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.

Hey, it's Annie Grace. I hope everybody's doing awesome. So I have a question here.

A reader's question, they wrote in and they said in the past, I've been part of every conversation

poking fun at those who don't partake in drunken gatherings. Now that I'm sober, I'm dreading

these get-togethers, although they'll be smaller due to COVID. I know I'll be the butt of jokes

this time, but I also feel like if I speak up, it will make me a hypocrite since I was

always laughing with them. Okay, so this is such a good question. First of all, what I would

do is I would write down all of the possible jokes that you used to make and that could

be made. And I would look at them and feel them and try to release your defensiveness around

it, because it's so natural, especially when we've made a change and we realized we're

wrong and we're trying to protect something new, it's so natural to just try to make the

other side and the other thing wrong. And I think that's really natural, but if you can

do this, if you can kind of like take everything you can possibly imagine that they would say

at this gathering, like whatever they would say. I remember I used to always say, oh, I

don't trust people who don't drink, you know, those people, blah, blah, blah, or, you know,

they're too good for us or whatever the case is. And there was all of this stuff and a lot

of it was coming out of my own desire to justify my own drinking. And then realize, try

to get back in touch with where you were at the time that you were saying these things

and making fun of it and try to get in touch with the underlying thing. Was it that you

just wanted to go with the crowd and you wanted to say what everybody else was saying and

you wanted to chime in where they were chiming in? Was it something else where you actually

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