You're listening to this naked mind podcast I'm here with Casey. Hi, Casey. How are you?

Hi Casey, how are you? Hi Annie good good. Good. Thanks for having me, great to see you. So why don't you take us back to the beginning in your

relationship with alcohol? Where did it all start for you? For me, like a lot of people pretty early on around 14 I'd say and it wasn't really present in my house.

My mom doesn't drink never has.

Dad was a social drinker but they drink,

never had. Dad was a social drinker, but they broke up around when I was 14 and dad left and I guess I was doing the

rebellious thing and exploring and it started with it actually

started with cigarettes first and then alcohol and just you know exploring and finding you know what I could do but the only

alcohol in the house was mums cooking sharing so that's what I drank. And I replaced it with green cordial because I don't know why I thought that might work.

But she never used it, it sat in the bottom of it covered and that progressed you know just

experimenting with friends whatever we could get our hands on which for a while they're

seemed to be port and things like that and it it sort of developed from there but it never it was never big in my life until probably my late 20s really I broke up with a long-term girlfriend I was living with with a friend of mine who had known since I was a kid and

We were just I guess two single guys living together with not much to do. So we would drink for something to do. And that I think was the start of kind of almost glorifying getting drunk like you know those I was you know, those, I was, you know, talking about how wasted we got the night before and laughing at it and all that sort of stuff.

That went on for, you know, quite a lot of years, typical weekend,

binging, that's good stuff.

But it was around then I started to look at my own kind of diet

and fitness and things like that. I had a snowboarding injury where I like dislocated my shoulder and that sort of that rehab set me on this path to start looking at that exercise And that's probably the beginning of those sort of early

30s of trying to live a more healthy life but also drinking a lot. So it was this dual kind of existence, but it wasn't that cognizant of, but it was there.

And then I met my, I will re-met my wife to be. We knew, we sort of knew each other before, but we reconnected and I moved to Melbourne and we met probably in an alcohol-fueled state and alcohol played a big part of our early relationship.

I do remember at a point really early on where we'd been, you know, together a few weeks, but always out, always drinking. And we met for dinner before going out drinking one night, completely sober. And I remember sitting there for a moment with panic of, I have anything to talk about and then quickly we got lots of drinks and you know so um at the time I didn't really

question that I was just like you know we need to drink to communicate and that's just how it is but I think as time went on and we've been together over a decade now.

We had a lot of alcohol fuel times and a lot of holidays and a lot of ski trips and a lot of where we would drink too much and cut back and have little breaks and those sorts of things.

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