Ep 184: I Might Mess Up Your Drinking

If you've started paying attention to your drinking and suddenly feel like you can't stop thinking about it — this episode is for you. Christie explains why the chatter gets louder before it gets quiet, what the closet analogy has to do with sobriety, and what it actually looks like to go from "all I can think about is alcohol" to "I'm not thinking about it hardly at all anymore." This is the episode that reframes the uncomfortable beginning as the path — not the problem.

Topics covered: The warning — awareness might mess up your drinking | The woman who said it's all she can think about | The closet analogy — why the mess has to come out before it can be sorted | Christie's outpatient moment and the word "yet" | The hamster wheel vs. seeing the hamster wheel | The arc: more, then less, then free | What to do with the discomfort right now | What God does in the awareness stage

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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, Christie 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 Fair warning before we get started, I have a reputation. Ask any one of my clients and they'll tell you, "Christie will mess up your drinking." Not because I'm going to scare you or shame you or hand you a list of rules, but because I am going to help you start noticing things. And once you notice them, you can't really un-notice them. And that, my friend, is where things get interesting. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you've started to feel like alcohol is taking up more space in your head than it used to, like you're thinking about it more and not less, I want you to stay with me today because that is not a sign that something is going wrong. It's actually a sign that something is going right, and I'm going to tell you exactly why. Now, I have had more than one woman come to me in the early weeks of doing this work and say something like, "Christy, I feel like all I can think about is alcohol. I wasn't thinking about it this much before I started. Did I make things worse?" And I wanna talk directly to that woman today, because if that's you, I need you to hear something very, very important. You didn't make things worse. You made things visible. And here's what was actually happening before you started paying attention. The chatter was already there. The 3:00 PM mental negotiation, that was already happening. The planning, the justifying, the little reasons, those were already running in the background. You just weren't watching them. You were used to them. You weren't thinking about them. But now you're watching them, and it feels louder because you're paying attention to something you used to just do. And that's not regression. That is awareness, and awareness is the beginning of everything. Here's the way I explain this to my clients when they are in that uncomfortable early stage. Think about when you are cleaning out a closet. You know the closet needs to be cleaned. It's been stuffed full of who knows what for years. Things are crammed in, shoved into the back, buried under other things. From the outside, it looks fine. You close the door and nobody knows. But when you finally decide to deal with it, the first thing you have to do is take everything out. And for a minute or an hour or a day, it looks so much worse than before. Everything is piled on the floor and it's overwhelming. You look at the mess and you think, "Oh my gosh, why did I even start this in the first place? It was better when it was just all crammed in the closet." But here's the thing. It wasn't better. It was just hidden. You knew all that stuff was there, and on some level it was weighing on you, but once you get all of that out, you can actually look at each thing and you can ask, "Does this serve me? Does this belong here? Is this something I want to keep carrying?" And piece by piece, you start to sort it, organize it, and eventually the closet is cleaner than it has ever been, and you can actually find what you need. That's what this process is. The early discomfort, the louder chatter, the feelings that surface when you stop numbing them, that's not the mess getting worse. It's the closet getting opened, and you have to open it before you can clean it out. So I wanna tell you something about when I first decided to stop drinking. My first attempt is when I went to outpatient treatment because my roommate and my boss were both like, "If you don't get help, you're gonna lose your job and you're gonna lose your place to live." And I was like, "Well, that is not ideal. I need to figure something out." So I decided to do outpatient treatment for alcohol addiction. And I gotta tell you, I was not a model patient. I was resistant. I sat in the groups. I looked around at people who were older than me, people who had lost jobs and marriages and years of their lives, quite frankly, and I thought, "I am not like these people. I am not that bad, and I don't even know why I'm here." But I was so busy comparing myself to where they were that I almost missed what I was actually seeing. Because here's the thing, even though I didn't want to admit it in that moment, there was a part of me that knew. I looked at those people, I saw their pain, I saw their hurt, and I thought, "I am not like them yet." And the word yet landed somewhere I didn't want it to land. If I kept going, that could be me. It was going to progress, and I couldn't un-know that. So when I left and I tried drinking again, it didn't work the same way anymore. The awareness had seeped in unbeknownst to me, and drinking with that level of awareness, well, it just felt different. It felt less like relief and fun and being carefree, and more like a choice that I could see myself making. And eventually, I couldn't keep making that choice anymore. That's the discomfort of awareness. It ruins the unconscious comfort of the habit And it changes the drinking. That's awareness getting in, and once it's in, you can't drink the same way anymore There's a saying that you've probably heard, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That's the hamster wheel, running and running and not going anywhere. When you're on the hamster wheel, you don't really see it. You're just running, and it feels like life. It feels like how things are. You drink, you feel relief, you wake up the next morning, you get through the day, you drink again, and it's just Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and then Thursday. But when you start paying