How to stop Binge Drinking with Mindset Coach Kathryn Elliott Tribe Sober - inspiring an alcohol free life!

 
How to Stop Binge Drinking with Mindset Coach Kathryn
In early sobriety I was dutifully working my way through the QuitLit but one day I picked up a book that changed everything for me – the Naked Mind by Annie Grace.  That book was a revelation  – I finally understood how we are manipulated endlessly by the liquor industry to believe that we need their toxic product to enjoy our lives.  I started to see things quite differently. I started to laugh when yet another booze advert came on tv or another glamorous movie heroine poured herself a huge glass of wine!
I realised what the missing piece had been all along – it was mindset.
Until I read the Naked Mind I was white knuckling my sobriety so I was missing the most important piece of all.  That’s why we say the objective of our workshop is to create a mindshift – we know that we have to enable you to change your thinking – about drinking if you are to go on and actually thrive in your alcohol free life.
Our next workshop is coming up on June 25- you can get more info and book here So now you’ve heard how what a gamechanger The Naked Mind was for me you will understand why I’m thrilled to welcome one of Annie Grace’s Mindset Coaches as my guest this week…
Kathryn shares her personal story with us and explains why binge drinkers often don’t even realise that they have a “problem”…
In this Episode
Kathryn was a teenage drinker. With a friend she got through a bottle of gin and a packet of cigarettes at the age of 14 – the results were not pretty and involved a lot of vomiting but did not deter her
Drinking is so normalised in Australia that she almost felt an obligation to “push through” these early experiments until she got to a place where she was enjoying it – and she did!
In fact she discovered that once she started drinking she didn’t really have an “off” switch.
Now that she works with a lot of binge drinkers in her coaching career she hears many of say that they don’t have an “off” switch
Kathryn would be in a cycle – go for it, recover, go for it, recover
She didn’t really see this as a “problem” even when she started having blackouts at 16 – some blackouts which involved driving
She could go for weeks without drinking and challenges like Dry January were easy for her but she would always see these dry periods as permission to binge before and afterwards!
As Kathryn looks back on those short periods of abstinence she realises they did nothing to help her understand her binge drinking habit
Women need to understand that binge drinking is particularly dangerous as it can take up to a month for our liver to recover from a heavy session.
We tend to think that once the hangover has gone we can start drinking again but that just piles more damage on top of the existing damage.
Both Kathryn and I spent far too much time in the “Moderation Trap” as we couldn’t imagine our lives without alcohol. Even if we white knuckled our moderation for a while the binge drinking would return.
We are also both health conscious so can now appreciate the irony of going gluten free, eating organic, doing yoga, exercising daily – and then drinking far too much!
It’s as if it’s the last piece of the puzzle for our health – we are prepared to do all sorts of other things (even run marathons!) so long as they don’t take our wine away!
Kathryn always imagined she would “grow out” of her binge drinking but by the age of 42 she realised she had been stuck in this pattern for nearly 30 years and something would have to change.
There were two incidents in her 40’s which were a catalyst for the change – getting drunk at her brother's wedding where she fell over and hurt her hand and then had a row with her mother.
The second incident was a family holiday where she frightened her teenage children by being unable to walk
The next day she sat on the beach and cried – she realised she would have to quit
I call this t