How Trauma Leads To Addiction

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For private one-on-one or group coaching, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. As DC fam, welcome back to another episode we are long overdue. I'm super excited to be back. As I said in some of my last episodes, I wait for a download before I just pop out a piece of content. I don't like producing fluff and filler content so I'm always waiting for an angle, something to hit me before I jump on here because I want to make sure that the time I spend with you guys and the value that I give is coming from a deep source of wisdom and knowledge and when I get that download and inside, I feel like everything just flows so much more smoothly and I'm really able to deliver an impactful message that's going to tangibly help you improve your life, expand your map of reality, and really step into that next chapter as it relates to overcoming alcohol and really being the best version of yourself. So in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about addiction as a trauma response. So I don't know where you are currently on your journey, whether you have had any time of insubrity and maybe you've gone back to drinking or if you're just kind of exploring this journey for the first time, whether you've known alcohol has been problematic for you for a long time or if you're just kind of discovering it. But with my content, with my information, what I really am hoping to and am doing in terms of the content that I produce is I want to help people begin to understand all of these things through the lens of neuroscience and trauma because the traditional kind of 12 step or AA communities, they're just a little bit older. Their methodologies are from 100 years ago and so they don't consider the neuroscience. They don't really consider the trauma so much. Yeah, you work 12 step and in its own way is kind of a technology to help you. Develop self-awareness and self-inquiry to identify where the pain is, where the anger is, where the resentment is, where some of the things that might need to, what some of the things are that you might need to make amends to or heal or whatever, but they don't really dig in. They don't give you a comprehensive understanding and framework. It's pretty surface level. And so in this podcast, I want to dig into helping you understand addiction as a trauma response. So in order to do that, we first need to understand trauma and what it is and how it affects us. And so I want to preface this off by saying when people think of trauma, they typically think of big tea trauma, what they call big tea trauma, like sexual abuse, violence, going through a war, major car accidents, things like that, sexual abuse, physical abuse. That's what they consider trauma. But then there's also little tea trauma. And little tea trauma can pretty much be everything else. So it doesn't have to be some major thing. Little tea trauma could be raising your hand when the teacher calls on you and all of a sudden when they call on you, you freeze up and then everybody laughs at you. And so you feel ridiculed and rejected and shameful and embarrassed. Most people by traditional terms of trauma wouldn't consider that traumatic. And I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who are like, I ask them a little bit about their upbringing, their background. And they're like, yeah, childhood was great. Things were pretty good. And then we dig deeper and they end up saying, yeah, mom and dad was an alcoholic. They divorced. We were able to really express our emotions. We didn't have a choice around going to church. Whenever I cried, my dad told me to suck it up and they wouldn't allow me to express emotion. It wasn't safe. Everything was very surface level. And so all of those things can be traumatic for a child. And trauma a lot of times isn't not only what happened to you, but it's also what your parents or caregivers fail to provide you during necessary critical times of childhood and adolescent development when you needed it. That also creates a sense of trauma, a lack of safety. So what is trauma? So the way I want you to think about trauma is trauma is any experience that is too overwhelming or feels too unsafe for the level of our window of tolerance of our nervous system. So everybody has a window of tolerance. Some people are very sensitive. Other people are more resilient. This can be based on genetics, upbringing, I mean, so many different things. So we all have a window of tolerance. But what we can all agree on is that a child's window of tolerance, regardless, is very, very small. So for a child between the ages of zero and seven, basically safety and survival are its number one core need. Safety, survival, and the feeling of being connected and loved. And so any experience that is too overwhelming that causes them to go out of feeling safe, if they do not have a mental, emotional, or physical resources to make sense of that experience, then that experience could be considered trauma. So trauma is anything that goes outside of our stress response window that we don't have the psychological, emotional, or physical resources to fully process and integrate back into a sense of safety and homeostasis. And so the way trauma works is, for example, it's the example of, um, a pretty common one a lot of people have, which is, let's say you go to the grocery store with your parents, with your mom, and you're walking down the vegetable aisle or the frozen food aisle, and you know, you're kind of walking next to her. And then all of a sudden you get distracted by, I don't know, some shiny fruit or some colorful looking thing on a shelf. And you turn away, and your mom doesn't realize that you're still not walking with her, and she turns the corner. All of a sudden, as you turn back, your mom is gone. And now you get this sudden, overwhelming feeling of fear and abandonment. You think that your mom just left you, right? And as a four or five, maybe six year old, who doesn't have the cognitive capacity to truly understand what's happening in that situation, you all of a sudden feel like your mom just abandoned you, right? And so what happens is in this traumatic experience, right? Because you don't have the map of reality. You don't have the intellect. You don't have the cognition, right? What happens in that moment where your nervous system goes into a state of fight or flight, the brain takes a snapshot of this experience like a photograph. Caching, it takes a snapshot of everything. It takes a recording of where you were, who you were with, the details of the environment, right? It takes a snapshot, and it records how you're feeling in that moment, right? That heightened state of fear and anxiety, right? Replace this with getting rejected or bullied, replace this with getting