Episode 288 Understanding “reentry Syndrome:” Why excessive drinking is a trauma response (and how to stop)
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Today we’re diving into something I call re-entry syndrome. And if you’ve ever felt that squeeze of anxiety in your chest when you start thinking about drinking and thinking that you’re not gonna be able to stop, like when you’re on vacation and it’s super cool and fine to drink every day, but you’re worried that you’re gonna keep going on the Sunday and the Monday when you get back.
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or after the holidays when you’ve gone to parties every single night and then everybody else is taking a break and you’re worried you’re not going to get back to normal, then this episode is for you. I’m gonna walk you through what reentry syndrome actually is, both from a brain chemistry perspective and an emotional one, and why this isn’t about your lack of willpower or self-control. Spoiler alert, it’s actually a trauma response.
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It’s the freeze or shutdown mode in your nervous system. And that sense of overwhelm is not just a feeling. It’s actually a fact. This is happening in your body. And once you understand that, everything changes. So we’re going to talk about what reentry syndrome looks like in real life and what it sounds like in your head. And most importantly, how to work with your nervous system instead of working against it.
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so that you can finally stop living in fear of yourself. So grab a cup of coffee or tea, get comfortable, let’s do this.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again.
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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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I want to talk today about how to solve for reentry syndrome, which I define as that fear that comes up that you’re not going to be able to get back to normal after a period of excessive use. You know, you have difficulty, quote, putting it down after an event or a period of time when, for whatever reason, you’ve given yourself permission to drink more than you feel like you should on a regular basis.
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In order to lay this out, I’m going to explain how reentry syndrome affects me, like when it happens, what it feels like, what it sounds like in my head, so that you can use my experience to build a model of your own. And I would love to hear from you if this makes sense. And have you tell me how your experience is either similar or different. So after you listen and process this, then send me a message and talk to me, okay?
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So back when I was in the throes of alcohol use disorder, drinking every day, waking up to varying levels of guilt and shame, and going in and out of periods of time where I would worry about it for a while and beg myself to change every morning, and then do absolutely nothing different every day and evening and send myself into the same exact damn situation with my fingers crossed, hoping that somehow I would get a magical dose of willpower, which is, of course,
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the definition of insanity. And then there were times where I just didn’t fucking worry about it. Like when I look back, I see that I had less anxiety during the holidays or at the lake in the summer because everybody was drinking too much and there’s safety in numbers. I could tell myself, hey, we’re all hung over. Ha, it’s funny, right? Like that’s what happens to rock stars. We work hard, we play hard. That’s literally how I thought about it.
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But then I’d have more anxiety when say my sister or some of my close friends were doing self correction. You know, they were doing diets or detox. FOMO is FOMO my friends. So while I couldn’t pass up a drink if other people were having one, even the thought that other people might be drinking somewhere would trigger my dopamine to go pour my own. I mean, it’s five o’clock somewhere, right? Cheers bitches. But I also had FOMO at the thought that other people were taking a break.
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having a normal evening snuggled in on the couch with no temptation to drink, no obsessive pull to go pour vodka in their Yetis. It felt so bad to be so out of sync. Like, how did they do that? How did my sister, how did my friends, how did other people go from blowing through bottles of wine for weeks on end with me? I mean, I wasn’t imagining all of it. We were all getting at least kind of drunk.
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How did they go from that to going back to reading books with their kids and doing facials before bed, like proper church ladies? And that’s when I started thinking of this as re-entry. I would notice, like when I’d go out to lunch with my girlfriends, everybody would have one or two glasses of Prosecco. Nobody was drunk. Everybody went on with their day, except for me. I’d either have to go home and take a full-on nap or go home and titrate my way through the afternoon.
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which is my chemistry major terminology for continuing to drink, just maintaining a light buzz so I could get through the day, because the calm down was just too painful. So I wanna frame reentry syndrome from two perspectives, the brain chemistry and then the emotional aspects. Of course, there is no separating the two. Brain chemistry is influenced by emotions and emotions influence your brain chemistry, your internal narrative, your perspective.
