Ep 171: The 4 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Stopped Drinking Nearly 30 Years Ago

Christie pulls back the curtain on her four coaching pillars — Catholic faith, neuroscience, inner healing, and identity in Christ — and shares the personal journey behind each one. Nearly three decades sober, she walks through why she built her coaching approach the way she did, what she wishes she'd known sooner, and why she believes this framework works. If you've ever felt like something was missing from your sobriety journey, this episode is for you.

Resources mentioned: Encounter School of Ministry, Be Healed by Dr. Bob Schuchts, Unbound by Neal Lozano, John 10:10

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Transcript

 Welcome to the Catholic Sobriety Podcast, the go-to resource for women seeking to have a deeper understanding of the role alcohol plays in their lives, women who are looking to drink less or not at all for any reason. I am your host, Kristi Walker. I'm a wife, mom, and a joy-filled Catholic, and I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and I am so glad you're here. So I wanna share something with you today that I've been sitting on for a little while now, and it's something that I don't think I've ever really talked about on this podcast, or at least not all in one place. Someone asked me recently, "How did you come up with your coaching approach? Like, how did you develop your four pillars? Why do you include faith and neuroscience and inner healing and identity? Where did this all come from?" I built the thing that I wish I had. It evolved organically. Nearly three decades ago, when I got sober, the tools that existed were tools that existed. Nearly three decades ago, when I got sober, the tools that existed were the tools that existed, and I am so very grateful for them. They kept me alive, and they got me through a really difficult time. But there was always this part of me that felt like something was missing, like there had to be a way to bring my faith into this. There had to be a way to understand what was happening in my body, in my brain, without constantly drowning in shame. There had to be a way to get to the root of why alcohol had such a hold on me in the first place, instead of just white knuckling my way through cravings. And then there was the identity piece, this deep, nagging sense that I was so much more than the label that I had been given, that alcoholic was not the truest thing about me. So I started building, and I kept building as my clients showed me what they needed, and the Holy Spirit kept guiding me toward the next thing, a book, a ministry, a piece of science, a scripture, and slowly, what I do started to take shape. And today, I wanna walk you through all of it, not just what my four pillars are, but where they came from and why I believe they work. Because I think when you hear the story behind the framework, something in you is going to click. Because I think when you hear the story behind... Because I think when you hear the story behind the framework, something is going to click for you, and you might find yourself thinking, "That's exactly what I've been missing too." Okay, so let's get into it. My first pillar is faith, which is the foundation that I almost walked away from. I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic school for many years, the whole thing. I always believed in God. I always knew that He loved me, but somewhere in my drinking years, I started to feel like He wasn't that interested in what was happening with me, or maybe I just wasn't that interested in finding out. When I got sober nearly three decades ago, I was given a language to describe myself, a label. And for about two years, that label gave me community and structure and something to hold onto, but then something started to shift. I remember asking in a meeting, "Can I say that I'm a recovered alcoholic? Can I use past tense? Can I say that this is something that I've moved through?" And the answer was a resounding no. You are always an alcoholic. You are never recovered. And I sat with that thought, and it did not feel true for me. Now, I want to be really clear. Those early years in Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life, and I have nothing but gratitude for that. But there came a point where the language started to work against me. My mom always said that your brain believes what you say about yourself, and she was right. The more I repeated that label, the more I lived from it, and I just knew that I needed something different, and that's when my faith started to gr-- So I stopped going, and that's when my faith started to grow in a way it never had before. It was slow, believe me. It was slow as molasses. I'd go to church with my mom occasionally, sometimes with friends. I'd pray more, and I started turning back toward God in small and ordinary ways. And then my husband and I got married, and we started trying to have children, and we struggled. And in that very painful and uncertain season, I leaned into my faith harder than I ever had. I asked for the intercession from any saint I could think of. I brought my heart to God in a raw and honest way. And eventually, the Lord blessed us with twins. And if you know anything about twins, you