EP339: The 3 Hidden Patterns Behind Overdrinking for Busy and Successful Women

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Welcome back, everybody. I’m Colleen Freeland, founder of Emotional Sobriety Coaching and the host of It’s Not About the Alcohol podcast. This show is for high achieving women who are tired of worrying about whether or not their drinking is a problem. My evidence based take it or leave it approach isn’t about following rules or denying yourself pleasure. It’s about transforming into the version of yourself who no longer associates alcohol with stress relief.

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so you can finally trust yourself again with or without a drink in your hand. We’re getting happy, not sober, because it’s not about the alcohol. And if you’re listening to this podcast, you are probably not a woman who needs more information. You already read the self-help books and follow the Sober Curious accounts on social media. You’ve tried doing Dry January or Sober October, and you’ve downloaded the Sunnyside or the Reframe app to track your drinks and to hold yourself more accountable.

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And you regularly promise yourself most Sunday mornings that this week for sure is gonna be different. And sometimes it is, but mostly it’s not. Either way, you keep finding yourself back on the hamster wheel. And I want you to hear me when I say this, there is nothing wrong with you. You’re just trying to solve the wrong problem. Every single one of my clients comes to me after having tried for years.

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harder than most people ever try at anything. They are not lacking effort or discipline or the motivation to stay consistent. They just can’t see where they’re standing on their own air hose because the patterns that are keeping you stuck are invisible until you start connecting the dots and looking at the bigger picture. That’s what a blind spot is. And that’s what I want to show you today. The three blind spots that keep

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busy, successful women stuck in cycles of over drinking. Because once you see these, you can’t unsee them. So let’s dive in. Blind spot number one is that you are whoever you think you are. I used to think that I had an addictive personality and that’s why I couldn’t just have one drink. That’s also why I went all in on everything I did. I didn’t just start doing yoga, I became a teacher. I didn’t just run a 5K or a mini.

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I ran full marathons. I didn’t just go on a diet. I became a vegan. I didn’t cut back on my drinking. I got sober. That was just how I rolled. Go big or stay home. And my brain was like all brains. It was constantly providing me with evidence that supported whatever story I was telling myself in the moment. But here’s what I didn’t know. That addictive personality that I was so convinced I had isn’t a real thing. Even addiction researchers will tell you that.

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But the truth doesn’t actually matter because a belief is far more convincing than reality itself. And that’s how your sense of identity works. It’s the foundation of all of your feelings and beliefs and opinions and biases. You don’t think or say or do or feel anything that doesn’t align with how you see yourself, your morals, your values, your religion, your politics.

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Everything that you think of as good or bad or right or wrong in the outside world is actually just a reflection of your own sense of identity. And your identity will make you or break you. But the blind spot isn’t actually about the external labels that you put on yourself because as you already know, those can change. For example, I grew up thinking that I would always be a born again Christian because I was taught that the alternative

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was eternal damnation in a fiery pit of hell with Satan himself. So not only did I take the purity pledge, I also promised to never allow a sip of alcohol to cross my lips. But then my parents left the church when I was 17. And by the time I went to college, my new identity was that of a professional partier, game on, all in. I didn’t even do a warmup lap.

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I was also all in on my identity as a working mom after I had my first child. I was totally committed to my career. No fucking way could I ever stay home all day with a baby. But then I met some stay at home moms at the pool one summer and they made it look fun. And within a week, I had switched teams, traded in my brand new car for an old minivan, gave my two week notice and never looked back.

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And then there was the time that I got on a plane carrying a ham and cheese sandwich and a book by Alicia Silverstone called The Kind Diet. And by the time we landed two hours later, the sandwich was in the trash and I was a newborn vegan looking for my first meal. Just like that, I made the decision to be someone else. And I didn’t waver from that identity for over 12 years. Even though within a few years, my body was starting to break down. My hair was falling out.