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That’s what’s dictating your dopamine and your stress hormones and your serotonin and your oxytocin, all of it. But it’s still important to acknowledge that as a heavy daily drinker, I did have really high levels of cortisol. And I know this because not once, but twice, I had a doctor who wanted to retest my cortisol levels because they were so high, like off the charts. And that didn’t match the peppy positive version of me that interfaced with my doctor. oh
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I even had my hair tested once. I was doing some sort of online alternative health program where I sent a hair sample through the mail and the results were so abysmal. There were red flags and warnings all over the report. And I just told myself, ah, that must be a scam. Of course the results are bad. They just want to sell me a bunch of expensive supplements. But regardless, I don’t need lab results to confirm that I had really high cortisol levels, which makes sense because
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Alcohol is a biphasic drug, meaning small amounts and large amounts have opposite effects. The therapeutic range is anything less than 0.05 blood alcohol level, which is about two drinks for women. When you cross the biphasic line, you move from buzzed to intoxicated, the negative side effects starts to compound because alcohol is a depressant drug, meaning it relaxes your central nervous system.
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and your brain has to keep you alive so that you don’t get so relaxed that you forget to breathe. So it releases adrenaline and cortisol. That’s why you wake up in the middle of the night. Once the buzz wears off, you are jacked on stress hormones. Your mind is racing, your heart is pounding, you feel agitated and restless. And of course, if that’s how you feel, that’s also how you think. So if this is a regular occurrence, your thought processes take a real nose dive.
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You lay there trying to make sense of why you feel so shitty and scanning for evidence to explain what’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with your life, what’s wrong with your kids, what’s wrong with your partner, your friends, your house, your community, God, this country and the entire planet. And that’s how you get caught in a mind body toxic tailspin. You’re steeped in stress chemicals and drinking becomes one of your only forms of escape, if not the only one.
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the more you drink, the more stressed you get, both mentally and physically. And so it would be rude of me to not mention that taking 10 days or even a month off from drinking can bring your cortisol levels way down and go real far in resetting your baseline levels of dopamine. That can help with reentry syndrome, but it would also be rude for me to not point out it’s also not necessary.
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For some people, it’s kind of a shorter distance between A and B, and for other people, it can actually make things worse. And regardless, a period of abstinence absolutely doesn’t cure reentry syndrome. And I know that because I was sober for almost three full years, and it only took one small drink, my first half a glass of wine, to reawaken all of those obsessive thought processes.
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And I knew in that moment that a few ounces of wine was not the cause of all that anxiety. And that’s when I really understood that alcohol use disorder is a straight up trauma response. Let’s review what a trauma response is. There are three states of the nervous system. Your parasympathetic state, the everything is fine and all good state. Then there’s the activated state where you have to fight or flee or fix it or figure it out.
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Stress can feel positive or negative depending on what you’re focused on. But either way, you’re in problem solving mode and you’re being fueled by adrenaline and cortisol. Then there’s the trauma response, which is when your nervous system determines that it’s all too much. You can’t fix this. You’re tired of fighting and there’s nowhere to go. The trauma response is your freeze state. You’re out of ideas, you’re out of give a fucks and you just shut down.
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What happens is all that excess adrenaline and cortisol gets trapped in your body Think of adrenaline and cortisol kind of like you do calories if you don’t metabolize your calories they will get stored in your tissues as fat and When you go into freeze and shutdown mode if you don’t metabolize the adrenaline and cortisol through somatic movements and mental processing Then that gets trapped in your body
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And that’s why you feel like you’re bracing for impact. You have tension and tightness and your body feels clenched and rigid. Overwhelm, the trauma response, is not just a feeling. It’s a physiological fact. You’re not in control of it. What’s happening is that your brain is not gonna waste precious energy. If you subconsciously believe that the situation is a fricking lost cause,
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which is why you’re not motivated to do anything, but just let it happen. Your dopamine isn’t gonna fire in the absence of hope. I can remember telling myself, I’m not gonna drink tonight so many times and never being able to follow through. I’d fight with myself and pester myself, but eventually I said, well, I might as well get this over with so at least I can go to bed at a good time. That is a freaking trauma response, my friends. So how do you fix this?
