I was listening to my teacher on a call when she said that healing and transformation only happen in presence.

It made me think of all the times I needed healing and where I went looking for it. The first sip of wine, a warmth filling my body, the first exhale I’d had all day. A warm bath with a book. Sex, my body alive in all its sensation, oblivious to any thought.

Transcendental. And gone the moment it was over.

As soon as the glass was empty, my clothes were on, the bath drained. I was left with what was. And how confused that would leave me. Isn’t this self-care?

These acts were certainly meeting the need in the moment. Admittedly, some sexual experiences left my needs feeling met for days. But once the buzz or the high or the warm wet relaxation dried up, there it was. The need. The constant inner vibration and static. The desire for more. That quiet question: is this it? The anxiety and overwhelm, immediately followed by: I’ve got to get out of this.

If changing the way I felt and avoidance were jobs, I could have made a career out of them. A successful one at that. I drank, moved, took anti-depressants and fucked my way through deaths and divorces. Economic downturns? Blinders on booking flights across the ocean and shopping. I couldn’t feel my reality, let alone look at it.

Isn’t self-care being packaged in a cocktail, a cream, another body and sold to us as the way, when what we’ve really been thirsty for is permission to soften, feel good, take up space in our own lives? And so far as I can tell, the messaging is exactly that. Have a drink and relax. Sign up for a dating app. Buy this book, change your hair, join this or that, take time off. YOU DESERVE IT. We call it self-care if there’s a nice bottle and a better candle involved. Nobody is asking what you’re actually trying to get away from. Or why the self needs care at all. No one profits off you relying on your body’s wisdom.

After several decades of reaching outside myself, I reached a dead end. I surrendered. No wine. No more casual sex. No trips. No shopping. I started to listen to what was there, moment by moment. It didn’t take long to understand the constant-ness of doing more, being busy, and trying to control every area of my external life was wreaking havoc on my body. Let’s just say there is no amount of face cream or cum that can solve for cortisol, adrenaline and epinephrine coursing your veins. (And if we are getting technical, one can hardly cum with all of those chemicals.)

When I stopped trying to change the way I felt, the way I felt started to change. I could breathe. I softened. I started to feel all that was coming up in this moment. And I realized this was the erotic act. Not the wine. Not the sex. This. Being present with what was. The pleasure of arriving to myself, as an altar, with my arms tightly hugging me back, was the embrace I had been looking for.

I witness the women I know and work with running the same errand. Different products, different people. Still empty. She doesn’t know yet that she was always the source. In many ways she has been taught to fear her body. So that’s where it begins.

And somewhere in that turning toward, she turns on.

What she finds is never out of reach. A few moments of quiet breath before she reaches for anything. A hand on her own chest. The question: what do I actually need right now? Usually the answer is smaller than she expected. A moment to soften. Permission to be.

That’s where transformation and healing begin.

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Should I go out and be wild this weekend?
Or should I be sober?

Like those are the only two versions of a life.

And I keep thinking… why are those the only options?

Wine was sold to us as the thing that would make us looser, freer, more ourselves. Sex got sold the same way, as something that required a drink first. Most of us bought both, without noticing they were the same pitch.

I want to talk about what it means to want both of those things, and to finally have them, without needing a drink to get there first.

The Lie About Inhibition

The promise is always the same: drink this and you’ll finally be free. Looser. Funnier. Sexier. Liquid courage exists as a phrase because we’ve collectively agreed that the sober self is the inhibited one, the buttoned-up, performative, socially anxious version, and alcohol is what removes the obstruction between you and your real self.

But look at what’s actually happening. The woman at the dinner party who’s had two glasses isn’t freer. She’s numbed. The thing that was inhibiting her, the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing, is still there. She just can’t feel it anymore. The inhibition didn’t leave. It went underground.

That inhibition isn’t random.
It got learned.

Which means she never actually solved it. She rented the feeling of freedom for a few hours and woke up with the same inhibitions, plus a mild hangover and the low-grade shame that comes from not quite remembering if she said something weird.

Inhabited and Uninhibited Are Not the Same Thing

There are two words I want to distinguish, because most people use them interchangeably and they are not the same.

Inhabited is a relationship with the interior. It is about whether you are actually present inside your own experience, in your body, in your sensation, in your emotional life. A woman who is fully inhabited feels what she feels when she feels it. She is not watching herself from a slight distance. She is not managing her own experience in real time. She is in it. The parts are known to her. She has moved back into the house.

Uninhibited is about what moves between interior and exterior. It is about expression, flow, the absence of obstruction between what’s happening inside and what you allow to come out. A woman who is uninhibited says what she actually thinks. She takes up space without apologizing for it. She doesn’t edit herself mid-sentence based on what she thinks you need her to be.

The relationship between them: you cannot be genuinely uninhibited without first being inhabited. Because uninhibited means the inside can move freely to the outside, but if no one’s home inside, there is nothing to express. You’re not actually uninhibited. You’re just performing it.

What the Wine Version Actually Does

Alcohol produces the sensation of being uninhibited by removing your awareness of the inhibition. The anxiety goes quiet. The self-consciousness dims. But the inhibition itself, the exile of certain parts, the conditioning that made the wine necessary, is completely untouched. You didn’t become freer. You became temporarily unaware of what’s been holding you in place.

Same thing with sex.
It’s not that you need the drink.
It’s that without it, you don’t feel like you can fully be there…
or be the version of yourself you think you’re supposed to be.

This is where it breaks down. You can’t be truly uninhibited in a body you’ve abandoned. The woman reaching for wine to feel free isn’t more herself with a drink in her hand. She’s less present to herself.

Real uninhibited works the opposite way. Someone has to be home for the inside to move freely outward.

What the Reclamation Actually Looks Like

A woman who has done this work, who has met the anxious part, the performing part, the good-girl part, the parts alcohol was animating or anesthetizing, that woman is no longer controlled by those parts in the same way. She is not numbing the obstruction. She knows how to be with it. The parts that used to require wine to surface are just available. Integrated. Hers.

