455 Transcript
Angela (00:07.374)
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Addiction Unlimited podcast. I’m your coach, Angela Pugh. How do I know if I actually have a drinking problem? This is probably one of the most common questions people ask themselves when they start getting uncomfortable with their drinking. Am I really an alcoholic? Do I actually have a problem? Or am I just drinking a little too much right now? Maybe I just need to cut back. Maybe I need to take a break.Maybe I should stop drinking during the week and only drink on weekends. We will create an entire strategic plan around drinking before we’ll sit down and ask ourselves the most obvious question. What the hell is going on with me and alcohol? And here’s the first thing I want you to understand. I am not going to give you a diagnostic quiz today. I’m not interested in do you drink X number of drinks on X number of nights?

Have you had X number of consequences? Check seven boxes and congratulations, here’s your label. That’s not how I look at this. And I never tell people.

Angela (01:52.102)
And I never tell people they’re alcoholics. First of all, way too many people can’t handle that word. We have some very delicate sensitivities these days. And I’m a little different about that stuff. I am a no BS human. Tell me the truth so I can figure out the solution. I don’t need you to beat around the bush or hold my hand or find the softest, prettiest language possible.

If I’m trying to fix a major problem in my life, I just let’s get on with it. I don’t particularly care what we call it. I care about how I’m fucking up and what I need to do to stop fucking up. I also understand that not everybody feels that way. So when somebody says to me, I don’t know if I’m an alcoholic, I think maybe I just drink too much sometimes. The first thing I notice is that they’re asking the question.

at all because that tells me something has shifted.

Angela (03:02.24)
You are questioning your connection with alcohol because somewhere along the way you felt that relationship start to change. You probably can’t even pinpoint exactly when it happened. You just know you’re thinking about alcohol more than you used to. You’re relying on it in ways you didn’t before. You’re planning around it, recovering from it, wondering about it, worrying about it. And there’s this little voice in the back of your head saying.

Something about this doesn’t feel right anymore. And that’s usually when we start asking the question. Then here’s what happens next.

Almost immediately after someone tells me they’re wondering if they have a drinking problem, they start giving me all the reasons they don’t. I don’t drink every day. I’ve never had a DUI, I don’t drink in the morning, I have a good job, my kids are taken care of, I don’t hide bottles, I can go days without drinking. And I’m just listening. Because here’s the thing: if an idea is completely preposterous to you.

You don’t have to build a defense against it. If somebody said to me, Angela, I think you might secretly be a six foot four professional basketball player. I’m not gonna spend the next three hours Googling the average height of WNBA players and gathering evidence to prove I’m not, right? I’m gonna say that’s absurd. And then I’m gonna move on with my life. When something happens,

Clearly doesn’t apply to us. We don’t usually have to convince ourselves that it doesn’t apply. So when you’ve built an entire defense around why you’re definitely not an alcoholic, I’m interested in why you need the defense in the first place. And I think part of the reason people fight this so hard is because they’re not only fighting a conclusion about alcohol.

Angela (05:07.69)
They’re fighting what they believe that conclusion says about them.

To a lot of people, the word alcoholic means, I’m not even really sure, weak, I guess, broken, irresponsible, a bad parent, a bad partner, a failure, somebody who can’t get their shit together. So sometimes when you’re fighting the possibility that you’re an alcoholic, you’re not even protecting alcohol. You’re protecting your identity. You’re saying

I’m successful, I’m responsible, I’m a good person, I take care of my family. I’m not that. And somewhere along the way, you’ve decided that being a person with an alcohol problem is incompatible with all those other things. I don’t see it that way at all. I wear the label alcoholic as a badge of honor.

Angela (06:06.112)
I wear the label alcoholic as a badge of honor. I have a tremendous amount of pride in being an alcoholic because to me, the word represents something I survived, confronted, and overcame. I’ve dealt with something that most people aren’t equipped to handle, recognize, and least of all have the balls to actually do something about it. And I’ve always been a little different in that way.

Even when I was drinking, I knew I was an alcoholic. There was nothing normal about how I drank.

But I lived in Los Angeles for many, many years. There were sober people everywhere, successful people, powerful people, celebrities. I had plenty of evidence around me that being sober didn’t mean your life was over, and being an alcoholic didn’t mean you were a loser, right? So I wore my alcoholism as a badge of honor.

Angela (07:12.556)
What embarrassed me wasn’t that I was an alcoholic. What embarrassed me was that I couldn’t handle my life. I was high functioning too. I could work, I made money, I could show up and perform and take care of all the things. But emotionally, I wasn’t growing. I couldn’t cope with my own feelings. I wasn’t advancing in life. Like I was just stuck. And drinking was the thing I used.