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I had a lot of headaches, I bruised really easily, but did I pay attention to that? Hell no, I couldn’t. I was a vegan. Pretty sure I just told you that. Then after drinking every single day for 15 years, I woke up one morning and decided I was gonna get sober, full stop, cold turkey, not going back. I started going to AA meetings. I read every single quit lit book that I could find on Amazon. And I literally tried to do all 12 steps in one day because again,

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per my usual, I was all in. And as you might expect, within a few years, I came to realize that, at least for me, getting sober was just the nothing in the all or nothing cycle. And for the first time, I started to see that maybe, just maybe, I might be running a pattern here, and that it wasn’t actually about the alcohol, or the food, or the religion, or the career. Obviously, I knew how to switch teams.

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I just didn’t know how to stop playing the goddamn game. I’d gone from team drinker to team non-drinker, team Jesus to team it’s all good, team carnivore to team vegan, team career mom to team stay at home mom. And I was exhausted by how hard I had to work just to be okay. And what I couldn’t see, the blind spot, was a pattern that I was running.

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that had nothing to do with what I ate or drank or whatever career I did or didn’t have at any given stage of my life or whatever I was addicted to or not addicted to in any given moment. And that pattern was the foundation of my identity. And that was that I had to do everything right or die trying. You know that line from Gone With the Wind when Scarlett O’Hara is on her knees in the dirt and she says, as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again. That was my energy.

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That was my identity. I was a fighter. I am a winner. I do not stop. I cannot stop. I will not stop. But that was the piece of code that was wreaking havoc in my life, keeping me swinging from one monkey bar to the next. And every visible identity that I fell into along the way was just an attempt to prove myself worthy because I didn’t think I was good enough as I was.

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And I thought that my ability to run circles around everybody else, do it faster and bigger and better, I thought that’s what made me special. I was secretly assuming that at some point in the future, I was gonna earn a lifetime achievement award for being the best. I just didn’t realize that the only person I was actually trying to impress was myself, which is why no matter what I did or how hard I worked,

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or how good I was, or how many people agreed and said, well done, good job, yay you, it never felt like enough. I spent the first 46 years of my life beating my head against every brick wall I could find, letting my brain run my body and my spirit into the ground, chasing the validation and the approval that I had no idea I could just give to myself. Which brings me to blind spot number two.

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And that is that asking for help is a faux pas. To understand this one, I need to tell you a little bit about my mom. She is a great mom, but she wasn’t very helpful in her role as grandma. Now, I had friends whose mothers were literally their daycare providers. They had built-in babysitters whenever they wanted to do anything, even on the weekends. Meanwhile, I had to cart a carload full of fussy kids with me everywhere.

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even though my own mom only lived a mile away and she didn’t even work. And I was really resentful. But I also, on some level, understood. She had raised us kids all by herself. My dad was always traveling. And honestly, she had it way worse than even I did. When we were little, she didn’t even have her own car. So.

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I got it, she had served her time in baby jail, and she had finally earned the right to play some golf and take some dancing lessons and go to lunch with her friends and not have to wonder who pooped in their pants. But then I got pregnant with my fourth kid. And after three perfect pregnancies, where I taught kickboxing and boot camp right up until I delivered, I started bleeding in the second trimester and I was put on bed rest. And my mom did show up for that.

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She’d take the kids to school or bring us dinner or help with bath time. But I remember getting really pissed at her because she wouldn’t also take over my yoga classes. I had built a strong following and she was a certified yoga teacher too. I figured she could just take those over for a while and she wouldn’t do it. She told me that I should just let that go, drop the classes. She told me it was too much and I shouldn’t be doing all of that anyway after the baby was born.

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which of course pissed me off. It was one thing to not help me and it was quite another to insinuate that I was wrong, that it was important to me to keep my one thing for me going. I was just asking her for a little support with something that didn’t have anything to do with my kids. And we had actually built the classes together. She had filled in for me many times before. My clients loved her. It was fun to be a mother daughter duo, but she wouldn’t do it because she didn’t agree.

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that I should be doing it. And her refusal, as you might imagine, only fueled my motivation. Because fuck her, I’m the type of person who will bend over backwards before I let somebody down. Too bad I couldn’t say the same thing about her. And whether she was actually trying to help me in her own way, or just saving herself from one more goddamn obligation that didn’t matter, she said no. And at that point, I had a decision to make.