That is genuinely uninhibited. Not chemically unaware of her inhibitions. Actually able to move with them without being blocked.

Inhabited is the work. Uninhibited is what becomes available after the work.

Which means the thing wine was pretending to sell, freedom, aliveness, access to yourself, is real. It exists. Women have it. They just don’t find it at the bottom of a glass.

They find it on the other side of having stayed.

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It was 4th of July weekend. My parents had been told by a friend’s brother that we met some boys at the movies on a double date. Which wasn’t true. When I went to explain that we just saw them there, I was told to be quiet. They didn’t believe me.

I can’t even count how many of those moments I wasn’t allowed to speak. Feeling the unfairness of the world and tiny amounts of rage building in me. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to share my side of things. Why no one believed me. Why it was always, don’t talk back. Perhaps it was a parenting era of don’t talk back and speak only when spoken to, perhaps it’s just the way things go with girls, but after years of it, I learned, don’t speak.

Unknowingly, I carried the weight of the anger and rage along with me.

Unless I was drinking. The arrival of alcohol brought with it the girl who had been told to be quiet. I could feel myself harden with the first drink. I was the girl who would be across the room from the guys and then suddenly slamming them into a doorway laughing. Pushing people in pools. Saying snarky comments. In my twenties, with my second husband, picking fights. Going to get a water bottle from the fridge, noticing they weren’t labels forward, throwing them over my shoulder at him. This part of me, the girl who wasn’t allowed to talk, was mad. And drinking allowed her to express it.

Quitting drinking closed the door on the part of me that raged for a short time. Honestly, I had entered such a state of resentment. Everything was “it must be nice”, and “why me/why not me?”

Until a few years ago. Something happened, and I can’t say for sure what, but I remember feeling burned up inside, like a bomb was about to go off. I also remember how icky I felt inside.

My stomach felt like a vat of green toxic bubbling goo percolating up from within. It rose into my chest, thick and hot, like it was going to spill over.

I. Did. Everything. To. Resist. It.

Distract myself, take a shower, call a friend. Nothing worked. Finally, I laid down on my floor and just let it take me over. I laid there breathing into every little bit of it as it boiled through my body, watching it and not interrupting it.

The sensation itself didn’t last that long. It certainly didn’t have the repercussions of a wife yelling at me for throwing her husband in the pool with his Rolex on.

Admittedly, with people close to me (like my boyfriend), when there is a breakdown, I’ve noticed ‘my practice’ of using my voice can way overcorrect. I find myself saying, I don’t know what came over me. I’ve had moments where I’ve felt like I’ve blacked out. Emotionally flooded and saying things without a filter. Things that I would have never said before.

For a short time I thought, maybe this is hormones, but I don’t think so. I think this is me finally stepping into the belief that I can say what’s on my mind. Besides, blaming hormones feels disempowering. Just like raging out while drunk did. That version of me was never created by alcohol. She is finally allowed.

So for now, I look for the moments in settings that give me an opportunity to use my voice even though it feels terrifying. Like asking the guy at the gym if he’s using the machine he’s sitting on.

For the girl who was told to be quiet, it feels like the bravest thing she could ever do.

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Not only did I feel gaslit, I felt an immense pressure and guilt. Like I had to explain myself. Justify why I didn’t want to drink anymore.

I’m sorry for letting you down.

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But I was also gaslighting myself. My reasons for drinking seemed justified. My kids are older, I deserve to have a good time now. I can meet friends for happy hour and Aperol spritzes. Go get drinks on a date. Sit on my sofa after a long day and relax with a glass of red and a good book. Writing this now, I think of how we romanticize a toxic ex. You don’t remember the bad fights and the breakups. Just the sex and the makeups.

On the outside, everything appeared normal. Nothing that looked like what we picture when we hear “rock bottom.”

And I often wonder how many women fall into this — an uncategorized, internal rock bottom. The kind that shows up as disconnection rather than catastrophe.

Don’t get me wrong. I had moments that still carry some emotional residue. Being catty with other women. Picking fights with my partner. Jumping on bar tops to dance. Drinking wine at lunch and then picking my kids up from school. Embarrassing consequences I haven’t fully forgotten.

But what I’m talking about is something slower. The erosion of who I was. The voice I couldn’t quiet down after a second glass of wine. The consistent feeling like shit in the morning, making promises to skip wine with dinner that evening, only to pour one anyway and then criticize myself for doing so.

This plus the hormonal hell-scape many of us find ourselves in in our late thirties and into our forties. Without any knowledge of peri/menopause, I just assumed this was how I was wired.

So when I tried to tell the people around me that alcohol wasn’t working, it didn’t land. It couldn’t. Eventually I had to make a choice nobody else could make for me. Nobody else was going to tell me. They'd already told me I was fine.

The night before my last drink was like most nights, but not. A friend invited me to join them at June’s for a glass of rosé. Which turned into two. This turned into us going next door for sushi, which arrived with sake and another glass of wine. I don’t recall drinking the wine after the sake.

What I will never forget is lying awake from around 2am to 6am thinking I might be having a heart attack and that maybe I should call the paramedics. And the stream of thoughts, more like an interrogation, reeling through my mind as I struggled to fall asleep.

Why did you say that earlier? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone knows you’re a fraud. How do you think you’re going to work after a night like this? They’ll know something’s wrong with you.

And on and on and on it went.

When it finally ended, I thought: we’re done here. That day I chose something different. I chose me.

Nobody witnessed my rock bottom. It didn’t look like anything from the outside. I went to dinner with a friend, had some sushi, came home. And then I was alone at 4am convinced I was dying while a voice in my head took me apart piece by piece. Nobody saw that part. Nobody ever does.

