In my last post I wrote about the woman I kept finding in the kitchen.

The one who was fun, free, and didn’t particularly need permission. The one who stuck two fingers up at the world occasionally just because she felt like it. The one I hadn’t thought to grieve when my relationship with alcohol changed - purely because I hadn’t realised how much of her had been channelled through it.

This week I want to ask you something specific about your own version of her.

Not about the drinking. About the rebellion.

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Nobody warned me about her.

When my relationship with alcohol changed, it wasn’t the difficult evenings that surprised me. Or the social situations I’d have to navigate differently. Or the (sometimes far from from polite) questions from other people. Or the genuine cravings.

None of that surprised me.

The genuine surprise was her.

She was the version of me I hadn’t thought to say goodbye to. The one who was fun - genuinely, unselfconsciously fun - with a lightness about her, a willingness to be irreverent, to be a little bit naughty, and to stick two fingers up at the world occasionally….. just because she felt like it.

I hadn’t realised she and alcohol were so intertwined. There was me just thinking I was changing a habit, when in reality, I was also, in some way, changing a self.

For a while after I stopped drinking, I kept finding her in the kitchen.

That’s where most of my drinking had happened, at the end of the day, with a bottle of wine on the go whilst cooking. And sometimes, in those early months, I’d be standing there, deglazing a pan with a splash of wine, and I’d feel the pull. ‘Go on… you can have a swig. Why not. Because I can’.

And occasionally I did. A swig, maybe two. Nothing more than that.

What followed was always the same.
First, a rush. A tiny, ridiculous, completely disproportionate getting away with it feeling. Like I’d broken a rule that needed breaking. Like I was still her, just for a second.

And then, almost immediately, the self-flagellation. The you should know better by now - and the disappointment that followed, reliably, every time.

Which, looking back, was just the old cycle running in miniature. Excitement > Relief > Shame . Exhaustion. The same arc I’d lived a thousand times, compressed into two swigs of warm Sauvignon Blanc over a chopping board.

So in truth, I wasn’t really escaping the pattern. I was just running a pocket-sized version of it - just enough to feel the rush, and then the shame. Both of which, in their own strange way, felt like home.

I hadn’t grieved her.

The one who could walk into a room and own it. Who was irreverent, a little bit naughty, and occasionally chaotic in the best possible way. The one who stuck two fingers up at the world just because she felt like it - and felt completely alive when doing so.

She wasn’t a problem. She was just... her. And she happened to drink.

When my drinking changed, she went quiet - and it turns out I missed her. So every few weeks, standing in the kitchen with the cooking wine, I’d go and visit her. Hello my old friend. Briefly, secretly, and always with that combination of aliveness and shame that told me the work wasn’t quite finished.

The work of integration is ongoing.

I don’t think there’s a moment where you arrive, where the old self and the new self shake hands and agree to coexist peacefully and that’s that. It’s more iterative than that. But I do know that the qualities I miss about her (the fun, the freedom, the rebellious streak and the not needing permission) were never really alcohol’s to give. They were always mine, but alcohol just happened to be the channel through which they surfaced most easily, reliably, and automatically. And when that channel closed, I had to go looking for others.

And yes, I’m still looking, if I’m honest. Still finding new places to put the rebellion, the lightness, the occasional impulse to be a little bit naughty just because I want to be.

If you’ve found yours, do let me know. It may well inspire a little naughtiness in me.

A few weeks ago I introduced the idea of the operating system. The beliefs that runs quietly in the background - shaping how we see ourselves, what we reach for, and what we tell ourselves we deserve or don’t deserve.

Those beliefs sit at the start of a chain that runs in one direction:
Beliefs drive thoughts…. and thoughts drive behaviours.

Which creates a problem when you’re trying to find your belief, because you can’t really start there. Beliefs are buried in the subconscious, running silently underneath everything. But what you actually do have access to is the last link in the chain i.e. the behaviour, the thing you did.

So to dig in and expose the belief, the trick is to run the chain in reverse

Here’s one of my examples.

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By now you’ve probably seen the headlines.
Brad Pitt, after seven years sober, is back on the wine. Drinking ‘in a more restrained manner’ (his words) and insisting he can have a few glasses, but not too many. That he has to be ‘professional about it’.

The internet, predictably, lost its mind, with the recovery community weighing in hard. ‘It’s the same thing every alcoholic says when they relapse’.
’If you could moderate, you wouldn’t need to think about moderating’.

