You're listening to this naked mind

naked mind podcast and I'm here with Kay. How are you Kay?

Yeah, good thank you. Thank you for having me.

Oh, I'm so glad. So why don't you sort of take us back to the beginning in your journey with alcohol? Where did it all start for you?

If I'm really honest, it probably went right back to childhood. So when I was probably like 10 years old. I can remember at social events, family social events, it was kind of a little bit of a joke how my granddad used to say,

here come and have a little sip of this, he used to say wet your lips, which, you know, is quite awful now when I think about it.

So I think that was the first time I kind of tasted alcohol and thought it was absolutely awful.

Then fast forward sort of three years from there when I was 13. I felt as a child I was quite sensitive, felt a lot of big emotions.

My mom was quite sick at the time and I think that was a time in my life when I was kind of felt

scared you know I didn't feel like things are quite as safe as they have been and so a bit of peer pressure at school and you know

weekends hiding around the back of schools and hiding behind the fences and having a sip on a on a

track of room for what it was something cheap and awful I'm sure and but that's pretty normal for UK culture I would say

definitely growing up in the 90s and so that's kind of where it began, but I quickly realized it was something that made me feel, it

dampened the feeling of the emotions that I had at the time. So it helped. At that time, it kind of helped me and so it started off fairly innocently and

but it fast progressed into going into nightclubs, underage. I've got two older brothers. They would get me into

nightclubs when I shouldn't have been in there. So I was drinking underage very young. I then at 16 got involved in a relationship that was not right for me and a lot more drinking was involved there as well and by the time I was well at 16 I did leave home as well for a period of time so I was sort of rebelling, going through a bit of a rebellious phase and I just, yeah, I just kept drinking weekends mainly. And then when I was 18 I had quite a few significant losses in my life and they

happened in quick succession so like within three weeks. So I lost two grandparents and a friend from school died in an accident

And it and it happened really really quickly and it was the first time I had experienced grief, didn't really have a name for any of it at the time and I drank more regularly, you know, binge drinking cultures big here.

So at that time, you know, I wouldn't think anything of going out on a weekend,

binge in all weekend and feeling like death at work, but you know, just getting on with it.

And that carried on and then I met my husband when I was 19, came out of that bad relationship.

And he, well, unbeknown to me at the time, because he was literally just met.

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