I think that's the rock bottom nobody talks about. The one that doesn’t cost you your job or your marriage or your reputation. The one where you get up the next morning, make breakfast, and go to work anyway. Where your bills are paid and your kids are fed and from the outside everything looks completely fine. Somehow we've decided those women don't qualify. That if your life is still technically intact you don’t have permission to say this isn’t working.

So most of them don’t. They just keep going.

It still amazes me how hard I tried to fit in, to prove I could be normal. I was willing to lose myself for you.

Today the conversation is very different. There isn’t one.
I am no longer gaslighting myself. I am no longer looking outside of myself to affirm or validate my decision. I’m so solid in where I stand that I don’t need to explain it to anyone.
I’ve found a new joy in the space between me and the person whose face can’t hide their disappointment. The face that reads: oh, one of those.
I just let their projection sit between us in silence.
I don’t care.
I’m willing to lose that person to save myself.

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I have spent years listening to both.

First in the dressing rooms of my lingerie and sexual wellness store. Then in coaching sessions around dating, sex, and relationships. Then in sobriety work.

Different rooms. Different problems. Same story.

Women who couldn’t get out of their heads and into their bodies. Women who felt they needed to perform, to give, to show up for everyone else while quietly checking out of their own experience. Women who believed that pleasure, orgasm, and feeling genuinely turned on was only available through someone else.

I heard the same things over and over.

“I just need to get it over with.” “I can’t orgasm unless I’m in love.” “I’m too tired. Too touched out. Sex is the last thing on my mind.” “I feel completely disconnected from my body.”

And then there were the affairs. More than you’d think. Women not necessarily looking for another person, but desperate to feel some sort of excitement in their lives.

What became obvious to me wasn’t that these women had bad partners or low libidos or broken relationships.

It was that they had completely lost access to their own bodies.

They couldn’t be present during intimacy. Couldn’t tap into their own desire. Couldn’t access that primal, alive energy without someone else unlocking it for them first.

And even then, they weren’t sure it was really theirs.

Then I started working with women on sobriety.

Same story. Different substance.

Women who couldn’t be in their bodies without wine. Who couldn’t access themselves sober. Who couldn’t let go, feel pleasure, or tap into their life force without alcohol lubricating the way.

The presenting problem looked different. One group wanted better sex. The other wanted to quit drinking. But the root was identical.

Both groups were outsourcing what was actually theirs to begin with.

The reasons varied. Social and religious conditioning. Sexual trauma. Chronic stress. Years of performance pressure and people-pleasing. Unprocessed grief. Shame around their bodies or their desires.

And decades of practicing how to disconnect so they could keep showing up, keep performing, keep being what everyone needed them to be.

But the pattern stayed the same. Somewhere along the way, they had both found something outside themselves to bridge that gap.

For one group, it was a partner.

For the other, it was wine.

Why This Intensifies at Midlife:

At midlife, this pattern becomes harder to ignore.

Estrogen drops, which lowers your baseline dopamine. You have less buffer for stress and less capacity to feel pleasure naturally.

Identity destabilizes. The roles that once defined you begin to shift or dissolve. The question of who you are becomes more urgent.

Your nervous system cannot maintain the performance anymore. Years of holding it together begin to surface in the body.

You are not reaching for wine because you are weak. You are reaching for it because you feel flat, and it is the only thing you know that brings you back to yourself.

Alcohol becomes the bridge back to sensation, to aliveness. Not because it restores you, but because it lowers the threshold enough to let you feel anything.

And this pattern has a name.

Regena Thomashauer has been teaching for decades that what many women experience as flatness or loss of excitement is often disconnection. Disconnection from anger that was never expressed. From desire that was never lived. From pleasure that slowly disappeared under responsibility and over-giving.

She argues that women are trained to be accommodating, appropriate, selfless, and small. Over time, that conditioning dulls a woman’s turn-on. Her creativity. Her sexual desire. Her emotional vitality. Her playfulness.

In her framework, turn-on is not indulgence. It is a sign of health. And when women are no longer connected to pleasure, they reach for what she calls the Four D’s: Drinks, Drugs, Desserts, and Drama. Not because they are broken, but because they are trying to feel something. *When she says drugs, she means antidepressants as much as anything else. The prescription kind that flatten the lows but also flatten everything else.

I saw the same thing in the women I worked with. The substance changed. The strategy did not.

What This Actually Looks Like

I was sitting with a group of women at dinner recently, listening as each one described her current state.

“I am just so depleted by the end of the day. I walk in and all I want is to pour a glass of wine.”

“I come home from work and my husband and kids are already expecting dinner. I just want a fucking time out.”

“I binge Netflix every night. It is the only way I can shut my brain off.”

None of them felt like they had time to take a breath, let alone regulate their nervous system, before the next round of demands hit.

These were not alcoholics. These were successful, intelligent, high functioning women. And every single one was using something outside herself to regulate.

Drinks. Drugs. Desserts. Drama.

For many women, this is the only way they know how to come back to their bodies.

The irony is that the body already knows what to do.

It knows how to regulate. How to feel. How to move emotion through and let it go.

Desire, grief, rage, pleasure. The body is built to let it rise, move, and pass.

Most of us were never taught how to stay with sensation long enough for that to happen. We were taught to override. To push through. To stay in control. When sensation became too intense, whether sexual intensity, emotional intensity, or nervous system activation, we learned to shut it down.

Wine works fast. So does sugar. So does drama.

They cut the feeling off before it can complete.

Over time, interruption becomes the strategy.

Wine As False Pleasure

Alcohol gives you temporary access to the parts of yourself you have shut down. The same parts that struggle to show up fully in intimacy without help.

The sensual woman. The wild woman. The woman who wants and does not apologize for it. The woman who can actually feel pleasure without guilt or performance anxiety.

And just as often, it softens the parts that feel overwhelming. The anxious one. The exhausted one. The one who cannot stop holding it all together.

Wine lets you bypass the conditioning that taught you to be small, appropriate, and good. For a few hours, it can feel like you are alive in your body again.