So I didn’t have to deal with any of it. That’s why I’m not particularly interested in convincing anyone to use the word alcoholic. I love the label. You don’t have to. The label isn’t the fucking point, right? The point is what is actually happening in your life, and are you willing to tell yourself the truth about it? Because I think one of the reasons people stay.

Angela (08:20.962)
Because one of the reasons people stay confused about this for so long is that we’re looking in the wrong place. We’re obsessed with quantity. How many drinks do I have? How many nights a week do I drink? How many drinks does an alcoholic have? Can an alcoholic go days without drinking? Can an alcoholic only drink on weekends? Can an alcoholic do dry January? And those questions can give you information for sure.

But they don’t tell me nearly as much as people think they do. I want to know about your relationship with alcohol. How much mental real estate is it taking up? How much of your time is spent thinking about drinking, planning drinking, actually drinking, or recovering from drinking? Because I had three stages of life. I was thinking about it, doing it, or recovering from it. There wasn’t much room for anything else.

And that’s what I want you to look at in your own life, because maybe you don’t drink every day, but you’re thinking about it every day. Maybe you’re making rules about when you can drink, breaking the rules, creating new rules, counting drinks, checking how much wine is left before people come over, wondering whether you need another bottle just in case.

Angela (09:40.748)
Maybe you wake up the next morning trying to reconstruct the night before. Like, how many did I have? Was it five or was it six? Did anybody notice? Was I too loud? Did I say anything stupid? And then by afternoon, you’re already negotiating with yourself about tonight. I’m not drinking tonight. Except you’re going out. So maybe you’ll have two. You’ll be good tonight. You’ll drink water between drinks, you’ll leave early.

And now you’re conducting a forensic investigation into Friday night while simultaneously negotiating the terms of Saturday night. Look at how much work that takes.

Angela (10:23.052)
Because all the things sneaking, minimizing, planning, counting, defending, negotiating, recovering, making rules and renegotiating new rules, those are not isolated behaviors. They’re an ecosystem. Alcohol has become important enough in your life that you’re having to manage your relationship with it. That’s what I want you to look at.

Not whether somebody on the internet says six drinks makes you an alcoholic and five doesn’t. Look at how much of your life revolves around managing alcohol.

And if you want an interesting comparison, watch somebody who genuinely has an uncomplicated relationship with alcohol. These fucking weirdos don’t think about it at all. They’re not obsessing about whether or not they’re gonna drink tonight. They’re not freaking out about dinner with friends because they don’t know what they’re gonna drink. They’re not looking at the restaurant menu three days in advance to make sure they have mocktails. They simply don’t care.

What’s in their glass? If somebody offers them a drink and they don’t want one, they say, no thanks, and that’s it.

No internal crisis, no elaborate explanation, no concern about whether everybody is gonna think they’re weird. They don’t want to drink, so they don’t have one.

Angela (11:55.894)
And here’s another thing these weirdos do. They don’t finish their drinks. Like, what the fuck is that? They sip. They leave half of it sitting on the table. They forget about it. Meanwhile, we’re watching the level in the glass and calculating whether the server’s going to be back here fast enough because we’re going to need another one. They’re not wondering whether there’s going to be alcohol at the party or the neighborhood barbecue or the camping trip.

They go camping to actually camp and enjoy their friends and family, not as an excuse to sit and drink in a different location. Alcohol has no gravitational pull for them. It doesn’t require management because it simply isn’t that important.

Angela (12:56.854)
And that is a much more interesting thing for you to examine than whether or not you drank three nights or four this week.

Angela (13:07.98)
And there’s another piece of this that I think is even more important, and that’s control. Because people love to tell me they can go days or weeks without alcohol and not even really think about it. Okay, a lot of us can stop for periods of time. We are fairly defiant people by nature. And especially if somebody tells us we can’t do something, boy, nothing will make me act like a toddler.

faster than feeling like somebody’s telling me what to do.

So if your spouse gives you a little shit about how much you drink, it doesn’t surprise me at all that you would go, okay, bitch, watch this, and quit for months, even. Because we are defiant and rebellious and we’re control freaks. So if you tell me in some way that you’re paying attention to my drinking, which means you’re trying to control how I’m drinking, of course I’m gonna do something major to prove you wrong. Honestly.

A decent amount of my resolve in sobriety came from spite because it was me against alcohol and I wasn’t fucking losing. Period.

