Soberly Speaking

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠   Raised in South Africa by two morticians, Kerry grew up with a loving mother and an absent, alcoholic father who, in her words, should never have been a parent. In sobriety, memories of him behaving in sexually inappropriate ways towards her, and allegedly involving his friends, have begun to resurface. But the harm within her family didn...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠   What happens when the life you were born into is the very thing trying to destroy you? Tove never chose gang life. She was born into it. Raised around gangs, addiction and violence, some of Tove’s earliest memories were pumping her stepmother’s stomach after overdoses. As she got older, gang members became her friends, then her partners a...

Join our patreon:  ⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking   Jackie grew up in Singapore as a bilingual only child, raised in top schools and even finding early fame as a pop star. In a country where drug possession carried the death penalty, her life could not have looked more different to where it eventually led. After moving to Australia, a traumatic event one night changed everything. From that p...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking   Nitrous oxide a.k.a. nangs, is something I’ve never spoken about on this platform before, yet it’s sold right under our noses. Tiny canisters are available over the counter in almost every tobacconist across Australia, legally accessible to anyone 18 and over. Sam Bramman was 18 when he first tried a nang at a party. Within just three weeks...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠   Jay  grew up in Geelong as a young gay dancer, supported at home but often made to feel different outside of it. His early experiences of bullying, trauma and assault shaped the way he saw himself, and how drinking and substances became a way to feel confident and finally accepted. After moving to Melbourne to study dance professionally,...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Louise Edmonds  was a small child when her experience of abuse by her grandfather began in her family home, a place that should have been safe, but wasn’t. Louise shares her story and how that experience continued over five years, shaping not only her childhood but the course of her life. Today, she's a passionate advocate working t...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains graphic and extreme depictions of violence. Listener discretion is advised. From the moment she was born, Donna was already in withdrawal. Her biological parents were both experiencing addiction and she was adopted soon after birth. Donna was then raised in a strict, hardworking family and given a...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Jasmine  grew up knowing something didn’t feel right in her home. The good days with her father felt like everything. The bad days felt unbearable. At 15, she witnessed him attempt to take his own life in front of her and her siblings, and from that moment she began using alcohol to cope with what she couldn’t process. Years later, she...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Peter Bates  was just a child when his father poured petrol over him and his mother to stop her from leaving. Extreme violence, coercive control, and fear shaped Peter’s childhood, but home wasn’t the only place he was unsafe. At school, he experienced SA at the hands of a male teacher.  Desperate to escape the violence, Peter found him...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Growing up around addiction, instability and an absent father shaped the course of Luke’s life long before he understood it. In this episode, Luke speaks openly about avoiding accountability and the impact his behaviour had on the people around him during the darkest periods of his life. Beneath it all was a lifelong search for love, va...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   If a mum of six can walk into her local pub and lose hundreds of thousands on a poker machine, where does the responsibility actually sit? Is it the machines, engineered to be addictive? The system that allows them to exist in every pub and club across the country? Or the individual sitting in front of them? In this episode I sit down w...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   You stopped drinking. You changed your habits. So why does it still feel like something is missing? Work, the gym, your phone, the constant chase for more… sometimes the patterns just shift rather than disappear. Trauma Therapist Drew Wild is back on the podcast to go deeper into what might be sitting underneath it all. We talk about th...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Trigger warning: This episode discusses child SA within a family, domestic violence and su*cide. Listener discretion is advised. Support resources are listed below. As a teenager, when Tanisha tried to speak her truth, she was not believed by those closest to her. That silence left her carrying a deep emotional weight alone. Over time,...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   From a young age,  Mikaela  felt the pressure to please those around her, men especially. At seventeen, she met the father of her firstborn in the chaos of partying and substance use. What began as young love slowly turned into a life she felt trapped in. With a mortgage, a baby on the way and no income of her own, leaving no longer fel...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Growing up as a second-generation Chinese Australian in Canberra, Alex spent much of his childhood wanting to be anything but himself. At just eight years old, he made a quiet but powerful connection: success, titles and money equals love. That belief followed him into adulthood and when COVID hit, the pressure, boredom and loss of iden...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Trigger warning: this episode contains discussion of sexual assault. Raj's earliest memory is of his father leaving him on the side of the road to teach him a lesson. It was the first of many moments that taught him emotions weren't safe to show. By his teens, he was selling and using. What began at parties didn't stay there...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Trigger warning: this episode contains detailed discussion of sexual assault.  Stacey was 14 years old when two strangers assaulted her. One night. A warehouse. An experience no child should ever survive. She did. And then she did something even harder. She took them to court as a child, and won. She has never spoken publicly about it....

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   “Comedy is a hotbed of mental illness"  Sian Smyth is a stand-up comedian whose past includes domestic violence, drug abuse, sex addiction, and sex work. After leaving an almost decade-long violent relationship in which she saw the devil himself, Sian finally felt free to take control of her body and experiment with every drug imag...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Trigger warning: This episode discusses sexual assault, substance use disorder and mental health including psychosis. Have you ever been in psychosis? You hear the horror stories of people staying in it for days, weeks or months, but Nikki lived with it for five years. During that time she became someone she didn’t recognise: erratic, p...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   At 26, Henry Brayshaw was drowning in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from his gambling addiction. Gambling had felt normal since childhood. Some of his earliest memories were placing bets on the Melbourne Cup and slipping into the TAB. What started as something familiar slowly became uncontrollable. As the debt piled up, so di...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   What really goes on inside the world of selling sex online? I was invited into the home of Australia’s most sexually active woman,  Annie Knight , one of the country’s top OnlyFans creators. From the boundaries she sets with her fiancé to exactly how she pulls in millions each year, Annie lifts the curtain on a world most of us only gli...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Soberly Speaking is back with a brand new season starting Monday February 16th. This season marks an evolution of the podcast. Once a month, you'll receive a documentary-style episode. These episodes take you inside the homes, lives and hidden worlds of my guests and are designed to be watched like a TV show, not just listened to. Y...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   For ⁠Ash Butterss⁠ , addiction was a constant pursuit of more: more thrill, more chaos, more ways to avoid the emptiness. It started with sugar in childhood, then alcohol at 12, and drugs by 14. She moved from one addiction to another, telling herself she didn’t have a problem as long as she had periods of sobriety. On the outside, her...

Join our Patreon:  ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/SoberlySpeaking⁠⁠   Andrew Moses⁠ grew up as a closeted Jewish gay boy, feeling immense pressure to be academically successful, marry a Jewish woman, and have Jewish children, all while battling the belief that something was fundamentally wrong with him. To fit in, he started using party drugs, masking his true identity and trying to convince everyone, inc...

The holiday season can be especially triggering when it comes to food and eating. In this episode, I’m joined by  Vanessa Kredler  to talk about food addiction, food noise, and why so many people feel stuck in the same cycle year after year. We explore why willpower isn’t the problem and what “food sobriety” really means. Vanessa shares how recovery is possible, what support can look like and how...