Sober Vibes: Sparking introspection
Courtney Andersen, the spirited voice behind the Sober Vibes Podcast and author of "Sober Vibes: A Guide to Your First Three Months Without Alcohol." With 12 years of alcohol recovery under her belt, Courtney's powerful insights into the rollercoaster of emotions, physical transformations, and mental shifts when quitting alcohol are life-changing.
Dive into a captivating and insightful chat with Amy and Courtney as they navigate the blurred boundaries of social drinking, alcohol struggles, and substance abuse.
Discover Courtney's mission to create a sanctuary for sober women and feel empowered.
Let's face it - the "mommy juice" trend is skyrocketing as more women turn to alcohol amid the chaos of shifting motherhood roles and routines. From play dates in the park to home get-togethers, alcohol has sneaked into our culture, blending boundaries and redefining mom-life norms. It's time we pause to reflect and perhaps redirect with healthier alternatives to ease those empty spaces.
Courtney reminds us that the path to sobriety isn't an instant magic trick; it's a slow, steady awakening. One that requires breaking free from shame and guilt. While ditching alcohol is a great start, true recovery lies in weathering the emotional hurricane of grief and finding your way through the chaos left in its wake. This journey isn't just about getting your life back on track – it's about embracing the awakening that comes with healing.
"Just because you stop drinking doesn't mean the problems all stop at day one. You have a whole tornado following you from all the chaotic stuff and decisions. And that's why it's called recovery. It's a process, and then it's a grieving process too. And I will tell you, grief waits for nobody." -Courtney.
Her new book, "Sober Vibes: A Guide to Thriving in Your First Three Months Without Alcohol," is a holistic step-by-step workbook to help navigate the challenges of early sobriety and lays the groundwork for a transformative and fulfilling alcohol-free life. The book, releasing in August (pre-order now), is written from a coach's perspective and guides us through the peaks and valleys of early sobriety.
WEBSITE: www.courtneyrecovered.com
Pre-Order Now: Sober Vibes: A Guide to Your First Three Months Without Alcohol
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[00:00:00] Amy: So let's get this party started. Oh my God.
[00:00:02] Courtney: All right.
[00:00:03] Amy: Can I just say that I was thinking about you earlier and I was thinking, you know what? I think I've had a girl crush on you for a while. I just, you know, we never met in person, right? We've never met physically in person, but we met through one way or another avenue and I've watched you from afar, essentially through social media and I've really admired you over the years. So I'm really honored to have you here. So I am very honored and excited to introduce Courtney Anderson and Courtney. You really have found a niche in I would say in the sober world for women. And that's really some of what we're gonna talk about. But let me read your bio real briefly to give our guests some information on you. So your title is You're a Sober Life Coach, you have a podcast, which by the way is up for nomination for One of the best podcasts for our Detroit, which is very exclusive in the Detroit area and probably Michigan really. I don't know. You'll have to tell me more. You found you were the founder of Sober Vibes and the founder of National Sober Day. I love that. And is there anything else? Is there anything else that you wanna say real quick about your bio?
[00:01:26] Courtney: Just add in there this year in 2023 the summer, my book. So I can now put published author behind my name. But I other than that, I'm a new mom, a wife, a friend, you know, to me, those credentials I love a lot better
[00:01:40] Amy: I agree. That's where we start. That's our foundation, right?
[00:01:43] Courtney: Yes. Like I'm a big, huge fan of laughing every day and Bravo, television.
[00:01:48] Amy: I don't blame you. Sometimes it's hard for me, because working with people and mental and emotional wellness and substance abuse and domestic violence, you know, all this stuff. It's so hard for me to not look at things from a clinical lens, you know, and I just start, it's not that I'm analyzing, but I'm thinking, my God, am I contributing to this unbelievably dysfunctional? But it's good stuff and you see, it really ties into our topic because it goes to show that no matter what you look like what socioeconomic status you come from, your gender, you can really have some serious issues, some serious mental health issues, some serious addiction issues, no matter what you look like, right?
[00:02:36] You know what I'd really like to just let everybody know, what we're gonna really talk about today is we're gonna explore the data and the research as to why there's such an alarming increase in alcohol consumption for women and mothers. And we're gonna discuss the normalization and sexualization connected to the wine mom culture.
