You’re not a woman who needs more information. You read the self-help books. You follow the sober curious accounts on social media. You’ve tried Dry January and Sober October. You’ve downloaded Sunnyside or Reframe to track your drinks and hold yourself more accountable. Most Sunday mornings, you promise yourself this week is for sure going to be different.
And sometimes it is. But mostly it’s not.
Either way, you keep finding yourself back on the hamster wheel.
There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just trying to solve the wrong problem.
Every single one of my clients comes to me having tried harder than most people ever try at anything. They’re 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. The patterns keeping them stuck are invisible until they start connecting the dots.
That’s what a blindspot is.
Blindspot one. You are who you think you are.
I used to think I had an addictive personality. That’s why I couldn’t have just one drink. That’s why I went all in on everything. I didn’t take up yoga, I became a teacher. I didn’t run 5ks, I ran marathons. I didn’t go on a diet, I became a vegan. I didn’t cut back, I got sober.
Go big or stay home.
Turns out addictive personality isn’t actually a real thing. Even addiction researchers will tell you that. But that doesn’t matter, because a belief is more convincing than reality.
That’s how identity works. You don’t think, say, do, or feel anything that doesn’t align with how you see yourself. Your morals, your values, your religion, your politics. Everything you think of as right or wrong in the outside world is really just a reflection of your own sense of identity.
But the blindspot isn’t the labels you put on yourself, because those can change.
I grew up thinking I’d always be a born-again Christian. I took the purity pledge and promised never to let a sip of alcohol cross my lips. Then my parents left the church when I was seventeen, and by the time I got to college I identified as a professional partier. No warm-up lap.
I was all in as a working mom after my first baby. Totally committed to my career. No way could I stay home all day with a baby. Then I met a stay-at-home mom at the pool, and within a week I’d switched teams. Traded in my car for a minivan. Gave my two weeks.
I got on a plane carrying a ham and cheese sandwich and Alicia Silverstone’s book The Kind Diet. By the time we landed, the sandwich was in the trash and I was a brand new vegan looking for my first meal. Twelve years. Never wavered. Even when my hair started falling out. Even when I was getting headaches and bruising easily. I wasn’t going to pay attention to any of that. I couldn’t. I was a vegan.
Then after drinking every day for fifteen years, I woke up one morning and decided I was done. Cold turkey. Started going to AA. Read all the quit lit. Tried to do all twelve steps in one day because of course I did.
And a few years into that, I started to see it. Getting sober was just the nothing in the all-or-nothing cycle. I knew how to switch teams. I didn’t know how to stop playing the game.
The pattern underneath all of it. The one I couldn’t see. Was that I had to do everything right or die trying.
You know the line from Gone With the Wind. Scarlett O’Hara on her knees in the dirt. “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.” That was my energy. I am a fighter. I am a winner. I do not stop. I cannot stop. I will not stop.
Every visible identity I fell into was an attempt to prove myself worthy, because I didn’t think I was good enough as I was. I thought my ability to run circles around everyone else was what made me special. I thought there was a lifetime achievement award coming for being the best.
I spent forty-six years beating my head against every brick wall I could find, chasing validation I had no idea I could give myself.
Blindspot two. I spent most of my life refusing help. And I couldn’t see it.
When I got pregnant with my fourth child, I started bleeding in the second trimester and got put on bedrest.
My mom showed up. She took the kids to school. She brought dinner. She helped with bath time.
But I remember getting really pissed at her because she wouldn’t also take over my yoga classes. She was a certified yoga teacher too. I figured she could just fill in for a while. My students loved her. We’d been a mother-daughter duo before.
She wouldn’t do it. She told me I needed to let the classes go. Told me I was trying to do too much.
Which of course pissed me off. It was one thing to not help me. It was another to insinuate I was wrong for wanting to keep it going. Her refusal only fueled my motivation. Because fuck her. I’m the type of person who will bend over backwards before I let somebody down.
So I told my students I couldn’t do most of the poses because of the pregnancy. I didn’t tell them I wasn’t supposed to be there. I just showed up and delivered. Because that was the only way I knew how to be okay with myself.
At the time I actually turned it around in my head and decided to be grateful. I told myself my mom saying no was making me a better teacher, because now I had to learn how to cue by watching my students.
But looking back, I was missing the entire point of yoga.
