The Hello Someday Podcast For Sober Curious Women

Getting through sobriety can be one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences of your life and Laura McKowen, founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community and best-selling author of We Are The Luckiest, The Surprising Magic Of A Sober Life is here to help us through the process. In Laura’s new book, Push Off From Here - The 9 Essential Truths To Get You Through S...

Are you ready to have an amazing sober vacation? Here are the 10 tips you need to do to plan your next alcohol-free trip and enjoy sober travel, even if you’ve never done it before.  I know it’s possible that every trip you’ve taken since college has featured cocktails on the beach, wine tasting tours or boozy pubs, but I promise you that you’re going to love sober travel.  I asked Margaret Ward,...

Mother’s feel that they’re not doing enough in the workplace when they leave the office to pick up the kids from childcare, when they try to get to a sports game, or when they have to block off time for a child’s dentist or doctor appointment.  And mother’s feel guilty that they’re not spending “enough” time with their children. Or volunteering at school. Or going on field trips. Or making homemad...

“Maybe you should reevaluate your relationship with alcohol”.   That’s what my mother said to me when I was 23 after I told her I had spent a very long night on my bathroom floor throwing up bile. She might have said it again when I was 25 and jumped off the stage at my sister’s wedding, tripped and slid across the dance floor on my knees in my maid of honor dress. And possibly for a third time wh...

How do you navigate life as a sober mom when the alcohol industry has spent millions of marketing dollars to embed the “mommy needs wine” message firmly in our culture?  How do you talk to other moms about your decision to take a break from drinking and see what it’s like to be a sober mom?  Motherhood without alcohol can feel like a foreign concept for many of us. We’ve been convinced, through ad...

Have you heard of Tommy Rosen and The Recovery 2.0 approach to holistic healing from addiction to alcohol and drugs?  If not, you’re in for a treat. Tommy Rosen is the founder of Recovery 2.0 and works to help people build powerful, sustainable lives in which they thrive, not just survive, in sobriety.  Anyone can fall victim to addiction, whether it be to alcohol, drugs, food, people, money, sex...

Do you feel stuck? Not just in the drinking cycle, but stuck in your job, your commitments, your role in relationships or habits or patterns that are no longer serving you and yet seem impossible to break.  Becky Vollmer, yoga teacher, speaker and author of You Are Not Stuck: How Soul-Guided Choices Transform Fear into Freedom, joined me to help us understand what’s actually holding us back from c...

Holly Whitaker, author of The New York Times best-selling book Quit Like A Woman, The Radical Choice To Not Drink In A Culture Obsessed with Alcohol, was an integral part of my decision to stop drinking and support in early sobriety and her work has helped thousands of women.  When I was 60 days sober I signed up for Holly Whitaker’s Hip Sobriety School, an eight-week sober coaching group program...

If you’ve evaluating your relationship with alcohol and looking for support as you stop drinking there are many paths to sobriety and sources of support for an alcohol-free life. The most important thing you can do as you stop drinking is to find the approach, tools and resources that are the right fit for you. For decades Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in 1935 as a mutual aid fellowship for abstin...

How many times have you told yourself that you were going to stop drinking? I did it hundreds of times.  Sometimes I’d rationalize drinking again that very night, but often I’d go 4 days, a week or even 2 weeks alcohol-free before I’d decide that I deserved “just a glass” on a Friday night.  Stopping drinking is hard, but making sobriety stick is also difficult. You might have decided to stop drin...

Finding your identity in sobriety can be scary for many women when they stop drinking.  For years I described myself as a “red wine girl” and drinking was essentially my favorite hobby.  I surrounded myself with other people who loved to drink so my social life, activities, favorite places, traditions and relationships were deeply intertwined with alcohol.  When I stopped drinking I didn’t know wh...

Highly Sensitive People may turn to alcohol as a tool to numb overwhelming situations or as a coping mechanism to dull strong emotions.  Alcohol has been described as a “mute button” for highly sensitive people in a world that is often too loud.  It’s estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the population are HSPs and 1 to 2% of the population are true empaths. An empath is a person who is highly sensi...

