You're listening to season six of the Recovery Happy Hour Podcast.

Are you ready? Hold on to your headphones.

Let's do this. Hi everyone welcome to Recovery Happy Hour where we talk about life beyond the

bottle and what happens after we stop drinking I'm your host Tricia and I've had Christmas

decorations up including burning non-stop pine tree scented candles since

October 27th. Thank you for joining me today. This intro topic was a very last minute thing, but something

happened to me last week that I thought, hey, you might benefit from it if I told you about

it. And that is forgiving yourself. I'm going to dive right into this.

As I've said before I got sober in November of 2016 just after the Trump presidential

election.

So while that election was going on,

my drinking was at its worst.

I was drinking every day, blacking out most of the time.

Never knew what was going to happen once I had my first drink and I was in a deep, deep

shame spiral because I didn't want anyone to know about my problem and I was obsessed with

trying to make it look like I had my life together.

Now when you quit drinking you get a whole year of sober firsts.

Your first holiday season, your first birthday,

the triggers of seasonal changes in the weather, sober sex,

dating, heartbreak, stress, etc.

You know, doing all these things for the first time without alcohol.

And after a full calendar year, most of your firsts have been checked

...