like, it's a loving you know, we, we're trying so hard to be loved. So we're like, Okay, well, this, this shame is there to prevent me from not being loved, right? So if we think about it in that kind way, but we think we need alcohol. It's a similar sort of thing. It's like, you know, alcohol gives us permission. It allows us to stop, it allows us to rest, it allows us to not be thinking about our to do list when we are putting our kids to bed. It allows, you know, all this stuff, right? So, alcohol meets a need, but it's culturally conditioned that we cannot meet that need ourselves, because no one ever showed us how, because no one comforted us in our distress. You know, suck it up back to cap and all those kind of things. And I know I spoke about this bit last night. So the solution is we need to start noticing when the shoulds are coming in, and we need to rewrite the rebel story, right? The rebel story is not about us rebelling for the people trying to control us by trying to stop us drinking, right? You know, for me rewriting and getting that fire in my belly about understanding things like the drink aware campaign and that that is we're being manipulated by big alcohol and the government to hate on each other and shame each other for having problematic issues with an addictive substance, right? And is that it's like, get angry with the right thing you know. Get angry with the fact that you know we don't know, and we haven't been taught, and our society makes it such, and it's so intergenerational that women don't believe that we can sit down unless we're giving something else outside of ourselves to give us the permission to do that, right? And so it's like, well, instead of getting, you know cross, you know cross, it's like, well, this is interesting, isn't it? Well, how do we work out how to give ourselves permission? And that's what I teach in my programs. So I love this by the holistic psychologist. If you haven't come across her, follow on social media. Social media is brilliant. Her books are good too. She's really good, but she says, we don't do compulsive behaviors because we lack willpower. We do them because it's the only way we know how to self soothe. Soothing is an instinctual behavior, not a moral one, and so if we can take off this like there's a reason why I'm doing it, let's get curious. What can it be? Yeah, all right, day for me. Now I think I've just done this one, so sorry. We'll skip through this. But this but this is a really great quote by Andrew Huberman, who, I don't know if you guys know Huberman lab. He did really good podcast eight years ago. It's about two hours long. It's quite a hefty one must have been, I must have been at least 2019 22 or 2319 22 that's 2022 where he talks about this. And I love this a general rule, beware of anything that delivers high dopamine with minimal effort. Enjoy the little things in life, but keep the amount of dopamine scaled to the degree of effort to reach it right. You know, if we climb a mountain, we get dopamine high. It would be relevant, high. If we drink alcohol, we get dopamine high. It's not relevant high. And so therefore it's going to bring us other stuff, bad stuff along with it, like, you know, the adrenaline, the cortisol, the dirt, the dynamorphine. So we just need to be careful of that. Because the other thing is, we start, you know, because it is like this. And again, you probably have heard these words before, but that's sort of like and I can go off on one on this. So apologies,
Unknown Speaker 49:04
but the idea of, I'm trying to think of the right word
Speaker 2 49:10
now, hedonism, right? So hedonism, pleasure seeking. Eudaimonia is another word for happiness that the Greeks had,
Unknown Speaker 49:17
which is more like a kind of comfort, contentment. You permanent,
Speaker 2 49:23
well being feeling, and this is what we're looking for, right? This is like the calm, the grounded, whereas, you know that that hedonistic pleasure seeking is kind of like gets which is what happens with dopamine. It gets us into that. And it's that, like I was saying, it's like it can never be satisfied. It's like we're always trying to scratch that itch. It's that kind of a vibe, right? And so it's understanding dopamine. Dopamine is great, like we and it's really something to be aware of, because when we don't have enough dopamine, or if you're like me, I'm an ADHD person, we have low dopamine, which means we will constantly be seeking dopamine, which we're much more. Having issues with alcohol, and a lot of us use alcohol to help us look after our nervous system in terms of dysregulation, but also if you're under great stress, like if you're if you're a person who is going through some really stressful stuff, and this is where I say, Please be kind to yourself. Yeah, don't be a dick to yourself because you're going through a really stressful time, the dopamine receptors and the channels that move dopamine around are basically the channels just drop dopamine out. It's like, it's like, it's a sieve and the and it doesn't connect to the connectors. So this is what happens when we're on stress. So again, it's really important to remember, you know, if you're trying to do something and you're finding it hard because you're dysregulated, because you're under the extreme amount of stress, that's the reason you're hiding it hard, not because you're a Bad human with no willpower. That makes sense. Okay? So you know, as I said, before it's it's the solution is getting the information, understanding how it works, taking the self blame, self judgment out of it, starting to learn about grounding, starting to learn about the nervous system, starting to learn out how to come down into your body, out of your brain. Brain will catastrophize. It will ruminate. It will give you all the shows, the to do, list everything because it wants you, is trying to protect you because it still thinks you're a small child. And one of the things we do in my programs is we start learning about this, and we start learning about how to, kind of like, get,
Unknown Speaker 51:35
you know, regain control of our ship, if that
Speaker 2 51:38
makes sense. So it's like, you know, these little protective parts of running around and trying to keep us safe by behave, you know, judgment and all those kind of things. But really, what they're doing is they're making us really stressed and feel like we can't be at home in our own bodies. And so, you know, a lot of this work is around being kind to our judgmental part and understanding them, but also letting them know that they're not running the ship anymore, and that we're here now, and we're not going to leave anymore. We're not going to keep escaping. We're not going to keep pressing the eject button. So they can trust us. This is what building self trust is about as well. They can trust us to stay and that we've got it, and that we understand that they've kept us safe for this long, and we think so with lots of parts work in my work as well, so internal family systems, which is kind of inner child work. And so it's about kind of working with those parts and bringing them back under our wing and letting them know that we're an adult, and also giving them, sort of and ourselves that sort of under unconditional positive regard, so that inside of ourselves, it's not a horrendous place to be, and this is one of the reasons I'm laughing, because we're talking about the buzz. So for me, the buzz is, you know, it's an interesting thing, and we can do work around it, because, and I really do encourage you to listen to the podcast on it, because the buzz is really
Unknown Speaker 52:55
our experience when we leave ourselves.
