This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - When It’s Not About the Alcohol: Why High-Achieving Women Overdrink & What Actually Needs Fixing with Colleen Freeland | 413

Starting point is 00:00:00 The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health. Riders of all abilities are welcome and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family, or corporate team, and make an impact. Register today at bikeforbrainhealth.ca. Quick pause. We expanded to YouTube because we keep hearing, I needed this 20, years ago. And the next generation shouldn't have to wait. So tell the young women in your world who are scrolling and watching to subscribe to This Is Woman's Work on YouTube. I am Nicole

Starting point is 00:00:54 Kalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and what it feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And if we're serious about redefining it and I think we are, then we have to be honest about all the ways that we're coping with it. Because if you really wanted to know how I was doing over the course of my adult life, like actually doing, not how it looked on paper or in pictures, you wouldn't look at my resume or my calendar or even my bank account. There'd be a few things you could look to to tell you the real story of how I'm doing. And one of them would be my relationship with alcohol. Because for a long time, that was the tell.

Starting point is 00:01:38 Maybe not in the addiction, can't get through the day without it, life is falling apart way. More like the high functioning looks great on social media, crushing it professionally, but miserable personally kind of way. The kind where I was achieving, producing, showing up, and feeling disconnected, always trying to prove something and not at all comfortable in my own skin. And alcohol became the shortcut, the social lubricant, the on and the off switch. I used it to buffer myself and to soften the edges of spaces where I didn't feel like I belonged. It was my tell, a reliable one for sure, because when I felt lonely, when my confidence was at all time low, when I didn't like myself or my life very much, that's when I coped and numbed

Starting point is 00:02:26 with alcohol. But also, when I feel grounded, connected, and good in my life, I have to be honest that alcohol is still often present there too, in moments of celebration, of connection, of trips and family meals. So it forces a question, right? Is alcohol the problem? Because, friend, if alcohol is the symptom for you like it was for me, then eliminating it might be a great choice. But I promise you, it'll just get replaced with something else. Work, perfectionism, isolation, even obsessing over your health. If we don't, address the root issues, we won't stop coping and numbing. We just get more socially acceptable about it. And to be clear, if alcohol is something you need or want to remove from your life completely,

Starting point is 00:03:16 I could not respect that choice more. But if, like me, it's been more of an indicator of a deeper issue, then it may be less about the alcohol and more about your relationship with yourself. So to help me and us think through all of that, I've invited Colleen Freeland to the show. Colleen is an intuitive drinking coach and host of the top ranked, It's Not About the Alcohol Podcast. She works with high-achieving women to reduce their drinking, not through willpower, but by changing how they cope, think, and relate to themselves. After struggling with alcohol use disorder for 20-plus years,

Starting point is 00:03:53 she discovered that the real shift wasn't about getting sober. it was about getting emotionally well. So, Colleen, thank you for being here. And I'm going to dive us right in by asking you to help us think through, when is it about the alcohol and when is it about something else? And how can we even tell? If you have to ask the question, there's the answer. And the answer is not, as you alluded to, alcohol specifically.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Alcohol is your, let's say, drug of choice. It's your coping mechanism that works for you. Just like some people can eat a lot of sugar and never get overweight. Some people eat a little bit of sugar and have diabetes. Like we're all programmed genetically different with how certain substances interact in our brain. And for me and for many of us, when you grow up in a culture, you're condescary. to use alcohol socially, although nobody ever taught me to drink like a grownup. I'd learn to drink in a frat house, and I want a lot of trophies. I'm not going to lie. I had the ability to tolerate it. But what I learned, and you also alluded to you, is I had the ability to tolerate ignoring my body. Nobody's body, I don't care what your tolerance, what your genetics. Nobody's body

Starting point is 00:05:18 enjoys drinking beyond the buzz. So there's a bifference. line with alcohol, it's, it means, and that means a little and a lot have opposite effects. Anything below 0.055 blood alcohol level is therapy, it can be therapeutic. It's that cozy, connected, relaxed feeling that you want. But if you continue drinking, then the negative side effects start to compound because alcohol is a drug, not a food group or a party paper and it's your brain has to release all the stress hormones that you're trying to manage if you're coping with stress in order to keep you from getting so relaxed you forget to breathe so it's it's releasing cortisol and adrenaline and norephenephrine that's why you're exhausted after a long week and you're like

