Episode #22: Taking a Break from Drinking with Rachel Hart

Rachel Hart coaches women who want to take a break from alcohol and helps them to rewrite their stories to help them feel deeply confident, powerful, and present in their own Super Powered lives. I appreciate and am inspired by her passion for helping others that’s not based on a black and white dichotomy of “bad” or “good,” but rooted in helping them observe and bear witness to their own their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Her approach is similar to a successful scientist — she stays open, curious and looks for certain patterns to pinpoint thoughts that lead to specific actions.

Rachel and Lisa talk about the important ties between language and emotions, the neutrality of alcohol itself, the emotions surrounding the choice to drink or abstain, and how we can create habits that are better aligned with what we really want from life.

Takeaways:

Rachel Super Powers showed up first working on human rights issues all over the world, including the American Civil Liberties Union. This sparked her passion to take an issue and “change the conversation” to one that breeds positive and empowering outcomes.
Rachel’s own curiosity to unpack the reasons why she drank alcohol led her to realize it wasn’t about the alcohol itself but a way to escape feelings normally viewed as overwhelming or scary. She started using alcohol as a social crutch to eliminate awkwardness or boredom.
As we start to understand and question our own thoughts about ourselves and who we are as a person, we find that they are optional and can be challenged.
Alcohol and the choice to drink or not drink is neutral — the stories and emotional baggage that come with these decisions can be what holds the charge and keeps us stuck in a place that doesn’t serve us or move us forward.
We live in a culture that is not the best at emotional fluency and it can be very vulnerable to access feelings of sadness, shame, loneliness, anxiety, etc. Once we learn to deal with these feelings head-on, our thoughts and actions change and we move away from habits that are used to distract us.

Mentioned in This Episode:

Other Resources

After publishing this show we found other resources for revisiting the relationship with alcohol. Here are a few good ones:

[Addendum: In the later episode #42 Listening for Truth with Natha Campanella we also touch on this topic. Her article “Five Skills to Get Good at If You Want to Quit Drinking” is another great resource.]

Quotes

“Changing your relationship with alcohol is so much bigger than saying yes or no to a drink.”

“If you can stay curious about what you are working on, you can make a lot of strides. The antidote to shame is curiosity.”

“Word choice matters.”

“What if we could be okay with who we actually are?”

Humans were built to run on habits. It makes us efficient as a species, but when you have a habit you want to change it can be incredibly frustrating.

“Taking a break for me forced me to be present, mindful, and look at my think-feel-and-act cycle in a way I didn’t have access to before.”

See the FULL TRANSCRIPTION of this show!

Resources: