Hold on to your headphones. It's season three of Recovery Happy Hour!

Hi guys, welcome to Recovery Happy Hour where we talk about life beyond the

bottle and what happens after we get sober.

I'm your host Tricia. Thanks for joining me today. So I'm hitting on a topic that we've covered before,

but it's still such a buzzword and it's one of my most downloaded episodes so I want to expand on it some more

gray area drinking you know when I considered getting sober I had this idea in my head that you could only be an alcoholic or a normal drinker with no in between.

For me, personally, the A word actually resonates with me.

I define myself as an alcoholic and have no problem using that

label. But after I got sober, I started hearing other people's stories and I

realized that I just happened to fall on one end of a spectrum.

There's black and white, okay?

Alcoholic, normal drinker.

Let's pretend those are on either side of this spectrum.

But in between alcoholic and normal drinker is this huge gray area of drinking that's not defined alcoholism but's definitely unhealthy drinking.

Binge drinking, drinking to numb your feelings,

using alcohol as an emotional crutch, mindless drinking.

These are all ways of drinking that are unhealthy, but it gets

weird here because they're all socially acceptable too. Mommy wine culture is a

perfect example of this. Mommy wine culture tells moms that parenting is too hard and too stressful to handle on your own

so you need to use alcohol to cope with it and to reward yourself.

Or binge drinking.

It's socially acceptable if not promoted and encouraged to binge

...