Your Sober Year with Kate Baily

Episode 135

My guest this week is the founder of Love Sober. She’s an author, a sober coach and a podcaster. She founded Love Sober with Mandy Manners to support women who are concerned about their drinking. She works hard to raise awareness around what women need to not only get sober but to stay sober – and to love being sober!

In this Episode

Kate shared her own story which was an interesting one.
She was always health conscious but determined to find a way to make alcohol fit into her lifestyle even though she knew she had no off switch
She knew deep down she was using it to cope and in fact when she did try to stop she could feel her anxiety ramping up and she’d feel unable to cope
Like many of us Kate found herself googling "am I an alcoholic?" at 3am which led her to a sobriety community
Once she had plugged into a sober community she felt like she'd been thrown a lifeline
That made her realise she was not alone in this and there were many other people just like her
She actually quit drinking for a year but then started again – with hindsight she can see that she just didn’t have the toolkit – all her bad habits were coming back
She was stressed with no boundaries and not enough self care.
We agreed that she had achieved her first year by using willpower alone and had not done the deep work of tackling her limiting beliefs and underlying trauma.
Her mindset around alcohol had not really shifted which meant she still believed that it served her in some way
As we’re always saying at Tribe Sober there is so much more to recovery than “not drinking” – we have to do the work and build the toolkit to make our sobriety sustainable
Kate explained that as we go into our second year of sobriety we often have a dopamine dip which means that its quite common for people to go back to drinking after they’ve had a sober year
That fact underlines our experience that we really need a project to keep our happy chemicals triggered so that we can thrive in our sobriety and make it a permanent lifestyle
So Kate returned to drinking but one day she had a major insight which changed everything for her
She realised that using alcohol was causing such a deep disconnect within herself that she couldn’t “find” herself, or comfort herself or act with self compassion
Like many of us Kate had to learn to love and comfort herself
This insight led to her second day one which was back in 2014 and she has been alcohol free since then
Her second attempt at sobriety was quite different. She got heavily into self care, she did a sobriety program and lots of yoga. She trained as a coach herself to increase her own sense of meaning and purpose.
Kate explored the “tools of living” – self compassion, gratitude and connection.
She realised that her sobriety was actually the foundation of her self development work
She was out and proud and blogged about sobriety under her own name.
It’s interesting how we evolve in our sobriety – personally I felt embarrassed and apologetic in early sobriety (dreading questions and hoping nobody spotted my AF drink) but these days I love talking about sobriety – it’s a bit like the #dontgetmestarted that Kate mentioned!
I’m now a bit like that joke – how do you know when someone is sober? – they’ll tell you within 5 minutes of meeting you!
Just like me Kate loves a reframe and came up with this awesome one – instead of saying
How do I stay sober every day? – rather ask - How do I look after myself every day?
We agreed on the power of a sober community and how we need to be reassured that it really is worth all the hard work to get sober – people further down the road than us will inspire us and show us that it really is worth it
Kate called those sober people the “guiding lights” – they c

Published on 3 years, 1 month ago

Podcast Episode Details

Your Sober Year with Kate Baily