But that feeling is deceptive. Wine does not give you access. It dulls sensation while creating the illusion of depth. You may feel looser, louder, more expressive. But underneath, the system itself is turned down.

Real erotic life force requires the opposite. Not numbing, but feeling. Not dissociation, but presence. Not escape, but embodiment.

The same is true in sex. You cannot access depth while simultaneously muting sensation. When sensation is repeatedly interrupted, desire does not disappear.

It flattens.

In your sex life. In your creativity. In your appetite for your own life.

The real shift is not about quitting wine.

It is not about fixing your sex life.

It is about whether you know how to stay.

Stay in your body.
Stay with sensation.
Stay long enough to let it move.

Because being fully here cannot be outsourced.

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I’ve watched this pattern play out over and over, in my own life and in the lives of hundreds of women I’ve worked with. We look for ourselves everywhere except where we actually are.

If it’s not a man, it’s a martini. If it’s not a martini, it’s a MasterCard. If it’s not a MasterCard, it’s a muffin.

We keep reaching outside ourselves, convinced that the next thing will finally make us feel whole. The next promotion, the next relationship, the next bottle, the next whatever. Worthy. Alive.

It’s an insatiable tank that will never fill.

You can stuff every hole you have (literally), do this long enough, and you’ll discover it’s nothing more than a game of whack-a-mole. One craving goes down, another pops up.

None of those things are what you actually need.

Here’s what’s actually happening; you’re drowning.

You’re managing the job, the kids, the aging parents, the partner who doesn’t see how much you’re carrying. You’re navigating a world that feels like it’s constantly on fire. The news. The politics. The economy. The climate. The everything.

Your body is changing in ways no one prepared you for. You’re not sleeping. You’re constantly anxious. Your nervous system hasn’t come down from high alert in years.

And wine is the only thing that makes you feel like you can finally exhale.

It’s not about the alcohol. It’s about the moment when everything stops demanding something from you. When you can finally just be.

Except you’re not really being. You’re numbing. And you know it.

The Real Problem

You already know this. You know that drinking every night isn’t making your life better. You know you’re using it to cope, to relax, to feel something other than the endless numbness of taking care of everyone else’s needs while ignoring your own.

Here’s what no one tells you… you don’t have a drinking problem.

You have an aliveness problem.

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Wine has become your way of accessing parts of yourself you’re not allowed to be when you’re sober. The fun version. The relaxed version. The version who doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks. The version who actually feels something.

And wine also has a way of denying access to parts of yourself that you don’t perceive as safe to feel. The grief you’ve been carrying for years. The rage at how small your life has become. The loneliness even when you’re surrounded by people. The terror that this is all there is.

Somewhere along the way, wine became both the key and the lock.

It lets you access parts of yourself. And it protects you from parts of yourself.

And you forgot how to do either one without it.

I know this pattern because I lived it.

What You’ve Been Missing

For years, I tried to face hard times through ways I genuinely thought would work:

Have a drink; it will relieve and relax you. Find a man; having someone to love you and protect you will make you feel safe. Shop; you’ll look and feel better. Pound the pavement until you can’t think; if you’re thin, you’ll be praised.

I deprived myself of feeling, nourishment, and pleasure.

I distracted myself with attention, validation, and material things.

I fell into depression when one didn’t work. I blindly defaulted to the next external high.

What I didn’t see was this: I was constantly choosing things outside of myself to feel good about who I am. To be noticed. To be chosen.

I was never choosing my Self. The one unidentified with the title, the man, the outfit or the friends.

Tuning In and Turning On

Your body has been trying to get your attention for years.

Every time you reach for wine, your body is saying: “I need something. I’m overwhelmed. I’m exhausted. I’m numb. I want to feel alive.”

Wine just helps you ignore it for another night.

The message is still there in the morning, isn’t it? You still wake up feeling the same emptiness. The same disconnection from yourself. The same sense that you’re moving through your life like a ghost.

That’s because wine doesn’t give you back what you’ve lost. It can’t.

You're not the problem. You're the solution. You are the way back to wholeness.

Not the wine. Not the man. Not the promotion. Not the new dress or the perfect vacation or the number on the scale.

You.

What Wine Is Actually Doing

Wine isn’t random. It’s serving a specific function in your life.

For most women, it’s doing one (or more) of these five things:

1. PERMISSION Wine lets you be the fun version. The relaxed version. The spontaneous version. The version who doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Wine gives you permission to let go, to stop performing, to finally just BE. Without it, you feel like you have to stay in control, stay responsible, stay “on” for everyone else.

2. ESCAPE Wine helps you not feel the anxiety, the overwhelm, the grief, the rage, the emptiness. It buffers you from emotions you don’t know how to handle. It creates distance between you and the reality of your life. Without it, you’d have to actually feel everything you’ve been avoiding and that feels impossible.

3. CONNECTION Wine helps you feel close to your partner. Vulnerable with friends. Intimate in ways you can’t access sober. It softens the edges, lowers the walls, makes you feel less alone. Without it, you feel disconnected, awkward, like you don’t know how to be close to anyone anymore, including yourself.

4. ALIVENESS Wine wakes you up in a body that’s gone numb. It makes you feel sexy, engaged, turned on by life again, even if it’s just for a few hours. It promises you energy, passion, desire. Without it, you feel dead inside. Like you’re just going through the motions of a life you don’t even want.

5. TOLERANCE Wine helps you tolerate what you actually hate. The marriage that’s gone cold. The job that’s slowly killing you. The life that doesn’t fit anymore. It makes the unbearable bearable. Without it, you’d have to face the truth: something has to change. And you’re not ready for that.

Most women have more than one.

And here’s the truth: until you know what wine is doing for you, you can’t stop drinking it.

Because you’re not just giving up alcohol. You’re giving up permission. Relief. Connection. Aliveness. The ability to tolerate your own life.

No wonder you keep pouring a glass.