Angela (14:24.586)
One of the realizations I had in my own rock bottom moment was that alcohol was controlling me. It was controlling my choices, my behavior, my chaos and consequences. And that pisses me off. I don’t like being told what to do by anyone. And as soon as I understood that alcohol was running the show, that fueled my fire in a huge way to stay sober because I am the boss of me, not alcohol.

So, yes, you may absolutely be able to decide not to pick up the first drink for thirty days or sixty days or however many days, but that’s not the only kind of control.

Angela (15:11.17)
But that’s not the kind of control I’m interested in. I want you to think about

Angela (15:21.868)
I want you to think about the last few times you drank before you had the first drink. Maybe you told yourself how you wanted the night to go, right? We love to do that. I’m only gonna have a couple, I’m gonna leave by 10, I have a workout tomorrow. So I’m definitely not gonna get crazy tonight. And here’s what I want you to notice. How much confidence do you actually have in that plan? Not how badly you want it to happen, not whether you’ve successfully done it before.

But when you put that first drink to your lips, do you know with certainty how the night’s gonna end? Or are you just crossing your fingers? Because those are two very different things. Are you having one drink? Or are you having a drink and hoping everything goes okay? Because hope is not control. Maybe tonight you have two and go home. Maybe tonight you have six.

Maybe you’re home by 10, maybe it’s two in the morning. Maybe you remember everything, maybe there are fuzzy parts. Maybe you’re perfectly pleasant all night long. Maybe you get a little too loud and develop a little attitude with somebody you secretly don’t like. Maybe you get home, wash your makeup off, get everything ready for tomorrow, get to bed, and make your workout in the morning. Or maybe

You wake up with a headache, cancel everything you planned, and spend half the day trying to piece together the night before while guilt and anxiety eat you alive. The question isn’t whether the worst case scenario happens every time. The question is whether you know which version you’re getting before you take that first drink.

Angela (17:18.786)
The question isn’t whether the worst case scenario happens every time. The question is whether you know which version you’re getting before you take that first drink. If you don’t know, that’s the part I want you to pay attention to. That’s the loss of control I’m talking about. And frequency doesn’t answer that question. But I only drink on weekends. Okay, but what happens when you drink on weekends?

I only drink a couple times a month. Okay. What happens those couple times a month? You could drink once a year. And if every time you take that first drink, you have no idea whether you’re gonna have two or 12, whether you’re home at 10 or 2, whether you remember the whole night or wake up wondering what the fuck happened, that’s worth paying attention to. Not quantity, predictability. And while you’re looking at that.

Stop using other people’s drinking to answer questions about yours. I hear this stuff all the time. My husband drinks way more than I do. My sister drinks every night. My friend gets way drunker than me. At least I’ve never blacked out. Okay. I was a raging alcoholic. I didn’t black out either. You can count on one hand the number of times I blacked out in 15 years of daily drinking.

I didn’t drink alone. I didn’t drink in the morning. And it took me 14 years to get a DUI. If I had picked any one of those arbitrary behaviors as the offensive

Angela (19:03.798)
If I had picked any one of those arbitrary behaviors as the official benchmark for alcoholism, I could have built a very compelling case that I was doing just fine. And I wasn’t. How much or how often somebody else drinks has absolutely nothing to do with your relationship with alcohol. There are probably plenty of people around you who have drinking problems.

It’s really none of your business. Your business is your drinking problem.

My mom doesn’t drink at all. Oddly, that had no impact on how much I drank, right? So stop looking sideways and just look at yourself.

Angela (20:04.856)
So, how do you know if you actually have a drinking problem? If you’ve been asking this question repeatedly, you’ve probably done some research. You’ve Googled it, you’ve taken the quizzes, you’ve read the articles and listened to the podcasts, and you’ve looked up how many drinks qualify as alcoholism. You’ve compared yourself to people who drink more than you do. And here’s what I want you to notice about that process. What happens when you get an answer?

You don’t like? Do you stop or do you keep searching? Because last week we talked about resistance.

Angela (20:52.908)
Because on last week’s episode, we talked about resistance and how when we don’t like the answer we’re getting, we just keep searching for a different answer. And this is what resistance can look like in real life. It doesn’t always look like somebody sitting on the couch saying, I refuse to deal with this. Sometimes resistance looks incredibly productive. You’re researching, you’re reading, you’re listening, you’re analyzing, you’re busy as hell, but you’re not moving. The searching

looks like problem solving, but it’s really procrastination dressed up as problem solving. Because think about it, if somebody finally looked at you and said, with everything you’ve told me,

If somebody finally looked at everything you’ve told them and said, nope, you’re fine. You absolutely do not have a drinking problem, would you believe them? I don’t think you would. Because somewhere underneath all the noise, you already know the truth. Even if you’re a master of denial, you know when something isn’t right. That’s why you’re Googling it in the first place.