[00:02:54] We're gonna define what social drinking is, problem drinking and substance use disorder, which is the new term in the DSM seven , they use substance use disorder instead of alcoholism. Because let's face it, there's so many comorbidities these days. I really wanna explore your kindling project, which is where you really made a niche for yourself in the sober world. How you decided to dedicate your life to this topic and what keeps you back. Courtney, one of the things that I've been doing the last five years is I've been in a PhD program, and I'm on the cusp of writing my dissertation, and my topic is essentially social media and the wine culture. Wine mom culture. And since the pandemic that it's been incredibly stressful on women and mothers, and how they've had to juggle, you know, working from home, taking care of their children. Also a lot of it is that now you can get alcohol delivered. You can get it in the parking lot and have the store bring it out to you.
[00:03:59] Now they make little pink feminine bottles of Prosecco and whatever all the other drinks are, the fancy ones. You know, back in the day it was like men drink Budweiser and big men drive trucks, and they, but now dainty women have our little tiny drinks in the bottles. Tell me, what are your first thoughts of that?
[00:04:18] Courtney: It makes me sad because guess who really loses out? It's the child. It's the kid who loses out because when it comes to this whole mommy wine culture and everything you just said, it now is a spectrum of the problematic drinking that is occurring. It makes me sad too, because I used to wait on moms who sat there and had at least three glasses of wine when I was in the restaurant industry and be there with their kid and crushed three glasses of wine, you know, so it's that at noon or picking their kid up after school and coming in and getting the child a snack and so watching that. It's alarming, it's sad. This is what I know about alcohol and that culture. Alcohol is a culture of its own. It's specifically when you get big alcohol, they then target towards women as you were just saying, we buy into a lie. If you ever remember, I don't know if it still happens, but vacations. I used to think about vacations on a beach with the Corona because that was what was embedded in my mind from commercials for years and years from Corona. It makes me sad and then it makes me mad towards big alcohol companies and it's a mess.
[00:05:26] Amy: It is a mess. You know, I noticed it years ago as it became progressively more obvious. And I don't know if it's because, you know, most of my social media friends are women, so I'm not following guys or dudes or anything like that, but I'm seeing moms or women, maybe from twenties to sixties. There's so much of this, it's so much embedded in the girls are getting together. It's a girls night out. We're gonna party, we're gonna drink our wine, we're gonna click our glasses with all of our matching mojitos. Now, look I really wanna stress that I'm not saying this is the negative. This is all negative. But then I would ask myself, well, are these women just drinking one drink, calling it a night and leaving, or are they drinking several drinks and then getting pulled over for a dui?
[00:06:18] Courtney: Or are they drinking several drinks and going home and continuing to drink several drinks and blacking out and not remembering what their children said to them the night before. You know, there's again, that spectrum. So in the past couple years, you have seen the rise. I interview a guy Daniel on the Sober Vibes podcast and we talked about the daddy drinking culture. There is a culture within Dads where he has told me, he was like, oh yeah, let's get together and beers and bourbon and all that stuff. It's not a judgment. And I've had to defend myself on that. It's an observation , and if you keep putting stuff out there on social media and it's about drink after drink and celebrating with the girls and all of that, it's well, guess what you just curated for yourself? You just curated this image that the one thing that you care about is getting together with girlfriends and drinking. But it really comes down when it's the mommy wine culture. It's and I just know this too, from coaching women who are on both ends, where I do get women who become the empty nesters and actually drink more because they don't know now the purpose. They feel lonely. They don't have the purpose of raising kids anymore. they want to fill that void. And then you have moms who are just starting out to escape from the day in, day out, changing diapers, brushing teeth, the groundhog day of what I am learning in stay at home motherhood is then you want to meet your friends and then fill that void. So I think what this all comes down to is, because alcohol is so socially acceptable and ingrained in our society that it's okay to meet Sally at the park with Little Bobby and Susie and Bobby get together and play. And then you and your mom are you and the friend are gonna have drinks. Why can't she have a cup of coffee at these play dates?
[00:08:09] Amy: And they're drinking from the Tumblr they got for their birthday from their friend, the Tumblr that holds a bottle of wine that has their initials on it.
[00:08:18] Courtney: Yeah. And then you get into these neighborhoods now that have been built up, you are drinking and doing all of that with now your neighbors.
[00:08:25] My husband and I were out for a walk the other day with cj and we ran into this other couple, and the first thing that this guy was like, he was like, well, you guys should come over and have a couple beers.
