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The Samantha Parker Show
Welcome to The Samantha Parker Show! An unfiltered and slightly unhinged look at what happens when you ditch the booze but keep the good stuff.
I’m your Sober Bestie, Sam, and this is the sober space you didn’t know you needed. Whether you’re sober curious, counting hours to that 24-hour chip, or a seasoned sober bestie, we’re here to spill the tea on how to live your best life sober.
We’re setting boundaries, chasing dreams, and living life to its fullest... just doing it with Mocktails now. And honestly? It’s a whole vibe.
Think girls' bathroom convos minus the vodka but with all the hype and the reminder that you’re never doing this alone. Life doesn’t stop when you get sober… it just get better.
Trade in the hangovers for No-Mosa Brunches. I’m sharing all about my journey, from AA to the “itchy” days when I want to grab a drink.
We might be on a sober journey, but we are never doing it alone.
The Samantha Parker Show
6 Reasons I Went Sober! Six Month Update!
Six months sober feels surreal. After over 20 years of heavy drinking, I’ve finally stepped off the rollercoaster. My reasons for quitting?
Exhaustion: mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Alcohol controlled everything from my relationships, my choices, my potential and how I showed up as a mom to my kids. I swore I would be different for my children.
I wanted better for my kids, my marriage, and most importantly, for myself. Sobriety hasn’t been easy, but it’s given me clarity, freedom, and a chance to ask, What do I really want in life?
It’s a journey of healing and rediscovery, one I never thought I’d take but couldn’t be more grateful for.
Sobriety has changed everything. My relationships, my mindset, and even my face (no more chipmunk cheeks). Six months down. The rest of my life ahead.
Let’s dive in.
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In honor of being six months sober, here are six reasons why I decided to go alcohol free this year. Of course, there are lots of reasons leading up to this main decision. You know, lots of mistakes. I've been a heavy drinker since I was 17 years old. So sitting here right now at 39, telling you I've been six months sober is completely wild to But
your reason to stop drinking alcohol might look completely and absolutely and totally different than mine. This is just my experience. And I really sat down and I thought about this and I was like, why did I choose to go sober? Why did I have all of these moments? Why am I choosing to be like this?
Because I have to tell you guys, it almost is easier to live in this world drinking alcohol. Like if I had to be 100 percent honest, I would say is a hell of a lot easier just to go with the status quo.
It has been an incredibly interesting, oftentimes incredibly difficult ride to be on this sobriety journey, but I'm happy I'm here and I'm. I'm like insanely grateful that I'm sitting here six months sober, because I can tell you it last year at this time, it's December, 2023, if you would have told me that I would stop drinking this year and kick it for good, and that I would start going to AA, That I would start working with a sponsor and I would start doing all of this work, like therapy, body work, and all of these things to be sober.
I would freaking probably completely laugh at you and tell you you're insane. And there's no way that was me. But the fact is, is it is me. Just think that six months is like such a great celebration. I feel like my first six months, my whole focus was just don't drink. Like don't drink, don't drink, don't drink, don't do it, Sam. Don't put the alcohol in your face. And now I feel like my next six months is really feeling a lot more like freedom.
Like, how do I want my life to look like? What do I want to do? You know, I had to conquer a lot of emotional demons because I used alcohol to really, really like deal with life, to deal with hard times to deal with happy times. And so now I feel like I get to look at the rest of my life and I'm like, what do I actually want?
What is it that I want in life? When I say, what do I actually want in life? I love this perspective because for years, my whole thing, what do I want in life? It's always been business driven. You know, what do I want to do with my business? Where do I want to take it? And of course I always still have those questions going on in my head because I am a business owner.
I do work for myself. I have created all of my life from the ground up, but this time it just feels different. When I say, what do I actually want in life? I'm thinking like forward thinking, like, how do I want to What do in my body? Like, what do I want to do in the next six months that I couldn't do before?