The press love this fall-from-grace angle…. seven years of sobriety - gone.

I get it and I understand why people responded that way.

But I think we’re asking the wrong question.

The conversation has been almost entirely focused on whether Brad Pitt can drink moderately now. Whether someone who once had a problem with alcohol can ever learn to drink normally again. Whether this ends well or badly.

And look - I don’t know the man (although like many a middle-aged woman I wish I did). I don’t know what his drinking looks like behind closed doors, and I’m genuinely not interested in predicting how his story ends.

But ‘can he moderate?’ is really asking ‘is he cured?’ And that framing assumes that alcohol was the problem in the first place.

I’d argue it wasn’t. I’d argue that alcohol was NEVER the problem.
What it was doing for him was.

In my book, and across this Substack, I talk about the jobs we give alcohol to do. The roles it takes on, whether that be numbing, coping, escaping, rewarding, connecting, quieting the noise we don’t know how to quiet on our own. Or a myriad of other jobs.

Those jobs don’t disappear just because the bottle does.

Simply stopping drinking is necessary (for some of us, urgently so) but it doesn’t automatically teach you how to handle all the things for which alcohol was your solution. That work is different. It’s slower and requires actually sitting with the uncomfortable feelings instead of escaping them. Learning to tolerate what you’ve been avoiding, changing the stories you tell yourself about yourself, and building a different relationship with your own inner life.

That’s the real work. Not the abstinence itself.

So when I read that Brad Pitt is drinking again, the question that interests me isn’t ‘can he moderate?’

It’s: ‘does he still need to?’

If it’s genuinely take-it-or-leave-it for him now - if the underlying relationship with himself has shifted, if the jobs alcohol used to do no longer need doing - then that’s bloody brilliant, and whether he has a glass of wine at dinner is almost beside the point. The nervous system that once needed the escape hatch may simply not need it anymore. That’s not relapse….. that’s a different relationship with yourself entirely.
And that’s the real work.

If, on the other hand, the need is still there (still running, still unexamined) then the moderation conversation is a distraction. A polite way of not looking at what’s actually going on underneath.

I don’t know which of those is true for him. Nobody does, except Brad.

But this story really matters, beyond the celebrity headlines, because most of us will never have a ‘seven years sober’ moment. Most of us won’t ever identify with the recovery narrative at all. We don’t see ourselves in it, and yet most of us are carrying some version of the same question - even if we’ve never framed it that way.

Not can I moderate?

But why do I still need to?

What job is alcohol still doing? What is it quieting, rewarding, helping me escape from, making more bearable? What is it about my life that is requiring that level of coping ….. or providing the urge to check out at 6pm?

Because that question - the one underneath the drink - is the one worth sitting with.

Not moderation or abstinence, but rewiring the need.

That’s the work.

There’s a moment in my last post where I describe standing over a Moses basket, crying into a parenting book, unable to hear my own instincts. Not because they weren’t there, but because somewhere along the way, without noticing, I’d drowned them out.

That moment wasn’t really about new motherhood. I think it was the moment I finally noticed what had been happening for years.

When we consistently reach for something to manage how we feel, we also lose access to what we actually feel. The signal gets quieter, the inner voice stops competing…. and eventually we stop noticing it’s gone.

So the question I want to leave you with this week isn’t about drinking.

It’s this:

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About a month after I brought my first daughter home from hospital, my mum came to stay for a week.

One day my baby was crying in her Moses basket and I just stood there, looking through a parenting book, desperately trying to work out what was wrong. I was crying too, whilst frantically flicking through the pages, completely lost, looking for clues as to why she was upset.

My mum watched me for a moment and then said: Anna, what are you doing? Put the damn book down. You’re not going to find the answers in there.

Through my sobbing I told her I didn’t know what to do. And she gently prised the book out of my hand and said: You do. You know how to do this. But you’re not listening. You’re not listening to your own intuition.

I remember thinking: I don’t. I don’t have that.
I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t hear the answers coming. I didn’t believe they were there.

Looking back now, I know with certainty what had happened. The inner voice (that quiet, wise compass that knows us better than anyone) had gone silent. Not overnight, but gradually, over the years, drink by drink, without me noticing. Because when alcohol is running the show, intuition is the employee that never gets a word in.