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Well, number one, you have to set realistic expectations. This isn’t gonna go away overnight, period. Number two, you have to let go of the idea that you’re out of control so that you can establish a sense of safety in your nervous system. Safety isn’t something you talk yourself into, it’s visceral. However, there is thinking involved, of course. You can use your mind to support your body.
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so that your body can then support your mind. You already understand how a negative feedback loop works. The more you worry, the worse you feel. And the worse you feel, the more you worry. Well, a positive feedback loop works the same way. The more you allow yourself to relax, the better you feel. And the better you feel, the more you can allow yourself to relax. So you can’t repattern your nervous system overnight. That’s going to take time.
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patience, consistency, guidance, and support. But you can shift your perspective. You just need to take a bird’s eye view and see where you’re at, where you want to be, and what it will take to get there. Where you’re at is a state of dysregulation. You don’t know how to manage your own nervous system. Where you want to be is a state of regulation.
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You want to feel like you’re in control of yourself and your destiny. And that’s a feeling, my friend. So what it will take to get there is a sense of safety. You have to learn how to stay connected with yourself in your body and be okay where you’re at because you know where you’re going and you have a roadmap to get there. Your drinking habits aren’t the problem. They’re just the surface symptom.
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of a trauma response. Your drinking habits are themselves an invitation to wake up and pay attention, to check the fuck back in, to switch yourself out of autopilot, stop running around like a chicken with your head cut off, and plug your brain back into your body. Because the trauma response just simply means you are disconnected from yourself. You are not aware of what is happening in your body.
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As I say with alcohol use disorder, it’s not that you have a high tolerance for alcohol. You just have a high tolerance for ignoring yourself because the way you are living, you are pushing it on all cylinders. You don’t know when you’re hungry. You don’t know when you have to pee. You refuse to allow yourself to feel tired. You suppress anything that’s bothering you because you just got to keep going, push through. But what you’re really doing is just running yourself into the ground. Your body doesn’t have
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the fuel, the resources, the rest, the nutrients, the hydration, the space and the time that it needs to function at a high level. That is what is putting you into the trauma response. It’s the overwhelm. And when you feel overwhelmed, you think overwhelmed. Your mind and body are connected, my friends. So let’s break down the most common reentry syndrome thoughts and fears like
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I’m not gonna be able to stop. Stop and ask yourself, like, why would you ever even think that? Because you do stop all the time. And yet you’re cherry picking evidence from bad behavior in the past because you haven’t forgiven yourself. You haven’t processed from your past mistakes. You don’t know how to move on because you haven’t taken the time to learn. What’s keeping you stuck here is that you don’t understand
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that your behavior with alcohol isn’t a reflection of you. It’s a reflection of a trauma response. Your nervous system gets overwhelmed, and you just run out of fucks to give. And what that sounds like in your head is, it doesn’t matter now. I don’t care. I’m not going to do anything different anyway. I just can’t stop myself. So reentry syndrome occurs when you’re not clear about why or how you’re going to stick to a two-drink limit.
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And so you say yes to a third drink, even though you’re already buzzed and well aware that the next glass is going to lead to not so great consequences. You’re not going to sleep as well. You’re going to feel depleted in the morning. And you already know that third glass doesn’t actually improve anything. It just gives you permission to stay where you’re at because you don’t know how to come back down. It’s the easiest decision. It’s got the least friction. You don’t have the energy to put yourself to bed.
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You don’t have the motivation to do the right thing. You just don’t wanna feel like what, what? Like you’re not even sure what you don’t wanna feel or what you do wanna feel. It’s murky, obviously, because given a clear head, you would wanna go to bed. You would wanna feel great when you wake up. Like who doesn’t want to feel great when they wake up? Well, somebody that’s in a state of overwhelm and doesn’t have any fucks to give about tomorrow because they don’t have the capacity to handle where they’re at.
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So whether you realize it or not, the decision to keep drinking is emotional. You’re not thinking clearly. Now, you may not feel emotional, but that’s actually confirmation. What you’re doing is avoiding the emotions that you’d have to feel if you told yourself no. And those emotions are being driven by unmet needs. I need more. I deserve more. I just feel depleted and drained.
