Wild Sobriety

Blind Spot #2 Quitting Is Making It Harder To Not Drink (5 Part Series)

• Mary Wagstaff

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The hardest part isn’t pouring the last drink — it’s learning how to live well without needing one. In this episode, I share why “just quit” often fails and how a commitment-first approach makes sobriety simpler, softer, and actually sustainable.

Instead of fighting cravings, I walk you through how to uncover what alcohol has really been doing for you — comfort, transition, connection — and how to meet those needs in ways that honor your values and your body. This is where the feminine path to freedom begins: rooted in embodiment, curiosity, and compassion rather than self-judgment.

We also talk about the difference between attachment and desire, how your stories around alcohol amplify craving, and how to build evidence of your strength with small daily actions. This isn’t about perfection; it’s about devotion — to the woman you’re becoming.

✨ Takeaways:

  • Why “just quit” creates resistance instead of relief
  • How to uncover the real need underneath each craving
  • Simple rituals that help you transition, soothe, and reconnect
  • What commitment looks like in a feminine, sustainable way
  • How to shift from self-control to self-trust
  • Learn how to say no to alcohol, deprivation free. 

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast and its contents are not a substitute for rehabilitation, medical treatment or advice. It is for educational and inspirational purposes. I am not a therapist or doctor. The views here are expressed a personal opinion and based on first hand experience. Please consult a doctor if your mental or physical health is at risk.

SPEAKER_00:

In today's video, I am going to teach you why quitting is secretly sabotaging your sobriety. This is part two of the five blind spots that are keeping you stuck and making sobriety way more complicated than it needs to be. My name is Mary Wagstaff. If you are new to this channel, as well as I am, welcome. I would love for you to subscribe and follow along on this journey with me. I'm a holistic alcohol coach for women, and I'm really excited to be here on YouTube. And I have a lot of, I would say, more hot topic buttons to discuss, but we're just warming up here and we're just getting to know each other. I'm going to bring you the basics of my teachings, the things that I've been helping women with, women from all over the world that have varying relationships to alcohol. And one thing that I know to be 100% true is that it doesn't matter where you are on your journey. Sobriety is possible for you. The fact that I am here talking to you is because I believe that every single woman has access to sobriety, especially through the lens of feminine empowerment and really through the lens of honoring our feminine expression. And that's something that I'm very passionate about because quitting drinking is really the next level of your evolution as a woman. And I'm thrilled to be part of this journey. I've helped countless women through my podcasts. And I thought it would be fun as I'm warming up to being on camera. I am a real human here and I'm getting my camera voice and understanding how I'm teaching through the lens of video now. I thought it would be fun to share a little ritual and to share a little something about me. So I have this amazing candle. Something that I wanted to share. It's just a little fun tip about me is I love Reiki ASMR. There is a woman named Anna, and she has changed my life. And I wish that I could be as amazing as she is, but I'm not. These candles are so cool. This is a local company. I live in the Columbia Gorge in Oregon on the other side. I can see Washington from the window. It's very cool. It's very beautiful. I hope to have you all out someday. It's called Adventurous Aromas. This company creates aromatics, and I use essential oils in my practice, in my private practice for the same reason. They create aromatic candles that will bring you deeper into your favorite story, your favorite gaming experience. If there's a novel series that you love, and I made this special candle, it's called Priestess Moon, and it was a manifestation candle that I made with them for the story that I want to tell of being together, gathering women under the light of the full moon, fully wild and sober, fully awake, fully authentic in our beautiful glory as women. And I'm gonna light this candle for us today. Quitting drinking doesn't work. There is a statistic. I've looked it up, and these are even cooler because they have the wooden wick and there's a crackle. This is for us in this new journey. Online, it says that quitting drinking, the average woman will quit drinking five to seven times. Now, of course, some of that is rehabilitation attempts, serious attempts at quitting drinking. But never does it say the woman who with a broken heart who wakes up every single day telling herself that today she will not drink. This is you, this was me. I was a daily drinker for almost 20 years. And I know what it was like to have a broken heart when I knew the calling that I was ready for alcohol to be out of my life. And of course I had conflicting thoughts, and that's what kept it in my life for so long. Quitting doesn't work because you do not grow a muscle overnight. Quitting is something when you wake up Monday morning and you say, I'm never drinking again. And in the last episode, we talked about avoiding alcohols. Instead, I'm going to drink only green smoothies. I'm going to train for a 5K. You set yourself up with all of these other expectations that also aren't habitual. And not drinking is habitual. Not drinking is something you need to learn. You need to learn all of the things that alcohol has been doing for you in your life. And the reason that quitting doesn't work is because you have to validate the reason that you were drinking in the first place. We don't do things in our life for no reason. Now, there is a physiological chemical reward that happens, that there is a pleasure response and a reward from that experience of drinking. And there's also other needs that you have. Maybe there's a connection that you think that you make with your partner. It's your downtime, it's your transition time. And you really need to know what that is and accept the fact that, yeah, their alcohol is doing something for me. It is meeting a need for me. You have to know what that is first. And it's like, okay, I have been doing this for a reason. Then we have to understand can I meet that need on my own? Have I ever even tried? So when you just quit, you never really understand what was alcohol giving me. What need did I have that wasn't being met? And then we have to understand what am I working towards on the other side of alcohol? What am I wanting to achieve? What is beyond this habit that I would never be able to have if alcohol continued to be in my way? A lot of that you might not know right now. What I know is the possibilities of sobriety, especially in midlife and after, become so vast and mind-blowing because of the skill set that you learn of what's possible, because of growing your awareness and stepping into uncharted, wild territory that you never would have stepped into before. You're not quitting alcohol, you are committing to the woman that you want to be. You are committing to a lifestyle of living in alignment with the truth of who you are. And that means getting crystal clear on your values that you have right now. And you might not know what those values are because you've never asked yourself as a grown woman, what are my values? And there might be a contrast, like we talked about in the first blind spot of avoiding alcohol. There may be a contrast that you know what your values aren't. You might not know what they are, but you sure know what they are not. For me, as an example, I was a yoga practitioner and a teacher of mindfulness and wellness for the same amount of time that I was drinking. Alcoholic raised me as a woman, but I was fortunate that I was on this path of spirituality and mindfulness. It was, I lived a parallel life. I was drinking and going down my spiritual journey. There was so much wonderlusting and a bit of existential despair. And what we'll get into in a later episode, the biggest thing missing from my spiritual journey was the divine feminine, was the energy of the feminine that didn't exist in my yoga practice, that didn't exist in a lot of the wellness modalities that I was studying. And maybe it did, and I just wasn't aware of it at the time. So it wasn't until I started committing to finding my wholeness as a woman. And I was fortunate enough to study with a mentor that taught me about the feminine mysteries and honoring my cyclical nature versus shaming it. So we have to understand when we're quitting, what we're committing to, because commitment doesn't mean one and done. Commitment means I'm here to learn. So say you go to school, you sign up for a program, you go to college. Well, you don't just say, okay, I signed up, now I'm a doctor. No, you have to go through the steps. You have to study, you have to learn, you have to create new habits, you have to learn a new skill set and a tool. And for some reason, and it's there's no shaming, right? There's just evolving. We are evolving how we understand the lens of sobriety. And there's many different methods that will meet many different people. But here, I don't believe that you need to take, you have to go cold turkey to generate evidence and to actually start the process of quitting. I don't believe that that's a requirement. Now, the longer alcohol is in your system, the more it will impact those thoughts because you're gonna have maybe some physical desire for it. You're gonna have a physical craving. But a lot of that craving comes from attachment. Our attachment to the story around alcohol, which we talked about last time, actually creates more desire. So there might be a physical desire for alcohol from the chemical alcohol itself. But once you unpack the story, you stop avoiding alcohol, your attachment to alcohol lessons. And I'll probably do an entire video on attachment versus desire. But what you need to know right now is that quitting is not serving you. Committing is the mindset that you need for this journey and to make it your number one priority. And what I want to tell you is that it's going to take as long as it's gonna take. But the more you put it, lead with it as your main intention, unpacking it, not shaming yourself, but bringing it to the forefront of the conversation for yourself, not avoiding it and committing to unlearning alcohol, the quicker it's going to go. But when it comes to alcohol and addiction, and I do believe you can be addicted to alcohol and then one day not addicted to alcohol, it is not a life sentence for you. Everyone's relationship to alcohol is different based on many different factors. So you are committing to your journey, not anyone else's. And that is such a crucial point to know this is for me. Just like your desires and your dreams are for you. They are not anyone else's. And your unique gifts and your unique expressions, some of many of which are waiting for you underneath alcohol, are yours uniquely alone. And your gifts are required and welcomed here in this world to meet the people that are ready to meet them. And chances are, and I know you, that you are already doing so many beautiful things with the unique expression of who you are. You have created a beautiful life, and it's the thread of the life that you have already created for yourself, your beautiful home, your beautiful family that is going to be, you are going to follow. You've already laid out the footprints for yourself and it's staring right back at you. If you want to start to take your journey deeper, I have a whole course of how to make sobriety simple. And it is called the sobriety starter kit. I will leave the link right here in the comments. It helps break down everything that you need to plan, to implement, and then to evaluate, giving you all of the beautiful, heartfelt, mindful tools that are going to take you on your journey as a woman beyond alcohol and have true feminine freedom for yourself and with your ideas and not living a life and performing for someone else. Make sure you subscribe and the next episode where I reveal the third blind spot that is secretly sabotaging your sobriety. Thanks so much for being here.