I had been so busy outsourcing my emotional life that I’d lost access to my own inner knowing. And I didn’t even realise it was missing until I needed it most, standing there over a Moses basket, crying into a parenting book, completely disconnected from myself.

But let me go back a little. Because it didn’t start there.

It started much earlier and Innocuously, with a job that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

At fifteen, alcohol’s job was simple: help me cross the threshold into adulthood. Help me belong. Help me feel like someone. Help me ‘arrive’.

Through my twenties, in advertising, in Soho, the job expanded - social lubricant, professional currency, the thing that turned colleagues into family. And it was bloody good at that job. I won’t pretend otherwise and those were genuinely some of the best years of my life.

But then came motherhood. And things shifted in seismic ways. The plates moved beneath my feet and I found it hard to stay upright.

The fundamental identity change, the sleep deprivation, the relentless responsibility, the persistent feeling that I was disappearing inside my own life. And so alcohol was handed a new job - not to celebrate, or connect, but to escape. To reclaim some fragment of the person I’d been before. A glass of wine once the baby was down. Me time. A kind of ‘fuck off world!’ sense of relief.

What I didn’t see - couldn’t see - was that the relief was costing me something. My inner voice was growing quieter, and my ability to trust myself was slowly eroding. I needed that parenting book to have the answers, because I no longer believed I did.

The fuller version of that story is in the book. But that scene with my mum …. that’s the one I keep coming back to. Because it showed me, more clearly than anything else, what a life of emotional outsourcing had quietly taken away.

And then came midlife.

Which, if parenthood was a tsunami, felt more like a slow tide. Persistent, reshaping and absolutely impossible to hold back.

The hormonal changes arrived first - hello disrupted sleep, wonky metabolism and emotional dysregulation. And alcohol, which had always promised to soothe, was quietly making all of it worse. Amplifying the anxiety it claimed to ease, deepening the exhaustion it promised to relieve. The solution had become the cause so gradually, and so silently, that I barely noticed the switch.

But it wasn’t just physical. Because midlife, I’ve come to understand, is bigger than hormones. It’s a reckoning, an identity shift and a moment when roles that once defined you begin to loosen. And the question that surfaces, often for the first time in decades, is: who am I now, if I’m not all the things I’ve been busy being?

Children need you differently, parents age, careers plateau or change shape. And in a culture that has asked you to carry a lot for a very, very long time, a glass of wine at the end of the day can feel like the one small kindness you’re allowed to offer yourself.

Except, I now know (from my own experience and the work I do with women navigating this stage) that alcohol really doesn’t answer the questions midlife is asking. Instead it dulls them and keeps you busy managing symptoms rather than listening to what they’re trying to tell you.

And the questions midlife asks, when you do let yourself hear them, are not small ones.

What do I actually want now?
What’s missing?
What would it mean to stop coping… and start actually living?

I don’t think any of us sets out to hand alcohol so many jobs. It just happens that way. It’s the PA who picks up another task….. and another…. and then another. Until one day you look up and realise they’re running the whole damn operation.

The question I want to leave you with, is simply this.

Looking back across your own life, what jobs have you given alcohol to do?
And are those still the same jobs it’s doing now?

In my last post I introduced the idea of the operating system.

The belief that runs silently in the background of everything - shaping how we see ourselves, what we reach for, what we tell ourselves we deserve or don’t deserve.

I’m not _______ enough.

We all have one. It’s a human thing, not a flaw.

So all I suggest you do this week, is take a moment for honest reflection.

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I want to come back to the Pyramid of Belief.

We’ve talked about it before in the context of alcohol - how the beliefs we hold about drinking were mostly built before we were thinking about them at all. They were absorbed from the house we grew up in, or the culture we swam in, or the adults we watched from the stairs.

But the pyramid doesn’t just build beliefs about alcohol.

It builds beliefs about us.

Those beliefs (the ones we carry about ourselves) are often what alcohol is really answering. Sometimes it's a sense of lack: I'm not confident enough, not fun enough, or just not enough full stop. And alcohol, for a little while at least, makes that feeling go away. But sometimes it's simpler than that, and the belief is just: alcohol makes me more fun. More relaxed. More me. And that belief is just as powerful - and just as worth examining.

I was sixteen when a belief was built in me that would quietly run my life for the next thirty years.