Angela (22:09.304)
People who have an uncomplicated relationship with alcohol aren’t repeatedly searching, am I an alcoholic? Because alcohol doesn’t have enough presence in their lives for them to wonder whether it’s out of control. So when you’re sitting in a pile of evidence and continuing to search for more evidence, eventually we have to ask, what are you actually looking for?

Angela (22:40.588)
Because sometimes you’re actually stalling. Because knowing creates responsibility. So as long as you’re still quote unquote figuring it out, you can stay exactly where you are. You can keep drinking while telling yourself you’re researching. You can stay in the comfort zone. You can stay in denial. You can stay in avoidance.

Angela (23:09.41)
But once you finally say this isn’t working anymore, well, now you have a decision to make. And that’s why underneath the question, Am I an alcoholic? there’s another question. And that question is is this bad enough that I actually have to do something about it? Because if the answer is yes, it’s like, fuck, now there’s another thing you have to fix. And I understand that.

You’re already exhausted. You’re working and parenting and running a household and trying to exercise and pay bills and managing relationships. You’re taking care of everybody. You already need an extra three hours in every day. And now the thing you’ve been using because you’re overwhelmed is apparently another fucking problem you have to solve. Of course, your brain wants to keep researching. Your brain is like, well, maybe.

We should make absolutely certain first. Let’s take another quiz. But there’s also a problem with the belief that recovery is.

Angela (24:30.484)
Of course, your brain wants to keep researching. Your brain’s like, maybe we should just make absolutely certain first. Let’s take another quiz. But here’s another problem. There’s a real problem with the belief that recovery is going to require all this time and energy you don’t have. We’re pretending drinking doesn’t already require those things.

We talk about recovery like it’s this enormous additional expense, another thing requiring time and money and energy and attention and inconvenience. But we’re making a huge error in that calculation. We’re treating drinking like it’s free. It’s not. Think about what you’re already spending to maintain your relationship with alcohol, not just money, although God knows we’re spending that.

But think about your time. The evenings that disappear, the mornings you lose because you don’t feel good, the workouts you skip, the hours of anxiety replaying what you said.

The emotional energy it takes to negotiate with yourself about whether or not you’re drinking tonight, or how much you’re gonna have, or whether you’ve been drinking too much, or whether you need to take a break, whether you have a problem, whether you need to quit. Think about how much of your life is already being consumed by this thing you’re telling yourself you don’t have time to address. You’re already paying.

Angela (26:06.518)
Recovery isn’t suddenly asking you to find resources you don’t have. It’s asking you to start redirecting resources you’re already spending. I had to be equally committed to my recovery as I was to my drinking. That means

I did my recovery when I was tired because I drank when I was tired. I did my recovery when I had a bad day because I drank when I had a bad day. I drank when I didn’t feel good. I went to the liquor store or the bar when the weather was bad. So when it was time to recover, I couldn’t suddenly decide that being tired or having a bad day or the weather being shitty meant I couldn’t show up.

Angela (26:53.814)
If it’s snowing out and you don’t want to go to a meeting, ask yourself a simple question. Would the snow have stopped you from drinking? Would the snow or the rain or whatever have stopped you from going to the liquor store or the bar? No. Then apparently snow isn’t the barrier. We will tolerate an unbelievable amount of inconvenience for drinking. We’ll spend the money we don’t have. We’ll sacrifice tomorrow morning.

We’ll be hungover. We’ll miss the workout. We’ll be impatient with our kids. We’ll lose an entire day. We’ll tolerate anxiety and guilt and embarrassment and making apologies. Then recovery asks us to be inconvenienced. And suddenly we’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s not get crazy. I don’t have time for all that. But here’s what I need you to understand: doing nothing isn’t the free option.

Angela (27:54.142)
One path costs you time, money, energy, and comfort and takes you straight into a dead end. The other path costs you time, money, energy, and comfort and gives you a path to freedom. You’re gonna spend the resources either way. The question is, what are you buying with them? The dead end or freedom?

So let’s go back to the question we started with because I don’t want you to get to the end of this episode and think I never actually answered it. How do I know if I actually have a drinking problem? I’m not gonna tell you it’s because you drink four nights a week instead of three. I’m not gonna give you a number of drinks or tell you which consequences officially qualify you. I’m gonna tell you to look at the relationship.