Because alcohol really does give us a lot of promises of freedom. You know, you see all the ads. You know, we're popping bottles in the club. It looks like wealth. But the truth is this alcohol is actually dirty, absolute trash. And once you step back from it and you get enough distance, you're going to be like, oh my God, I actually have so much freedom and I can literally choose anything that I want.
And it's a little bit of a high. Yeah. It's a little bit of a high for sure,
Okay. So let's dive in.
And yes, I am ranking these top six things in order of what feels least important to me to what feels like the most important part of this whole entire journey.
Okay, let's rip the band aid off. Number six. I was tired. I was tired mentally, I was tired physically, and I was tired emotionally. Mentally, it is exhausting. I am a high functioning alcoholic, which means I was still appearing like I was pretty normal. The alcohol wasn't really affecting my life. I think the people closest to me could definitely see how it was.
And when I look back, I could see how it was, but mentally it was like gymnastics all the time. If I wasn't hyperfixated on when I was going to drink that week, I was either at the event where I could drink or I was at home where I could drink and then I was hyperfixated on how much I could drink and the cycle just kept going and going and going.
Physically drinking alcohol is insanely draining physically. It is so toxic physically is so much work, not to mention, you know, the sleep you lose, you never go into that deep sleep pattern, that dream sleep, so that's just scientific facts right there. But just always kind of like functioning at that high level, but pouring a toxic in your body, it's a shitty place to be.
And emotionally I think I was exhausted from just constantly covering up how I was feeling. And again, that could have been happy. That could have been sad, depressed. Or that could have been like on top of the mountain. I was emotionally exhausted from pouring alcohol on top of those emotions instead of just letting myself fill them.
It's like a cycle. Like if you're in it, you get it. Number five, I wanted my relationships to change the relationship closest to me as my husband. I think that's the obvious place we could start. And I was really starting to notice how we had spent our 17 years together instead of just sitting down and having really good conversations about things that were going on, which we would do it sometimes like my relationship was pretty good.
Okay. It wasn't like totally awful, but that last year, like the last year before May 20th, which is the last day that I'd had a drink, we had been like a freaking at it. Circus show, like a legit circus show. Like I'm saying there was punches thrown on my side. Don't worry guys. Let's, let's be honest. I was the one who threw the punch and it's super embarrassing, but it was just like, everything was starting to get explosive.
And I was like, this isn't how I want our relationship to be. We've been through so much together. My husband's been deployed multiple times. And I was like, this is not how I want my relationship to be. , and then if we even step down a tear from that, the relationships in my life where I was allowing people to treat me like absolute trash was insane.
Because if we go back to reason number six, I was really addicted to the guilt, shame pattern, that whole cycle where I would drink to feel good, then I would feel guilty for drinking. And then I would go into a shame spiral for anything that I had done like ever in my life. It was really interesting. And so, Especially the things that I had done while I was drinking, I was analyzing every conversation that I could remember.
You know, you look at your phone and you're like, there's no effing way I said that in a text. or you're trying to remember what you said to so and so and then I would feel shameful. I'd be like, well, my behavior must have been bad. So I was allowing a lot of people in my life to treat me like shit because I was treating myself like shit.
I always was feeling like I wasn't good enough. I wasn't doing the best that I could do and it was bad. It was bad. So there was a lot of relationships in my life where, yeah, I was getting treated like absolute shit and I was allowing the cycle to repeat again and again and again. So friendships for sure.
A hundred percent for friendships. And in my immediate family, I just knew that I could have a better relationship with people if I removed alcohol from the situation. And number four I really felt like I had lost control of the little bit of control that I had. I wanted to control my life so bad and the more that I drank, the more I would try and control things, you know, like explaining this to you right now, like you listening on the other side of this.
It's kind of wild to think that I was drinking in order to control things because when you drink, you kind of lose control of things. So part of me almost wonders if I was so tightly wound in trying to maintain control of my life, because that would keep me safe. So much of it had to do with safety that alcohol would give me those little moments of reprieve.