Starting point is 00:06:08 fine i'll just come out for one drink and then you're closing down the bar and you don't remember where you parked your car and oh no it's because those stimulants wake you back up alcohol also a net anesthetizes, pain, emotional pain, fatigue, exhaustion, all of that. So used responsibly, alcohol can be a part of a healthy and well-balanced life. The problem is we're not educated about how alcohol affects us. And because our culture has such a dichotomy where we believe there's a difference between a normal drinker and an alcoholic. And if you're a normal drinker, knock yourself out. You can have as much as you want whenever. you want, whatever you want, whatever. But if you have a drinking problem, get your butt to AA,

Starting point is 00:06:55 you're never drinking again. This is a lifelong chronic, debilitating, threatening disease that if you ever drink again, it could destroy not only you, but everybody around you. And that messaging keeps all of us who are realizing, huh, to your question, is this a problem? We can't raise our hand. That's a lifelong commitment. And so it's, it's, it, it, closets us, it perpetuates shame, and once you feel guilty and bad, and a lot of women don't associate shame with their drinking, but here's what it sounds like. I'd look better if I didn't drink. I'd be more productive. I'd be getting more done today if I hadn't had that glass of wine last night. That is shame, and that is what perpetuates the disordered thinking that causes

Starting point is 00:07:46 more and more drinking. This is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. Okay, so there are several things in there, but early on you said nobody taught you how to drink like an adult. And that actually jumped right into my brain because my mom is from Germany and I have found that Europeans are, I don't know if they teach people to drink like adults, but it just didn't seem so bingy and so problematic and so all of the negatives. And that, to me, when I look back on my life, it was the blackouts and the hangovers and the didn't know when to stop. and, you know, drank myself into oblivion, those were huge tells that I was in a really bad place. If I have a glass of wine with dinner, I don't have any feelings about that anymore.

Starting point is 00:08:32 So, okay, I don't even know where I'm going with this, but my question is, how do we begin to rebuild a relationship with thinking about alcohol, given all the stuff and all the noise that we've been taught up to this point? the first thing is to realize you've always been doing the best that you can with the tools that you have. And to speak to the source of why there's bingy, blackouts, well, our drinking age in America is 21.

Starting point is 00:09:04 So most of our first experiences, we had to drink as much as we could, as fast as we could, so that we didn't get caught. So we had to, you know, drink all the stuff before we went out because the adults could just have a drink and get through the e-eval, but if you were under 21, you had to pregame. So understanding there's nothing wrong with you and that this is a mix of culture and environmental and stress and how alcohol interacts with your physiology. So step one is to realize nothing has gone wrong. You are where you are and you've got a habit that you would like to change because you think you want better.

Starting point is 00:09:45 you know you could you could be better and feel better. It's about looking forward and okay, I'm at point A and I'm going to get to point B and also having very realistic expectations that you can't rewire the patterns that have been driving your drinking for decades overnight. Like there's a process and I teach this and it actually begins with not changing your drinking. That's the big mistake that everybody makes. that too much drinking is solved by no drinking or less drinking and they're all focused on the behavior and that becomes a negative feedback loop because you're delaying feeling confident and powerful and motivated which are the things you need to feel in order to go against and reprogram a habit

Starting point is 00:10:36 you're delaying that feeling until after you can look back and say oh I haven't made that mistake in a long time. I do have my shit together. Like, the reward is so far in the future. And then you still have the fear that it could slip back. And this is why the method that I teach is designed for high achieving perfectionists. Because if you don't get a 10 out of 10 and stick the landing, then you dissolve into a puddle of, well, I guess it's not possible. And I keep doing this. And I can't trust myself. Because you don't understand how habits work, how alcohol works. And what the actual process of changing your drinking habits so that they align with your values and goals. The harder you try to change your drinking, the harder it gets and the more you end up drinking.