laughed at or at school, replace this with your parents not validating your feelings and emotions and being, you know, abusive, replace this with your parents splitting apart and you not knowing what the future of your family looks like. I mean, it could show up in a million different ways, right? So in this moment, that's too overwhelming for the limited nervous system and the limited capacity of the child or adolescent, right? This is what the body does. This is what the brain does, right? Because think about it. Let me backtrack a little bit. So between zero and seven, right, your brain is taking in all this data through your five senses and it's forming the neural networks in your brain to establish how to survive. So every experience you have from the moment you're born throughout your life and it doesn't stop at childhood, but between zero and seven, your brain is like in a hypnotic state where it's taking everything in, it's taking everything literally and it's recording it and it's forming the, it's base layer of beliefs, right? Many of the beliefs that you establish early on are the beliefs that you carry with you throughout your life. But it's not only forming the beliefs, but those beliefs are then being unconsciously practiced and becoming part of your perceived self-identity or your ego. Your ego is the construct of who you think you are. It's made up. made up. It's just based off of all the series of experiences you've had from the moment you were born, when you learned language, when you learned shapes, when you learned all the basic fundamentals of if you just think back to how foreign it was to be alive and how everything was something to explore and to adventure. Now life just seems monotonous and routine, but remember that when you were young your brain was taking everything in it was trying to figure out how to make sense of reality. So it's forming these neural networks and who you think you are when you say this is me, this is my personality, these are my tendencies is nothing more than in an automatic process in which you are unconsciously or sometimes consciously pulling a data point from your past, looking at the details of that data point and then bringing that data point into the present moment to try to determine what your next step would be. This is what we call personality and this is how we experience our reality. In every present moment when we are confronted with anything, a refrigerator, a car, a stove, a sink, a phone, the way we learn, the way that we manage ourself, the way that we move forward is by going into the data bank of our memories, pulling the thing that seems the most closest and has the most resemblance to the thing in front of us so that we can execute it or so we can know what we should do next. So when you go to a fridge, the first time you went to a fridge, you just, I've got one here behind me if you're watching on YouTube, the first time you looked at it is just this big box. You didn't really understand what the door was, you didn't know it could open, but as your parents sat there next to you and they said, "Hey, this is the fridge, this is where we keep the food." It goes here and it goes there. Eventually, you build that pattern inside of you and so now every time you see a fridge, you say, "Okay, open door, food is inside there." Every experience that we have throughout our childhood and through our development, especially the early ones as it relates to our relationships with our parents, our attachment to them, the type of love and safety and support they provide, how they communicate with us, the belief systems they install, what's appropriate, what's not appropriate in the household, behaviors, all of these things. These are forming the synaptic pathways and neural networks in your brain which then become the data that you begin to use as you go out into the world. If we have a lot of these experiences that are painful and traumatic and are unprocessed and unresolved, the brain takes a snapshot of the experience, it records how your nervous system is feeling, let's say, fearful or angry or frustrated or overwhelmed or scared or anxious. When these experiences go unprocessed, it's like putting on a pair of classes. Let's say this trauma, it's like you don't have, you experience this trauma, your parents don't come to your rescue, they don't come get on one knee, come down, I level, hold you, put one hand on your heart, one hand on your back, talk to you, help you breathe, help you regulate back down to safety, help you understand how to process that experience. If for example, when your mom left you and you thought you were being abandoned in that moment and you went into this extreme state of fight or flight or fear, and then after 30 seconds of you screaming mom or she yelling out your name, you guys find each other and she yells at you and berates you and gets mad at you for getting distracted or walking away rather than her taking responsibility and seeing you that you're scared that you're just a young child who's in this intense state rather than taking responsibility and ownership and helping you self-regulate and process that experience, hey, I love you, I care about you, I would never leave you, you're safe, you're okay, just breathe, we're here together, right? If she instead berates you and is mean or rude, right, that whole thing totally scrambles you, now it's unsafe for you to feel scared, now it's unsafe for you to feel anxious, right? She like gas lights you almost, right? How do you think a six or seven or eight year old is supposed to make sense or process any of those things? As children, we take everything literally, that's the thing and this is what every child does, this is a normal response, this is a normal adaptive response to survive. With every experience that's painful, if we don't know how to make sense of it, we blame ourselves, we create a story and a narrative that blames ourselves so that we can create an additional adaptive pattern or mechanism to protect ourselves from having to feel that pain again, so we withdraw, our energy decreases, it represses, right? And when you have hundreds of these traumas or thousands of these traumas that go unresolved for too long in the way that they affect our identity, our thoughts, our self-perception and negatively affect our nervous system, constantly keeping us in an anxious state or in fight or flight, this is how anxiety is developed, chronic anxiety or social anxiety or depression, right? They used to say depression was low serotonin, but now the studies show that it really doesn't have that much to do with the neurochemistry, sure neurochemistry does affect it, but it's more psychological and emotional as it relates to trauma. People who experience depression are individuals who basically have had lots of trauma that have gone