15. Learning to Stay: What 100 Days Sober Taught Me About Self-Trust

For the past few years, I’ve challenged myself to do Dry January. But…this year became something much bigger. 

What started as “just seeing if I could do it” turned into 100 days sober. Honestly? The biggest thing I’ve gained hasn’t been about alcohol at all! It’s been about self-trust, and proving to myself that I CAN do hard things, sit with uncomfortable feelings, and stay present (even when I want to check out).

Believe me, I totally understand the many “quiet” ways that so many moms cope. Whether it’s alcohol, scrolling, overworking, or staying constantly busy, sooo many of us are just trying to find relief from #allthethings that come with motherhood. 

More than anything, this episode is about learning how to STAY. Stay with yourself, your body, your hard emotions, and your life…even when it feels uncomfortable. 

Self-trust is not built in huge, dramatic moments -it’s built in small, quiet choices over and over again. This is your reminder that you do not have to be “perfect” to rebuild that trust - you just need to keep staying!

Episode Recap:

• How doing Dry January turned into 100 days sober + a deeper journey of self-trust
• Learning to stay with hard emotions instead of immediately checking out
• Why self-trust matters just as much as confidence or discipline
• How ADHD can impact follow-through, emotional regulation & identity
• The connection between ADHD, overwhelm, and substance use
• Why many moms use alcohol (or other coping tools) to regulate an overwhelmed nervous system
• Realizing alcohol was often about seeking relief, not the drink itself
• How stopping drinking changed relationships, socializing & identity
• The unexpected benefits that came with cutting alcohol 
• What really builds self-trust over time

**Disclaimer: The content shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care. If you’re struggling or need support, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional in your area, because you don’t have to go through it alone.

Links/Resources:

• Follow on Instagram @tztherapy
• Check out my website

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi friends, welcome to Reproductively Speaking. I'm Karen Sweiger, and every week we will explore the intersection of parenthood, purpose, and mental well-being through honest stories, expert insights, and practical tools for everyday life. Grab your coffee, take a deep breath, and let's get into today's episode. Hey everyone, welcome back to Reproductive Speaking. I'm your host, Terrence Weiger. Today's episode is a little bit more personal than usual, but part of why I do this podcast is to create space to be fully human. And I also want to normalize experiences that so many parents are navigating or maybe they have navigated at some point in their journey. So for the past couple of years, I've challenged myself to do dry January, you know, the giving up alcohol for the month to start the year feeling fresh and clear, hangover free, more energized, all the things. And honestly, I've been pretty successful. Last year, I even made it all the way to St. Patrick's Day without having a drink. And that was pretty exciting for me. And overall, in 2025 alone, I feel like I drank significantly less than I had in the previous eight years of parenting by far. But this year has felt a little different. Yesterday, I hit 100 days sober. And in that time, while continuing to figure out what I actually want my relationship with alcohol to look like, I've spent a lot of time reflecting and staying curious and being open to whatever this experience has to teach me. And I think I went into it assuming that this would mostly be about the alcohol, right? But it really hasn't been. For me, it's been about self-trust. It's been about my body. And honestly, it's been about learning how to actually sit with myself. And as I've been in this process, I keep coming back to this thought. This isn't just about me. Because so many of the things that have come up in this journey, coping, feelings of overwhelm, disconnection, the need for relief. These are the things that I see every single day in the work that I do with moms. But we don't always talk about it in this way. We don't always talk about the quiet ways that we find to check out or how hard it can be to actually stay present in our life, in our bodies, and in our own experiences. So today I just wanted to share a little bit about what these last hundred days have taught me, not just about alcohol, but about self-trust, nervous system regulation, and what it really means to stay with yourself even when it's uncomfortable. One of the biggest things I've learned in the last hundred days is that I can actually count on myself. And that might sound simple, but for most of my life, that hasn't been my experience. I've always been really good at starting things, new planners, new routines, new goals. That initial excitement, the motivation, the this time will be different energy, right? And then life would happen and I'd fall off and almost immediately have this negative self-talk that would kick in. See, you can't stick with anything. Why do you even try? This is just who you are. You should just give it up. And I don't think we talk enough about self-trust. Sure, we talk about confidence and we talk about discipline, but self-trust, I'd say not really. And what I'm realizing is how powerful it is to prove to yourself over and over again that you can do hard things, that you can sit with hard feelings, and that you can move through hard moments without immediately escaping them. And something else that's felt really important for me to name in all of this is my diagnosis with ADHD, because I was diagnosed as an adult. And like a lot of women, it wasn't super obvious growing up. It didn't look like the typical ADHD that we often think about. And it looked more like being in my head a lot and overthinking, struggling with follow-through, feeling really sensitive to feedback and a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. And when you don't understand what's actually going on, we can create these stories about ourselves that we are inconsistent, that we're not disciplined, that we can't trust ourselves. But these things, this diagnosis of ADHD, it's it's not a character flaw. It's a difference in how our brain functions, especially when it comes to our executive functioning. And we know that executive functioning is basically just our brain's management system. It's what helps us plan and organize and initiate tasks and follow through, regulate emotions, make decisions, all the things, right? So when our systems are strained, it's not that we don't care. It's just that we're having a harder time. Our brain is having a harder time with executing. And when I look back at my patterns, at the things that I struggled with, the starting, the stopping, and the way that my inner dialogue was sort of like turn on me so quickly, it makes so much more sense now because our ADHD, when you when we're struggling with ADHD, it doesn't just impact our focus, it impacts our emotional regulation, it impacts our identity, and it impacts how we experience ourselves. And there's also a really important connection here, too. As I've sort of been digging into the research and taking more trainings specifically on perinatal substance use, um, we know that ADHD and substance use are closely linked. And many people with ADHD are more likely to use substances as a way to cope, especially when emotions feel intense or the mental load feels really overwhelming. And when I started reading all of this research, it made so much sense to me. It also felt a little bit validating because if our brain is feeling constantly overstimulated, if our emotions feel big, if it feels hard to slow down or get relief, then of course we're going to be looking for something, anything that helps. And I think that this can be especially hard if you've spent a lot of your life being a people pleaser, which I always tease and say in sessions with clients that I am a recovering people pleaser. I'm still working on it. But when our focus is constantly external or on what other people need, what keeps things smooth, then we start to lose the connection with ourself. And we're not thinking about what we want or what we need or what actually feels good. And self-trust gets really shaky in that space. Something else I've noticed is that I don't think that I fully understood my relationship with alcohol until I stopped. And there have been so many moments over the last hundred days where I caught myself thinking, oh, old me would have already had a drink in my hand right now. Or I would have been looking forward to that all day. And instead of judging that, I just got curious. And I simply just tried to ask myself, why? What is it about this moment that makes me want to check out? And what I realized most of the time is that it wasn't actually about the drink. It was about relief, relief from the mental load, relief from overstimulation, relief from my own thoughts. And honestly, sometimes relief from being in my own body. And I know that this isn't just my experience because in the perinatal period, substance use shows up more than we talk about and way more quietly than we acknowledge. And when we look at the context, higher rates of anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, identity shifts, relationship strain, um, and having very little structural support, it all makes sense. When moms are drinking, it's usually not about being reckless or recklessness, it's about coping. And it's about trying to regulate an overwhelmed nervous system. Because here's part of my experience that I didn't expect. When you take away something that helps you disconnect, you're left with just yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your body. And I think that for a really long time, alcohol helped me not feel so aware, not to overthink, not to sit in discomfort, not feel everything so intensely. And as a mom, that really hits differently because your body already doesn't feel like your own a lot of the time. You're touched out, you're overstimulated, you're constantly needed. And so, of course, it makes sense that at the end of the day you'd want something to take the edge off. But what I'm learning is that the goal here shouldn't be escaping our body. It's learning how to actually feel safe in the body that we have. And also, people are really weird when you stop drinking. I've noticed that I don't get included in things as much, or people assume that something's wrong. I'm in a bad mood or something if I'm not drinking. And it's been interesting to see how uncomfortable it can make other people when you make a different choice. Um, it's also made me reflect on my relationships and who I could actually show up as myself with instead of this version of myself that I would become or that I would feel more social, like wanting to be social, network, whatever, whenever I would drink. And with that, this one kind of surprised me. I feel like I've always considered myself to be an extrovert, but I feel like I've realized I might not enjoy socializing as much as I thought I did. Or maybe I just don't enjoy it in the same way or in the same environments. And that has been an identity shift, sort of figuring out what I actually enjoy, not just what I've always done or what has been acceptable or the easiest thing over the last couple decades. And I'd totally be lying if I didn't say that the part that's also been really amazing is 100 days free without a hangover, no anxiety, no lost days trying to recover. Yeah, I don't miss that at all. That has been so awesome. And with not having a hangover and not having days to recover or not having that anxiety, I've also noticed that other areas of my life, I've been more consistent. And even the areas of my life that are so silly and simple, but like my nighttime skincare routine, I haven't missed a day since January 1. Like I've done it every night, I've stayed consistent. I have like a little morning routine where I like start a little laundry, you know, start the dishwasher, whatever things that sort of help me, those things also have been pretty consistent. Um, because I just feel overall, like I just have felt uh more consistent in so many different areas of my life. So that's been really awesome. And, you know, more than anything, the experience has been about learning just how to stay, right? Like how to stay with myself when things feel uncomfortable, how to stay when I want to check out, how to stay when my brain gets loud. And every time I do that, every time I stay, I get curious instead of you know critical or running away or numbing, I build a little bit more self-trust. And I think a lot of moms in today's day and age, now 50 years ago, whatever, are walking around feeling really disconnected. And not because they're doing anything wrong, but just because they're overwhelmed and they're overstimulated or under-supported. And so they're doing what they can to cope. And again, that makes sense. But maybe the question worth asking is what are you actually needing relief from? And what might be underneath that? And if you're someone who feels like you can't stick to things or you don't trust yourself or you feel disconnected from your body, I just want you to know that self-trust is something you can build. And it's not about being perfect, it's just about staying. It's about following through in small, quiet ways over and over and over again. And you don't have to love your body every day, but you do deserve to feel at home in it. And you don't have to escape yourself to get through your everyday life. And I think that's really what this has come down to for me is just this idea of learning to stay, learning to be with myself, learning to be with the hard emotions, and not perfectly, and not every single moment, but more often than I used to. And every time I do, I'm building a little bit more self-trust. If anything in this episode resonated with you, I just want to remind you, you don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to do it perfectly. You don't have to escape yourself to get through life. You sh you don't even have to give up drinking. But I would just challenge you to see about how you can build your own self-trust in these really small, quiet moments when you do choose to stay. If this resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with another mom who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, make sure that you're following us so that you don't miss any future episodes. As always, I'm really glad that you're here. We'll see you next time. Hey, thanks for being here and spending some time with me on Reproductively Speaking. I hope today's conversation left you feeling a little more seen, supported, and maybe even inspired. If it did, share this episode with a friend who might need it. And don't forget to subscribe or leave a review. It truly makes a difference. Until next time, take care of your mind, your relationships, and yourself. You got this.