[00:08:34] Amy: Right? I see this on halloween. Like the dads are walking the kids and they're drinking. We raised our boys in that neighborhood. You know, we were the first people in the neighborhood and there was a lot of that. There was a lot of that. I participated in it often with the neighbors and the kids and all this kind of stuff. Let me just throw out some questions, and this is gonna help some people figure out whether or not, you know, what defines a drinking problem.
[00:08:59] One of 'em is if you're drinking alone, drinking alone can escalate quickly. And if you're increasing your drinking alone, it can be like, well, who's gonna know? My kids aren't off the bus yet. I can have a couple glasses of wine or whatever and no one's gonna know that I already polished off half the bottle.
[00:09:17] I've been known to hide food okay , because I'm in a house of boys, so if I see like some Oreos or something, I gotta tuck 'em behind something because that's a different podcast. But, you know, hiding your intake, if you're sneaking a drink when no one is looking or hiding bottles of wine or liquor from your family members, that's a sign that there's some problematic drinking. Okay, now I think you and I can both relate to that. And then the third is using alcohol as a coping mechanism. So just thinking that it's okay to use alcohol to take the edge off or loosen up, or I earned it. I worked hard all week. This is my time. The research is showing these are questions that you can ask yourself. Like I mentioned earlier, you've created a niche for yourself.
[00:10:00] Courtney: So August 18th, 2012, it was my day one of my sober date, last time I drank was August 17th. And I had a 10 year raging toxic relationship with alcohol. It started off very innocently and then progressed, and progressed. When I quit drinking, I then proceeded with life. I actually got into multi-level marketing with health and fitness, and I really enjoyed coaching, and I still continued to work on myself and my sobriety. But in that period, I always had people reach out and ask me about coaching for their sobriety. And I didn't wanna do it until I knew that I was good and ready with my own self. So there was a year in the beginning of my recovery I stepped into aa. I was not ready for it. That was in the first couple weeks. It was too much for me. And so then I went back and I participated in the program one summer and I sat there and participated and listened and participated and listened and participated and everything kept. There was always something that always came up. There needs to be empowerment behind this because we didn't just get sober just to go to work and come here and not do anything else. And I listened to women being like, you know, I would love to get out there and go to a Tigers game and be able to sit with people and not worry about drinking. From that summer, I created something going into what was sober vibes. Everybody's different on where they're coming at in their sobriety, in their recovery, in their drinking relationship, and the spectrum that they are on of it, what type of problem they have. So not everybody's the same.
[00:11:38] And that's why in recovery, there's no one size fits all type of help. Leading up to the years, that is how I became a sober coach because it really is, anytime I work with somebody who's starting at day one, it's a reminder and it helps me and me being able to do the podcast it's a chronic reminder because this is what can happen too. It's like, When you start forgetting of what life was like in your active addiction with alcohol, your active relationship with alcohol, I'm not saying live it every day, but it's very easy to forget. A lot of this too, has just continually helped me show up in my own sobriety as well. And being able to teach women what worked for me because to a lot of stuff in sobriety, when you quit drinking, it comes down to a lot of limiting beliefs that you put on yourself for a lot of years. And then plus alcohol on top of it really made you believe that story.
[00:12:31] Amy: Did you do your research and see if there were other sober coaches around? Because to me it seems a very progressive approach. Especially in 2011.
[00:12:42] Courtney: I like
Marker
[00:12:42] Courtney: to stay in my own lane, and when I say this, I stay in my own lane because I don't wanna get heavily influenced by others. But yes, you're right about that timeline. Is that when it was like starting to pop up and the approach of it, you know, was people still think that we're frauds. Which makes me giggle.
[00:13:01] Amy: You can have 10 degrees, you can still be a fraud. You can come up from your own experience and you can be the real deal. And you walked the walk so you knew you know.
[00:13:12] Courtney: And that's why I waited until after six years, about six years is when I really stepped into that role of being like, okay, I can do it. That you need to work on yourself first, because it is very easy to then be like, oh, okay, I have three months sober. I want to go and become a sober life coach, and then fully enthrall yourself into somebody else's issues and problems, and therefore you're not working on yourself.
