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 everybody, it's Scott Pinyard, head coach of this naked mind and I am back with another coaching questions podcast.

I'm really excited today to have another guest co host and it's Robbie, St. Er Sullivan. How's it going Robbie?

Oh well, I'm really happy to be here Scott. So Robbie is one of our incredible coaches and I'll let her do the talking about what she does, but I just want to say in particular, you know, working with and getting to know Robbie over these last couple of years, there's a lot of.

There's a lot of fun energy with Robbie, you know, when I see her coaching and our problems programs and working and so yeah, so I'm going to tee you up as an introduction like that. So Robbie, why don't you tell us kind of like what your story is like, how did you get to the point where you wanted to be a coach.

All right, well, short, I would say two years ago, Scott, I was really down and out. I was really my kids at left home, had a lot more time on my hands.

I wasn't being productive in the ways I assumed I would be, you know, my career for a long time had been a journalist. So I'm, you know, sort of a news junkie was hanging out on the couch watching a lot of news, drinking a lot of wine and just getting more and more miserable.

And, you know, as luck would have it and all of my news watching and scrolling, I, I stumbled upon the alcohol experiment and I looked it up following day and decided to do the self guided one.

It was a day before Easter and I was like, well, geez, I can't do it before Easter because we always go out to dinner with my in-laws and I'm going to be drinking and have to drink, right. I did it anyway. I started that as my start date and, and it was amazing.

I, I realized then that I had to change that I wasn't not only was I unhappy, but, you know, what had made me happiest in life was giving back and was being involved and, and feeling like I made a difference in other people's lives and in the world community around me, the world around me and I, you know, I wasn't doing any of that. And I not only was I not doing that, but like I was just getting more and more healthy physically and mentally.

And so, this idea that had to start with me was just what I needed to hear. That there was nothing that was I was going to read or hear somewhere that was going to make me feel better and all of a sudden, like, be ready to take on the world.

That's not the way it works. Right.

So I really literally stopped looking for outside sources to make me feel better about the world around me or about myself and I started digging in really deep and that was really rewarding, really tough.

But, at the end of that 30 days, I thought to myself, I feel amazing. I can't believe I did this.

I think I want to try drinking again the right way. And what amazes me is that I never did. I just never did. And every day, I was really for the first time in my life able to take it date, date by day.

And like, I feel really good this morning. I feel really good this afternoon. I want to feel this way again tomorrow. And then I just started going through all the first, you know, we have date my husband going out for date night and gosh, how can I do that without alcohol and then you know, I did three or four of those.

And I was like, wow, it's even better. We're actually talking and I'm not worried about whether or not I can get that half glass of wine, right.

And, yeah, weddings and nights home alone and uncomfortable feelings and difficult situations and calls from my kids that normally would have set me off and made me feel like I couldn't, I couldn't handle their emotions without tamping mine down first, right.

So, yeah, you know, I came at it from that direction and then, you know, lo and behold, what happened afterwards was absolutely amazing more so because I realized that the other two things that were driving me that I wasn't aware of at the time, you know, once I figured out that drinking wasn't helping me that it was actually hurting me, the other two things I'd always struggled with in my adult life or

every time I would go back to therapy, I'd be like, I don't want to talk about my father anymore, this is crazy because you know, what could just that do, but every time we would talk about my father and really it was because I was still trying to understand, I was trying to understand what happened, right.

And why I loved him so much and hated something that I didn't understand so much kind of thing, I was able to make that transition on my own after I understood what alcohol was and that it's addictive and that he wasn't to blame, he wasn't making these choices over us. So that, that was amazing for me.

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