unresolved for far too long, which is totally repressed the expression of their energy because they don't feel like they can problem solve their life, they don't feel resourceful, their emotional system is always out of whack and anytime they move towards some level of discomfort or risk, the system just goes haywire and so they literally don't feel like they can create the life that they want for themselves, they feel like they're behind bars and when you constantly hit walls like this eventually it depresses the system. So the brain takes a snapshot of that experience that's traumatic and now it's like putting on a pair of glasses, you now look into the world, right? It's like this permanent pair of glasses that you have now just put on until you go back and reprocess that experience and apply new meaning to it and allow that energy that's repressed to semantically move through the body, right? So now every time you look out into the world you're looking out into the world and your relationship to yourself is through the lens of that trauma, right? So let's look at the neuroscience here. So what happens is with every experience we're forming neural pathways in our brain, right? And so if we have a neural pathway that is represents a traumatic event or a traumatic experience that goes unprocess and doesn't complete its psychological, emotional and physical cycle back to safety, now as a way to protect ourselves, this is the unconscious automatic happening of the brain, this is what the brain does, right? It's always just trying to keep you safe and comfortable and in the known and what's familiar. Even if what's known and familiar and comfortable is something abusive or painful or traumatic, that's why you have a lot of people who grow up in dysfunctional households or abusive type environments who then go out and unconsciously seek out partners who are the same. Even though they consciously understand and recognize that, hey, this is not good for me. This person is rude to me, mean to me, cheating on me, hurting me, abusive, right? Like whatever, but you continue to stay with them because that's all you know. That was the program, that was the series of programs that were installed during your childhood. Consciously you know it's not right? But unconsciously, right? The unconscious being everything that is not consciously you're aware of now. So let's talk about what the conscious versus the unconscious. So the conscious mind can hold five plus or minus two bits of data per second. So at any one time you can only focus on a few things. You can focus on you know the chair underneath your butt. You can focus on the temperature of your the environment on your skin. You can focus on maybe the wall in front of you and you can focus on you know the the posture of your back. Right? That's like four things. If I keep adding things eventually one of those data points are going to fall away. Right? So our conscious mind can only focus on a few things at a time. The unconscious mind represents all of the other data that's stored within us and is in our memory bank and that we have access to but we would have to retrieve. So that's the conscious versus the unconscious. And so that's why you hear when it comes to coaching or therapy or behavioral transformation in order to make lasting changes you have to make the change at the level of the unconscious. Right? Because the reality is is that as human beings when we're moving forward in our life our thought patterns our behaviors our routines how we show up our belief systems all of the these things exist at the level of the unconscious. Our conscious mind is the last one to the party. You think that you're making decisions, but you're really not. And they've done brain scans and hooked up EEG, all those electrodes to people's brains, and they've asked them questions. And they've been able to detect through waveforms that when you ask somebody a question, the answer comes from the unconscious and it travels to the conscious mind. So you think you're making a decision, but you're really not. And so everything in our life is determined by our unconscious imprints and belief systems and programs and patterns, and all these things are installed at a very young age. So we now go into the world with these glasses on. And these glasses, for example, there's 1,000 and a half and a million and a half different types of traumas we can have an experience. And so these glasses now tell us that I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. I have to abandon myself and make sure other people are taking care of so that I can receive love, so that I can receive admiration, so that I can be validated. I have to be perfect or else the people around me won't love me. Or I have to be perfect or my mom will get hurt or my dad will get hurt. I have to over achieve so that I can receive love. Right? I mean, there's so many stories and narratives that we might construct or take on as adaptive programs and behavioral patterns when we're young as a means to survive. And so every time, right, now we're not wearing these glasses and we're filtering our reality and all this is unconscious, right? You're just now learning about it as an adult. So think of the hundreds of thousands of repetitions you have had through your childhood of, "I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. I can't do it." People, you know, could reject me. Whatever it is, right? Think about your childhood. Think about your adolescent. How many unconscious stories, how many unconscious programs you have been running in the background? And the average person has 60 to 90,000 thoughts a day on average, 90% of them being the same as yesterday. Most of us don't really have completely new creative novel thoughts. We're just running this dialogue in our head and this dialogue is just based on the past. Right? You can't pull dialogue from the future. The future doesn't exist yet. You can't pull dialogue randomly from the quantum field unless you're connected to your intuition and you get some sort of download, right? Or from Spirit or God or Source or whatever you want to look at it or call it. The story is a narrative that you're constantly telling yourself this self-talk is based off of all the programs and experiences of your past, right? It's like building a computer. Once you understand your linguistic programming, you really just look at the mind and the emotional operating system like a computer. So imagine you're putting together a brand new computer. You buy all the separate components, the graphics card, the motherboard, you know, the fans, all of it, right? Each and every one of us are mined, our psychology, our emotional system. It's a construct of the experiences we've had, right? So we're now going out into the world with all these traumas, with all these glasses