This is why willpower doesn’t work. Your conscious brain says “I don’t want to drink.” But your body says “I NEED this”—and your body is right. You do need something. You just don’t need wine.

You need to learn how to give yourself what wine was giving you. You need to meet the parts of yourself wine was protecting you from. You need to give yourself permission to be the woman you’ve been hiding.

That’s the real work. Not “stop drinking.” Not “count your days.” But actually understanding what you’ve been using this FOR and then learning how to get it back without alcohol.

What Aliveness Actually Means

When I talk about aliveness, I’m talking about something most women at midlife have completely lost.

I call it erotic energy. And before you close this tab, I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about EROTIC in its truest sense: your life force. Your passion. Your curiosity. Your full engagement with being alive.

Think about a time when you felt completely turned on by life. Not sexually, but ALIVE. When you wanted to devour a book, create something, dance in your kitchen, stay up talking for hours. When everything felt vivid and possible. When you felt AWAKE in your own body.

That’s erotic energy. And most women at midlife have lost it entirely.

Frankly, wine becomes a cheap substitute for it.

Wine promises you that feeling of aliveness. That engagement. That sense of being fully present in your own body and life.

It delivers numbness instead.

Real aliveness, real erotic energy, is what presence gives you back.

A Practice to Start

Before you reach for wine tonight, try something with me.

Put your hand on your heart. Feel the warmth of your palm against your chest.

Take three slow breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth.

Now scan your body. Where do you feel tension? Your jaw? Your shoulders? Your belly? Just notice. Don’t try to change it.

Ask your body: “What do you need right now?”

Not your head. Your body.

And then listen. The answer might come as a sensation. A color. An image. A knowing. It might be: rest. Movement. Touch. To cry. To scream. To be held.

Whatever comes up, that’s what’s true.

Ten out of ten times— it’s not wine.

Your body knows why you drink. Your brain just hasn’t learned to listen yet.

The Way Forward

I’m not saying you need to quit drinking forever. I’m not saying you need meetings or labels or a whole new identity.

What I’m saying is this: you need to get curious about what wine is actually doing for you.

Because once you understand the function it’s serving, you can start to find other ways to meet those needs. Real ways. Body-based ways. Ways that actually give you back your aliveness instead of numbing it.

That’s what the work is. Not about NOT drinking. About reclaiming what you’ve lost.

Your energy. Your presence. Your passion. Your desire to actually be in your life instead of watching it pass by from behind a wine glass.

Your aliveness.

This isn’t about deprivation. It’s about getting yourself back.

The wild, alive, turned-on version of you that wine promised but could never deliver.

She’s still here. She’s just been waiting for you to tune in.

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RELATED:

I keep seeing these sober-talk videos floating around, people reassuring you that “No one cares if you’re not drinking during the holidays. Literally no one. Stop stressing.”

And listen… I love the sentiment. I love the confidence. But I don’t know who these people are spending the holidays with.

I absolutely stressed about what my family and friends would think when I stopped drinking, and guess what? I wasn’t wrong. They cared. Deeply.

Now, maybe your people are different. Maybe they shrug and say, “Oh cool, sparkling water?” Maybe your relationship with alcohol was toxic enough that everyone is relieved you’re not showing up sauced and they truly don’t care what’s in your glass.

But some of us? Some of us come from the wine-pairing, cocktail-hour, dinner-party girlies or the moms who unWINE, the ones whose every gathering revolves around drinking or the families whose answer to all things cold, celebratory or sickly was whiskey. (I’m from North Dakota, do you know how much whiskey it takes to stay warm?)

They care because:

It’s a lifestyle. A way of life. The way to survive life.

They also care because if you’re not, what does that say about them.

Some of us have families who think that uncle so-and-so falls down at Thanksgiving, and you’re not as bad as that so just moderate.

Some of us have friends who genuinely want you to “loosen up,” “join the fun,” “compare hangovers tomorrow,” and share in the experience because that is the only experience worth having together.

Here’s what’s really going on: you’re disrupting the pattern.

Anytime someone makes a major change, getting sober, getting divorced, having a baby, moving, or setting boundaries, it forces everyone around them to renegotiate who they are in relation to you and themselves.

And there is nothing more threatening to someone’s sense of normalcy than the people around them changing and the pattern and behavior shifting.

So if you’re heading into the holidays feeling stressed about not drinking and worried about what others will think, let me give it to you straight:

You’re not crazy. You’re not imagining it. People might care. People might make it weird. People might project their stuff onto you.1

But none of that means you’re wrong for changing. None of that means you owe anyone a drink. None of that means you should shrink yourself back into the version of you they’re most comfortable with.

I spent years, almost a decade, listening to people tell me I didn’t have a drinking problem. That their drinking was worse and if anyone had a problem, it was them. That I wasn’t my mom who had a severe problem. Not only did I feel like they were gaslighting me, I felt this immense amount of pressure and guilt; like I had to explain myself or justify why I didn’t want to drink anymore and I’m sorry for letting you down.

Not exactly festive.

Today the conversation is very different. There isn’t one. I am no longer gaslighting myself into thinking drinking is fun for me. I am no longer looking outside of myself to affirm or validate my decision. I am so solid in my not drinking and my reasons behind my ‘why’ that I don’t need to explain it to anyone. And honestly, I have a new found joy for the space between me and the person whose face can’t hide their disappointment. The face that reads, “oh, one of those.”

I just let their projection sit between us in silence.

I don’t care.

I’m willing to lose that person to save myself.

Now, I know that I’m on this side of sober and it’s easier for me to say than for you to experience. This is where you get to stop taking on their discomfort and instead open up to what it’s like for you to disappoint people. 2

I’m reminded of a sober friend who found herself panicking about going home for the holidays where most of the day was about everyone eating and drinking together. All she could think about was how everyone would keep asking and wanting to know why and can’t you, ‘just for the holiday’? Then she had this idea to turn it into a game:

How many people can I disappoint by declining to drink this weekend?