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You need to see these feelings as a symptom of the trauma response. And what these feelings sound like in your head, again, it’s whatever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I can’t be perfect all the time. It’s all just too much. I don’t have it in me to make one more goddamn good decision today, so fuck it. I’ll just keep drinking because that’s what feels good right now. That’s the easiest thing I can do right now. In this state, you literally don’t have the capacity to make a better decision.
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There is a gravity to staying where you’re at that you don’t know how to escape yet. You can learn how to escape it. But here’s the scary part for all you perfectionists. Listen carefully. You have to learn how to escape it before you’re going to learn how to avoid it. That’s the order of operations, which means you’re going to have to read the fine print on what I’m saying. The most powerful learning comes after you have failed.
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not before. And in truth, you’re going to have to stop seeing failure at all. Perceiving failure is what’s keeping you stuck in the trauma response. Remember, I said, you can’t pattern your nervous system overnight. The only thing you can change with a simple decision is your perspective. So you have to stop perceiving failure and start looking at how much you drink and how often you think about drinking as simply data from your nervous system.
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Your drinking is not the problem. It’s the solution for your dysregulated nervous system. And the only thing that’s going to cure your dysregulation is a sense of safety. You have to be safe with yourself, which means curious about what’s happening and compassionate to yourself that you keep doing this. You keep making this mistake. You have to keep an open mind. You have to shift your goal from, I need to control my drinking.
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And I need to drink perfectly at all times to the real goal, which is I want to live in a regulated nervous system. I want to feel peaceful and safe with myself at all times so that no matter what I can learn and grow and evolve into a powerful, happy person. Because my friends, if you felt like a powerful, happy person, when you feel like that, you will drink like that. You think how you feel and you drink.
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how you think. So stop focusing on your drinking and focus on your thinking and solve for the first foundational feeling that you need in order to move forward. And that’s a feeling of safety. So what does this look like when you wake up and realize, fuck, I did it again. The first thing you have to do is accept this situation, this hangover as a gift. It’s an invitation. Apparently,
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your body and your mind need your attention and you’re going to have to slow the fuck down. And then as you process what happened, you’re going to need to choose to see the situation with so much compassion for yourself. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt, whether you think you deserve it or not, because you already know that beating yourself up doesn’t work. So shift to the assumption that you’re always doing the best that you can. You were doing
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the best that you could when you overdrank. You just ran out of gas. You hit the wall. Drinking too much is a clear consequence of giving yourself too little. And the call to action is not to swear and beg and plead with yourself that you’re never gonna do it again, but to figure out how to correct for the variables that prevented you from acting in your own best interest instead of judging your inability to do so, so that
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you can do better next time. You gotta have hope, my friend. When you learn from your mistake, you’re hopeful to do it again. Put me back in, coach. I can do better next time. But if you don’t take the time to process and learn and plan for a course correction, then you’re resetting the cycle, which means that whenever you think about drinking, you’re going to be experiencing anxiety. You’re going to go back into thoughts like,
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I don’t think I can tell myself no. And what if I can’t stop myself? Because you did not take the time to get clear about what causes over drinking to happen and what prevents it from happening. And if you don’t learn anything, you subconsciously know you’re not going to do better next time. That’s the hellscape of anxiety. So when and every time that anxiety comes up for you, the reentry syndrome, that squeeze of pain in your heart,
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that intense burst of realization that, ugh, you can’t do this. When and every time you catch yourself in those thought processes, when you notice that you’re thinking about drinking and you’re feeling anxious, you have to respond in the present moment to the body that is having this experience. This has nothing to do with how much you will or won’t drink in the future. How much you drank last weekend and how much you’re gonna drink next weekend
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is not the source of your anxiety on a Thursday afternoon. The source of your anxiety is your dysregulated nervous system. And the only way to respond to that is by making it safe for yourself to be here now. So you have to be safe with yourself. You have to make friends with your anxiety. It’s trying to teach you something. You just have to stop using anxiety to fuel your mind.