that we've put on. And every single day we are unconsciously affirming to our self. I'm not good enough. It's not possible for me. You know, it's hard, right? Simultaneously, as we're telling ourselves those stories, our nervous system is dysregulated. So the nervous system has, you know, two states, sympathetic and a parasympathetic. Sympathetic being in a state of fight or flight or arousal and parasympathetic being rest and digest, feeling calm and neutral, right? And when we experience these traumas, our nervous system is likely constantly in a state of being sympathetic, right? So our sleep is worse. We're not digesting as well. You know, we have less energy, right? We're always on edge. We're always anxious. We're always worried. Something bad might happen. Something might go wrong, right? It's just, this is the nature of the nervous system as a result in how it becomes affected as a result of having these painful experiences that go unprocessed. The human being is now on high alert. And so as we're interfacing with reality having all these experiences, right? We're now filtering every experience through the lens of that trauma unconsciously. This is what the brain does because the brain doesn't want to experience that pain again. So every experience is like, hey, could this re-experience that pain? Could I get cheated on again? Could this person potentially hurt me? Could this boss take advantage of me again? Could whatever it is? If I take this risk, could I fail and be ridiculed and rejected just like I was in sub-the-grade? And every time you think about that experience unconsciously, hundreds or not hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times, you are actually strengthening the neural network in your brain for that trauma. It's becoming more and more and more part of who you think you are, part of your perceived identity, part of your energetic resonance and expression. And so you say, well, this is who I am. I have social anxiety. I'm a socially anxious person. You start to take on these experiences that were never fully processed and you start to take ownership of them. It's not because you're less than or you're bad or you don't know any better. It's just, I mean, maybe it is. We don't know any better. This is all a natural adaptive response as a means to protect ourselves from pain. And so we strengthen these neural networks in our brain and they become bigger and thicker like a well-traveled down path in a forest or like if you're at the top of a mountain and you're going to go skiing down it, you're probably going to ski down the slope where everybody skied. There's a well-defined groove so you have a path to go down. These painful experiences of our life become these well-traveled, well-known paths that we just constantly refer to. And when I say that constantly, it's because this is what this vehicular organism does. As human beings, you have to remember the two drivers of life are pain and pleasure, are safety and death. And you forget about this because we live in concrete jungles with paved roads and technology and iPhones and grocery stores and running water and governments. But you have to recognize that this vehicle, this operating system, pain and pleasure, those are the two core fundamental drivers of all things. And so when we have a lot of trauma, our mind or body is in a state of pain. It dysregulates our thoughts and it dysregulates our emotional responses. Our ability to handle stress, our ability to handle overwhelm, our ability to handle intense feelings and sensations like anxiety or anything else. When we have all this trauma, we have no understanding of this operating system and how we came to be the way that we are. And nobody teaches us how to cope. Nobody teaches us how to manage our mind. Nobody teaches us how to regulate our emotional operating system. We don't understand mindfulness. We don't understand breathwork. We don't understand grounding. We don't understand different ways to manage this operating system. And then we get herded like cattle through this K-12 system. And we've got all this matrix media coming in through every form of consumption from our phones and Netflix to everything else telling us to drink. We then discover alcohol. And because the system is dysregulated, we're stressed out, we're overwhelmed, we're fearful, we don't really believe in ourselves. We have all these self-imposed limitations from our past that were never processed, that were likely our parents, they gave it to us. We took on these limiting beliefs from the people around us, whatever, right? All of a sudden you find a reprieve in alcohol and it's like, oh my gosh, floods your brain with dopamine, acts on your GABA receptors, gives you a combination of feeling pleasurable and euphoric and finally relieving that tension from the dysregulation of your nervous system, right? It becomes God to you. It becomes the best thing that you've ever found, right? And so as we look at how addiction happens, right, addiction is a response to trauma, right? We go for the bottle because we are reaching out for something to self-soothe a system that is dysregulated, that has psychological and emotional dissonance. It is in a lack of balance, it is in a lack of harmony. That's what alcohol represents on this macro level of our society and our spiritual development as human beings. It's not this cool, fun, exciting thing that we all were marketed. The human being is turning towards alcohol because something inside of them, psychologically or emotionally, is too much. Whether it's boredom, whether it's frustration, whether it's overwhelm, whether it's loneliness, whether it's feeling like you're not enough, whether it's financial stress, relationship stress, child stress, right? And so this is what we have to understand. This is where we have to place our attention and area of focus. If we want to quit drinking alcohol and embark on this journey so that we can step into the chapter and you've heard me say this time and time and time again, it has nothing to do with alcohol. Alcohol is not the thing that we should be placing our attention and focus on. When you go to quit drinking alcohol, if you just do nothing else and just put the bottle down, which is what 99% of people do, as they embark on this journey, they get a week, they get 10 days, they get a month, they get seven months, and then they go back to drinking, it's because you never began to address the vehicle that you are inhabiting. You never begin to address at a deep internal level your psychology, your thought patterns, your relationship with yourself, how you think, how you interpret your belief systems, your paradigms, your perceptions, your values, your models of reality. You never begin to address your emotions, the sensations that move through your body, right? When we don't work