My brother had just been accepted to Oxford. My parents, with the best of intentions, encouraged me to sit the Oxbridge entrance exam. I didn’t want to, I knew I wasn’t prepared, but I sat it anyway.

I turned over the paper. The question was a lyric from The River - my favourite Bruce Springsteen song - and for one brief, glorious moment, I thought: I’ve got this.

And then I had nothing.

I sat for an hour and produced four lines. Four completely inadequate, mortifying lines. And as the adjudicator collected my paper, he sniggered.

I have never felt shame and ridicule like it.

The experience: humiliation

The attention: that snigger. That single sound, which my brain filed away and kept.

The theory: I’m not up to this. I’m not like my brother. I don’t belong in these rooms.

The judgment: I got it wrong. I failed.

The belief, settling in indelibly, like ink sinking into paper: I’m not smart enough.

The pyramid of belief, in action. With a self-constructed, self-belief perched on top, that would stick around for decades

But notice it had nothing to do with alcohol. It was built before alcohol became a significant presence in my life. It was just there, humming away in the background, shaping how I worked, how I presented myself, how I measured my own worth.

The operating system, already installed.

We all have one, by the way. Our own personal version of iOS, installed years ago and rarely updated.

An ‘I’m not _______ enough belief’, sitting quietly in the subconscious, running in the background of everything we do- and the blanks are different for all of us:

I’m not smart enough.

I’m not interesting enough.

I’m not successful enough.

I’m not fun enough.

I’m not worthy enough.

I’m not loveable enough.

They don’t announce themselves, sitting front and centre in our minds. Instead they just subconsciously steer, shaping the way we see ourselves, the choices we make, the things we reach for when life gets hard or when we need to feel more like the person we wish we were.

And when those beliefs create negative thoughts - when the operating system throws up an error, when the depletion kicks in, when we feel ourselves falling short of whatever standard we’ve silently set - we reach for something to make it stop.

For many of us, that something is alcohol.

Not because alcohol is the problem. But because alcohol is the thing that steps in. That shifts the state. That quiets the punishing voice, just long enough to get through the evening.

The belief was always there. Alcohol just answered it.

There’s more of this in the book — the Oxbridge story in full, and what happened to that sixteen year old girl over the thirty years that followed. If you haven’t read it yet, that’s a good place to go deeper.

But for now, I want to leave you with just one question.

What’s in your blank?

I’m not _______ enough.

If something comes to mind - quickly and instinctively - that’s probably the one to explore.

I liked to think of myself as a good time girl.

Fun, upbeat, and the one who got the party started. I’d also be the one that kept it going, and the last one to leave. I liked to think off myself as someone people wanted around. That all just felt like who I was, like it was a core part of a personality I’d been born with.

It took me a very long time to notice that the good time girl only really showed up when there was a drink in her hand.

Which meant she wasn’t really a personality trait at all. That version of me was someone I’d been outsourcing.

A bit of an uncomfortable epiphany to be honest.

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In my last post I introduced the idea of alcohol as a Personal Assistant. Someone we hire to help out with a few things. And how, over time, that PA can quietly work their way up the organisation chart until they’re running the whole emotional show.

It’s a useful metaphor. But it’s only useful if you apply it to your own life.

So that’s what I suggest you have a go at this week - just a wee, non-judgemental audit.

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I was fifteen when I hired alcohol for the first time.

Not that I thought of it that way. I was sitting in my boyfriend’s garden, Blue Curaçao in hand, The Smiths playing in the background. I wasn’t thinking about what role alcohol might be playing in that moment. I was just doing what I desperately wanted to do - crossing a threshold and becoming someone. Dipping my toes into the world of adulthood, which from where I was sitting looked enormously appealing.

The simple job of marking a moment, heralding a transition and helping me feel like I was no longer a child.

Classic Personal Assistant work.

What I didn’t notice (or couldn’t have noticed) was that alcohol was already quietly auditioning for a bigger role.

Because underneath the excitement of that garden moment of feeling almost-adult, there were other things going on. My parents were going through a divorce, stirring up a shed-load of emotions I had no language for and no framework to process. And somewhere in that first drink I discovered something that would matter enormously for the next three decades.

I could shift how I felt.

When things felt out of control - and at fifteen, a lot of things did - here was something that could change the channel. Enough to feel, briefly, like I was somewhere else.