know everything gets real very, very fast. So when they were about five months old, we had them baptized 'cause that's what you do. Even though I was really just kind of a nominal Catholic at best, I knew that there were certain boxes that definitely needed to be checked, and one of them was to be baptized. So we had them baptized, and then eventually we got them into Catholic school when they were ready for kindergarten, and my husband went through RCIA and fell in love with the church. And suddenly, my sons and my husband were coming home and telling me things about my own faith, because I'm a cradle Catholic. They were telling me about my faith, things that I didn't know. And I thought, "Well, if they know more about my faith than I do, our faith, our family's shared faith, then I need to go deeper," because eventually my kids are gonna be at an age where they start asking questions, when they start questioning things, which is completely natural. And was I gonna have good answers? Was I gonna have real and true answers? I did not think so. So I started to go deeper. I started listening to Catholic Answers. I started listening to Relevant Radio. I started reading books. And what I found when I started digging deep was that the sacraments aren't just rituals. They're not boxes to be checked. They're real, living channels of God's grace. The gifts of the Holy Spirit aren't just something that you read about in confirmation class. You are sealed with them. They're activated in you, waiting for you to use them, and the more you use them, the more God pours in. It's like the parable of the talents. The more you activate what you've been given, the more graces flow. And I started to get so excited. I started realizing that the strength I was looking for, the peace I had been searching for... And I started to get really excited. I began realizing that the strength that I was looking for, the peace that I had been searching for, and the identity I needed, it had been available to me all along, like through my whole life, through my faith, and I just didn't know how to fully access it. And that's the first pillar, and everything else is built on top of that the second pillar is neuroscience, the piece that removed my shame. Okay, this next one I have to be honest with you. I wish I had known this 25 years earlier because even after I got sober, even deep into my faith journey, there was still this quiet voice in the back of my mind asking, "What is wrong with you? Why couldn't you drink like a normal person?" And maybe you know that voice too. But it wasn't until I was about 25 years sober that I really started digging into the neuroscience of alcohol, and what I learned completely blew my mind and dismantled my shame. Because here's the thing about alcohol. It's not good or evil, it's just neutral. It's just a substance. But for some of us, what it does to our brains makes it incredibly difficult to stop, and this is not a character flaw, it's biology. Alcohol floods your brain with dopamine, your brain's reward chemical, and your brain is smart, it adapts. So over time, you need more to feel that same effect, and then when you stop drinking, your dopamine system doesn't just bounce back overnight. Because real lasting recovery of those receptors takes time. We're talking 60 to 90 days before you start feeling genuine shifts. And that's why so many people try to stop and get a few days or a few weeks in, feel awful, and go back. It's not a weakness, it's just brain chemistry. It's genuinely out of balance, and it's kind of just setting off an alarm in their head. So here's what I want you to hear. Every single day you don't drink, every time you push back against a craving, you are building new neural pathways. You're literally rewiring your brain, and if you slip, you're not starting over, you are starting from experience, and that's the difference. So understanding the neuroscience didn't make me want to go back and drink, it made me feel compassion for myself and for every woman I work with who thought that she just wasn't trying hard enough. You were trying hard enough, and now that you understand what is, what is actually happening, you can work with your brain instead of fighting against yourself Okay, now we're gonna talk about the third pillar, which is inner healing. This is about getting to the root. Here's the piece that took me the longest to fully understand. Alcohol isn't the problem. I know. Stay with me. Alcohol is a symptom. It's a tool. It's something that we reach for because something underneath hurts, and alcohol makes it quiet, at least for a while. Maybe it's trauma, maybe it's loneliness, maybe it's a broken relationship or a wound from childhood that never healed, or a lie that you came to believe about yourself somewhere along the way, that you are not good enough, that you are too much, that you are too far gone to be helped. And alcohol became your way of coping, your way of numbing or becoming the person that you thought you needed to be in that moment. But there is a gift in understanding that. If you can get curious about what you're really reaching for alcohol to escape from, you now know where the real healing needs to happen. Because controlling your drinking isn't necessarily the goal. Healing the