This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace, the author of this naked mind and the creator of Alcohol Experiment,

a 30-day challenge to just sort of interrupt your patterns. You can find it for free at alcoholexperiment.com.

And today I have a question from Giannis. And Giannis says, my question is for a long time,

I've been a horrible, nasty drinker to my husband who's also a big drinker into his family.

And I've gotten worse and worse with loneliness. I live in a small town,

it's the town where my husband was born. We get together with my in-laws and I would be outside the circle of conversation if I wasn't drinking.

I watched my husband's class and never be empty and it would always get messy.

I would get annoyed even more if he was leaving me out because I wasn't drinking and it slowly got worse.

I did have stayed for seven whole years but I drank on holidays and that was moderate for me.

But I slid back in four or five years ago. Then mid-November I went back to polishing off three bottles of wine.

And sometimes two, you know, more during the day. The big turning point was now this has moved to the next generation.

And I have seen this with my kids. And so I really want to stop drinking but I don't know how to combat the loneliness.

I just want to overcome loneliness. And actually, I'm going to answer sort of, I get this question twice.

There's another question and says, hi Annie, I have a very empty life. No partner, no kids.

My mom is 85. She's the closest person to me. I dread the time when she's not here with me.

I feel so unfulfilled that I drink to numb the void inside me and I cannot see a way out of this repetitive behavior.

So there are loneliness is a tough one because loneliness means I think so often when we feel lonely, we are looking for someone else or something else to come and pick us up or connect with us.

And especially when we feel lonely, we often feel down on ourselves or maybe that we don't deserve to have connections or companionship.

So we don't necessarily have the desire to go after them ourselves. We sometimes think that some of these things will just get fixed and we feel victimized by being lonely.

We feel like loneliness has happened to us and we're so alone in this and we can't really pick ourselves out of it.

...