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Use your mind to release and clear the anxiety in your body create a sense of safety so that you can open your mind and look from a bigger perspective and learn from Where you’re at and where you want to be you can use your mind to soothe your body and so you’re going to start with truth truthful acceptance of This as a negative experience Just allow yourself to feel whatever you’re feeling
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without trying to change it or argue it or fix it or make it go away really fucking fast. Say things like, it is safe for me to feel like I can’t do better. It is safe for me to feel overwhelmed. It is safe for me to feel uncertain and confused. It is safe for me to feel resistant to making promises I’m not sure I can keep. It is safe for me to acknowledge that this feels hard.
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that I feel weak and stupid and embarrassed and so over it. It is safe for me to feel like this is too much. It’s too big. It’s too bad. I want you to think of this as microdosing safety. Bring yourself into the present moment so that you can turn off the alarm in your nervous system and just focus on being okay, even though it’s not really okay. Put your hand on your heart and say,
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I don’t have to figure anything out right now. I don’t have to make decisions in this state of mind. I can feel these feelings without letting them consume me, without letting them control me. This will pass. I will be okay. My only priority right now is to stay present with myself. I’m going to give myself permission to take a break from the worry. I’m going to give myself permission to feel safe and just be calm.
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about all this, which means I’m going to take my foot off the gas. I’m going to stop pressuring myself to hurry up and change. I’m going to protect my body from this internal dialogue and all this mental pressure. And when you’re doing this type of inner dialogue, using your mind to soothe your body, you can also put in some somatic practices, which is basically just you connecting with your body in some sort of
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rhythmic or repetitive motion or mantra that helps you feel gentle and safe. You can take a deep breath and ah sigh it out. You can do the VU technique. VU or you take a deep breath in and you make the VU sound that resonates on your vagal nerve like all the way down into your gut. So make the VU sound a couple of times. You can let yourself cry. You can allow yourself to shake or purposefully shake your hands.
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flicking your hands and maybe your feet as well to just kind of clear some of that adrenaline and cortisol. You can put your hand to your heart and just speak loving words. You can haven, which is where you rub your arms together, you know, like you would if you were cold or if you were really upset. And you can haven and you can say, you’re OK. It’s OK. You’re safe. I got you. You need to speak the words and do the motions.
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that your body needs to hear. You’re your own rescuer. You gotta learn to save yourself here. You gotta learn to be that person of you. Like there’s two versions of you. There’s the version of you who’s sick and struggling and over it and overwhelmed. And then there’s the version of you who’s in charge of helping and supporting and caring for that version of you. Like there’s two points of view you can see yourself. Move out of the one where you are broken.
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and move into the one where you are caring for the woman who feels broken. So I hope you’re clear by now that your problem is not an inability to control yourself. Your problem is that you don’t know how to manage your nervous system. And because of that, you’re in the habit of thinking that you’re not going to be able to control yourself, which of course doesn’t just occur when you’re drinking. That’s like only 1 % of it.
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The other 99 % of this is happening around the clock in your head when you’re having thoughts like, oh, I so enjoy drinking on this vacation. I don’t even feel guilty, but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to go back to sober evenings when I get home. That’s reentry syndrome. Or I really want to have a drink later, but I know I’m going to drink more than two.
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And so then you go into your head and start plotting to buy more or maybe hide it from your partner or adjust your schedule tomorrow to accommodate for the fact that you think you can’t control yourself and you’re just going to be hung over no matter what. All of those thoughts are the problem. That’s what reentry syndrome sounds like and looks like in your head. So step one again is safety. Put your hand on your heart and say it is safe for me to notice these thoughts. It is safe for me to feel
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Uncertain right now. Nothing has gone wrong These feelings these thoughts don’t mean anything about me I am ready to learn how to deal with this and then as you calm yourself down as the anxiety drops as you pull out of those thought processes and just focus on what’s happening in your body and giving yourself what you need then your logical rational mind starts to come back online
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And instead of skipping back into your full throttle day like you just got a fast pass around the anxiety, I want you to stay and take five minutes to process reentry syndrome. Get out a sheet of paper and write down the thought that was bothering you the most. So let’s say, for example, you were telling yourself that you can’t drink tonight. So the thought you might write down on your paper is, I don’t want to drink tonight.