She said at first it was a little awkward. By the 3rd or 4th person she found herself laughing by the absurdity of their reactions but by the end of the first night, she said she felt empowered.

She had never used her voice or her ‘no’ like that before. From that day forward, she stopped caring what others thought about her not drinking.

She started caring for herself.

That’s what I want to offer you do this holiday season. Stop caring what others think and start caring for you.

My eyes glaze over as I loop through this process. Nonstop.

This dopamine reward center and false feedback loop? It’s real.

I mentioned this to friends one morning after a swim. The phone is a legitimate problem for almost everyone. Everywhere you look, people staring at screens, not even conscious of why they just picked it up. Ten minutes of life vanishes and they think, what the fuck, I did it again.

“Instead of picking up our phones,” I started to say, “we should grab a vibrator.”

My friend screamed: “Turn it into a taser!”

Pain or pleasure. Same function. Gets you in the moment.

Then I asked them, and I’ll ask you:

Did you know there are only two industries that call their consumers “users”?

Can you guess what they are?

Digital technology and drugs/alcohol.

What You Didn’t See Coming: The Gender Gap We Don’t Want

Here’s what I was really building toward: for the first time in history, women are closing the gender gap in drinking themselves to death.

Alcohol-induced deaths in the U.S. have nearly doubled since 1999—an 89% increase. The sharpest spike? Women aged 25–34, whose alcohol-related deaths rose 255%, compared to 188% for men.1 While men still die at higher rates, women’s numbers are rising faster across every age group.

Normally I’d be thrilled about closing gender gaps. But not this one. Not in deaths. Not in cirrhosis. Not in the slow destruction of our livers and lives.

Over the past century, society has normalized women drinking “like men.” Equality in the worst possible way; not in pay or representation, but in it being socially acceptable to destroy ourselves with alcohol.

The biological reality? Women can’t metabolize alcohol as efficiently. We have less of the enzyme that breaks it down, less body water to dilute it, and more body fat to store it. The result? We absorb more alcohol, feel its effects longer, and develop damage faster.

As one researcher put it, “Women really can have it all—even cirrhosis and liver disease.”2

The Midlife Multiplier: When Hormones Meet Happy Hour

If biology wasn’t already stacked against us, midlife brings its own plot twist.

During perimenopause and menopause, the liver—the same organ responsible for metabolizing both alcohol and hormones—slows down. It clears alcohol more slowly, which means it’s also slower to process estrogen. The two systems jam each other up.

It’s a perfect storm: alcohol intensifies hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, and sleep disruption. By menopause, our tolerance drops even further. That “one glass” that used to relax you now keeps you up all night.

We reach for the thing that promises relief while it pours gasoline on the fire.

Nearly one in five women aged 45–64 exceed recommended drinking limits. Studies show perimenopause is a time of “instability” in drinking habits. Many who once drank moderately start drinking more. And alcohol doesn’t just mess with mood; it interferes with calcium absorption and bone health at a time we can least afford it.

That nightcap you swear helps you sleep? It actually shreds REM, spikes cortisol, and leaves your nervous system fried by morning.

The Science of Want: Dopamine, the Clever Bastard

To understand why we drink or scroll, or shop, we have to understand dopamine.

Desire begins in thought: I deserve a drink. I’ll feel better. Everyone else is having one. Each time we reward that thought with alcohol, we reinforce the craving loop.

Dopamine is the molecule of wanting, not having. It’s the thrill before the reward—the foreplay, not the orgasm. It fuels anticipation, the fantasy that the next sip or scroll will make things better.

Originally, dopamine kept humans alive. It motivated us to hunt, build shelter, find connection, but modern life hacked the system. We took basic survival drives and condensed them into quick hits: sugar, sex, shopping, and a drink.

But dopamine doesn’t care how the story ends. It only wants more. It has no interest in hangovers, shame, or regret. The more you chase, the less you enjoy. Unless the substance overrides the off switch.

That’s what alcohol does. It hijacks dopamine’s natural rhythm, keeping the wanting loop alive even as the pleasure fades.
You’re not drinking for the taste or the buzz anymore. You’re drinking for the promise of relief that never actually comes.

When Dopamine Doesn’t Know the Difference

When you don’t understand how dopamine works, you start believing your desires are urgent truths.

You need the thing. Now. It feels like you have no choice.

Dopamine lights up the idea of a better future just out of reach and your brain, wired for what feels easy and immediate, will chase that feeling over and over. That’s why sex, alcohol, sugar, shopping, and scrolling are such reliable hits. They promise an instant chemical reward.

What dopamine doesn’t register are the consequences: the hangover, the crash, the shame. There’s no connection between the wanting and the wreckage.

So we ask ourselves, What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep going back?
Gabor Maté reframes it:

“Don’t ask why the addiction. Ask why the pain.”

The cruel irony: alcohol, the thing we reach for to calm our nerves, amplifies them. It’s a depressant. If you’re down, it sinks you lower. If you’re anxious, it dials it up.

That first drink might bring twenty minutes of ease, but from there your body is just processing poison… cortisol up, adrenaline up, estrogen down.

The relief you’re chasing is the very thing the drink erases.

And while our bodies are burning out, the culture just keeps pouring another round.

The Marketing Machine: Selling Self-Destruction as Self-Care

It’s impossible to avoid alcohol. It’s everywhere: brunch, breakups, book clubs.
The rise in women’s drinking isn’t just about stress or hormones; it’s marketing.

It’s sold to women as luxury, lifestyle, fun, and stress relief. The media portrays the good life with a drink at the end of each day. Rosé all day, wine o’clock, you deserve it.

It’s more socially acceptable to drink than to not drink. Alcohol has been rebranded as self-care, empowerment, even feminism. It’s sold as the reward for surviving your day, the accessory to your success.