Starting point is 00:11:25 Okay. So I want to get into that. But before I do, I said in the introduction that I believed if you just eliminate drinking and let's say you're successful with that, you'll end up replacing it with something else. Is that accurate? Am I full of shit? No, that can be a brilliant first step. And I, one of my first steps during COVID, when all of the things that kept me with a very manageable drinking problem, I had to teach hot power yoga at 7 a.m. I had seven teenagers. I had committees and meetings. So I was drinking around all of that and I was managing it. COVID comes. And all of a sudden, it's happy hour at noon. And I just got up at 11. and it was just bad. The only thing I could control during COVID was to stop drinking completely. And so, but what I realized quickly, once I detoxed, takes about 10 days if you're a heavy daily drinker, it takes about 10 days to get all the metabolites out. And it takes about 30 days, if you want to go the cold turkey route, it takes about 30 days

Starting point is 00:12:37 to get that dopamine baseline back. I went three years. And after the first month of just feeling like a relief, like I'd walked away from a car accident because it was bad. I was drinking a bottle of vodka a day at the end. But then I, that's how I realized the perfectionism, the anxiety, the lack of boundaries, the lack of action towards things that I needed to change in my life. I didn't have a coping mechanism.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Two years into my sobriety, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, and I had never been a problem even when I was drinking. So there is no right way to take the first step. The first step is whatever you're willing to take. I just deal with a lot of women who it's not that bad. And they're in their heads about whether or not it's even a problem and what do they do. And that's where my approach is so counterintuitive and unique where I'm like, come with me. Like I want to drive a bus around AA, stop places and be like, get on.

Starting point is 00:13:40 the bus, I got you, you can bring your drink because removing the coping mechanism that is currently one of the pillars on the tent poles that are keeping up your life before you have the capacity to deal with the stress and striving the drinking is why you end up on and off the wagon. And so another myth in our culture with the AA culture is that you have to be sober to do the work. No, you don't. You're doing the work every day all the time. You're doing the best you can. And so what if the first step is just, first of all, deciding if you want to take a break or not and then getting support with that. But you still got to do the work. Removing the drinking is not fixing the problem. So either way, you have to make space to begin to focus on nervous system

Starting point is 00:14:35 regulation. Like my women are shocked at simply by the first 30 minutes of your day is foam-free. Taking a lunch break where you're chewing and eating your food. Coming home from work and spending five minutes dancing or laying on your bed or doing something to bring yourself back into the state of regulation. You mentioned something that I want to point to where when you're bad, drinking is bad. But when you're good, it's not an issue. Exactly. And when you realize that probably in any given day, you're good and bad and good and bad, those are states of your nervous system. Those are feelings. Then the more you begin to expand your capacity to be okay, to walk through your day calmly, the more you're going to land in the evening with an option to have a drink or it

Starting point is 00:15:28 doesn't even occur to you to pour a drink because you don't need it like you used to. And when you start looking at your own patterns, the solution already exists. You just haven't noticed. A lot of that resonated with me. And I want to hone in on this idea that all of our days have good and bad. And what I've kind of seen, if I look historically, is it's not so much the moments of good or bad on a day-to-day basis that were impacting me. It's more of the larger periods of life like COVID. as an example. I definitely drink more in the first year of COVID than I had in many years previous to that. And it was a coping and it was a numbing. And I wasn't in a good place, not from moment to moment day to day, necessarily, but just over a long stretch of period. And that just became a little bit more of the default.

Starting point is 00:16:21 So my question is knowing that every day is going to have some good and some bad, or every week is going to be a little bit of that roller coaster. But how, How do we stay with ourselves as opposed to reaching for something, whether it's alcohol or something else to cope? Yeah. Well, it really begins, like you and I can't help anybody, including ourselves, change habits through talking. You can't listen to what we're saying and change. What you can change is your perspective. And what you need to understand is that the way you're thinking, which for many of us is as soon as, all this stress clears, as soon as the lockdowns end, as soon as I find the job or I decide if I'm getting a divorce, then I'll get back to normal.