Speaker 2 52:58
And the thing is, and this is a really important thing to remember, and for me, it was a really transformational piece. Was, you know, when we leave ourselves, we're still there. And there's, you know, it's often very good reasons why we're leaving ourselves, you know, a million reasons why that might be because, like I say, the brain and body doesn't do anything for no reason. But when we leave ourselves the problem, the thing that we're trying to escape in, you know, we might think, oh, it's not a problem. I'm celebrating. But the fact is, if we can't celebrate without alcohol, there's a reason, and it's like, what would that experience be for us? Be like for us without the alcohol? So if it wouldn't be so good, is that? Because, you know, is it actually a good experience for us in the first place? And there's all these kind of questions that we can ask, of questions that we can ask and work through, but it's like this idea that coming back to self, coming back to the person we were put on this world to be, before the world turned around and told us there were things that were wrong with us and that we needed to be something else in order to be acceptable. And so for me, down with, you know, the buzz for me is like, yeah, you know, I get it. I love the buzz as well. You know, I love that, like sensation. But, you know, it's amazing when you learn some of these skills and tools that you can start to bring the buzz to yourself, and you start to realize that you have that as an option as well. And then you start to realize that, you know, actually building relationship with self. So I want to stay so I want to hold her hand in her distress. I want to be with her. I want to know who she is, and I want to know how she is, and I want to know what she likes. And for me, that's very much part of this journey. Oh my gosh. Five minutes. Okay, can I just have a sip of my drink? Anyone? Any questions while I do. Okay. So this is where this is completely different. So I'm sure that for many of you, you approached alcohol as I did for the years that I was trying to reduce my alcohol consumption, you know, and get it back in line. And I do, you know, dry, July, dry. January, 5, first, October, and I'd always go back to drinking as much, if not more than I did, because I wasn't working on the root cause of my drinking, but also because I started with the behavior. I started with the behavior and the substance. And I think that's how most of us do. It's like that feast and famine, isn't it? Like, I'm going to stop. I usually would, you know, get quite drunk, have quite a few drinks, you know, the night before, and then I start, and I do my like, month or sometimes I break it. Sometimes, I wouldn't, you know, but I'd be completely focused on the behavior, and I'd be in wheel power the whole way through, and I'd hate it. I might feel good about myself every now and again and get a bit like but it wasn't a nice experience for me. I was in willpower, so my body was exhausted, and by the end of it, I would usually drink more at the end. And so this is why this, this method that I teach the third way, is very different. So we start with knowledge, we start with awareness, and then we start to so when we know differently, we feel differently about stuff. So for example, I'm sure some of the things that we've spoken about tonight, if they're new to you, you might be like, Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. And we start to know different things about ourselves, notice things about ourselves, like, for example, for me, when I just, you know, I was just like, slowly discovering that actually, when I was a little kid, I was really quiet. I didn't really like people coming around to my house. I prefer to read my book. I wasn't an extrovert at all, and so and I used to hate when my mom used to, like invite people around, and we all had to like perform family. But, you know, I changed myself in order to be what was acceptable in the world. And it's so interesting for me. Like now, like, trying to find go back to this person, but this, like, you know, thinking about things differently. It's like, you know, I might have regarded drunk me as more fun and the life and soul of the party. But then now, when I think, Well, I think, well, you know, that little girl that I left because I didn't really like her very much, because she was a bit shy, she was a bit awkward, you know, what if I felt differently about her? What if, instead of leaving her in order to perform me, I chose to stay and what if my choice became like a really loving, loving, beautiful journey of discovery. And so once you can start to see things differently, you feel differently about them. You know, same with when we talk about outcome, we start to understand it's not because we're a dickhead or we've got no willpower or we're weak, it's because chemically, that's how it works. And we start to feel differently, and then we start to have different emotions, and we start to imagine the possibilities of things being different. And we let go of this whole like, you know, alcohol is something we can't have, or we've got to restrict ourselves. And we come back and forth and back and forth and and we can start to think, well, maybe we can have a life where it's actually we don't have to do any of that. We can just really work on how we feel about ourselves, about how we feel about the world. And do you know what alcohol will reduce its interest for us? Yeah, and then we take action. So it's a very different approach. So for me, before, it would have been like, well, I'll take action and I'll just be doing the action, and I might learn a few bits and pieces, but generally, I'll just be doing the action, then I go back to drinking afterwards. So this is a very different way. And so these are the questions. And again, I have these are in your workbook, and we won't go through them now, but I encourage you. I'd love to