Where I could relax, I could let go of the control and then things would just spiral out of control completely. So there was nothing healthy happening here at all. And number three, I just constantly had this little voice in the back of my head that knew that I could be so much more. I felt like I was always holding myself back.
Alcohol puts huge limitations on us. It limits, well, just like basics, like it limits, like, you know, you're driving that day. But outside of that, everything I was doing needed to revolve around alcohol. So I was limiting all of these different experiences that I could be having. And I knew that I had so much more potential in my life.
And again, you guys, high functioning alcoholic, I was a high achiever. I wanted to get so much done, but I was constantly like pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. And then it, Alcohol was making me feel like shit, shit, shit. So I was going in toxic guilt and shame. And so it was like, I was really never quite hitting my true potential or just living the way that life is supposed to be freaking live, to be honest.
And yes, I knew it was holding me back and I knew that I needed to let go of it in order to experience life that really, really was sitting deep in my heart. Like I just inside my chest, inside my brain, constant nagging was you can do so much better than this.
And it was interesting because a lot of times I would put that on other people, you know, I would be like, they could do so much better when I wasn't willing to look at my life and be like, no, you could do so much better.
Number two, this one is probably the hardest to talk about. Um, I feel like it could almost be its own separate entire podcast episode or entire video, but really the second biggest reason that I did this was for my kids. Everything I hated about my childhood, I was repeating in my own life. So, you know, lots of binge drinking, lots of unhealthy drinking.
I was repeating it, and I was making lots of unhealthy choices. I was doing stupid things. You know, my kids are teenagers, and I was It's getting a lot of those comments. Like mom's just drunk again. You know, I did a lot of shitty things while I was drinking and the reason why it's hard to talk about is I can't really go back in the past and change things, but I know that I can do.
Things differently moving forward. And there's a lot of times I feel a ton of guilt and sadness on this whole sobriety journey, because I am seriously mourning the person that I could have been, but I'm also at the same time, I'm looking forward to the person that I'm becoming. And look flat out, I knew my kids deserved a better mom. Would I say I was a shitty mom? Absolutely not. My kids have had an amazing life, but I think, but again, I could do better. And I was noticing the same patterns that I didn't want to repeat from my parents were starting to get repeated in my kids.
And I was like, I can't ask them to do better if I'm not willing to do better. And then the number one reason that I got sober was for myself. Look, I am a huge fan of doing things for your family, doing things for your community or doing things. We're doing things for the people in your life in general that will like better them.
But at the end of the day, you ultimately have to do things for you. Like this has to be for you. You know, I can say that my kids are my inspiration behind it, but again, at the end of the day, I'm the one who's going to put one foot in front of the other or, or in my case, I'm the one who's not going to take a damn drink of a toxic substance.
And in that same exact category of doing this for myself, it was clear that my body was not going to be able to maintain the amount that I was drinking. You know, one bad night I would spend three or four days hungover.
My face shape has totally changed in the last six months. I was so bloated and I had so much inflammation. I had like those chipmunk cheeks and there was bloating in my abdomen. You can see it even in my arms and the crazy thing. Was, was that I was like very consistent with my workouts. I was working with a health coach.
I was counting all my macros, doing all that kind of stuff. Of course, I was absolutely lying about how much I was really drinking. I was like one vodka soda would go into the app logs, you know, because I could fit that into my macros. But the truth was, is I had probably had three to five. Okay. Like, let's be honest.
But I wasn't going to lose the weight and I wasn't going to lose the inflammation. I put on 27 pounds in like the span of a year and that was just wild to me. That was while I was going to the gym while I was counting the macros, but I was still pouring the liquor down my throat. So you can kind of see like where this disconnect was happening.
My body was bloating, puffing, and so full of all of this extra toxic shit I was putting into it that I couldn't reach my goals.
You know, at the end of the day, I was the only person that I could blame for feeling the way that I did. So ultimately I had to do this journey for myself. And honestly, it was just time. It was just freaking time.