I thought I was just having a drink because that’s what adults did, and I so badly wanted to be one. But I was also, subconsciously, getting my first glimpse of what alcohol could really do. That it could not just be used to mark a threshold, but it could also be used to manage a feeling.

That was the moment the PA started eyeing the corner office.

Here’s how I think about it now.

We hire alcohol to help us out. A few jobs here and there, at first. Nothing too demanding, just help me relax after a hard day, or help me feel more confident at this party. Or help me celebrate this moment properly. Help me get through this dinner.

The kind of thing a good PA handles without breaking a sweat.

But with the marvellous benefit of hindsight, once you’ve discovered - in your body and in your nervous system - that something can shift how you feel, you subconsciously call off the search for anything else.

Why would you keep looking? You’ve found something that works.

And so, the next time a difficult emotion shows up, you don’t pause to consider your options. You reach for the thing that worked last time…. and the time before. The PA gets the call, handles it, and delivers. And in doing so, picks up another responsibility in the creation of an ever-expanding job description.

Over time, the job description expanded beyond anything I’d originally intended.

Bad day? Alcohol, please sort that out.

Good news? Alcohol, let’s make this last.

Anxious about tomorrow? Alcohol, please help calm the nerves.

Celebrating? Alcohol, make this feel even better.

Lonely? Bored? Overwhelmed? Exhausted?……… Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol.

EVERY emotion. The negative ones I wanted to escape, and the positive ones I wanted to prolong, or create. There wasn’t an emotional state that didn’t get routed through the same solution.

And because emotions show up every single day - because what is life if it isn’t relentlessly, persistently emotional - the PA was working around the clock. And somewhere along the way, without a job interview, without me signing anything, they stopped being a PA at all.

They’d become my Chief Emotions Officer. Sitting in the corner office. Running the show.

I don’t think this is unusual, by the way. I think a lot of us do this, to varying degrees, with varying consequences.

The question worth pondering isn’t whether alcohol has ever managed your emotions (because it almost certainly will have done). The question is how far up the org chart it’s climbed.

Is it still a PA - showing up occasionally, handling specific situations, working for you?

Or has it been promoted?

And if it has, when did that happen?

In my last post, I talked about the change that happened when I stopped tracking how much I was drinking - and started simply observing the circumstances in which I drank.

No numbers, no tally, no judgement and no verdict.

Just curiosity.

If that resonated with you - and you’d like to try it for yourself - here’s a simple structure you can use. It takes about two minutes at the end of the day. There’s no right or wrong answer to any of it. Nothing to add up, nothing to feel bad about. You’re not being assessed - you’re just paying attention.

That’s all curiosity ever asks of us.

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I’ve always been resistant to tracking things.

Food diaries, drink diaries, exercise logs. I’ve never been able to sustain them, because for me, they always felt like a report. A verdict and a judgement call on everything I’d done (or not done) in a week.

And as far as my drinking was concerned, I most definitely didn’t want to look at the numbers. I found that shameful. Deeply shameful.

But something really changed for me when I started keeping a different kind of account.

Not how much I’d had to drink. Just whether any particular day had been a drinking day or not. And then (and here’s the important bit), what kind of day it had been. What moods or emotions had been most dominant. Whether it had been a good day or a hard one. Whether I’d felt depleted or okay.

That’s a very different thing.

It was no longer a quantitative measure of what I’d consumed. It was more an observation of the circumstances in which I’d had a drink. And that’s where things began to get interesting.

And when something becomes interesting, it piques your curiosity.

What I started to see, once I looked at it that way, were patterns. And really clear ones at that.

Drinking days and harder days kept showing up together. Depletion, a dominance of negative emotions, and the sense of a day that had ground me down in some way. And what that began to reveal wasn’t really a picture of my drinking at all.

It was a picture of my life.

A life in which struggle and depletion were showing up with uncomfortable regularity, and days that were leaving me feeling like that drink wasn’t a choice so much as a necessity. Like I’d earned it, or needed it, or simply couldn’t face the evening without it.

I hadn’t set out to examine any of that. Not at all - I’d just curious….. and that curiosity led me somewhere far more interesting than any drink diary ever could have.

In the book, I talk about approaching alcohol like an exhibit - something to observe rather than defend or attack. And I think that’s exactly what this was, in practice. A small, quiet act of observation that changed the quality of the question.

Not how much am I drinking?

But why, on these particular days, does a drink feel necessary?

One question leads to shame. The other leads somewhere useful.

