You're listening to the Recovery Happy Hour, where we talk about life beyond the bottle and what happens after we stop drinking.

I'm your host Tricia and when I was chugging Martinez in 2015, I never thought that in 2020

I'd be this obsessed with putting alcohol-based products on my hands.

Thank you for joining me.

The next couple of weeks episodes are going to be featuring bench drinking stories before

I celebrate the big second birthday of Recovery Happy Hour

coming up soon too. There's going to be a pretty big giveaway for that so keep your

eyes on social media for those details coming up. But Finch drinking can be just as bad of a problem as daily

drinking and if you're a bench drinker yes you can still become addicted to

alcohol even though it seems socially acceptable to bench drink.

You know, we see it on movies, TV, magazines, music, real housewives, you name it.

And every person on this show who's talked about it always says, it's just this thing you feel

like you're supposed to do.

I know that the connection between binge drinking and being at social events are deeply

intertwined. It's just not super common for people to

start out as a solo artist in the beginning of a binge drinking career, you

know? And today's guest, Carla has a story of binge drinking at social events.

Carla and I met in the spring of 2019 last year when I was hosting my first virtual

happy hour on Zoom, which by the way people didn't really get what I was doing at the time, and it turns out I was just way ahead of my time and Corona had to catch you all up with me.

Carla was an early sobriety when we met at this happy hour and she was doing the thing, you know,

learning how to attend events as a sober person, learning how to speak up about having

non-alcoholic drink options at work happy hours, learning how to spend weekends, doing stuff sober, attending

...