Starting point is 00:17:12 And the truth is there is no such thing as going back to normal. And that's the good news because your brain is neuroplastic, which means it's all. always changing. So some of this is a perspective shift in that if you're not, there is no going back to normal because that story then says, well, screw it. You know, I can't, I'm just going to do the best I can to cope with it now because I have to wait to feel better when. Part of this is understanding your nervous system only ever lives in the present moment. She doesn't live in the past. She doesn't live in the future. And that's changing your relationship with yourself. Most of us that are high achieving, highly productive, we don't even pee when we have to pee. We are putting ourselves last on

Starting point is 00:18:03 the priority list because the bully in our brain that's a perfectionist is like you got to push, you got to go. That sense of urgency though, like your body speaks energy, not English, all this, even the thoughts in your head about alcohol at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. when you're like, oh, I'm having a glass of wine later, your brain is trying to solve a problem in that moment. She needs relief now. That glass of wine later tonight may make you feel better in the moment because you're anticipating relief. You got to understand how dopamine works too. But the bottom line is you don't actually want to drink. You want relief. There's no words for that. That's why the solution to over-drinking, to being the person you want to be is always a present

Starting point is 00:18:46 moment feeling. You can solve for this in 30 to 90 seconds, no matter what's happening. You can be sitting in a jail cell and connect to the version of you who is okay, even though it's not really okay right now. Okay. So then how do we do that? How do we seek relief in, I don't know, healthier, more productive ways that actually solve the now problem or address the now problem? Yeah. So this is why it's so important. to understand that this is at its core a nervous system regulation problem, not a drinking problem. Because your awareness, your focusness, your consciousness is a flashlight. You can only point it in one direction. And if you're pointing it as how much you drank last night and how much you're going to

Starting point is 00:19:34 drink later, you're using an extremely intelligent tool to solve the wrong problem. So the first step is understanding that the solution to every single problem in your life, be it the money in your bank account, the conflict in your relationship, your relationship with alcohol, it all begins with nervous system regulation. And that has to be your priority, not getting more money, not getting the divorce or getting married, not fixing alcohol. In your relationship with yourself has to be your highest priority that everything else will and can wait, until I get myself regulated. And then once you understand that that's the bullseye on the tree, that is the agenda, that's what I'm doing, then there's hundreds of tools and things that you can do.

Starting point is 00:20:24 Oh, and P.S., they don't all work the same day. What worked yesterday? Yesterday's truth? Tomorrow's bullshit. You have to always be paying attention now. Our needs change. You know, I'm a 52-year-old woman. What I needed at 30 or at 20, it's changed. The truth is always, is your experience. So what can you do is understand first that your nervous system, your regulation and your nervous system is your highest priority. I don't speak. I don't go to work and solve problems. In the mindset that feels urgent or frustrated or angry or stress, all of those feelings are welcome, but where the tail wags the dog in our strategies is that I have to go out there, to fix how I feel in here. And so we spend our whole life avoiding the negative emotions because we

Starting point is 00:21:19 think the only way to fix them is to go out there and into the future or into the past and change that. Like, that's a thing. And so it's really about understanding that nervous system regulation is the skill. And then it's becoming as easy as taking a double inhale, coming into the present moment, being safe in the here and now. You know, there's a lot of somatic work that must couple the mindset work. I'm curious, for me, sometimes the most important first step is acknowledging, if my brain goes, what am I going to drink later, acknowledging like, oh, I must be looking for some sort of relief in my life. Or, oh, my God, I am feeling so frustrated right now. Let's sit with that. Why? What's going on? What am I making up about it? Like, there's so many, as you said, so many ways,

Starting point is 00:22:10 but for me, sometimes it's in the acknowledgement of like what's really going on here that is often the first step for me taking a more empowered or more productive approach to something. Thoughts? It's called emotional hygiene. And if you have been leaving your emotions at the door, because that's what makes you successful. And you have been from eyes open to eyes close running and you are not stopping. and even noticing that something made you uncomfortable, or you're agreeing to things that you don't actually agree with. You're ignoring yourself. And when you heal your relationship with yourself, what does that actually tactically look like? It means you start talking to yourself like you're a person. So many of us feel so unappreciated. Nobody notices all the shit that we do. Start thanking yourself. Thank you for making my lunch. Thank you for making my bed. I'm going to so appreciate that. later. I'm going to stop at the store and grab you some sushi so you've got something to eat later.

