Five Intoxicating Lies about Alcohol with Meg Geisewite

Episode 148: Five Intoxicating Lies about Alcohol with Meg Geisewite

In episode 148 of the Sober Vibes podcast, Courtney Andersen welcomes Meg Geisewite to the show to discuss the five intoxicating lies about alcohol.

Our chat deeply delves into the complexities of high-functioning addiction and its generational perceptions. Meg enlightens us about the significance of self-care and equipping oneself with coping strategies to handle life’s curveballs. We also address the elephant in the room - the mommy wine culture, especially during the pandemic, which unfortunately triggered a wave of addiction and shame.

Meg Giesewhite is an award-winning and best-selling author, Meg is changing the narrative on the mommy wine culture, the hustle culture, and our pro-drinking culture. In Meg’s debut book, Intoxicating Lies: One Woman's Journey to Freedom from Gray Area Drinking, Meg flips the script on the five most intoxicating lies we tell ourselves about alcohol and about our self-worth.

What you will learn in this episode:

• Meg's Story 
• Five intoxicating lies about alcohol
• Mommy Wine Culture 
• Being present for your kids 

Thank you for listening.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Music.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Hey, welcome to the Sober Vives podcast. I am your host and sober coach, courtney Anderson. You are listening to episode 148. On today's episode we are talking about intoxicating lies that alcohol tells you. But before I get into that, I hope you are having a kick-ass day today, wherever you are in the world listening to this episode. And if not, what do we say? There's always tomorrow, right, maybe you just need to go to bed. Go to bed if you need to and wake up feeling a new tomorrow. That's what sometimes I gotta do. Well, I have to wait for the dictator to go to bed first, and then I sometimes have to go to bed. I have to put my little ass to sleep, just because not every day is all rainbows and butterflies, and that is okay, because that is life right?

Speaker 2: 1:27

Before I introduce our guests today, make sure, if you haven't already, to sign up for my free workshop that is going on Wednesday, september 27th, at noon Eastern Standard Time. Okay, I'm gonna bring back live workshops because I really enjoy doing them, and I'm gonna do them monthly till the end of the year. See how they go. So if you want to join that workshop, find the link in the show notes below and click on it and then register. All of that information will be going out via email. I'm trying to do this in the Facebook group but I always get there's something wrong with my computer Just being honest here of why I can never connect live, so I have to figure that out. So if I don't go live in that Facebook group, the Silver Vibes Facebook group then I will just do it on Zoom and email you the replay in case you cannot make it live. I suggest you making it live because I will be doing a Q&A and I'm going to, in this workshop, help and provide three tips to help you in your long term sobriety journey. Okay, and each month the topic will be different, because it's not gonna be the same old. No, thank you, we will all get bored with that. So please come along, make sure you find the link in the show notes and sign up for that. Again, it's absolutely free and I really do. I'm connecting with you guys live. It's fun. It's a fun one. Also, too, if you haven't gotten my book yet, please do. Silver Vibes, a guide to thriving in your first three months without alcohol, is out, and it should be out at this point. All over the world. The shipping should have gone out internationally, because it's about six to eight weeks of a delay, but it should be out to you guys who are not in the United States and Canada.

Speaker 2: 3:28

So my guest today is author Meg Geisweight, and she is the author of Intoxicating Lies One Women's Journey to Freedom from Gray Area Drinking, and she shares the Intoxicating Lies today. What alcohol tells us right, what we believe, and this is a great conversation, because there are lies that we have been told and that we fall into the trap of thinking like, oh yeah, this is it. And then it's a crazy thing, because you get sober and you're like what in the fuck just happened? And you have to unpack a lot of those lies honestly. And if that has happened to you so far, please reach out to me on Instagram and send me a DM on sober vibes, because I also, too, love hearing from you guys in those DMs.

Speaker 2: 4:19

But it's the truth and sometimes it can be very jarring when you wake up with the clarity and you really have to reevaluate what you thought once was and what isn't. It's crazy. It's crazy. So if you haven't yet, please make sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show. Check out Meg's book. It's a great one. I hope you enjoy this conversation and, again, keep on truckin' and stay safe out there. Hey, meg, welcome to the Sober Vibes podcast.