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And then you want to explore the feelings underneath that thought so you can figure out what’s really going on. Write that thought, I don’t want to drink tonight, and then finish the sentence with the word because. I don’t want to drink tonight because I can’t trust myself to stop. I don’t want to drink tonight because I don’t want to feel like shit tomorrow. I don’t want to drink tonight because I’m scared I’m on a slippery slope. I don’t want to drink tonight because
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I’m embarrassed about my behavior. Write your statements out. Get them out of your body. Look at them directly without shame. Be curious. Wow. No wonder I feel so bad. That’s a terrible thing to think about myself. No wonder my body is alerting me trying to get my attention. That is a toxic, self-limiting belief. And it’s not even always true. I want to change that. And here’s how you change that.
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Realizing that you can believe anything you want and that your beliefs aren’t true Truth your truth isn’t true. It’s just familiar It’s whatever you repeat to yourself over and over and over and then at some point you just internalize that it becomes encoded in your nervous system And that’s your truth. So what we’ve done here is you’ve written out a list of statements that are your shitty nasty hidden shameful truth and You’re gonna pull it out
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so that it no longer has power over you. It is not the truth that sets you free, my friend. It is you who sets the truth free. You get to believe whatever you want. Whatever you tell yourself, whatever you repeat will become your truth. And your truth is always changing. You haven’t always felt that you can’t trust yourself or that you’re embarrassed by yourself. You haven’t always felt that way. You don’t always feel that way, which means that you won’t always feel that way if you do the work to change that.
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emotional wound that you’re carrying. You have to do the work to heal. So here’s how you do it. Once you write out those statements, finish your sentence and then explain why you think that. And then you’re going to go back over them and use kindergarten words to name the emotion that they trigger. So for example, I don’t want to drink tonight because I can’t trust myself to stop. That is weakness, weak. You feel weak. That’s the kindergarten word, weak. If I can’t trust myself to stop, I must be weak.
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I don’t want to feel like shit tomorrow. That’s scared. I’m scared. I don’t want to feel like shit tomorrow. I’m on a slippery slope. That feels out of control, right? I’m embarrassed about my behavior. That’s shame. So you’ve made a list of all your shitty beliefs that you believe about yourself. Then you have identified using kindergarten words, the emotion that that belief is triggering. Then for each emotion that you identified,
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Name some form of the opposite. So what’s the opposite of weak? Strong. What’s the opposite of scared? Excited. What’s the opposite of out of control? Powerful. What’s the opposite of ashamed? Proud. Now you’re going to get creative and you’re going to write down some statements that would help you feel these new emotions. And there’s no right answer here. This is a creative exercise. Coming up with different thoughts is like trying on a new pair of shoes.
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You’re just going to think and try the words on in your body and find a thought that feels more comfortable, supportive. It feels roomy, like you could walk around in this thought all day long. So what is a thought that would make me feel more strong? I’m doing the work. I’m not giving up on myself. I’m learning so much. I can do this. That would make me feel strong. What would make me feel excited? Wow. It feels really good to see how my brain works.
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I’m learning to use my mind to support my body and my body to support my mind. This makes so much sense. I can see why this keeps happening and I am on a slippery slope all right, but I’m climbing up, not falling down. Thoughts that might make you feel powerful. I can handle this feeling. I can make room for it. I can learn from it. I am capable of doing anything I set my mind to. I’m not giving up on myself. I will master my mental health.
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thoughts that would make you feel proud. I don’t give up when shit gets hard. I’m really good at figuring things out and I’m really proud of myself for addressing this. So the bottom line is that reentry syndrome is the fear, anxiety and embarrassment you feel when you’re telling yourself a story that you’re not going to be able to control yourself in the future. But reentry syndrome is not about the future.
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It’s a trauma response in the present moment. Your nervous system is detecting a problem and it’s calculating that you don’t have the capacity to fix that problem. And allowing your brain to run off leash and think when you’re in a trauma response will absolutely not solve the problem. It only makes it worse because the unconscious beliefs of a trauma response of your overwhelm by definition are that you literally can’t solve the problem. It’s bigger than you.