Starting point is 00:23:15 Like, I'm doing you a favor. It's like, this is how you turn on the energetic connection. When you both give and receive your own attention, that's what plugs your brain back into your body. And so you have to think of yourself like a person, which we've never been taught of. But just imagine you've been issued. You get to Earth school and they issue your meat suit and your physical body is mine's 52 years old. She's got blonde hair, four kids, and my only job is to take care of her today. And the more I take care of her by noticing her,

Starting point is 00:23:53 acknowledging when something hurt her feelings, setting herself up, one of the best analogies is every action you take goes on a conveyor belt, and it's either a gift or a piece of shit for your future self to open. So when the dog food arrives late at night and it's dry freeze and I look at it and like, I don't want to do that. Oh, that's a dick move. I'm not going to leave that for Colleen tomorrow. I will do that for her.

Starting point is 00:24:18 So you have to create a relationship with yourself through dialogue. And it kind of feels like learning a new language because most of us don't realize we are talking to ourselves horrifically. We're in an abusive relationship with ourselves. We set unrealistic expectations. We expect more of ourselves than anybody else. And if alcohol is your pain point, then here's what. All you need to know is that you're operating on a deficit. You are giving more than you take. And that doesn't mean you have to quit your job or change your whole life. That means you have to go pee and don't take your phone. Two minutes. That's it.

Starting point is 00:24:56 Okay. So the crux of it is really regulation. It's connection with self. It's, for me, it was repairing self-trust, confidence. I think, as you said, may look different for each of us at each different stage of our life, but it is really being in relationship with ourselves. And let's say we evolve, because it's not an overnight thing, into that with and for ourselves.

Starting point is 00:25:25 And it's, you know, never a, we arrive, plant the flag and the work is done, right? It's an ever-evolving, ongoing work we get to do. If we're in that space, I would imagine that our relationship with alcohol or whatever it is we're using to cope and numb may look different. And for some people that may look like, I just choose to never drink again. And for some people that may look like I have a glass of wine when I'm in Italy because I want to. And for some of us, that might look like whatever. When we do the work with and for ourselves, how does that play out with this thing that we were using in an unhealthy way before? So you spoke to self-trust and confidence. And another perspective shift that you have to have is, how do you have self-trust and confidence when you wake up hungover? It's redefining success as away from that performance mindset of,

Starting point is 00:26:33 I nailed it. My behavior is good. I performed the best version of me. Self-trust is actually, I trust myself to learn from every mistake. Because that is the evolution of this, I don't trust myself to always drink perfectly. That's not what that means. That means that if I wake up with a hangover, I'm going to pay attention. I'm going to look at the factors. Where was I blowing through my stop signs? and not being regulated and putting myself into a situation that was not setting me up for success that allowed that old habit to rear its ugly head. It's like self-trust is about learning and realizing you're always going to learn and something's going to hit you sideways and you're going to react kind of instinct. Maybe you're drinking. Maybe you're avoiding like doing the things you've always done.

Starting point is 00:27:31 and the moment you realize that is the difference between being able to solve this problem and not. That is where the work starts. That's why I call myself the hangover whisperer on social media. Because the work you need to do is not about how much you're drinking Friday night. It's about how you respond to yourself when you've made a mistake, when you're feeling ashamed or frustrated or like there is a setback. That is where self-confidence and trust comes in is in those moments you're not abandoning yourself and telling yourself some shitty story that you're not capable or you always screw up or you've embarrassed yourself, nobody's going to love you again. You have like, that's the moment. And that's why in my program, most women come in, they don't quit drinking. Because if they quit

Starting point is 00:28:18 drinking, then we've got a perfectionistic performance. The work can't start. If somebody says, I'm going to do three months of sobriety, I'm like, well, maybe just call me in three months. because sobriety is how you avoid your shame, not heal your shame. You got to have the shame in the context you're having it. That's the work. Does that make sense? It does. It definitely flies in the face of, I think, what many of us have been taught and potentially believe.