Speaker 1: 4:53

Hi, Courtney, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today.

Speaker 2: 4:56

I'm excited too, because our last conversations I had to keep putting them off power outage. I think I was sick one time, I don't know. There was two times we've had to reschedule. So we are here today.

Speaker 1: 5:09

That's right, divine timing.

Speaker 2: 5:10

Yeah, exactly as we were talking about in our pre-interview chat. So why don't you share your story with us?

Speaker 1: 5:19

Sure. So I grew up in a house where drinking was seen as the way to let off steam after a hard week. My mom had the three of us my brother, sister and I alone why my dad traveled for work every week and he would get off the plane and take us to McDonald's and then she would whisk him off to a cocktail party and they really ran in this heavy drinking cocktail party scene where we were either having a cocktail party at our house or they were going to one every weekend and my mom used to dress me up in my best dress Jessica McClintock, if you remember those dresses, the blue velour with the pilgrim's top, with the big white bow in my hair, and she would have me serve adores to her guests, to their guests, and I really saw drinking as a way to connect, socialize, let off steam from the week and it was just very normalized in my house in such a manner. And when I got into eighth grade I really wanted to fit in and be part of the popular group and I had the girl. I was in a new school and I had some girls over and they asked if they could read my parents' liquor cabinet. So we got into the peach schnapps and I did shots of peach schnapps to be cool and fit in and I had my very first hangover and it was God awful. The next day and my mom thought I was just sick. And high school just was the same thing. It was like this social way to fit in when you could sneak it in at a party or what have you, on an occasion, more of a binge type drinking.

Speaker 1: 7:00

And then in college, my freshman year and I won't go into detail just in case there are any trigger warnings here, but my freshman year I was heavily drinking at a on-campus party and was asked to go outside because the music was too loud and was sexually assaulted, and that incident really left me very confused as to why somebody would do this to someone else. I blamed myself, I blamed how much I was drinking, blamed even like what I wore that night. And we know this is not my fault or anyone's fault when this happens to somebody, but I mention it because not many people do talk about it and alcohol puts us in these situations where we can't make good decisions. And so it unfortunately happened to me in another heavy drinking situation after college with somebody I had been dating. And so I say all that because those two traumas they put me into this over functioning, because I was a person that liked to be in control and I had no control over my body. I really went into a trauma and I didn't even know it at the time a trauma response of really wanting to control everything, really wanting to be like a perfectionist, a chronic achiever, a people pleaser. And so after college, drinking again was still this binge, like just on occasion, where maybe there was one or two nights of too much but nothing, where I was drinking all the time or during the week.

Speaker 1: 8:40

And then after college and in my sales career, I got involved with some companies where it was like really a pro-drinking culture and it was frowned upon if you didn't go to the bar. And it was very much of this work hard, play hard type of environment where drinking was really endorsed and seen as the way to let off steam. And again it was that I go back to my childhood, right, that was just like, oh right, this is what we do after we work really hard. And so, fast forward, I meet my husband in sales, we get married, we have two kids and I really fell into the mommy wine culture. I was in a state of taking care of everyone's needs, but my own was working all day, coming home taking care of the kids, and I found wine in particular to become a way of turning off the chatter in my head all day of over functioning and overdoing. And it was my me time, it was my self care and it was the time that I allowed myself to slow down and really exhale.

Speaker 1: 9:51

I would say it was still on occasion, but then I had three back-to-back life incidents that happened, and they were all two weeks apart and I do talk about them in the book, and those three things catapulted my drinking into, instead of a recreational use, a nightly medicinal use, and it was what turned off, I would say, the demons in my head from everything that was happening and that I didn't have control over and that I couldn't. All my coping mechanisms that I'd worked in the past were no longer really working, and so what ended up happening was I went to my therapist and I said I think I'm relying a lot on this wine every night and I think I might have a drinking problem, and she said no, I think you're thinking about it too much, I think you're just overthinking it and her advice really kept my gray area of drinking going for about two more years. All of those incidents that happened in my life resolved. Everybody got better, but me. I was stuck with this nightly wine habit and some nights it would be one glass of wine and some nights it would be three heavy pours, which we know is a bottle of wine. And more often than not it was that.