How can couples heal and recover from infidelity once trust in an intimate relationship has been shattered by an affair? The first step, after the sexual acting out has stopped, is to understand and treat the betrayal trauma. In addition to learning about and coping with infidelity, an affair, sexual acting out, pornography use or sex addiction itself, the partner who has discovered infidelity is...

In early sobriety, it’s important to have tools and practices to help you overcome alcohol cravings. It’s normal to have cravings to drink in your first few weeks without alcohol, and they’ll get less strong and frequent the further you get away from the drinking cycle.  In the beginning, alcohol cravings are driven by physical, social, emotional and habitual cues to drink.  Understanding why crav...

When you first start on your sober journey it’s hard to imagine life after drinking, much less how you’ll feel at 2 years alcohol-free.  So I asked a sober coaching client of mine, Sue Winters, to join me on the podcast to talk about quitting drinking and her life now that she’s 2 years alcohol-free. I started working with Sue in early sobriety and here’s what she told me about her drinking… “For...

Your first sober year can be awkward, challenging, empowering, tender, transformative and unsettling. Over the course of moving from your first 30 Days not drinking to completing 12 months alcohol-free you will learn to navigate events, relationships, work, parenting and joy, anger, anxiety, stress without drinking.  You’ll also move through awakenings, transitions and the seasons of the year with...

If you’re in early sobriety or are trying to stop drinking, navigating your first sober holiday season can be a challenge.  Why is it hard to get through your first sober holiday season? Well, the holidays are not only a wonderful time of year but also a gauntlet of social, emotional and environmental triggers to drink.  I was nine months sober my first holiday season and thought that I would have...

When you’re struggling with drinking it can feel like a battle within you, between your addictive voice that tells you that you deserve to have a drink and the other voice (the one that shows up in the morning) that tells you alcohol is dragging you down and making you sick.  I call my addictive voice “Wolfie” based on the parable of The Two Wolves.  When that endless debate goes on in your head a...

What are the risk factors for alcohol use disorder? Are they genetic, social, environmental or psychological? Alcohol is the most widely misused substance in America and, according to the National Center For Drug Abuse Statistics, 1-in-10 Americans over the age of 12 qualify as having a mild, moderate or severe Alcohol Use Disorder. So how do you get to your first year alcohol-free? I asked Dr. Nz...

Redefining your relationship with alcohol is a learning process that requires compassion and grace for yourself.  Alcohol is the most prescribed drug in the world by friends, family and society. Many people are actively encouraged to drink by others if they are having a bad day, stressed out, out for an evening or celebrating. And it’s no surprise that nearly half of all American adults are dealin...

Navigating a toxic relationship with a narcissist is incredibly difficult and it’s easy to start drinking as a coping mechanism to escape.   You may have a partner who is a narcissist, have grown up with a narcissistic mother or father, or navigating co-parenting your children with a narcissistic ex.  And if you’re in a relationship with a narcissist and you’re drinking a lot, they will use your d...

Therapy for women often focuses on a unique set of challenges experienced by women in their lives and in society. Some mental health issues are much more common in women than in men, some only appear in women, or some mental health issues may affect all genders but impact women differently. The US Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health reported that more than 1 in 5 women...

What does an unhealthy drinking culture at work look like?  Is drinking a company-organized activity? Are company events centered around alcohol?  Are new employees taken out for drinks, team bonding gatherings hosted at a bar or holiday parties at a winery? Is drinking normalized as a coping mechanism for stress at work? Do you hear colleagues discussing “needing a drink” after a tough day or bei...

In the book, Big Feelings: How To Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, Liz Fosslien and her co-author, Mollie West Duffy, examine the seven emotions that are especially hard to overcome: self-doubt, comparison, and anger, as well as burnout, perfectionism, despair, and regret.  And these are emotions most of us never talk about. Instead, we move through life wondering “What’s wrong with me?” and “Why...

High-achieving women can struggle to set boundaries. If you’re managing an endless to-do list and many responsibilities you likely have a tendency to over-deliver, over-give, people please and ignore your own needs instead of setting strong boundaries.  While you may get positive reinforcement from doing all the things for all the people (especially by those who benefit from your over-giving like...