attention, when you start asking why, and noticing the chatter, and getting curious about what the drink is actually doing, well, you step off the wheel, you turn around, and you look at it. You see it. You see the loop. You see the cue, and the craving, and the relief, and the depletion, and the next day's craving. You see how it has been running your evenings, your weekends, your social life, your nervous system. You see it clearly and maybe for the first time. And to be very, very honest with you, seeing that can be really uncomfortable because you can't get back on the wheel the same way once you've seen it. But here's what I want you to hear. That discomfort, it's not a problem. That discomfort is the moment right before everything changes. I wanna tell you how this actually goes because I've watched it happen with enough women now that I can describe it pretty clearly. In the beginning, you do think about it more. You're noticing things that you used to just do unconsciously. You're catching the negotiations in real time. You're feeling feelings that you used to drink down. The chatter feels louder because you're hearing it now. You're listening for it. This is the hardest part. This is the messy closet all over the floor. And then something, something starts to shift. It happens slowly, You start to recognize the triggers before they become cravings. You start to understand what you're actually reaching for: rest, relief, connection, escape, and you start finding other ways to meet those needs. The awareness that felt overwhelming, it starts to feel like information, useful information, and that is data that you can actually work with. And then I have watched this happen over and over, and I tell you, it never gets old. These women come back to me and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm not thinking about alcohol hardly at all anymore." Not because they white-knuckled their way into not thinking about it, because they did the work of understanding it. They untangled themselves from the grip that it had on them. The grip loosened, and then it loosened some more, and then one day they realized it's just not that loud anymore. That is the freedom I'm talking about, not thinking about alcohol every single day or calculating and negotiating and managing. Just not thinking about it because it's no longer running the show. That's where this work goes, and the uncomfortable, chattery, messy closet beginning is the path to get there. So if you're in that early stage, if the chatter is loud, the awareness is uncomfortable, and you're wondering if you made things worse, here is what I want you to know. Get curious instead of panicked. When the chatter starts, instead of fighting it or giving into it, just watch it. What is it saying? What is it asking for? what does it think the drink is going to do? You don't have to answer those questions perfectly, just start asking them. And then name what is coming up, the feelings that surface when you stop numbing. The anxiety, the restlessness, the grief, the loneliness, they need to be named. Not fixed immediately, just named. This is anxiety. This is loneliness. This is boredom. Naming it gives you just enough distance from it not to be consumed by it. Then remember the closet. When it feels like a mess, remind yourself, this is what cleaning looks like in the middle. The mess was always there. You're just seeing it now, and seeing it is the only way to actually sort it. And then stay in it, and this, ladies, this is the most important one. The women who get to I'm not thinking about it hardly at all anymore, they got there by standing in the discomfort long enough to work through it, not around it, through it. Every woman I've coached who wanted to quit this work right in the uncomfortable middle stage, the ones who stayed in it are the ones who got free Now I wanna say something about what God does in this uncomfortable awareness stage. When you stop numbing, you create space, and God moves into space. the feelings that surface, the grief, the anxiety, the loneliness, the old wounds, those are not problems God is asking you to manage alone. They're simply invitations. He's been waiting for you to put the thing down that you've been using to avoid them so that He can actually get to them with you to heal those wounds. The awareness isn't just physiological. It's deeply spiritual. It's the beginning of letting God into a space that's been closed off for a long time. And that, well, that is worth the discomfort of the messy closet every single time and hey, if you want someone to help you open that closet and actually sort through what's in there, that's what I do. A clarity call with me is free. It's just a conversation. You tell me what's going on, and I tell you what I see, and we figure out together if coaching makes sense for you. Whether you decide to work with me or not, you will leave knowing exactly what you want your next steps to be The link is in my show notes, or you can visit my website, thecatholicsobrietycoach.com. Okay, here's what I want you to remember from today. Listening to me is probably going to mess up your drinking, and that might be the best thing that ever happened to you. Not because awareness is comfortable, it's not. Not because the beginning is easy, it isn't. But because you cannot clean what you cannot see, you cannot heal what you keep numbing. The chatter getting louder is not a warning sign. It's a sign that you're finally paying attention. The feelings surfacing, they're not problems. They are the contents of the closet finally coming out into the light. Stay in it, get curious, name what you're feeling, And trust that the women who came before you, the ones who sat in the uncomfortable, messy middle and kept going, they got to the other side. And on the other side, they say, "I'm not thinking about it hardly at all anymore." That's the freedom, and it starts right here in the uncomfortable noticing, in the messy middle, in the moment that you decide to see the hamster wheel for what it is instead of just running on it. Next week, I wanna talk about something that I think a lot of you are starting to feel as we head toward the end of summer. What does this look like going into fall? How do you protect what you've built when the seasons change and life picks back up? That one is going to be really important, and I don't want you to miss it. I'll talk to you again soon. 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 @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.