wound underneath is. So for me, that deep inner healing work came through Encounter School of Ministry, through Dr. Bob Schuchts and his book, Be Healed, and through Neil Lozano's Unbound Prayer Ministry. What all of those have in common is this: they invite Jesus in, not as an observer, as the healer, as someone who is fully present in your wounded memories and your bo- broken places, and He wants to transform all of it. And in our community, we use our gifts to support each other through that... And in my Sacred Sobriety community, we use our gifts to support each other through that process. There's women praying for women, women encouraging women. That charism of community is one of the most powerful healing forces that I have ever seen. The inner healing work is hard, yes, but it is also holy. And it's absolutely worth it because when you address the wound instead of managing the symptom, everything changes All right. Now to the last pillar, identity in Christ, knowing whose you are. This is critical because identity is where all of this was always headed. For a long time, my identity around alcohol was tied up in a label. I'm an alcoholic. That's who I am. That's what I say. It's the first thing I announce when I walk into a room. Well, not really, but it was always on my mind. And then slowly, through faith and healing and learning and community, I started to discover a different truth about myself. I am a beloved daughter of God. Not someday when I have everything figured out, not after I've earned it. Right now, beloved, chosen, equipped. Not enough in myself, but in Him, with everything He's placed in me, that is more than enough. And one of the most liberating things I ever did was I stopped calling myself an alcoholic and just say, "Christi, I'm a daughter of God, and I don't drink." Yes, alcohol is part of my story, but it's not the headline of my identity. You don't need a label. You don't have to decide right now whether you're a gray area drinker or someone with a problem or whatever category the internet wants to put you in. You can just look at your relationship with alcohol and decide what you want it to be. Less, none, different. You choose. Alcohol gets to be neutral. Your identity does not have to be defined by it. Now, John ten ten says that the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and that includes your sense of who you are. He hijacks your identity with shame, with those very unkind inner voices that tell you you're not worthy, you're damaged, or you're too far gone. But Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full. Your identity isn't hijacked permanently. It's reclaimed. You are redeemed. You are restored. And the more you start living from that truth, and not someday, now, the more everything else begins to shift, including your relationship with alcohol So when I say I coach within four pillars, Catholic faith, neuroscience, inner healing, and identity in Christ, this is the story behind that. I didn't read it in a book, I lived it, and then I kept watching what my clients needed and let the Holy Spirit guide me toward what was missing, and the approach kept growing and deepening. Faith gives us the foundation and a source of grace that we just cannot manufacture on our own. Neuroscience removes the shame and helps us understand what's actually happening in our bodies and brains. Inner healing gets to the root, the wounds that alcohol was medicating. And identity in Christ gives us somewhere to land that isn't a label or a diagnosis. It's just the truth of who we are. That is what I want for you. I work with Catholic women who are ready to look honestly at their relationship with alcohol, not from shame, not from white-knuckling it with willpower, but from a place of grace and understanding and real deep healing. Some women decide to stop drinking entirely, and some reduce significantly. Some just arrive at a place of genuine freedom where alcohol no longer has power over them. But what they all share is this: they come in feeling like something is wrong with them, but they leave knowing the truth, that they are beloved daughters of God, fully equipped and more than capable of this. So that's what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here and for trusting me with a little piece of your time. If this episode hit close to home, if you heard yourself somewhere in what I shared, know that it is not an accident, and you are here for a reason Share this with a woman in your life who might need to hear it, and come back next week. We're going to keep going deeper into all of this together. Until then, you are loved, you are equipped, and you are not doing this alone. Well, that does it for this episode of the Catholic Sobriety Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I would invite you to share it with a friend who might also get value from it as well. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a thing. I am the Catholic Sobriety Coach, and if you would like to learn how to work with me or learn more about the coaching that I offer, visit my website, thecatholicsobrietycoach.com. Follow me on Instagram at thecatholicsobrietycoach. I look forward to speaking to you next time. And remember, I am here for you. I am praying for you. You are not alone.