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either let her know, hold me back, or start teaching yoga while sitting in a chair in the front of the room. Giving myself the option to quit at that point was not actually an option for me. So I went to class and I told my students I couldn’t do most of the poses because of the pregnancy. I didn’t tell them I wasn’t even actually supposed to be there. I just showed up and delivered because that’s how I roll. That was the only way I knew how to be okay with myself.

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And since I didn’t like to hold grudges, I preferred to be positive and optimistic at all times. I even turned it around in my head and decided to be grateful that my mom had said no. I told myself that this was actually making me a better teacher because I had to learn how to cue by watching my students instead of performing in front of them. And that is a real skill. But looking back, I was also missing the entire point of yoga because yoga is the practice of sitting with your own discomfort.

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And I was telling myself that teaching from a chair was how that was supposed to look. That was me being willing to meet myself where I was at, allowing myself to be where I was. But that was not what was happening. Where I was supposed to be was at home in bed. The discomfort that I still had yet to learn how to tolerate was the discomfort of acting in my own best interest instead of like a little girl with something to prove. I had taken a practice about honoring my body

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and I had used it to override my body. And even though that felt right at the time, in hindsight, I can see that I was just rebranding self-neglect as integrity. I wanted to see myself as a strong, capable pregnant woman doing her best to honor her commitments. The blind spot was that that wasn’t the only truth happening here. I had no idea that…

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not making my needs a priority, and failing to see that my own fear of feeling weak or lazy or not up to the challenge was slowly eroding my capacity to actually honor my commitments. Now, I didn’t drink during any of my pregnancies, but once she was born, premature and by emergency c-section, I might add, but I didn’t let that slow me down either, I never stopped pushing myself.

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The summer after she was born, I remember I would load up a double jog stroller with my two boys, strap my two-year-old into a backpack and the newborn into a sling, and jog walk with all this shit, all the pool toys and the snacks and the change of clothes and the sunscreen and everything else we needed to survive a day at the pool. Meanwhile, my girlfriends, who had their own vans full of kids, would slow down and make fun of me. Like, is your car in the shop?

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Do you need a ride? Nope, I was just fucking crazy. Why in the world would I drive like a lazy ass when the pool is only a mile and a half away? Get with the program, ladies. We’ve got calories to burn. Yeah, that’s how I lived every single day. And unsurprisingly, not only did my preference to end my day with a few glasses of wine in the evening come back once I was done breastfeeding, I soon crossed the line into daily drinking, as I’ve talked about in other episodes.

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because alcohol was no longer just a celebration or even a reward. It had become a coping mechanism. The only way I could say yes to everything and everyone around me all day long was to tell myself no all day long. So by the evening, my ability to say no to a glass of wine was long gone. I’d get the kids to bed and my body would still be buzzing with everything I needed to finish. And the only way that I could keep going or…

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allow myself to take a break and sit down and watch a show was if I had a drink, which makes perfect sense because I didn’t know how to give myself permission to stop. So I needed alcohol to do it for me. It’s not that I didn’t have an off switch when it came to alcohol, which is what I used to think. Alcohol was my off switch for 15 years straight every single night. Now I want to pause here.

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because if you’re still with me and maybe you’re seeing yourself in some version of this in your reality, there’s probably a few things happening in your body as you realize like, oh shit, hashtag me too. And the very first move your brain is gonna make because it’s the move the brain always makes is to turn your grit and sometimes stubborn determination into one more thing that’s wrong with you. Something you should have noticed and already figured out. And I wanna get in front of that.

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because there is a third blind spot. And if you don’t keep listening, your brain is gonna use this entire episode against you. It’s gonna take everything that I’ve just told you about identity and perfectionism and refusing to give yourself a break and use it as one more piece of evidence that you’re a hot, crazy mess. So let’s talk about blind spot number three. And that is this, you’ve always been doing the very best that you could.

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I have always been doing the very best I could too. I mean this so sincerely. Every single thing I’ve told you about, the partying, the veganism that left me malnourished, teaching classes when I should have been on bed rest, refusing to drive to the goddamn pool, drinking wine at the end of every single day, and by wine I mean a bottle of wine. Every single one of those is an example of a precious, loving, dedicated, and very intelligent person.