on those things, then yeah, we can go a few days without alcohol or a week without alcohol or a month without alcohol, but when that pain starts to build psychologically and emotionally, when all those past traumas start to red line and overwhelm the system, then one day, six months into it, we say, "Fuck it, let's just have another beer. I'm tired of this. I'm stressed out. I'm overwhelmed." But the other thing too, so we're talking about trauma, but the other components too, we have to understand with alcohol is, and this is why alcohol is one of the most challenging drugs to quit is because it's so socially acceptable. So everybody you know does it, right? And so if you're not making changes to who you associate with and being more mindful and intentional of the energy that you associate with, that could be a reason you go back. If on the other hand, you're also not taking neurochemistry into account, that's why they call it recovery. People who are getting sober are in recovery because you're doing real damage to your neuro transmitters. When you abuse alcohol for long periods of time and it disrupts the sensitive balance of your dopamine, putting you in a dopamine deficit state, there's a recovery process that we have to go through to allow our dopamine to come back to what feels normal. And for some people, depending on how long you've been drinking or whatever, it may never get back to the state it was before you were drinking. Like there's real consequences, my friend, to this stuff. And just because it's legal and just because you see it everywhere does not mean it's harmless. In fact, it's the most harmful. If you go to Google and you look up, what is it? It's like destructiveness of drugs, ranked in order. You'll find that alcohol is at the top over everything, over everything. Methamphetamine's crack, heroin, like overarching in terms of the number of people who consume the damage to society, the damage to the economy, the risk factors and the health factors that come as a result of it, the relational, familial factors and impact, it's insane. It far exceeds anything else. So understanding that addiction is a trauma response. When we don't have the psychological and emotional tools to deal with our mind and to deal with the sensations that are too overwhelming, we turn to alcohol. So that's why I say this process of quitting drinking has nothing to do with the alcohol. It's a macro process of getting to a place within your human development. Some people get to this place at 25, some people get it at 29, 30, 35, 40, 55. I've coached a few seven-year-old. I've sent three clients over 70. It's about getting to a place in your psychospiritual, emotional development as a human being where you develop the courage to say enough is enough. I'm no longer going to run from the sensations. I'm no longer going to run from the thoughts that overwhelm me. In that process is an even playing field. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or if it doesn't matter if you're just graduated college. The dopamine feeding cycle takes, doesn't judge. The anxiety, the withdrawal, it doesn't judge. We've all felt it. We all had to go through it. We all had to deal with it. We all had to go through the process of making changes to our values, to our communication, to the people we associate with, to our weekends and how we spend our free time. We have to recognize that this process at a deep level is a healing journey. It is a journey of discovering who and what you are. It is this process of identifying the things that have been limiting the optimal expression of our energy as human beings. Why else are we here on earth? The reason we incarnated, and I mean a lot of different ways we can look at this, and I've got different perspectives, but one reason, we're born. We go through this system, so we can develop tools and skills and faculties so that we can go out and create a life that we want for ourselves. Create a life that feels good, that feels meaningful, that utilizes our gifts, that utilizes our skills, that utilizes our talents, in a way where we can have good relationships, where we can be a leader, where we can serve other people, where we can make an impact, and leave this place better than we found it. That's what I'm trying to do. Along this path and journey is we move forward if we find that we have limitation rather than numbing yourself from that sensation that's too overwhelming or that perceived psychological limitation of I'm not good enough, rather than doing that in just numbing yourself from it and distracting yourself and drinking, what we should be doing is holding the mirror to say, "Okay, where does this come from? Why do I not feel like I'm good enough? Why do I feel like I'm not worthy? Why do I feel like it's not possible for me? Why do I feel like I can't enjoy a weekend and just go on and venture alcohol free? You have to be willing to ask yourself these questions. And then you have to be willing to get ruthlessly committed and curious about answering them, or you're just going to keep procrastinating, an alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. That's what we're doing with alcohol. We're just procrastinating the inevitable. At some point, you're going to have to stop drinking, or you don't, and it kills you, like it killed my dad. And I know many of you have lost parents or loved ones to alcoholism. So at some point, you're going to have to stop. At some point, you're going to have to feel the craving. At some point, you're going to have to feel the anxiety. At some point, you're going to have to get to a point Friday night where you have two options of going out to the bar or sitting at home and watching a movie, and you're going to have to sit with the discomfort of watching a movie. And so that's what this is. This process is about redefining, reinterpreting your relationship to the internal discomfort that you have been suppressing and repressing and locking away and running from enumming. But let me promise you, let me, let me, let me make it very, very clear that the things that you are avoiding, the things that you're most anxious about, the things that you're most saddened by and hurt by and fearful about are the very things that lead to your personal evolution and transformation and maturity and growth as a person. At a macro level, it's about understanding that our pain, our childhood pain, our adolescent pain, the challenges of our life, turn into our power. They turn into our foundation. They turn into the wisdom that we can carry to be more mindful, to be more aware, to be more compassionate, to be more empathetic, to be more proactive in the way that we live our life and the way that we impact others. A lot of people have shame and guilt and a lot of just challenging sensations around their past. But I want