Behind every “you deserve this” ad is an industry that knows exactly how dopamine works. They’re not just selling alcohol, they’re selling the illusion of relief.

There’s a difference between having a drink for pleasure and using one to survive the day.

We live in a culture that’s made it normal to soothe ourselves with substances but taboo to self-regulate through the body.
No one teaches us how to come down from stress by breathing, moving, or feeling.
We’re told to pour a drink, not take a breath.

We can market vapes, alcohol, and pills to kids, but we can’t openly teach them how to connect with their own bodies through rest, breath, or even pleasure.
We can’t talk about sexual pleasure as a birthright or an orgasm as nature’s antidepressant—a mood lifter, a way to self-soothe, to flood the body with its own feel-good chemistry—but we can glamorize every addictive behavior that pulls us further from ourselves.

That’s the real irony: we’ve normalized numbing and outsourced relief, but we’ve forgotten how to live in our own skin.

The Underlying Pain: Human Giver Syndrome

One in four women struggles with depression. Heart disease remains our leading killer.

Instead of reaching inward, we’re taught to reach outside ourselves to buffer discomfort with anything that promises relief. Pills. Drinks. Dessert. Distraction. All of it pulls us out of our bodies and comes with its own side effects: hangovers, weight gain, no sex drive, more anxiety, more depression.

Of course, some people truly need medication for chemical imbalances. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the culture we’ve built that tells women to numb instead of feel, to fix instead of rest, to perform instead of pause.

When we say we’re down, no one asks about our lives; our thoughts, our relationships, what’s missing, what we actually need. We’ve been socialized not to feel our emotions, not to speak our needs, not to hold boundaries.

Don’t be emotional.

Don’t be difficult.

Take care of everyone else.

We’re raised to be human givers—caretakers of husbands, partners, kids, and communities. We carry the emotional weight of others, sacrificing our time, our bodies, our joy to make everyone around us comfortable. Asking for help feels like social suicide.

Emily and Amelia Nagoski call this Human Giver Syndrome

the contagious belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity to support others, no matter the cost to you.

And it’s costing us. Our health is declining. We’re deprived, depressed, resentful, overwhelmed, exhausted. On the edge of burnout—or already there.

When life feels impossible and time feels scarce, the brain looks for the fastest exit ramp: a pill to make it better, a drink to bring relief, a piece of cake to soothe your soul, a bit of validation to fill the void.

Unfortunately, none of these things solve the real problem; the emotion stuck in your body, the old patterns and unprocessed pain driving the loop you’re desperate to escape.

When you finally stop reaching outward and start listening inward, that’s when things begin to shift.

And maybe that’s the real buzz kill.

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If something in this piece resonated and you’re ready to explore what life feels like when you stop numbing and start living—I can help. I’m a certified life coach specializing in wholeness-based recovery and midlife transformation for women. I help women close the gap between who they’ve been and who they actually are. You can learn more here.

If you’re specifically exploring your relationship with alcohol, I’m writing more about that at my Substack, This Side of Sober.

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5 months ago · 1 like · Ashley Kelsch

Last Sunday marked me reaching eighteen months without a drink. A worthy milestone worth celebrating, especially this second time around. Once upon a time I reached five and a half years, a significant amount of time that I felt was hard earned every day. I made the decision to ‘go back out’ and the first lesson I was able to glean from that 5 years without a drink was that, even though I wasn’t getting drunk, I was still living my life like one. I spent most of those years not drinking, not working on myself and instead, trying to work out questions like: if my drinking problem was mine or my mom’s; if I inherited the problem; if it was all the result of being the child of an alcoholic; if I’d ever be able to drink like a ‘normal’ person again.

With the exception of knowing that I didn’t feel good about a lot of the decisions and outcomes that had resulted from my drinking, I never took an honest look at myself and what led to that drinking.

Which is probably what made it easy to start drinking again. My life hadn’t gotten easier without alcohol. In fact, it got harder. Little thoughts like, clearly my drinking wasn’t the problem to begin with soon grew on themselves. It didn’t take long after that to begin dismantling what had been my main driving force to take it off the table to begin with: I didn’t want my kids to experience being the children of an alcoholic. But, in time, I was able to convince myself that my kids were ‘old enough’ for me to experiment with drinking again. They were teenagers and ‘didn’t need me’ the way they once did. It wouldn’t be possible for them to experience what I had.

To this day, there has been no greater gaslighter in my life than me.

The sickest truth was in discovering that there wasn’t room for my children to be the children of an alcoholic; I was too busy filling that role; forever the victim of my mother’s drinking.

It may not come as a surprise to some of you reading this, but pretty much from the first day I took a drink, I spent the majority of the next three years trying not to. Taking breaks that lasted 30 days here, 90 days there, 3 weeks here, 4 days there. Finally my rule became I would drink less in the calendar year than I would not consume. If I put this kind of time and attention into my finances my life would look very different.

One day I was on a walk with a friend who was sober. I was telling her about the crippling anxiety I had experienced in the middle of the night after a couple of glasses of wine. At the same time I told her how much I was enjoying drinking, how much fun I was having.

“I’ve finally reached a place where I’m not being hard on myself or judging myself about it. Whatever ‘thinking problem’ I used to have about drinking is gone.”

She stopped and looked at me. “Ash, are you having fun? Because that’s not what you’re describing or what I’m hearing in your voice.”

Was I having fun? In some ways, yes. It was the first time that I could remember not being hard on myself for being hungover; that I let myself be out late with friends; that I didn’t experience the volume of the inner dialogue talking to me while I was drinking, about my drinking.

But this ‘fun’ didn’t last long at all.

Aside from my sober friends, there was and continues to be a majority of people who knew me who don’t think or would ever think I had a drinking problem. What most of those people didn’t know or understand was that my alcoholism doesn’t express itself outwardly. I can’t tell you the amount of times I heard over the years, ‘you’re not your mother, Ashley’. People knew how much confusion I had around her alcoholism and addiction and mine.