Speaker 1: 11:14

And as a person who likes to be in control, my rock bottom, or my moment of realizing that this was a problem, was when I no longer wanted my kids to do sports in the evenings so that I could come home to my rewarding glass of wine.

Speaker 1: 11:31

And I was like, wow, this really has a grip on me. Now, at this point, my inner knowing was pleading with me. It was saying, even though when I talked to friends and family they said oh Meg, you drink just like I do, winning awards at work, my marriage was fine, my kids were okay, so it was like really confusing for me. So I suffered silently and alone, thinking there's something wrong with me. Why can't I get this under control and everybody else around me can? And then the book really opens up with a scene with another highly prominent, successful businesswoman that was drinking just like me and we were finding condolence in our gray area of drinking and in 2019,. I had never heard of gray area drinking and once I heard about the term and I saw a video from Jen Kouch with Sobersus, who talked about the detox to retox loop, I was like oh my God that is me.

Speaker 1: 12:32

And so I thought, well, me and three other women will figure this out. And so I got into her program and there were hundreds of women and I'm thinking, why are there so many women in here? And I honestly didn't wanna break up with alcohol in November of 2019. I just thought, well, I will get some tools under my tool belt and I'll go back to being a quote, unquote normal drink or whatever that means. Right.

Speaker 1: 12:58

And what happened was I ended up, because I'm in pharmaceutical sales, falling in love with the science and the facts of what truly alcohol is, especially reading the Snaked Mind, and I did the alcohol experiment too, and so I thought, wait, what is this providing for me? Why am I doing this? Why am I having a toxin with my kale salad? Why do I think this is rewarding when I'm waking up at 3 AM, when I'm too tired to play with my kids? And so I became more curious and I ended up doing Jen's 90 day program, and it was really at that 100 days that things really started to shift for me.

Speaker 1: 13:41

You started waking up, I started waking up, and the fog that I was in every day, that slight shade of gray, was never like a terrible. Sometimes it was a terrible hangover, but for the most part it was just always a slight like waking up each day at a deficit. And there was an AM me and a PM me and I was just constantly in conflict with my own battle with this. And it was nice to be with other women who felt exactly like I did. And my husband said to me is this like a forever thing? Because our relationship was really centered around alcohol and putting the kids to bed and opening up a bottle of wine and unwinding and relaxing together.

Speaker 1: 14:27

And I told him. I said I can't figure out one reason to go back now that I know the truth of what it is. I can't believe we're not warned about it. And I realized that I had fallen into five intoxicating lies about alcohol and I go through that in the book as well as intoxicating lies about myself and my self-worth. There's no way you go through becoming alcohol-free and not go inward and look at your own limiting intoxicating beliefs that you believe about yourself. So the book really starts with the lies and stories that I told myself growing up and then goes through the five lies of alcohol and really ends with the truth of who you are and the freedom that comes along with being alcohol-free.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Isn't it amazing, too, though, how easy it is to become high-functioning? Oh yeah, because there are more high-functioning addicts alcoholics, alcohol abuse disorder, whatever you want to call it. I believe that there's more high-functioning of those than what the media has portrayed for years upon years of where you're homeless, underneath the bridge.

Speaker 1: 15:42

Right, and I think that keeps us trapped.

Speaker 2: 15:45

It does 100% Well. I do want to say that I definitely empathize and sympathize with you about the sexual assault, because that has happened to me before. So thank you for sharing that. And I want to just go back. It's always funny to me of the boomer generation I think that's probably what your parents are in that it was always the schnapps, it was always schnapps. I'm very confused on why the boomers loved the schnapps when they were in their younger selves. Was that because of what? I am very confused about the schnapps, but I see that. And now it's like our generation. It's like my son was older and I was still drinking. It would be like he would be getting into whiskey, he would be getting into wine, he would be like the IPA. So it's just funny.

Speaker 1: 16:37

I know you never hear of anybody talking about drinking schnapps anymore. I don't even know if it's still made you don't.