[00:13:34] Amy: Absolutely. That's one of the biggest challenges alcoholics have is boundaries. My sobriety date is January 9th, 2013. Initially in sobriety, I would sit at tables and listen and just cheering everybody on, you know, but it was so much easier for me to do that because then I didn't have to deal with myself and how I got there. That's what recovery teaches you. We spent a lot of time focusing on what everybody else did to us, and this is why we have to use, it's a whole thing and you absolutely have to have good clean time. You can't give away what you don't have. I love that you took this pivot into a community. And I remember, you know, when I got into aa, my boys were younger and I would think they need an AA for women, like a modern day woman because, I'm a busy mom. one thing that I've admired about your community is that there's women, it's about women.
[00:14:37] Courtney: I always focus towards women because that is where I felt comfortable. When I created Silver Vibes, especially in it being an online community and I was in some Facebook groups before. I saw some creepiness in the group. And this is the thing, women aren't gonna open up 100% around men because there could be a lot of trauma from a male in a person's life. So I always kept it with just women sober and sober curious women and really meaning them at with where they're at. And then that has fed into other women helping each other out. Men and women's recovery are completely two different beasts.
[00:15:16] Amy: It's so different. So a few questions, Courtney. How do you address the shame and the guilt that so many women experience when they come to you?
[00:15:25] Courtney: Shame and guilt is gonna be there. And if you're still in that active state of using and not changing anything, it's just gonna keep being there and being there and not change. But when women come to me, I tell them that it is a process. You have to give yourself time and you show up for yourself every day because that's what it's about. Within time that shame and guilt starts lessening and lessening because you were no longer living in that active shame cycle. Because that's what you're doing right now. You're just living in the shame cycle and wake up the next day and using.
[00:16:00] Amy: Absolutely and oftentimes women have to give themselves permission to forgive themselves because that's where the resentment lies.
[00:16:10] Courtney: My motto is, give yourself grace. I say this on repeat because a lot of women are high achievers, high achieving is that you're always on. you always are taking care of X, Y, z. Saying yes to stuff, getting it done, but then completely burnt out by the end of the day and a lot of high achieving women are either highly sensitive or are empaths. Just because you stop drinking doesn't mean that the problems all stop at day one. You have a whole tornado following you from all the chaotic stuff and decisions. And that's why it's called recovery . It's a process and then it's a grieving process too. And I will tell you, grief waits for nobody.
[00:16:48] Amy: Oh, that is so true. And I've been with my grandma, my mother, and my sister when they've taken their last breath. But I can say getting sober was up there. I smiled because when you said high achieving, perfectionism, I've heard people say I'm a recovering perfectionist. My goodness, this takes people down this whole other path and the empath, we are very sensitive. We feel things, we feel energy, we feel vibrations, and we absolutely have to protect that. I am so grateful to be sober and getting here was fricking by hook or by crook towards the end of my addiction, I felt like such a fraud. You know, I really thought I was this like, carefree and easygoing and accepting and, puppy dogs and rainbows kind of girl Now, I am all those things, but I wasn't in active addiction. Today I can be fully authentic. I can be vulnerable with women. I can say I need help. There's so much more awareness and confidence. Do you find that women who come to you wanna either stop altogether, moderate, or explore the relationship with alcohol?
[00:18:01] Courtney: No. They wanna stop all together. Have tried the exploring, have tried different avenues of help, and it brought them back. It brought them back to the same place. There are people in this world who can drink alcohol on quote unquote or normal. I am also a firm believer that there are people who cannot drink alcohol in this world. And once alcohol chemically takes over your brain, you can't go back to what it was like 19 years old having a couple beers and being happy.
[00:18:29] Amy: Yeah. Absolutely. This is what I was working with a client earlier, and as I explained it's a mental obsession and it's a physical allergy.
[00:18:39] Courtney: There are so many components to it too because just seeing how alcohol is played out in families and that's why going back to the mommy wine culture where it's so sad because when I quit drinking man, and I had that talk like, you know, I'm so excited for when we have a child that they won't know this. They won't know what it's like to have a parent whose first love is alcohol. And who chooses alcohol, and is not present and is not fully functioning. And then that comes into the conversation too, where you're breaking generational patterns.
[00:19:11] Amy: Tell us about your book.