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You can fight it and maybe win a round, but you’re not going to win the war. So whatever, good luck. Don’t bet on it. That is by definition, how you think and what you believe when you are, your nervous system is in that trauma response. So you have to get your nervous system into the right state so that you can put your brain into the right gear so that it works for you with you instead of against you. You have to use your mind to support your body and your body to support your mind and trust.
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that the more safe and supported and seen that you feel with yourself, the more your drinking habits will reflect that. And if this episode resonated with you and you’re ready to stop living in fear of yourself and you’re ready to take control,
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you’re ready to do the work. You’re ready to stop telling yourself that you can’t stop once you start and having to worry about how much you will or won’t drink or how much you did or didn’t drink, then take an action right now. Your next baby step. It’s just one step at a time. Get in the show notes, click the link and apply for a discovery call. If this episode opened your eyes to the fact that your drinking habit is simply
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uh manifestation of underlying emotional issues and brain chemistry issues and you understand that you can’t fix this on your own unless you are going to become an expert in nervous system regulation and neuroplasticity and rewiring your dopamine. If you understand that alcohol use disorder is a trauma response then you understand that you absolutely
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need support to move through that because the trauma response is coded with, can’t do this. I can’t stick with this. I’m not going to follow through, which is why you need a roadmap of all the pitfalls. You need specific tools and strategies, step-by-step processes of what to do every single day to heal your nervous system and change your thinking processes. You need to learn the skills.
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of using your mind to manage your emotions instead of letting your emotions manage your mind and run you into crazy town. The women I work with are busy, professional women who understand the value of their own time and energy and appreciate the relief that comes with knowing if you can read and follow directions and you just have a plan and you work the plan that you can just focus on.
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putting one foot in front of the other. I’m not saying that healing is simple and I’m not saying that it’s easy. I will say that not healing is also not simple and not easy. And so if you are ready to say, draw a line in the sand, I am not going to be struggling this from one year. I’m going to reclaim my mental health. I’m going to take control of my nervous system. I’m going to be the master of my own destiny.
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and get in the show notes and apply for a discovery called. You do not have to do this alone. You can join our fabulous community of supportive, strong, badass women who are getting emotionally sober so that they don’t have to worry about their damn drinking anymore. And if you’re an over thinker, you don’t have to decide whether or not you’re joining my program. You just have to decide what day and time you’re going to have your discovery call. It is a free hour of coaching that will be
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customized to your needs. have a pre-call podcast that you can listen to so you know all about the framework of the program and the cost and the structure and the format, all of it, so that you can show up on the call and talk about where you’re at, where you want to be, and we can help you put together a plan of how you’re going to get there. You need a plan, my friend. You have to know where you’re going if you ever expect to get there. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening today.
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If this content is resonating with you and you’ve got that friend who you know needs to hear this, who you know needs to have a shift in perspective of what’s really going on and so that she can feel hopeful and more powerful and perhaps get herself some help, then share this episode, text it to a friend or post it on your socials. And if that’s not your thing and you just want to support the show.
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I would be so grateful if you took one minute to rate this show on either Spotify or Apple. Just go to the homepage on either platform and rate this show. Five stars would be wonderful. Thank you very much. Or you could leave a review on Apple or post a comment on Spotify. Just any interaction with the show would be so wonderful. And I appreciate you so much. Your support means the world because that’s how this show grows. We’re growing organically.
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and it’s people sharing it and it’s people giving it five stars or a comment or a review so that the algorithm continues to promote it in other people’s feed and people can find the show women who are looking for an alternative approach to the insanity of over drinking and the only solution appearing to be you’ve got to either quit forever or I guess keep struggling in silence. The more you support the show organically the more other women just like you.
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will be able to find hope. I want you to know how much I appreciate you. Thank you for being here and spending your time with me. Thank you for choosing this show and my community to be a part of in whatever way you feel is most supportive. And that’s it for this week. I’ll see you on the next episode.