Speaker 2: 16:43

It's like only the kids of the baby boomers. It just makes me giggle. So we went from one serious moment to one laughing matter about the peach shops, because it always starts. A lot of people's drinking always starts with the schnapps in a certain generation. So, going back to the high functioning what point do you remember at what point where you're drinking all of a sudden became to like casual glass of wine? To then where it got turned up, where you did not want your kids to be even partaking in sports, which is very powerful to say into a bit.

Speaker 1: 17:20

Yeah, it really. I know exactly when my drinking shifted was when we lost our best friend. My husband lost his job and a loved one came forward to me and was sexually molested and I was her safe person and that brought up all of my sexual salts and all of my stuff that I had buried down with my coping skills of being over functioning and staying busy, to not look at it and not deal with it. And it forced and they say spiritual awakenings happen in threes and it forced it all to come to the surface. I was overwhelmed with anxiety and depression and all the things in society, and even my own therapist was basically like you're good, go have a drink, this is how you deal with it. And I just did not have the right coping skills. We don't really have, or didn't back then at least. I think it's more mainstream now, but we don't talk a lot about how to regulate your nervous system and how to do the air school of taking care of yourself and when these types of situations happen and they continue to happen now and I'm so grateful I have the skills to know how to deal with them now. But yeah, it was, it really. That's when it ramped up and then I started realizing I'm like going to a party or to a bar or to a restaurant and being like where's the bar? I it was taking this grip on me and I felt like I was using it more and more as a crutch. And it was the thing that I looked forward to at the end of the day, as the reward for all of the messes that were happening at the. They were all coinciding.

Speaker 1: 19:06

And then I just had regular life of work and everything else and I'm in sales. So I have to look like, hey, everything's fine, I don't have any issues going on in my life. Would you like to buy blah, blah, blah? And it was hard to put on that show constantly. And so I just fell deeper and deeper into this nightly wine habit. And then, like I said, when I no longer wanted my kids to do sports, that scared the crap out of me. I was like, wow, this thing is in way more control than I ever thought and I really thought that I just needed to rein it in a little bit, like that moderation, and that there was this other there's going to be, like Laura McCohen says, the third door that I could go into. But I just I didn't know at the time what I know now and how I had really fallen into these five intoxicating lies.

Speaker 2: 20:01

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Speaker 2: 20:32

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Speaker 2: 21:38

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Speaker 2: 22:44

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Speaker 2: 23:56

Before you get into the five intoxicating lies I want to add into this you are not the first person I have heard who's been on this podcast before, or I've talked to with a client that they had a therapist tell them that they were fine and their drinking was fine. So I want to add this that even though I love therapy and I think everybody should have a therapist that then something needs to change here within therapy and within medicine, of these practices, that when people are saying to them I think I have an issue here that these motherfuckers aren't listening and then telling people that they're okay. And that's what pisses me off, because even to recently, there was a book and my husband was telling his therapist about the book and the book. And the therapist was like, oh, I've never heard of that and I was like what in the fuck? And this book is about its emotionally immature parents, where, like, everybody should read this book, and it blew my mind.

Speaker 1: 24:56

But that's okay.

Speaker 2: 24:57

But I just like with this, with people not listening, it's like enough is enough already, because? But the response to it just shows you how embedded and ingrained alcohol is in our society. And even these people who have these I'm a therapist, I'm a doctor, I'm a dentist, no shade to any of you, but that's you're not you can you have these problems too?

Speaker 1: 25:24

Yeah Well, they're stuck in gray area drinking themselves and so they want to normalize it as well. I was interviewed by a reporter who kept trying to put me in this darker box like black and white drinking right, and I was like no, it's on a spectrum and and we've just been trained to be like, oh, you have to hit absolute rock bottom, like we see on TV and in the movies. And I call him physicians and I was just talking to one of my doctors the other day and she was like if someone came into me and said I'm having two whiskies a night, I would be like, oh my gosh, we really got to take a look at your drinking. But then a woman comes in and says she has two glasses of wine we got. We just turn our head like, oh, that's normal.