Yoga is the practice of sitting with your own discomfort. And I was telling myself that teaching from a chair was how that was supposed to look. Meeting myself where I was. Allowing myself to be where I was.
That’s not what was happening. Where I was supposed to be was home, in bed. The discomfort I needed to learn 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 and used it to override my body. I was rebranding self-neglect as integrity.
I didn’t drink during that pregnancy. I never drank during any of my pregnancies. But the pattern was still running. Full speed. No alcohol in the picture at all.
The summer after the baby was born, I’d load up the double jog stroller with my two boys, strap my two-year-old into a backpack and the baby in a sling, and jog-walk a mile and a half to the pool with all the pool toys and snacks and sunscreen. My friends in their minivans would slow down to make fun of me. “Is your car in the shop? Do you need a ride?”
Nope. I was just fucking crazy. Why would I drive when it’s only a mile and a half?
Once I was done breastfeeding, my few glasses of wine in the evening came back. And then it crossed the line into daily drinking. Because alcohol wasn’t a celebration or a reward anymore. It was a coping mechanism.
The only way I could say yes to everything and everyone all day was to tell myself no. By the evening, my ability to say no to a glass of wine was long gone.
It’s not that I didn’t have an off switch when it came to alcohol. Alcohol was my off switch. For fifteen years straight. Every single night.
Blindspot three. You’ve always been doing the very best you could.
If you’re still with me and you’ve been seeing yourself in any of this, there’s probably something happening in your body right now. That “oh shit, that’s me” feeling.
And the first move your brain is about to make, because it’s the move it always makes, is to take your grit and your determination and turn it into one more thing that’s wrong with you. Something you should have already figured out.
I want to get in front of that.
Because you’ve always been doing the best you could. I mean that literally. The partying, the veganism that left me malnourished, the classes on bedrest, the stroller to the pool, the wine at the end of every day. Every single one of those was a precious, loving, dedicated, intelligent person doing the best she knew how to do.
I was not failing. I was not weak. I was not undisciplined. And I was not broken.
I was just blind to the programming that was working against me. You can’t see your own patterns when you’re in them. And having your mom or your partner point them out to you tends to backfire, because we’re hardwired to double down when we feel criticized. Especially by people who have no idea how much effort we’re already putting in.
Criticism, from other people or from yourself, only makes the blindspot bigger.
It doesn’t matter how capable or funny or kind or smart you are. Blindspots can and will take you down. And actually, your intelligence works against you. Because your brain filters everything through your core beliefs. It can take the most simple, rational bit of logic, like “you need to stop pushing yourself so hard,” and instantly generate a thousand reasons why you will as soon as, or you can’t because, or that’s not actually the problem.
And before you know it, you’re back on the same hamster wheel you’ve been trying to escape.
You cannot think your way out of a pattern you cannot see. That’s not a failure on your part. That’s just how perception works.
Which means the only way out is to have someone you trust help you see what you’re missing. Someone who can reflect the discrepancies back to you in a way that doesn’t activate your defenses.
That’s what my mother was doing for me, and I couldn’t hear it from her. My husband tried to tell me and I divorced him over it. Because it was too threatening. They were telling me I needed to change, and I was already doing the best I could. I had no idea what that even meant.
This is why I offer free discovery calls. Because you need someone who is not inside your life. Someone who doesn’t have a dog in your fight. Someone whose only job is to see you clearly and hand you back the thing you can’t see on your own, so you can decide what you want to do next without pressure or judgment or ultimatums.
Your drinking is not the problem. Your blindspots are the problem. Your patterns are the problem. Just like a character in a book can’t meet the author, you can’t see that your entire identity is a story you’ve constructed in your head about why you want what you want and do what you do.
Before you can escape the story, you have to see it’s a story.
If you want a raw, real, honest conversation with someone who’s been through this and come out the other side, book a discovery call. Link below.
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 cycle that’s making your life harder. Not because you’re wrong or bad. Because you actually do deserve better.
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And if you want to learn more about my “Take it or Leave it” Methodology, check out these additional resources:
Free Masterclass
The Science of Take It or Leave It: Why Some Women Can and How You Can Too
It’s Not About the Alcohol podcast
EP339 The Three Hidden Patterns Behind Overdrinking in Busy and Successful Women