to help you begin to expand your map and framework and understand that this process of quitting drinking is about developing the courage within yourself to begin working through that. Because once you begin to work through that, the path is what you discover on the other side is you start to experience psychological and emotional harmony. Your nervous system starts to relax. You feel less anxious. You start to feel less depressed. You start to feel more empowered. You start to feel more in control. You start to believe in yourself more. You start to love yourself more. But in order to get to those aspects of reality where you're confident and empowered and certain and proactive and consistent and living that side of life, you can't get there by hacking it. You can't get there into a state of psychological and emotional stability and balance and harmony where you feel empowered to architect your reality. You can't get there by bypassing the work. You can't get there by bypassing all your traumas and saying, oh, well, that's just in the past. Yet you're still constantly anxious. Yet you're still constantly emotionally dysregulated. Yet you're still constantly overwhelmed. Yet you're still constantly judging people and pointing fingers and not taking responsibility. The way that we get through to the other side is by developing the courage within herself to reprocess our experiences. And as we do this, we experience visceral, noticeable, experiential changes in our psychology in the way that we relate to ourself, our self-talk, the voice in our head, as well as the energetic resonance of our body. I remember like eight to nine months into my sobriety. I went through what I could only describe as a spiritual awakening, where for like this one to two, and maybe what it was is just a shift in the fabric of my nervous system, where over this one to two month period, I just, it didn't feel like I was living in my body. I felt like I was somebody else. And I was so much more connected to the present moment. There was so much overwhelming gratitude every single day for breathing, for being alive, for taking a shower. Like, it sounds crazy, it sounds crazy. But my entire life from my background and all the trauma and all the dysregulations, sensationally and psychologically that I was caring began to shift. And it was, I'll never forget it. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life through that time and my journey. And now as I look back, like I just, you don't know what you don't know, right? Moving into your potential, transforming your life, moves you into a space, a domain of reality that you can't see now, you can't feel now, you can't predict now. And maybe that feels uncomfortable, maybe that feels scary, the uncertainty of that, right? When we have a lot of trauma, despite the pain, we like the certainty, we like what's known, we like what's familiar, we like what's comfortable. But this is where courage comes into place. And if you read that book's levels of consciousness, but by, I can't ever remember, is it David Hawkins or Richard Hawkins? And he talks about the scale of consciousness as it rises. He says, when you reach courage, which is the vibrational scale of courage, it's like, he marks some numbers, it's like 200. He says, that's when everything in your life changes. Because courage is the key, it is the catalyst for transformation. The courage to deal with boredom, the courage to let go of toxic relationships, the courage to stop playing small, the courage to stopping so afraid, the courage to forgive, the courage to let go, the courage to take a risk, the courage to put yourself outside of your comfort zone, meeting new people, the courage to doing something you've never done before. So much of our life is just a constant repeat. We think we're experiencing these new novel experiences, but if you're really honest with yourself, how much is your life changing? How much adventure do you really have? When all you do is follow the same path and same routine and all you do is you just sit down and drink for four hours, for six hours, multiple days per week. You're not doing anything. Imagine there was a camera in the corner of your house recording you whenever you just sat there on the couch and drink or in your kitchen or in your office. Once you be in that camera room and look at yourself and be like, "Yo, what the fuck are you doing?" Go do something. Why are you just sitting there numbing yourself? This is a really powerful thought experiment. It's an authentic exercise. Imagine, like, makes you self-conscious in a way. Like you're just sitting there watching yourself doing something you know is destroying your life, destroying the fabric of your relationships, destroying the fabric of your family, setting a poor example to basically ensure and repeat generational trauma as your kids watch you do it. Like, dude, we have to get to a place in our life where we develop the courage to begin to just be present, to just begin practicing mindfulness, to recognize that regardless of how intense this sensation is in our body, if you're sitting at home on the couch, you're safe. You're safe. Doesn't matter how redlining and blistering the intensity is, you're safe if you're sitting on the couch at home, under a blanket, drinking water with a pillow next to you. You're safe. And as you dig into mindfulness and meditation, and you begin to experience as a fact, understand that everything is impermanent and constantly changing. Your thoughts are constantly changing. Your emotions are constantly changing. Your feelings about how you're interpreting those emotions is constantly changing. The sensations in your body are constantly changing. You recognize that craving and alcohol and fear of missing out in all these archetypical problems and challenges we associate with getting sober are also all impermanent. If you just step back and pause and wait and breathe and do something different for an hour, you'll get through it. I promise you, there is no secret, there is no hack. And it's like, this is where we need to, we need to change the narrative. If this at scale is gonna change our culture, I've got 250 videos on my TikTok and I explain to you these profound, like deep concepts around understanding how to quit drinking. And I can't tell you how many thousands of comments have gotten people from people that say, but yeah, how do you stop? And I get it, it's like the most mind-boggling thing, but you just, you don't pick it up. You just stop, that's how anybody gets sober, alcoholic or not, you just stop. And you develop the courage within yourself to move through the discomfort that presents itself. You develop the courage to pay back the debt that you have neurochemically inquired and emotionally inquired as a result of hacking your neurochemistry. And I'm not blaming you and I'm not judging you. We all drink with the best intentions to self-soothe. But at some point, we get to a place within our development and we journey where we recognize that hey, this strategy to self-soothe is no longer working. It's no longer useful. If I play the tape forward, it is going to destroy and take everything away from me. So you have to be willing to choose your sacrifice. And if you don't, your sacrifice is get chosen for you. And that's just what it is. There's no way around it. And then you just take it one day at a time. You do not think about the future. You just take it one day at a time. How do I get through the next hour? How do I get through this evening? You optimize for sobriety. You filter every decision through the lens of, is this going to support my sobriety or is this going to put me at risk? I say this to my clients all the time. Like if you're 50 years old and we're working together and we've got another 50 years left, can you take from 50 to 51 and go all in on you? Can you put your head down? Can you go monk mode? Can you be willing to make some changes? Can you be willing to make some adjustments? Can you be willing to make what feels like sacrifices for the next 12 months? So that the next 49 years of your life are smooth sailing. And is there going to be challenges and might you get cravings or whatever along the way? For sure. That's just part for the course when we're talking about addiction, right? But if you really commit to this process and go all in on it and build a foundation and expand your map of reality and reinterpret your entire human physiological operating system and gain a better understanding of how your mind works, how your emotions work, and how all these things connect together. And you begin the healing process of healing your inner child, reinterpreting your past, re-imprinting new memories, practicing new ways and techniques to regulate your emotional operating system, taking a completely proactive approach to living your life with discipline and accountability and routine where you're increasing your self awareness, you're improving your relationship to yourself, you're becoming smarter, wiser, you're developing new skills, you're losing weight, you're getting into better shape. Like, dude, that's what happens when you quit drinking. But you have to be willing to deal with and move through that initial craving, the initial boredom, the initial challenges. But on the other side is everything that you could possibly want. Now, does this mean that just by quitting drinking all your problems go away? No. No. The problems that were induced by alcohol go away, but if there's any residual damage left, now we have to clean that up. But that's part of our growth process as human beings, is learning how to communicate, learning how to be a better leader, right? If you're in a relationship, better understanding a partner, having boundaries, understanding masculine and feminine dynamics, right? Being a better mother, being a better father, being a better employee, being a better business owner, figuring out how to manage your time better, working through social anxiety, healing your inner child. like this is just part of the process. that we go through. Like, why else are we here? It's not just about work. It's not just about going to the beach. It's not just about watching Netflix. Like, this work, all this work that we're talking about, all these things, this is why we're here, is to learn how to work through and manage and navigate our internal experience of reality so that we can get to a place where we feel empowered, empowered to create the life that we want for ourselves. That's it, right? Like, it's a simple question. Like, if you felt good and confident and certain and empowered to create the life that we want, would you constantly go and numb out and drink alcohol? It's like, no, I would just use my gifts. I would use my talents. I would go out, I would be happy. I'd build relationships, I'd go on adventure, I'd go on a vacation, like, I would do things that are good and I would create positive experiences. I would be of service, I would be of impact. But when we're on the other side of the spectrum, and we can't see all those things because we've got this trauma and this dysregulation psychologically and emotionally, and we think the world is out to get us and people can't be trusted and men are this and women are that and this and like, it's overwhelming, man, it's overwhelming. So, turning to alcohol is a, it's a trauma response. We are attempting to hack our neurochemistry to self-soothe something inside us. So, if you want to quit drinking alcohol and all you're doing is putting the bottle down and not making some of these other changes, like, it's gonna be a hard road because wherever you go, there you are. And just by putting the bottle down, if you don't begin to expand your map of understanding and reality of all these things I'm talking about, like, the pain's gonna still be there, the anger's still gonna be there, the frustration, the sadness, the hurt, the loss, and it's just gonna get to a point where you just say, "Fuck it, it's too overwhelming." You have to learn how to offload pain. You have to learn how to offload stress. You have to be able to manage your mind in such a way where you're able to take multiple vantage points at a single thought. You have to be able to reinterpret beliefs. You have to get to a place where you're able to feel sensation in your body and maintain a space of regulation or at least healthy strategies into regulation so that you can continue focusing on the goal and making forward progress, whether it's at work or with your partner or your kids, and you don't have a meltdown and you don't blow up and you don't disrespect people and hurt people and then hurt yourself in the process. This is all a learning process. That's why I say we don't quit drinking. We're learning how to live alcohol free and this is a learning process. It's not a light switch for everybody. So if you've tried to quit drinking and then you go back, don't beat yourself up. If this was a light switch, I wouldn't exist, addiction wouldn't exist, rehabs wouldn't exist, the world of mental health wouldn't exist. We'd all just be hunky-dory. It'd just stop things and start things and there'd be no downstream consequences or residual net effect of anything. So this is a learning process, but, you know, don't bullshit yourself. Learn what you can. Learn from your mistakes, right? If you had a string of 30 days and then you go back, rewind the tape like you're watching, like you're a coach watching game film, rewind to the moments before and have a transparent look at your psychology and your emotional system in that moment and figure out what happened. Where did the play go wrong? Where did we make a decision that we could have made differently, right? Where could you have made a different decision? Where could you have practiced a technique? Where could you have exited the situation? Where could you have denied going out? Where could you have like, and then integrate that, integrate that, meaning next time you're presented with something similar, catch it ahead of time and make the different decision no matter how hard, no matter how sacrificial, no matter how much phomo, no matter how much pain, no matter how much anxiety, no matter how much you want to go out and have a stake with your friends and drink wine and go to the country club and play golf because you know where it leads to. You connect your input to your output. And I know this makes sense on a conscious level, but Barty, in the moment it's just so overwhelming, I know it's overwhelming. Trust me, I know better than anybody, it's overwhelming. But what do we gonna do? Are you gonna allow the excuse of it's just too overwhelming to dictate the unfolding of your life or are you gonna take back your personal power and say, "Hey, I don't give a fuck anymore, I don't give a shit anymore, like I'm done, it's not negotiable, I'm done for today." And that's it, that's the only decision you have to make, I'm just done for today, just not doing it. You guys are going out, go out, have fun, I'm gonna go do this. That's it, and you're gonna be okay, you're gonna discover that, hey, they're gonna come back drunk, they're gonna wake up hung over the next day and you're gonna feel good, you're gonna be glad you didn't do it. And yeah, there's an adaptation period, psychologically and emotionally, socially, where we have to go through and reorganize our life, you have to reorganize certain individuals we associate with and what we do on the weekend, how we spend our evenings, but what's the alternative? What's the alternative? Play the tape forward, what's gonna happen if you keep drinking the way that you're drinking for another six months, one year, 18 months, three years, five years, 10 years? What's gonna happen to you? What's gonna happen to your income? What's gonna happen to your career? What's gonna happen to your relationship? What's gonna happen to your kids? What's gonna happen to your social circle? Play that forward and assume it's gonna get worse because it does. You're a finite being, consuming poison that is every time you consume it, disregulating your psychological and emotional system more and more, it's atrophying your brain more and more, it's strengthening the emotional automatic decision-making process of your brain more and more. It is disrupting the balance of your neurochemistry, causing you to go into a further dopamine deficit more and more. You can't win against this thing. You don't win. If you've developed a problematic relationship with alcohol, there is no winning. There is no, let me moderate. Let me beat this thing. You just have to accept that, hey, this thing neurochemically does not jive with your brain chemistry and system. And I know it sucks and there's an anger process, there's a resentment process, there's a, why can these fucking people drink and I can't, we all go through it. It's all part of the process. But trust me, when you do the work and you follow the path and you get to the other side and you experience a real sense of freedom, you realize that all that shit is nonsense. In the beginning, you feel like you're the outside looking in. Once you're sober, you're the inside looking out at everybody else who still is turning to alcohol in this attempt to relax, in this attempt to have a good time, but when you lift the hood and you really get to know them and have a deep authentic conversation with them, you just see the truth. You know, and I'm not here to judge. This is just the reality of it. You know? So I hope this episode was insightful for you. I hope it expanded your map of understanding as it relates to our development, the role Trauma plays in our psychology and our emotional operating system and how Trauma dysregulates our perceptions and identity thereby causing false beliefs, false narratives, a false self image, right, which then affects our emotional operating system, which then affects the output of our behaviors, right? And how all these things compounded over time lead to the illusion of self that we feel restricted by. And the process of growing through this and the process of healing through this and what it looks like on the other side. I'm telling you what's possible. And if you've tried to do this on your own and you haven't been successful, you gotta have support, you gotta have accountability. There's no way I would have been able to do this thing on my own. I mean, I was in animals drinking four to six bottles of wine a day at my worst. You know, you might be drinking a bottle of wine, you might be drinking just a couple glasses of wine or a couple beers, it doesn't matter. You know, you need accountability, you need structure, you need routine, you need support, you need to be able to start digging into all these things. And I've created a system of program, step by step, super comprehensive that covers pretty much all of it from A to Z to provide you a path forward with community, with support and accountability, where you get to work with me one on one. And we meet once a week, you schedule a call with me over Zoom, you and I connect, personally, we dig into the things that we need to dig into. And we help you get through this thing one day at a time. And I promise you, I promise you. What is waiting for you on the other side of this is more beautiful than you can begin to imagine. The growth process, the transformational journey of getting going alcohol free is, there's no words to describe it. It's only a nectar, people who have been through the process can taste. So check out my website if you wanna work with me, directly one on one, www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. And I just, I think, I've just added a review button at the top. If you scroll down to the bottom, I've got tons and tons of testimonials and reviews. I just screenshot these straight from my community. I'm not asking for these. These are just what people say. And I screenshot them. I blur out the name to keep it private. And yeah, just look at what other people are saying about this program and share this episode with somebody who you think it'll help and it'll impact. And if you haven't yet, I'd appreciate it if you left a five star review on Spotify and Apple, it'll help push this podcast out to reach more people who need it. So I appreciate you listening and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.thestoptrinkingcoach.com and book a call with me. I offer private one on one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.