First, how much mental real estate is alcohol taking up? How often are you thinking about it, planning it, negotiating with yourself about it, doing it, or recovering from it? If alcohol requires that much management, if you are constantly creating rules around it, worrying about it, thinking about whether there’s enough, promising yourself you’ll do something different next time, that’s a clue.

Second, what happens to your control after the first drink? Not whether you can quit for a week or do dry January, but when you have that first drink, can you reliably predict what’s going to happen? Do you know you’re having two and going home at 10? Or are you hoping you’ll have two and go home at 10? Because hope is not control.

Angela (29:39.064)
Third, what are you doing to protect your drinking? Are you minimizing it, hiding it, sneaking it, defending it, comparing yourself to people who drink more, looking for all the reasons you can’t possibly have a problem because you’ve never had a DUI or you don’t drink in the morning or you’ve never blacked out? If you’re working that hard to prove

If you’re working that hard to prove alcohol isn’t a problem, I want you to ask yourself why you need such a strong defense for it in the first place.

And fourth, what is alcohol costing you? Not just catastrophes. I don’t care whether you’ve lost your house, your marriage, or your job. What is it costing you today? Your mornings, your energy, your workouts, your patience, your presence in your family, your confidence in yourself, your emotional growth, hours of your life spent recovering, days spent feeling anxious and guilty about the things you said or did. You don’t need a catastrophic rock bottom.

before the cost counts.

Angela (30:54.01)
And finally, why are you still asking the question? If this is the fifth article you’ve read, the tenth podcast you’ve listened to, the 20th quiz you’ve taken, what answer are you still looking for? Because at some point the searching becomes part of the answer. The obsession with proving you don’t have a problem becomes evidence that something isn’t right.

People who have an uncomplicated relationship with alcohol don’t spend this much time trying to figure out whether their relationship with alcohol is complicated.

Angela (31:47.138)
Deciding or understanding you have a drinking problem is a very personal decision that you have to make for yourself. But I can tell you that if alcohol is taking too much space in your brain, if you can’t reliably predict what happens after the first drink, if you’re constantly managing and defending your drinking, if alcohol is costing you things you care about, and if you keep coming back to this question over and over again.

You have enough information to stop dismissing what you’re seeing.

Angela (32:24.022)
You don’t need to figure out the perfect word for it before you’re allowed to do something about it. Maybe today all you’re ready to say is my relationship with alcohol isn’t okay anymore. That’s enough truth to start with. And then get out of your own head because your head is not a reliable source of information. It’s what got you into this mess. Go find a sober community.

Start listening to people. And I mean actually listen. Don’t walk into the room and immediately start scanning for all the reasons you’re different. Don’t look at what they’re wearing, what they do for a living, whether they drank more than you or less than you, or whether their story looks exactly like yours. Listen to how people think. Listen to the rules they made, the negotiations they had with themselves. Listen to the guilt.

Listen to how much space alcohol took up in their lives. Listen to what happened inside their brain after that first drink. Because that’s where you’re going to hear someone who is successful and accomplished and married and raising kids and running a company and doing all the things. And suddenly you’re going to think, fuck, she thinks exactly like I do. That’s what you need. Perspective.

Angela (33:49.824)
You need to see that you’re not the only high-functioning person on the planet who ended up with a fucked up relationship with alcohol. Not everybody has some desperate, catastrophic, rock bottom moment, and you don’t need one. You need people who are further down the road than you are so you can see what this looks like on the other side. And if you don’t have that community, that’s exactly why I created Sober Society. We have meetings every week.

with real people having real conversations about sobriety and life, the feelings, relationships, triggers, growth, all that shit that happens when you stop using alcohol as the answer to everything. Just get out of isolation and start hearing from people who understand the conversation happening in your head. And if you want to join me, you can find sober society, addictionunlimited dot com forward slash membership.

That link is also in the show notes, addictionunlimited.com forward slash membership. And whether you join us or you find another sober community that feels right for you, I want to leave you with this.

Angela (35:05.184)
Out of millions and millions and millions of sober people, there are people just like you too. You are not the one special case that no one has ever seen before. There are people who drank like you, who thought like you, who were successful like you, who were scared like you, people who sat up at night Googling the exact same questions you’re Googling.

Angela (35:33.12)
And there are people who found their way through it. Maybe you don’t need one more quiz or challenge or one more definition, one more comparison or consequence or one more terrible morning. Maybe you already have.

Angela (35:58.243)
Maybe you already have enough information. Maybe the next step isn’t finding another answer. Maybe it’s finally doing something with the one you already have. I love you, my friend. I hope you’re having a fantastic day, and I’ll see you next week.