see I didn't see anyone's no one's written any responses to them in Facebook group. It's really nice if you can, because it starts everybody sharing, and it's a really lovely way to do it. But, you know, I understand that you might not want to, but I have these posted in the Facebook group, and the questions are like, when, when you've tried to change your relationship with did you start with the behavior? What do you think might happen if you started with knowledge? What do you think might be different if you approached change looking with all of those three components? Imagine the emotions that you'd like to experience and how that would feel. So those are the questions that I get you to do in your journaling. You'll also, you know, there's also a workbook that you can download from the hub as well, and I've already given you the information for that. And so again, just asking your patients while I talk about my program. So I have the 30 day Great Aussie alkyl experiment. It's a really fantastic program. It's very small. I only have 25 people in my group ever. I never go any bigger, because I am a licensed and registered psychotherapist, and I want to be able to work with people deeply so that we can understand the root cause of what we're doing, because that's where we get change. That's where we get that take it or leave it relationship with alcohol. Within the program, you get daily videos. They're very short, they've got suggestions, and they try to challenge the way that you think about the conditioning that we have from our society around alcohol. There's also a downloadable journaling workbook with 30 days. Is worth of journaling prompts, which are absolutely invaluable, and then the beautiful community that I create, which is always amazing. The women are always brilliant in it. It's very small, and like I said, it's one of my clients described it as boutique, not Kmart, which I think is priceless, because you're not just a number, you're somebody I know. I know your name, I know what your goals are, because we will sit together and go through them. It's Australian, New Zealand, times. It's not us, UK centric, and it's neuro affirming, because, as I said, I'm an autistic ADHD human, and it's trauma informed. And when I'm talking about trauma, people kind of go, oh, I don't have trauma, but it's impossible to be in our world as a human being without having some kind of trauma. The very fact that we disconnected from self is a trauma. Now, there's different levels we call Big T, little T, but it's important that we come to this from a nervous system and trauma informed perspective. And I'm able to do that. So that is, again, a priceless
Unknown Speaker 1:01:00
part of working with me. We're
Speaker 2 1:01:04
starting on the Monday, the third No, the second of Feb, and I will offer anybody who joins up over this three days a discount of $200 off the upfront payment, which is 700 would make it $797 for the 30 days, and that you'll get 30 days of group coaching with me at in the evening at varying times, you don't have to go to them, and there are replays of them, but you can come to them if you desire. And people find that really good. Over a 30 day break to be able to go somewhere in the evening and hang out and talk things through and talk through cravings, and learn and change our beliefs. And you also get a one to one session with me, which is absolutely vital, in my opinion, a 30 minute session which is worth $100 and we literally go through and understand your own personal needs around alcohol, where you want to go. And we create a plan. We co create a plan together. So that's my program. I'll just put the details of it in the chat as well. So again, that offers available until end of play Thursday, when we finish this plan together. So I encourage you, like I said, there's only 25 people allowed in the whole thing, and quite a few of the current group are joining. So that's it in a nutshell. As I said, also in there, I've put an after survey, so if you have the time, and I would very much appreciate some feedback on the presentation that you've experienced. If you're able to that would be wonderful. Otherwise, I'm here any questions, or if you don't want to ask me anything. Now I've also there's my contact details, the website address, my email, my Instagram and my Facebook is the same, and the podcast midlife, AF,
Unknown Speaker 1:03:05
how did that go? Everyone? How did you feel?
Unknown Speaker 1:03:12
How is everybody my whirlwind tour,
Unknown Speaker 1:03:16
apart from the confusing thing at the end, anyone got
Speaker 2 1:03:22
any questions? Anyone want to ask me? Anything? Anyone want some more information? Informative? Thank you. So no worries Sharon, no problem at all. Great to be able to to share. It's my passion. I absolutely love this work. I'm glad, I'm glad you enjoyed it. No worries Tanya, I'm so pleased you enjoyed it as well. Alright, my lovelies, well, there's no questions. You know, you can reach out to me, as I said, there's a 15 minute inquiry call there as well if you want to contact me on that and as I said, the reset pricing for the payment plan and for the full price offer is there as well. Alright, my darlings, I will leave you and let you go. Not doing too badly on the time five minutes past seven I'm getting I better head off. So I've got another group at eight of some of you are part of so Alright, take care. Everyone. Reach out if you need any information at all, and I'll see you tomorrow. Now, tomorrow, we're going to do some really practical steps as to what's next? What do we need to do to get to this third way, this Take it or leave it? Relationship with alcohol. We want to feel about alcohol like we do a cheese sandwich, yeah? So it doesn't hold any excessive draw for us. Yeah, that's what we're going to be doing tomorrow. All right, my darlings, take care. Thank you so much. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