Speaker 2: 26:05

Yeah, and it's not because this is the thing too. When you're telling a doctor and I just know this because I worked in the medical field in years of doing it myself to doctors and then being in this space for so many years I had a girlfriend say to me the other day she's like such and such, came to me and said wanted to know about how I quit drinking and he would. And he told me he was drinking four to six whiskies a night and I said, well, okay, let's say 10, because nobody's sitting there, with no one sitting there with shot glass and measuring this out. Same thing for a wine If you're emitting, you're having two glasses of wine, that's most likely a bottle, and if you're having four glasses of wine, that's most likely two.

Speaker 1: 26:46

Yeah, yeah because nobody's pouring five ounces, like you said, and measuring it. No, and I do want to say that she's my former therapist, if I didn't say that because I no longer went to go to her. Yes, I agree with you, therapy is. I'm a big proponent of therapists. But if you're inter-knowing, even if a therapist is giving you bad advice, like I, have another therapist in the book. This was a marriage therapist that told me when I was having intimacy issues with my husband to go green when I was on yellow with sex. Just be submissive, just give in, don't worry about yourself, make sure he's taken care of. And I looked at her like, are you kidding me? That's your advice to me. And so when that initial intuition and inner-knowing is like oh my God, no, or oh my gosh, this is not serving us, listen to that voice, listen to that inner-knowing, this is how the book ends, because it is always guiding you back to the truth. Yeah, and it is usually right, right.

Speaker 2: 27:48

I had a therapist a couple of years before I quit drinking for God and she said to me God bless a sweet woman. But she said she goes. Maybe you should try it and quit drinking. Do you ever think alcohol is the problem?

Speaker 1: 28:01

And then I fired her. I don't want to hear that right now.

Speaker 2: 28:05

Yeah, and again, it's not. I don't want to put all of these therapists into one category, but is that you? Just? I just wanted to make that point that you are not the first person I've had. I've told this to and I say that in my book as well. Like you can ask these people, these professionals, these questions like hey, do you drink? If you want to be in a healthy space with somebody, ask them if they're doing A, b, c and D where you're like OK, cool, I want to get professional advice from somebody who is also living the same way. So so share with us the five most intoxicating lies of alcohol, which I think is brilliant.

Speaker 1: 28:44

Thank you. So the first one is and I think this is the one I hear the most from individuals is I deserve a glass. Yeah, so we feel like we've earned it. It's our reward, it's how it's our self care. We live in a hustle culture. Keep the grind going and keep on producing and we've got everything coming in at us at work speed. We need time to rest and a lot of people are using that wine hour or whiskey hour or whatever you want to call it, to do so.

Speaker 1: 29:16

The second lie in the book is you don't have a drinking problem, which is exactly what we just talked about. It doesn't matter if a professional or you're in that comparison lie where you're looking, you will always find somebody who's drinking more than you are. What matters is not what, what we compare ourselves to, or even what some of the professionals, because I've heard many give the permission slip to drink. What matters is it good enough for you? Is it serving your life? Is it? Is it giving you what you really need? And my book I really want to encourage curiosity, not judgment. Is it really rewarding you? Is it really giving you a crutch, or is it adding to your anxiety and depression? Is it making you more exhausted, is it terrible for your health? And the third one which I think everybody in their alcohol free journey goes through this at some point is moderation, which is I can control my drink.

Speaker 1: 30:12

We all want to hold on to it. It's oh, I'll just. I went through a phase I'll just drink tequila, right, like it's not as bad, and I'll just only drink on the weekends. And we put up all these guardrails. And then the vicious shame and drinking spiral happens, the cycle where you start beating yourself up because you can't keep to these rules and you start to go into this detox to retox, just maddening Groundhog's Day of over and over again beating yourself up and it is no fun. There's no freedom in it because you're constantly trying to watch yourself when you're at a party and it's still in complete control of you. Yeah, but we all go through it.

Speaker 1: 30:52

And then the fourth lie in the book is being sober is boring. I really was scared, I have to be honest. They was like can I still have fun? I started drinking at a young age and it was at all of the social events and I was not sure what I would be like without it. And our pro drinking culture wants us to believe that we cannot have fun without it, which is so untrue.

Speaker 2: 31:20

I just have to add into there of talking about sexual assault and pro-drinking culture. Rape culture goes in with the drinking culture. You got it. It's right there. Balance it right next to each other. So, because it is a thing where you do it's like for a long time, you've gone through this, I've gone through this, it's well. Was that my fault? Because I drank too much in for a long time? Up until the Me Too movement, a lot of women have carried that guilt and shame around.

