You Meant It When You Said You Were Done Drinking

Hey everybody, welcome to the Addiction Unlimited podcast where you get to learn everything you want to know about addiction and recovery. I'm your host, Angela Pugh, co-founder of Kansas City Recovery, Life Coach and Recovery and Alcoholic. To learn more about me, you can listen to episode zero on your podcast app or find us on the web at AddictionUnlimited.com. Hello my friend, welcome back to Addiction Unlimited, I'm your coach, Angela Pugh. Today's episode is about something I haven't heard discussed in the recovery space, not the way it needs to be. You meant it when you said you were done. You weren't lying, you weren't being dramatic, you weren't caught up in a moment, you meant it. And now you're sitting here again doing the exact same thing you swore you wouldn't do. And I want to talk about why, not because you lack willpower, not because you don't want it badly enough, not because something is fundamentally broken in you. It's because something has been happening underneath the surface, long before you ever said I'm done, that nobody's talking about. And once you see it, you're going to understand this whole thing differently. We talk a lot about relapse, we talk about triggers, we talk about willpower and discipline and building better habits. But there's a layer underneath all of that that doesn't get enough attention. And it's this, by the time you finally say I'm done, really done, not just frustrated done, not just scared done, but really done, your relationship with yourself has already been quietly steadily destroyed, not by other people, not by circumstances, by you, by the drinking, by thousands of small moments that you didn't even register as significant. And that's what I want to walk through today, because I think if you understand what's actually been happening, you're going to stop being confused about why I'm done, doesn't seem to stick. Most conversations about drinking focus on the obvious costs, right? The health stuff, the money, relationships, the mornings you can't remember, those are real in their important, but they're also the surface. Underneath all of that, there's a different kind of damage happening, slower, quieter. And in a lot of ways, more destructive, because drinking doesn't just cost you money and health and relationships. It costs you yourself. And think about what you've actually been giving up your time, not just the hours you were drinking, but the hours recovering from it, right? Slow mornings, lost afternoons, the evenings you checked out before dinner was even done, time that you'll never get back. Or your integrity, the version of yourself you knew you were supposed to be. That person got smaller and smaller, not all at once, just a little at a time every day until you look in the mirror one day and barely recognize who you're looking at. Your honesty, not just the lies you told other people, but the lies you told yourself, I'm fine, it's not that bad. I can stop whenever I want. This is the last one. You became fluent in a second language, right? Or your principles, the things that used to matter to you, being present for your kids, showing up the way you said you would, following through, keeping your word. You didn't abandon those things all at once. You traded them away in little small increments, a drink here, a missed thing there, a promise that quietly expired before you even noticed it was gone. And your growth, this one is sneaky because drinking doesn't just pause your life, it freezes it. The emotional maturity, self-awareness, personal development, all of that that should have been happening, it gets put on hold. People in recovery often talk about feeling emotionally stunted, right? Like I'm 35 years old with the coping skills of a teenager. I'm not 35 years old. And that is true. The growth stops when the drinking really starts. And here's what I need you to hear about all this. You knew, maybe not consciously, maybe not in words you could put on paper, but somewhere inside you, you knew, you felt every one of those compromises. You were present for every one of those moments and something in you registered it, filed it away even when you weren't willing to look at it directly. And that matters. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But here's what nobody tells you about drinking. Every single day that you're drinking, every time you say just two and have six, every time you hide a bottle, every time you tell your partner you only had a couple when you had a lot more, every time you isolate, so nobody sees what you're really doing, you're making a withdrawal from your self-trust account. Not a dramatic one, not a big obvious one, just a small, quiet withdrawal, every single day. And here's the thing about those withdrawals. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, your internal sense of self shifts. Not who you tell people you are. Not the face you put on at work or at school pick up, but the internal version, the one that only you know, it starts to change. You start to understand on a level below conscious thought that you cannot be trusted, not by other people, not by yourself. You say, "I'm only going to have two." And you know when you say it, it's a lie. Maybe you don't admit that, but you know. You say, "I'll be home by eight tonight." And somewhere in the back of your mind, you're already calculating the exit. You say, "I'm fine." And you feel the falseness of it, even as the words are coming out of your mouth. You know, you always know. And every time you say one thing and do another, every single time, you teach yourself something. Not on purpose, but the lesson lands anyway. You teach yourself. My word doesn't mean anything, even to me. And that is devastating. And it happens so gradually that most people don't even realize it's occurred until you're too deep in it, until the self-trust is so eroded that they can barely trust themselves with small decisions, let alone life-altering ones. This is the damage nobody talks about. Not the liver damage, not the financial damage, the self-trust damage, and it's profound. So now let's bring this forward to the moment you say, "I'm done." You mean it. Let's be clear about that. I know you mean it. Something real happened, something shifted. Maybe it was a specific incident. Maybe it was just a quiet accumulation of enough. But the intention is genuine. And here's what happens next. Even though you'd never say this out loud, there's a part of you that immediately goes, "Yeah, we'll see." Not loud, not dramatic, just a quiet knowing skepticism. The kind that comes from experience. Because you have experience. You've made promises to yourself before. You've meant them before. And you know, on a visceral, bone, deep level, how that tends to go. So even in the moment of real intention, there's a voice that doesn't believe you. And that voice isn't your enemy. It's not sabotaging you. It's just reporting the data. It has watched you say things and do other things for years. It's drawing a reasonable conclusion. You've been here before. We'll see. And that gap between the genuine intention and the quiet internal disbelief is where so many people get stuck. Not because they don't want sobriety, because they don't trust themselves to actually follow through on it. They've broken their word to themselves so many times. And self-trust, once eroded, doesn't come back just because you've made a new decision. It comes back through evidence, through follow through. Through doing what you say you're going to do, even in small things, even when no one's watching. The decision to get The sober is real and it matters. But the decision alone doesn't rebuild the trust. The action does. And that takes time and consistency and a whole lot of doing what you said you would do even when you really, really don't want to. Let me zoom out for a second and show you the full picture because I think when you see this clearly, something's going to click. And here's what the pattern actually looks like. You drink and you compromise yourself, right? Your time, your honesty, your integrity, your word in small ways constantly. You're making withdrawals from your self-trust every single day. But you're not tracking them consciously. So they're just accumulating in the background. Then something happens, a wake up call, a hard moment, a realization. And you say, "I'm done." And you mean it. And then that quiet internal voice says, "We'll see." And either you hold through it or you don't. And if you don't, that voice gets a little louder, a little more confident. See? Called it. And then you try again, same sequence, same moment of genuine intention, same quiet skepticism. And maybe you hold a little longer this time. Or maybe you don't. But each time you break that word to yourself, the evidence stacks a little higher. This is what we do. We don't follow through. And that's what makes this so painful. The real heartbreak of it is that it stops staying contained to drinking. That erosion of self-trust starts to bleed into everything. You hesitate on decisions that should be easy. You second-guess yourself constantly. You pull back from things you actually want because somewhere in the back of your mind, you're not sure you'll follow through anyway. You play smaller. You commit less. You promise less because you've learned not from other people, but from your own track record. You've learned that your word has expiration dates. And that affects your whole life, not just the drinking. The self-trust damage doesn't stay in the drinking lane. It spreads. It touches everything. And a lot of people don't connect those dots. They don't realize that the real reason they feel vaguely unreliable in their own life to themselves has roots in what's been happening with alcohol for years. So here's where I want to shift. Because everything I've described so far can sound really heavy. And it is. This is the real damage. But here's what's also true. Patterns built through repetition change the same way. You got here through thousands of small moments of breaking your word to yourself. And you get out of here the same way through small moments of keeping it. This is not about a big dramatic declaration. I know you've made those. They feel good in the moment. And then they put so much pressure on you that the slightest crack sends everything crashing down. This is about something much simpler and much harder. I'm not drinking tonight. That's it. That's the promise. Not I'm done forever. I'm starting a new sober life. This time is different. I mean it. Everything is changing. Not that. Just tonight. I'm not drinking. And then you don't. And that matters. Not because one night changes your life. But because your brain is watching and it's collecting evidence. And for maybe the first time in a long time, it gets to file something new under your name. Said it. Did it. And then tomorrow you do that again. Not forever. Just tomorrow. I'm not drinking today. And you do it. Said it. Did it. And slowly, not overnight, not in a week, something starts to shift internally. Not because you've hit some milestone. Not because you've earned a chip or completed a program. But because the evidence is changing, your internal track record is changing. And that quiet voice that used to say, yeah, we'll see. It starts to get quieter. Because the data it's working with is changing. Every time you do what you said you would do, you're making a deposit back into that self-trust account. And deposit's compound too. This is why structure matters. This is why support matters. This is why you don't do this alone. Because the pattern you've been in was built in isolation. You hid from people. You isolated. And isolation is exactly where drinking thrives and self-trust dies. You break the pattern in community, in accountability, in having someone else who knows what you said you were going to do and is going to ask you about it. I want to close with this. I know you mean it when you say you're done. It's real. The moment is real. The work now, the real work, is not about being more determined or more disciplined or more serious about it. The work is rebuilding the relationship with yourself that got eroded over years of drinking. One small promise kept at a time. One night, one day, one decision. What's been happening underneath all of this is that you've been breaking your word to yourself for a long time. Not in one big moment, in thousands of small ones. And those moments added up. They built a pattern. They shaped how you see yourself. They trained that quiet voice in the back of your head to say, "Yeah, we'll see." And that's why this feels so hard. Not because you don't want it, but because part of you doesn't believe you'll follow through, that's the gap. That's what's been missing from the conversation. And that's what recovery actually is. Not just the absence of alcohol, but the return of yourself, the return of your integrity the return of your self-trust. The same way this pattern was built is the same way it gets rebuilt. Again, not one big decision. Not with the dramatic this time is different, but with follow through. Simple, consistent, repeated. You say you're not drinking tonight, and you don't. You say you're going to show up, and you do. And every time you do what you said you do, you shift the pattern. You change the evidence, you rebuild your relationship with yourself. And that matters more than anything, because this isn't just about alcohol. This is about how you move through your life. The decisions you make, the risks you take, the things you go after or don't. When you trust yourself, you move differently. You commit differently. You show up differently. And if you've been feeling stuck, if you've been feeling like you keep starting over, this is the work. Just stopping, but rebuilding that internal track record. And if you're listening to this and something clicked, if you're understanding this pattern for the first time, good. This is such an important piece of what we go through when we're traveling from drinking to sober to real recovery. But it's not something anyone is talking about. It's a huge internal barrier that we all face when we've damaged that relationship with ourselves. Then you need to get sober and you need to be able to rely on yourself and you can't. This is huge. And if you want support navigating it, you know I'm here. I'm the person you call when you're done screwing around. When you're done with all the drama and the starts and the stops, when you're done feeling like crap and repeating the same patterns over and over again, when you're there, I cannot do this anymore in that spot. Call me. Addictiononlimited.com/call. We'll talk about where you are, what's holding you back. We'll figure out the right level of support for you no matter how many times you've tried or what your budget is. There's something for everyone. That link is always in the show notes. Remember, we didn't create this mess overnight and we're not going to fix it overnight. Start with one decision and follow through. Then share that victory with someone and do it again. I don't care how big or how small the decision is. Maybe it's for the next 10 minutes, I'm not going to complain about anything. Maybe it's when my kids are my partner driving me crazy, I'm just going to shut up. it this way. I'm going to say no to everything and create some space for myself. Just start. I hope you're having a fantastic day and I will see you next week. You've reached the end of another great episode of the Addiction Unlimited podcast, candid and honest conversation about addiction and recovery. Be sure to visit us at AddictionUnlimited.com to join the conversation and access show notes and links to everything we talked about. Love this episode? Please take 30 seconds to subscribe, rate and review on iTunes to help us improve and give you the information you want. Thanks for listening. See you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]