My Journey to Healing: Breaking Free from Alcohol as a Health Coach

As a health coach, I often have to address many different components of health with clients as they embark on a healing journey. Getting healthy isn't a one-size-fits-all situation, and many layers need to come together when creating a healthful scenario for someone. One of the most common questions I get when coaching a client is, "What about alcohol?" Can I drink? Should I drink? Does quitting booze truly change anything? Can I heal my body while still consuming it? These are all very valid questions. I don't have all the answers for you because the answer depends on the individual and their underlying circumstances. 

I do have the answer for myself, though; 

I can no longer have alcohol in my life, period. 

Alcohol slowed my progression of healing:

I started to feel that after years of cutting out the inflammatory foods that were making me sick and trying to eat healthy, I was hitting a wall and wasn't progressing like I thought I should. I still seemed to have gut issues, bad breakouts on my face, bloating, and depression. When I would drink, I would participate in other unhealthy behaviors like smoking cigarettes and weed and binging on pizza or fast food by the end of the night because I was drunk and didn't care. Despite eating healthy and having decent habits during the day when I was sober, I was still going out on most nights and weekends and making decisions with food and lifestyle that didn't align with the person I wanted to be. Truthfully, this is when I realized I had a drinking problem, something I had never really taken the time to evaluate before. 

Where it started:

Drinking was always something everyone seemed to do everywhere I went. Growing up in a rural, blue-collar farming community, I regularly witnessed that drinking was a big part of my culture. People worked very hard, so they partied hard, too. My parents drank, and all the friends I ever had drank a lot as well, and it was all socially acceptable. This realization was what helped me understand my origin story with alcohol, and it helped me make sense of why I was the way I was. I eventually realized this is not who I am, and I no longer want alcohol to be a dominant part of my identity or a dominant component of my diet. 

The mental and emotional role of my alcohol use:

Not only was this a family and cultural influence, but I realize now that it was emotional and mental. Without fully realizing it at the time, I used alcohol to self-medicate for many things that I struggled to cope with on my own. I actively used it as my mechanism to avoid and suppress negative emotions and to "transform" myself into a person I thought other people might like to be around. I never felt fun, social, likable, or entertaining enough as I was. Looking back on it now, I realize I was tremendously ashamed of who I truly was. In many ways, I wanted to snuff my true self out for good and replace her with a more popular, extroverted version.

A darker side to my dependency on alcohol:

There were other things sprinkled into my need for dependency, like my high school diagnosis of OCD, a strained, tumultuous relationship with my mother, and a series of tragic deaths/losses in my early 20s that left me debilitated by grief. I never pursued mental health help for those issues until many years later, which is one of my biggest regrets, and by the time I did, I was flat on my back at rock bottom. The shame I carried for my perceived social inadequacies was bad, but not near as bad as the shame I had around my grief and the broken state of my mental health. Grief is weird and belongs in another blog post for another day, but my mind, cloaked in grief, was a very dark, sad, and lonely place. For me, the combination of grief and alcohol was the birthplace of behaviors and limiting beliefs about myself that were well on their way to creating symptoms of mental illness. 

How I started to separate myself from alcohol:

Once I became aware of my habit, I dug in to find its origin story in my life. Then, I kept a mindful awareness of when I was consuming alcohol, with whom, where, and why. I journaled and tracked the details of these events around alcohol and started to notice patterns. Once I was able to recognize the patterns, I was then able to make changes that helped me to separate myself from alcohol (i.e., transitioning jobs, moving to a new location, shaking things up for myself in general so I could add distance between myself and alcohol). Overall, I started paying attention to how I felt while drinking. I noticed that I wasn't getting good sleep, my hangovers came with feelings of dread and anxiety, and I would lose days just laying in bed recovering after every weekend. Adding the mindfulness component was critical for me to see my patterns and get sick of them. 

The damage of Alcohol on the Body:

Additionally, I heavily researched the health effects of alcohol. I learned that it can mess up our gut microbiome, cause dysfunctions in almost all of our major organ systems, cause sleep disturbances, and create systemic inflammation in the body. Heavy alcohol use is associated with rapid aging and an increased likelihood of injury or death, along with degeneration in mental health and brain function. Knowledge is power, and with this knowledge, I decided that if I really wanted the healthy lifestyle changes I was implementing to work, I needed to remove this barrier.  

One size does not fit all regarding healing and finding health. Since my health was not improving by changing my diet alone, I had to look at my other lifestyle choices and behaviors and identify things that were getting in the way of my happiness. Turns out, not only was I drinking too much, but I was using alcohol to cope with many emotional and mental problems. I know so many people who have a good relationship with alcohol, consume infrequently or in moderation and can have control when consuming it. I am not one of those people, and that's okay! I have just learned how to hang without it.

This story has a happy ending:

I never imagined in a million years I would be free from the grips of alcohol, let alone actually thriving and enjoying my life. Don’t get me wrong, it was hard for the first 3 months or so, but after that, it was like the skies opened up, and the clouds of inflammation had lifted. My mood evened out. I stopped experiencing high highs, low lows, and waves of depression and anxiety. I started to sleep better, my relationship with myself changed, and I grew to adore this person I once tried to drink away. I learned to feel my raw emotions and started feeling re-connected with my estranged soul. I saved my own life and showed myself what real healing truly looks like. Again, I can’t speak for everyone, but I think my experience is a telling one that is worth sharing, at least!

If you are interested in stepping into a healing journey and want to talk with someone about how alcohol may be affecting your ability to achieve the lifestyle you want, book a free consultation call so that we can talk! If it’s important for you to be able to hire a coach who has been there and done that with booze, I am your gal, and I’m only a click away!

In good health,

Betsy