Speaker 1: 31:53

And the reality is that?

Speaker 2: 31:54

no, just because I was drunk does not mean that I was supposed to be taken advantage of, so that's right. I wanted to say that it's not a permission slip and it is not your fault, exactly.

Speaker 1: 32:05

And then the last lie in the book is the mommy wine culture. Behind every great mom is a bottle of wine. I bought the t-shirts, the tea towels. I thought it was funny. I would post a glass of wine that said if I go missing, put my face on a wine bottle. And I just was drinking down the messages. And I know why now because it normalized my drinking. It normalized and made me think that it was funny and it wasn't that heavy and it wasn't that bad.

Speaker 1: 32:33

And what I didn't even realize at the time is that I was making other people sick by posting it. I was literally putting alcohol on a pedestal and I just couldn't see it at the time. I didn't even realize. I was so entrenched into it. It's hard, you know, and you can't do motherhood without it. And I didn't realize that. And looking back, this is the part like if you were to say is there anything that burns you up or you have regret over? Is this in that I was too tired to play with my kids in the ocean or on the playground from my rewarding glass of wine? This is me off to this day that I missed out on some of those memories. And what message am I sending to my kids? Like mommy wines, so I wind. Like that they're a burden. Yeah, and guess what? Kids, when life gets hard, have a drink. Like what are the messages that we're sending?

Speaker 2: 33:29

How many years did you hold your kids when you quit drinking?

Speaker 1: 33:34

So it's been three and a half years. So my daughter was like 12 and a half and my son was like 10. Yeah, around that, 10 and 12. So there was many years of those young years, especially the three leading up to right before I quit, when I was in probably my heaviest drinking and honestly, those are like the sweet years right, like they're not teenagers yet they can dress themselves, they don't have tangerines, those are like the golden years in some senses and I was pretty fogged out for them and that I have regret over that. It was really when moms are really with young ones. I'm like God bless that you're doing this early and you're gonna get all this time with your kids.

Speaker 2: 34:14

But even in my group we had an 80 year old woman and so it's never too late either it's really not, but I get that from a lot of women I work with or a lot of women in this community, because I had, I have he'll be two next month, but I had him at 38. And I hear that all the time where they have told me when I was pregnant, they're like this is so wonderful, you get to experience this sober. And that is the number one thing that I hear from moms, and so like it pulls at my heartstrings that you're just talking about this. It's like those precious years right, I was tired or I could have handled that better and all of that stuff. So I know a lot of women carry, a lot of moms carry around a lot of shame with that, so, but I have to say, on the flip side though, but they get you now like this and it gives me chills when my daughter said to me mom, you have so much more patience since you quit drinking.

Speaker 1: 35:08

Oh my God, that's worth it's weight in gold. That's what we want, right? Motherhood is hard. It pushes you to the brink of no patience. And to hear that that is the greatest gift that being alcohol free has given me. Oh, my God, absolutely absolutely, there's so many gifts, but it is true because it is motherhood it does.

Speaker 2: 35:30

I call my son little dictator, just for, as you can tell, I like to joke like just for shits and giggles. But they are dictator.

Speaker 2: 35:37

So it's yeah, but there has been times where I'm just like my eyes twitching because I'm like, oh my God. And I have to reflect back because it still keeps me sober to this day, because at the first couple of months of his life I was getting a little wonky there, like it was getting to the point, with no sleep, where I'm like drinking sounds good, but I just yeah, I just I'm very grateful that I don't drink for this, because it would have been a mess, it would have been a mess. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:09

So oh, were you gonna say something no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, I know I just I could go on and on about the mommy wine culture and how toxic it is and how much compassion I have for moms who have been in that space and trapped in it, because we've just been sold a bunch of lies and it's not your fault.

Speaker 2: 36:28

When you see that, when you see that now, like now that your kids are older and do you I'm sure you still have to do social situations with sports or whatever do you see that mommy wine culture and there's daddy drinking culture too, there's like a daddy whiskey culture? Do you see that rising more and more, especially after the year 2020?

