You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 10.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit from the inside out.

We're challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink and why it can be hard to resist temptation.

No labels, no judgment, just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking.

Now here's your host, Rachel Hart.

Hi everybody, welcome back. Welcome to episode 10.

I've been thinking about my podcast listeners a lot this week because I just wrapped up the final meeting from my book group.

So for those of you who don't know, in December, I published a book called Why Can't I Drink Like Everyone Else that outlines all the tools that I use with my coaching clients.

It talks about all the concepts, all the ideas that I have around why drinking can become a habit, why it can be tricky to change that habit and how to move forward if you want to cut back or take a break.

And the book group was amazing. I had 20 people together and we were all talking about the concepts, the chapters, what they were struggling with and really learning together as a group.

Now one issue came up as part of that book group that I don't talk about in my book, but I wanted to do a podcast episode on because I think that it is something that so many people really struggle with.

If you are thinking about changing your drinking or cutting back or taking a break, whatever it is, a lot of people will start that work.

In fact, a lot of the people that I work with will begin that work and they will get stuck in one place.

And the place where they will get stuck is feeling that they are unable to forgive themselves for something that they did in their past when they were drunk.

So you might be able to relate to this.

And this issue is really close to my heart because I will tell you that this was a monumental struggle for me.

It really was drinking, let me cut loose, it let me be a little crazy. It gave me a respite from my B perfect, do perfect mentality that I had in my day to day life.

But sometimes I took things too far. Sometimes I wound up being a little bit too reckless and I would wake up the next day and I wasn't just dealing with a hangover, which was bad enough.

But I was dealing with the embarrassment and shame of how I had acted or what I had done the night before.

And when I first started doing this work myself, so I started paying attention to my thoughts and my feelings and my urges, I felt so much more in control.

I felt so much more in control around alcohol, but I also just started to feel better.

I was feeling happier, I was feeling more at ease, but there was one thing that I couldn't shake.

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