Which is why I want to ask you - gently, and without any agenda - what might you notice if you tried something similar?

Not a drink diary. Not a report card. Just a note, at the end of the day. Was today a drinking day? And what kind of day was it?

You might see nothing particularly interesting. Or you might see exactly what I saw.

Either way, that’s curiosity. And in my experience, it’s a far kinder place to start than counting.

In my last post, What Emotions Arise?, I mapped an arc.

Excitement. Warmth. Relief. Escape. Shame. Exhaustion.

A shape that plays out across a lifetime - and also, in minia…

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In the first chapter of the book I ask a question:

What emotions arise when you think about alcohol’s presence in your life?

It sounds straightforward, but it really isn’t.

Most people have never thought about it, because alcohol is so woven into the fabric of everyday life that the question simply never arises. It's like asking what emotions arise when you think about coffee, or the commute home. It's just there. Present, unremarkable, and unexamined.

And even though my relationship with drinking got out of hand, the answer is not straightforward. You may expect that I’d cite guilt, or regret. But that’s not the case.

When I ponder that question honestly, I don’t find one single emotion. I find an arc.

It starts with excitement.

At fifteen, sipping Blue Curaçao in my boyfriend’s garden, The Smiths playing in the background, and a cigarette in hand. I wasn’t just drinking. I was crossing a threshold and becoming someone. The excitement wasn’t really about the drink - it was about what the drink meant. Adulthood and belonging. The beginning of a version of myself I hadn’t yet met.

That excitement followed me into my twenties. The advertising world in Soho, the agencies with bars inside the building, the long client lunches that became long evenings, that became long friendships. I travelled the world with people I loved being with. I felt completely, gloriously alive. Alcohol wasn’t a problem in those years. It was the backdrop to some of the best times of my life, and I won’t edit those memories, or pretend otherwise.

Then comes the warmth. The specific, physical warmth of the first drink. For years, I experienced this straightforwardly, as relaxation. It was good. And from there, connection flowed more easily, conversation opened up, and the room felt more inhabitable.

And then a few years later, relief. The glass of wine poured as soon as the children were in bed, the day finally, mercifully over. Relief is not a complicated emotion. It just feels like setting something heavy down. And that was exactly how it felt after a day of juggling everything that modern motherhood and a busy career involved.

But then comes escape. And this is where it starts to shift.

Escape feels like relief at first, but it’s really very different. Relief is about the present moment - releasing what’s there. Escape on the other hand, is about not wanting to be where you are at all. That shift came for me in my mid-late thirties, when I found myself using alcohol not to unwind from the day, but to disappear from it entirely.

And then somewhere in the escape, grew a hefty dose of shame.
Why did I not want to be in the day, with my children?
Why did I feel so unfulfilled?
Why did I feel like I was constantly failing?
Why did I want to check out and go somewhere else altogether?

Not the dramatic shame of a rock bottom - though I would eventually find my way to something that mentally felt like one. No, mine was the shame of knowing it was all unravelling, like watching a slow-motion car crash …… and continuing anyway. Of finding myself in a therapist’s chair, being asked a question I couldn’t answer honestly, and mumbling I’m fine when the truth was something else entirely.

I won’t go further into that therapy room here - it’s in the book, and it belongs there. But I’ll say this: the shame wasn’t just about the drinking. It was about the distance between who I was presenting to the world and what was actually going on inside.

And finally, exhaustion. Not just the physical kind - though alcohol is extraordinarily good at producing that too. But the exhaustion of maintenance, and of keeping the story straight. Of being someone who handles things, when the thing you are using to handle things, has quietly become the thing you need to handle.

Here is what I find most interesting about that arc.

It doesn’t just map onto a life. It maps onto a single evening.

The anticipation on the way home - that’s excitement.
The first drink - that’s warmth.
The second - that’s relief.
The point in the evening where you stop caring about anything - that’s escape.
And then the 3am panic attacks, the next morning anxiety, and the rinse and repeat of doing it all again that evening ………..that’s the shame and the exhaustion compressed into twelve hours.

The macro arc of a life, and the micro arc of a weekday evening.
The same shape, playing out at different scales.

So when the book asks what emotions arise when you think about alcohol’s presence in your life? - it’s really asking something more honest than it first appears.