Starting point is 00:28:46 I do worry a little bit about people who have an alcohol addiction, not my area of expertise, but. It's called alcohol use disorder. and it's a spectrum. Most of the women that we are talking to you right now, if you can still go to work, function highly, and most people wouldn't guess that you have a drinking problem, we are not talking about that level of addiction. There are people who can't function,

Starting point is 00:29:14 who are drinking before, during, and they don't even have a job. So it's a spectrum, and you have to understand solutions are different. But that's what's so counterintuitive is we're giving everybody the same advice. If you're drinking too much, you should quit. And women, they're like, I'm running a business.

Starting point is 00:29:34 I'm at, don't tell me. And then it's so condescending as though one size fits all. And alcohol disorder is so stigmatized. We label the person, not the problem. And that's why we don't want that label. And that's why we go years and years and years without saying, I don't drinking too much. Is anybody else?

Starting point is 00:29:56 Like, what do I do about that? We can't intervene early because we're waiting to hit rock bottom. I think you hit the nail on the head for me personally is this one size fits all solution. And it's one extreme or the other. And that's it. Anything in between is a problem, right? That part has never resonated with me, this sort of condescending feeling of, oh, well, you know, you must be weak or not have enough willpower. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:30:26 there's a lot, I think, in what you said that really resonates with me. And I don't know why this keeps popping into my head. So I'm just going to honor it. But we had a woman a couple years on the show on the topic of body confidence. And she talked about how we often think of body insecurity is the shame and the noticing every little thing and always thinking about your body and what it looks like to others and what you're going to wear and blah, blah, blah. And then we think of body confidence as its opposite. Like, oh, I look good, I feel good. I wear what I wear and I'm showing everybody or whatever. And her argument was that body confidence wasn't the opposite. It was an absence of thinking about it all the time. It was just like, I don't think about my body all the time.

Starting point is 00:31:13 It is not the top of my mind. And I'm butchering the way she framed it. She obviously did a beautiful job. And that's kind of what I'm hearing when I'm listening to you as well, where, again, Again, each individual makes their choice, and wherever you're on the spectrum, that is obviously something to include in that choice. And when I'm in a really good place, when I'm happy, when I'm healthy, when my confidence is an all-time high, it's the absence of thinking about alcohol that often is where I know I'm in a good place. That is what I show women in terms of painting the picture. It's kind of, Coming home from work and not even occurring to you to pour a drink.

Starting point is 00:31:59 And also recognizing that that obsessive thinking about alcohol, it's the first thing you wake up, think about in the morning by midday, you're planning. Am I stopping by the store? No, I'm not going to drink. All the alcohol thoughts, that's where those are a symptom of nervous system dysregulation. And that reframe is the entry point. when you realize whether it's because we get obsessed with whatever the problem is. The difference is fixing the problem or creating a solution, creating a reality where that

Starting point is 00:32:33 problem doesn't exist anymore. And so when you realize you're stuck in your head about alcohol, you can diagnose yourself with an alcohol problem and how's that going? We've got people in meetings that haven't had a drink for 30 years identifying. is being addicted to alcohol or having a lifelong disease. Hello, you haven't had a drink in 30 years. Like that's not even logical. A-A. And that whole concept was developed before they understood neuroplasticity. So if you can just learn that when you're stuck in your head about the money in your bank account, about how much you drank, about what's going on with your kid, and realize it's not about any of that. That's just like the energy, your brain is translating the energy in your body.