[00:19:13] Courtney: So my book is called Silver Vibes, A Guide to Thriving In Your First Three Months Without Alcohol. It's from my coach's perspective of helping you through those first three months and navigating the sober life in a holistic way. It's also a workbook, which you get a two for one in it, which I'm so excited that's how it all panned out. Everybody has their own puzzle that they have to put together, and it just starts clicking and you're building this foundation and building this foundation. If somebody asks you like, Hey what are you drinking? You can lie. Sometimes little fibs are okay, vodka, soda, that's it. because you sometimes will be met with people who push, push, push.
[00:19:51] Amy: Yeah. And I think that's really good advice for early sobriety because you don't really know how to handle it. The more you get into it, you just don't care what people think because you know that it doesn't matter. You know that saying fomo, you know, the fear of missing out? Well, I call it jomo, the joy of missing out. Monica and Melissa make fun of me, but I'm such a homebody now at this point and I really have been in for a long time.
[00:20:15] Courtney: A lot of those questions come up of I'm gonna miss out. I'm gonna lose friends. Those two I hear a lot.
[00:20:21] Amy: When is your book gonna be released?
[00:20:23] Courtney: August 15th. But it is available for pre-order, which you can find on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It will be on my website. I'm just currently building a page for all of that stuff.
[00:20:33] Amy: It's such an honor to have you announcing that, so we'll definitely put all of the links in our show notes. Final words here. What are your final thoughts? Reflecting now the promises of sober living. What do you have to say about that?
[00:20:48] Courtney: A lot of these sayings sound very cliche, but it's so true. You know, I always get choked up about this stuff because if you would've asked me 10 years ago, 11 years ago if I was going to write a book, About helping a woman thrive the first three months of sobriety, I would be like, you are crazy. But that is one of the promises that sobriety has delivered to me. But that also too comes from the years of showing up, even on the days, if it's just you getting outta bed and brushing your teeth and giving yourself grace with that. And two, just going back to somebody who once didnt wanna live, you know, now just trying to live every day as much as possible, you know, even if that's just loving my son harder one day or you know, doing something like this of showing up to be able to help. That's all promises and just liking myself, that was a promise of sobriety . Cause I did not used to like myself. It's incredible now in the year 2023, the different options of help that you can get if you are suffering in silence because of your relationship with alcohol.
[00:21:54] Amy: I think there's a lot of really good takeaways. I cannot thank you enough for showing up for us here at the Kindling Project.
[00:22:02] Courtney: Thank you! Thank you so much for having me on. And again, for anybody listening who is struggling, there is hope. There is help and I believe in you.
[00:22:12] Amy: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for that. Do you wanna give a shout out to somebody today?
[00:22:17] Courtney: I do. I wanna give a shout out to my sister. My sister and I, we've always loved each other, she has had her own recovery, well her own addiction issues. But I have to say it's so wonderful cuz she's sober as well and in recovery. We do our show on the podcast every third episode called Living on the Elledge. And I just love my sister so much and I'm just, So fortunate that she's here today and that we're able to do that I did not think that show was going to get the response that it did. I just love my sister so much. She's my rock. So I wanna give her a shout out and say thank you, Kimmy.
[00:22:52] Amy: I love that. I feel like I need to know her too, cuz the two of you together are so cool and so real. I'm gonna give a shout out to, I'm thinking about college kids, especially the kids at Michigan State University and kids being so brave and so courageous. And I know it's not exactly on subject, but I'm so in awe of the young people today who are facing so much adversity through covid and mass shootings and things like that. I just really admire these young people. And when I'm talking to them, I've been doing a lot of fielding some crisis the last 48 hours. I bring up using drugs, using alcohol to deal with this kind of trauma. So that's my shout out to the young kids and to your sister. There's nothing better like sisterly love. Courtney, thank you so much for being here. Good luck on your book. I know I mentioned earlier that your podcast is up for-
[00:23:49] Courtney: it's on the ballot for the best of our Detroit. So I am up for the podcast Silver Vibes and also for social media influencer under Courtney Anderson over on Instagram. So if you would like to vote something like that to be recognized for, all it does is help the awareness of sobriety, recovery, addiction, and then when you start getting sobriety, recovery, addiction, we then go into mental health issues. So it's just all added awareness to topics that we need to break more and more of the stigma of.
[00:24:24] Amy: Absolutely. It's just raise that level of awareness as much as we can. All right. Thanks so much, Courtney. We'll talk to you again.
[00:24:31] Courtney: Thank you!
[00:24:32] Amy: Bye-Bye.