It’s asking: when you trace the full arc - the excitement, the warmth, the relief, the escape, the shame, the exhaustion - can you notice where one tips into the next? The moment when relief becomes escape. When pleasure becomes necessity. When the thing you chose becomes the thing you reach for without thinking.

All of it is information - even the parts that feel contradictory. Especially those.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Why would I? It was just what happened when Dad came home.

After dinner, my brother and I would leave the table. Off to watch Grange Hill, or do homework, or play out. And my parents would remain at a table that would shift into something different - something more sophisticated and adult. There would be another drink, maybe a cigarette, and definitely conversation that wasn’t meant for us. A space that was theirs.

I understood, in the way children understand things without being told, that this was how grown-ups were together. This was their time, their language, their way of drawing a line under the day.

And running underneath all of it, the assumption I’d already absorbed from simply never having seen otherwise: drinking is what adults do. It was the thing that separated the table I sat at, from the table I’d one day be allowed to stay at.

None of these were lessons anyone taught me. They were conclusions I drew from what I saw, in an ordinary house, in an ordinary decade, watching the people I most wanted to be like.

Which is why I invite you to consider:

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• Have you ever paused to ask why alcohol has the place it does in your life?

• Have you made conscious decisions along the way - or is it something that has just happened?

• If you were to view alcohol as an exhibit, a cultural artifact rather than a given, what would you notice? How has it been presented to you through society, the media, and personal experiences?

Most people, when they sit with those questions honestly, realise they don’t have a very clear answer. Not because they haven’t thought about it, but because the beliefs we hold about alcohol were mostly built before we were thinking about it at all.

Which is where a framework that I really love comes in.

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There’s a version of this story that most people are familiar with, even if they’ve never been through it themselves. It’s the version where someone puts down alcohol - and life gets better. A clear before and after; the thing you let go of, and the space that opens up once you do.

It’s a compelling arc, and for many people that’s roughly what happens - not necessarily immediately, but over time, little by little.

But there’s another version of the story, that I’ve been thinking about ever since my recent conversation with Dr Sarah Michaud, a clinical psychologist who has spent over forty years working in the field of addiction.

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We’d both done the work ourselves. We knew what helped. We knew we could create the content, community and conditions for others to do the same.

So we opened the door.

The women who arrived were exhausted - by the mental noise, and the lack of physical energy. By the endless internal negotiations, and the ‘starting again on Mondays’. They didn’t know what to do, only that life was not good enough, and they wanted to feel less alone.

Over the last year we have watched them change. Really change. And it has been a wonderful thing to witness.

On Thursday 9th July at 7.30pm UK time (BST), Tabbin and I are hosting a free live session.

How to Get Unstuck: A Year Inside a Community That’s Changing Lives.

We’re going to share what we’ve witnessed, what we’ve learned, and what we know about what women actually need when they want to change.

It’s free, It’s live - and there’ll be a proper Q&A at the end.
So, if you’re a woman searching for these answers, it’s an hour you can’t afford to miss.

Register here

Can’t make it live? Register anyway - the recording is available for 48 hours afterwards.

If this resonates with you - or with someone you know - I’d love you to share it.
The more women in the room, the richer the conversation

There’s are a multitude of moments, every day, that most of us have stopped noticing.

When the meeting ends. Or we’ve completed a task. When the email sends. Or the phone call ends. There’s a beat of perhaps just a couple of seconds before the next thing begins. A small, unscheduled pocket of nothingness.

But almost immediately, we reach to fill it.

We check our notifications, have a quick scroll, or refresh our inbox for no particular reason. Or we click the kettle on - we don’t even want a cuppa, but it gives us something to do. Somewhere to be.

We have become, without ever consciously deciding to, people who cannot leave a gap alone.

Psychology has a name for what happens in that gap, if you let it exist.

The default mode network is a system in the brain that goes quiet when you’re focused on a task and lights up the moment you stop. Stealth-like it goes to work, sorting through what’s happened during the day, processing conversations, forging connections between something you read this morning to a problem you’ve been carrying for weeks. Building, in the background, your sense of who you are and what you actually want.

It needs the gap to do that. Not hours of enforced silence. Just the small windows we’ve been filling with noise.

And here’s what happens when it never gets theses gaps, you instead feel a low-grade, persistent exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.

A sense of being full and empty at the same time.
A feeling of having done a great deal and understood very little of it.

Sound familiar?

Now add a drink to that picture.

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