Starting point is 00:33:22 and that's the closest problem it can find, and you're actually just dysregulated, that's the answer to point. That's moving in the right direction. It's not beating yourself up because you're thinking about alcohol. You can't change what pops into your head ever. You can change how you respond to what pops into your head and stop believing everything you think. Your body speaks energy, not English. Okay, I could ask you so many more questions, and I'm sure our listener is going to want to learn more and dive deeper into this. I want to go back to what you said, create a reality where the problem doesn't exist anymore. I think that is the greater invitation here, whether it's alcohol or any other coping or numbing mechanism

Starting point is 00:34:08 you may be using like perfectionism or work addiction. There's so many things in scrolling. There are so many things in today's day and age that we sort of default to. And I love this invitation of creating a reality where the problem doesn't exist anymore. And I don't want to make it sound easy or oversimplify it. It is going to require deep, potentially hard, definitely emotional work. So any last piece of, I don't know if advice is the right word, encouragement for our listener who is willing to accept the invitation to work on their reality. Yeah. It's the absolute best work that you can do.

Starting point is 00:34:50 and, you know, if you have an alcohol-specific problem, getting an alcohol-specific solution like mine, counterintuitive, that can help. But simply pursuing nervous system regulation and realizing that the peace you seek is already inside of you right now. And the first step to being okay is to acknowledge you're not okay and to be okay with the fact that you're not okay. And that's what grows your capacity to handle bigger and bigger things in life. And that is the superpower that every high achieving stressed out woman is looking for that you don't even understand. Your success is not with the trophy.

Starting point is 00:35:39 Your success is being good with how you're showing up right here, right now, when your new puppy pittles on the floor, when your kid wrecks your car, And you get fired from your job and realizing that you're the person, you are your own life partner, whether you like it or not, this whole idea of I can't trust myself, bitch, you don't have a choice to trust yourself. I can't handle this. Oh, you are handling it. Like, you're not handling it well, evidently, but you are handling it. Like, being your own best friend versus your own worst critic is the difference between,

Starting point is 00:36:20 professional success and personal success and being miserable in the middle of having a life that's enviable to everybody else. Yeah, it reminds me of something I say to myself often when I'm not okay or when I have a bad day or whatever. It's like, I'm not okay or this sucks or whatever. It's the added part is and I trust myself to figure it out. Yes. Because I always have. I mean, I have more evidence of that than anything in my life. And I love what you said. It's like, if you don't trust yourself, who will? And we don't have a choice, friend. That's not a thing. You are with you from the first moment. And you are the only person who can never abandon yourself. Right. You are the only person who can always be on your side and always get your point of view. Even when your dearest, most beloved person

Starting point is 00:37:11 in your life betrays you. You're still with you. And learning that feeling like your own best friend is a skill nobody teaches you. What they taught you is how to perform. And if somebody says jump, you say how high and then you worry about managing everybody else's feelings. No, just manage your own. Just manage your own feelings. Your feelings about everybody else's feelings are still your feelings anyway. So the more you realize the answer is inside, it gets a lot simpler. And I'm not going to say easy and that, you know, there aren't specific tools that can be really helpful in whatever,

Starting point is 00:37:50 what you're dealing with, alcohol specifically. But when you realize that the solution is to become your own best friend, then your brain will help you get whatever you want. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. If you're ready to say yes to yourself, just open your eyes and it'll be there for you. That's how it works. Okay, friend, well, if you're looking for more guidance, more support, if you're ready, the website is Emotional sobrietycoaching.com.

Starting point is 00:38:20 Colleen also hosts a podcast call. It's not about the alcohol, so you can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course, you can find her on social media at The Hangover Whisper. Colleen, thank you for a really interesting conversation that I think blew apart a lot of things in my brain. And I'm going to look forward to continue to think through, live through, learn. through all of this. So thank you. Thank you, Nicole. All right, friend, we hear a lot about managing our indicators, drink less, work smarter, scroll less, eat healthier, be more disciplined. And none of that

Starting point is 00:38:53 is bad advice. It just may not get to the root of what is actually going on. Because if something in your life has become the way you cope, the way you numb, the way you get through, removing it won't automatically make you better. It just removes your current strategy. And without doing the deep work. We don't stop coping. We just find a different way to do it. So maybe the work isn't just to eliminate. Maybe the work is to build the capacity to stay with yourself, to feel, to process, to create a life that you don't regularly feel you need to escape from. Because doing that, well, that is woman's work.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - When It’s Not About the Alcohol: Why High-Achieving Women Overdrink & What Actually Needs Fixing with Colleen Freeland | 413

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