Speaker 1: 36:54

Oh, the pandemic drinking when not 41% in women? It's becoming an epidemic for women and that is why I was like I have to get this book out. We have got to start talking about the space, in particular, for women, because we do not metabolize alcohol like men do and it's killing us at a faster rate as well and making us sicker. And we've just been shamed and sold a bill of goods and I am so. No, I'm not. We are not gonna take this anymore and we have enough on our plates. We don't need to have shame and stigma on top of it. We need to discuss the space and talk about more self-compassion and awareness of it and how to get through it together. Versus. It just is so toxic on so many levels. And the pandemic we were trying to juggle homeschooling and work online and we were stuck inside all day with our people and we were cleaning in the kitchen 24 seven and we were told to have a quarantine to drink it all and to drink away the stress and it really addiction went through the roof at that time. So we're seeing the aftermath of that and it's heartbreaking for me. I'm grateful that much like you're grateful that you quit before you had your son. I'm grateful that I quit right before the pandemic because I'm pretty sure if I drank through the pandemic I don't even know if my marriage would have survived it.

Speaker 1: 38:24

I had it in the book. I had an effing moment time with COVID. We were two on two different pages politically and there's a whole story in the book where I hadn't drank for 15 months and I just hit a wall and I went downstairs. I kept alcohol in the house because it really wasn't that big of a deal to me, but I went down and I poured myself a glass of wine and I took three big swigs of it and my body was like, oh my God, are we doing this? It burned, going down and my daughter came down the stairs with tears in her eyes and she said is this my fault? Oh, and it was like my why got slapped across my face and I realized in that moment it actually took. That moment.

Speaker 1: 39:06

I still had a lurking belief in the back of my head that if the shit hit the fan, wine would be there still Again. I still had a little lurking belief about using it as a crutch and I realized in that moment that COVID wasn't going away. The presidential debate wasn't gonna go. Work wasn't gonna get any better. I had to sit with all of that effing moment experience and let it pass and show my daughter too right, that this is how we deal with life when it's hard and go for a walk. And what I love now is like when I am having a really bad day. My son will say to me mom, do you need to go for a walk? Not, mom, do you need a glass of wine?

Speaker 2: 39:50

Yeah, I love it. I love the walks. My son and I do a lot of walks and it's just something that I want him to grow into. But yeah, and you know what, Sometimes those reminders of people, your kids, whether it be your kids, your partner or whatnot like sometimes you just gotta love something more than you love yourself in that moment to keep fucking pushing forward.

Speaker 2: 40:16

Yeah that's true and it is the case. It's just COVID. If I were to drink during COVID, I would have burned this house down with man in it. He used to say that he's gone. I'm happy you're not drinking during these times. And I was like, excuse me.

Speaker 1: 40:32

Yeah, I really do feel for a lot of people. It really put people into a dark space.

Speaker 2: 40:38

Yes, it did. It did so and we're still gonna see the years to come of that. So well, where can people get your book? I don't think you have not. What's the name of your book? Where can people find it? Where can they find you if they would like to connect?

Speaker 1: 40:53

Thank you. It's intoxicating lies one woman's journey to freedom from gray area drinking, and it's anywhere books are sold. If you go to my website, which is intoxicatingliescom, you can get a personalized, signed copy of it which I will mail directly to your house. Nice, yeah, so I would love for you to visit my website and sign up for my newsletter and hear some of the things that are coming up for me. And I'm on Instagram. All one word, my handle is intoxicating lies book. It is attached to my Facebook, which is my business page. Intoxicating lies, the title of the book. Intoxicating lies one woman's journey to freedom from gray area drinking.

Speaker 2: 41:36

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, meg, for being on the show. I will connect all of the links down in the show notes, so make sure you check them out. Connect with Meg on Instagram. This was a great conversation. Thank you again for sharing with us today and thank you for listening to another episode of the Sober Vibes podcast. Thanks, courtney. Oh, yep, let them know. It's awesome to why. Yeah, oh, my goodness, yeah, okay, take that where there's left off in the middle. Yep, that's somebody else's. Oh, just kidding. No, a second, I have to many asked.