And I understood where they were coming from. My mom’s addiction was the sort that you couldn’t miss even if you tried. It wrecked her, her life and the lives of some of us around her.

What people don’t realize is I would have a couple glasses of wine with friends at dinner and would then spend the second half of the night with my body and mind rejecting the alcohol. I was physically unable to process it. People knew I was drinking less and I would try to explain how sick I would feel. The joke soon became that Ash was a lightweight who couldn’t hold her Rosé. It was part of my charm! I won’t lie; I kind of relished in the attention everyone gave me.

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What wasn’t cute was the anxiety that felt impossible to contend with. Hangovers that hung on for days. Lying on the floor of the shower while the world spun around me.

I started googling ‘signs that you are allergic to alcohol’.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself having a conversation with my anesthesiologist before a surgery.

“Wow,” he said. “Your blood pressure is really, really low.”

“I know,” I replied. “I bet you’re going to ask me if I’m a runner.”

A question that I had heard in response to the same blood pressure results for twenty years.

“No, I was going to ask you if you’re a cheap date. With blood pressure this low, it’s close to impossible for your body to process narcotics and substances.”

“Wait, what?!” I said with wide eyes. “I have been experiencing vertigo and vomiting after a glass or two of Rosé and I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack when I should be sleeping. I thought I was allergic.”

“Nope. It’s your body unable to break it all down.”

I laid there in disbelief before going under.

Here was my answer. Finally. After all this time. SCIENCE. It made so much sense.

My mind and beliefs shifted drastically about alcohol and putting it in my body. Suddenly, it seemed I was poisoning myself. I started thinking about the fragility of my body and brain. How I couldn't spend the next forty years of my life feeling this way and putting my body through this. I couldn't mentally handle it either. I started thinking about what I've put my body through over the years. Not just drinking, but marathon training, burning through the days with stress and anxiety. How hard I've been on it and how much I've demanded it do without considering that it might not be able to keep up and give back. It seemed an unreasonable request that I insist on figuring out how to drink when my body was showing me it couldn't handle it.

RELATED: 🎧 BUZZ KILL Women Are Narrowing the Gender Gap in Alcohol Related Deaths

Of course, none of that mattered a couple of weeks following my surgery and the new information about my body not being able to process alcohol. I met a friend for happy hour. I told myself I would have one glass of Rosé. What could it hurt? Which turned into two glasses of Rosé. That rolled into two tall shot glasses of sake with dinner. I remember feeling like my speech was off. I also remember barely making it through the door before the room started turning on its side and I with it.

What I still remember all too well were the hours from two am to six am. My heart was pounding out of my chest, my mind reeling. Convinced I was having a heart attack, I thought about calling 911. I thought I was dying. In a way I was wishing I was. I was consumed with terror. I chose instead to lay there, breathing, talking back to my brain and waiting it out.

That morning I canceled my day.

And drinking forever.

Since that day, I have not had any desire to drink.

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The harder truth to face…

15 months into not drinking, I started looking at my alcohol-free life. I could not for the life of me understand why I felt emotionally broken or why nothing was getting better.

Worst of all, my brain was a never-ending hellscape and my worst enemy. Constantly choosing chaos or creating it. Paranoid that everyone hated me. In a constant state of anxious apartness. On and on and on. Sober.

While sitting in the chair at my hairdresser’s, one of the women asked me, “Ash, what have you had it with?”

“My mind,” I replied.

She burst out laughing.

“Seriously! I can barely handle the shit my brain makes up about what is going on.” Which was true. I had reached an emotional and mental rock bottom.

Being convinced that Self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.

Unlike the first time I gave up alcohol, I found myself not desiring a drink but desperate for help. And slightly shocked that I didn’t want a drink considering how miserable I felt.

I sat on my sofa sobbing, asking, begging, for help from something bigger than myself.

I won’t go into all the synchronicities that occurred almost immediately after that moment, but the people, books, and experiences that showed up have been nothing short of miraculous.

Call it a paradigm shift, a change of mind or even a spiritual awakening, but something fundamental shifted. I finally understood what I’d been missing all along: I could stop drinking, but if I didn’t address who I was being and why, nothing would change.

I didn’t see the denial I was in or the absolute gaslighting of Self or my inability to accept my problem. I didn’t do the deeper work. I didn’t seek community or support from other sober people. I only reached out when I needed to get out of trouble or wanted to feel better.

I was all about me.

I’ve since started taking a long hard look at my drinking and drug use over the last twenty-five years. I had my first drink and got drunk at fourteen. I was using hard drugs by the time I was fifteen. Strung out and near my end at nineteen, I was able to get myself off the hard stuff, but I wouldn’t consider quitting alcohol until I was in my early thirties.

Who I’ve been and the choices I’ve made, clean, alcohol-free or not, the behavior was all the same. My impulse to choose self and chaos only continued to bring me where I started: on my knees begging for help, convinced I would never figure any of this out.

So the next thing I quit was me.

My big break up of 2023.

Admittedly, it’s not the easiest relationship to end. I’ve always said that the part of me that chooses drugs and alcohol, to lie and cheat, to escape feeling the discomfort of herself or feeling in general, is the part of me that got me through surviving life. Making sure she is not shamed, but loved harder than anyone ever knew how and taken care of and accepted is crucial. Reminding her that what she thinks is fun, in reality, is literally not fun for her. I don’t know that ‘she’s’ ever really going anywhere. I used to say,

the girl can leave the party, but the party doesn’t leave the girl

But the part of me that was once crowded out has found her voice and here’s what I know:

I am an alcoholic and addict.

It’s not my mom’s problem, it’s mine.

It’s separate from being the child of an alcoholic.

As much as I love my children and would do anything for them, they still weren’t enough to keep me from drinking.

I had to want it for me, first.

I will never be able to drink ‘like a normal person’.

And that my life has opened up in ways I could have never imagined.