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doing the best she knew how to do. I wasn’t failing. I sure as hell was not weak. I was not undisciplined and I wasn’t broken. I was always trying. I read all the self-help books. I read all the science and I tried to apply all of that to the best of my ability while also wondering why it felt like a goddamn game of whack-a-mole. I was just blind to the internal programming that was working against me. You can’t see your own patterns when you’re in them.

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and having your mom or your partner point them out to you tends to backfire because we are hardwired as human beings to double down when we feel criticized, especially by people who have no idea how much effort and planning and sheer force of will that we put in every single day. Criticism, whether it comes from other people or yourself, only makes the blind spots bigger. It doesn’t matter how capable or funny or kind you are.

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It doesn’t matter how smart you are either. Blind spots can and will take you down. And actually, your intelligence can actually work against you because your brain filters everything and twists it so that it aligns with your core beliefs, your internal programming. It can take the most simple, rational bit of logic, like you need to stop pushing yourself so hard, and instantly generate 1,000 reasons why you will as soon as, or you can’t because.

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or that’s not actually the problem. And before you know it, you’re back on the same hamster wheel that you’ve been trying to escape. You can’t think your way out of a thinking pattern you’re not even aware of. And that’s not a failure on your part. That’s just how perceptions work. Our blind spots are, by definition, blind spots. Which means the only way out is to have someone you trust.

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help you see what you’re missing, where you’re telling yourself a story that just isn’t true. You need somebody who can reflect the discrepancies back to you in a way that doesn’t activate your defenses. That is what my mother was trying to do for me, but I couldn’t hear it from her. I couldn’t hear it from my damn husband. I divorced him over his stupid opinions about what I should and shouldn’t be doing because it was all too threatening. They were trying to tell me that I needed to change.

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And as I was already doing the best I could, I had no idea what that even meant, except maybe they were just selfish assholes. The only thing I needed to do was push back and say, you know what, that’s fine. You do you. I’ll handle it all by myself. I don’t need you. And this is exactly why I offer free discovery calls to any woman in my community. If you’re listening, you count. Because honestly, I know from my own life and from coaching thousands of women,

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You need to talk to somebody who’s not inside your life, somebody who isn’t biased by their own agenda, somebody who doesn’t have a dog in your fight, somebody whose only job is to help you see yourself clearly, see the things that you can’t see on your own so that you can decide what you want to do next without pressure or judgment or ultimatums. What I want you to take away from this episode is clarity. I want you to see that you’re drinking

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makes perfect sense, no matter how bad it is, and that you are doing the best you can with what you know. And I want you to hear me when I say that the more you focus on changing your drinking through sheer force of will, as you already know, that doesn’t work. The more you focus on the drinking, the harder it gets to change. It’s a negative feedback loop. And that’s one of the things my certified coaches can help you see. Your blind spots are the problem. Your patterns.

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are the problem. The stories you’re telling yourself are the problem. Just like a character in a book can’t ever meet the author of the book, you can’t see that your entire identity is just a story you’ve constructed about why you want the things you want and do the things you do. Before you can escape the story, you have to see that it’s a story and you have to be open to asking yourself, what else could be true here?

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What is another way I could look at this? How does all of this actually make sense? And that’s what the discovery call is. It’s not about figuring out what’s wrong with you. It’s about figuring out what kind of support you actually need to break the cycles that are making your life harder. Not because you’re wrong or bad, but because you actually do deserve better.

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If you want to have a raw and real and honest conversation with someone you don’t know, somebody who’s been through this and come through the other side, there’s a link in the show notes. You can book a discovery call. So that’s it for this week. Make sure that you are following or subscribed to the show. And if you know somebody who needs to hear this episode, grab the link and share it. I’d also appreciate if you could leave me a comment if you’re listening on Spotify or leave me a review if you’re on Apple. Otherwise.

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Thank you for taking the time to listen and to be a part of my community. I see you, I get you, and I appreciate you. Have a great day and a kick-ass week, and I’ll see you on the next episode.