Welcome to the Catholic Sobriety Podcast, the go-to resource for women seeking to have a deeper understanding of the role alcohol plays in their lives. Women who are looking to drink less or not at all for any reason. I am your host, Christie Walker. I'm a wife, mom, and a joy filled Catholic, and I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and I'm so glad you're here. One of the things that I teach every woman who comes into my sacred sobriety lab is this, stop asking yourself who you are right now and start reminding yourself about who you are becoming, because your brain will follow the story you give it. And if the story is, I'm someone who is always gonna struggle with alcohol, I have no willpower, and on and on and on. That is exactly what your brain will keep believing. So we do thought work around identity, around your future self and around learning to say and mean. I am becoming a woman who, a woman in my coaching program just hit 90 days and when I asked her what shifted, she didn't talk about willpower or rules or counting days. She said something like this. I stopped trying not to drink and started becoming someone who just doesn't, and that my friend is the work right there. That's exactly it. Now I wanna talk today about what I think is the most underrated shift in this entire journey toward alcohol freedom. Not a strategy, not a technique, and not a 30 day challenge. It is a shift from behavior management to identity. Now most of us come into any real attempt to change our relationship with alcohol, with one strategy, and the strategy is often try harder not to do the thing. Don't drink tonight. Don't go past two drinks. Don't open that bottle. Don't let yourself get into that place again. And we bring willpower into it every single time. We also bring rules. We bring apps that count our days and podcasts that keep us motivated. Like this one. Thank you for listening, and promises we make to ourselves every Sunday night that we really do intend to keep and. Now, look, I did this for years. I know exactly what this feels like and some of that, the accountability, the awareness, it has real value. So I'm not dismissing it. But here's the problem. All of it sits on the same foundation. The foundation is this. I am someone who wants to drink and I'm trying to stop myself. Do you hear what that assumes? The whole framework takes for granted that drinking is what you actually want and you're fighting against yourself to get a different outcome. And you know what? I probably don't have to tell you this, but it's exhausting. Of course. It's exhausting. You are at war with yourself every single day, negotiating. And here's what neuroscience is very clear on. Willpower is a limited resource. I say this all the time. It depletes, it does not hold up under stress, and it doesn't hold up under the grief of the loss. Of who you think you are with alcohol, the loss of that crutch, of that coping, of that self-medicating substance. It doesn't hold up when you're tired and it's 9:00 PM and everyone else is asleep and the wine is right there. Your nervous system is screaming for relief. Willpower was never designed to carry that weight long-term. It's a short-term bridge. It's useful for getting through a hard moment, but it's not the foundation for a changed life. So if you've tried this approach and it didn't stick, I want to say something that I say quite often and it bears repeating. That is not a character flaw. That is not a weakness. That's just what happens when we use the wrong tool for the job. And the right tool here is identity. Now let's talk about what identity actually means. When I say identity, I don't mean a label. I don't mean you walk around announcing I am an alcohol free person, and then everything magically changes. Identity is much, much deeper than that. Identity is the story that you believe about who you are, and here's why it matters so much neurologically. Your brain is always, always working to keep you consistent with the story it believes about you. And this is how habits form at the neurological level. Your brain is not trying to make you happy. It's trying to keep you consistent. It loves patterns. It builds neuro pathways, automatic responses. It is very efficient. And it's all in the service of keeping you acting like the person it thinks you are. So when the story in your brain on repeat is, I'm someone who drinks to relax, to decompress, to de-stress, to be less anxious. Then your brain will root you there. It'll prompt you to reach for the glass almost automatically. It'll make every stressful evening feel like it's pointing toward alcohol, because that's the story. That's the path that it knows. But, and here is where it gets hopeful that story can be rewritten. Not overnight, not by saying an affirmation in the mirror, but through small repeated choices that signal to your brain, this is who I am now. Now the woman in my coaching group put it beautifully. She said that she stopped thinking about what she was giving up and started asking herself, what would a healthy person do right now? What? Would someone who actually takes care of herself choose in this moment? And that question changed everything for her because instead of standing at the edge of the craving asking, can I resist this? Which let's be honest, that puts everything in the hands of willpower. Instead of that, she was asking, is this consistent? With who I am now with who I am becoming. Now, that's a completely different internal experience. One is white knuckling, the other is becoming, I. Now, here's where my story comes in. I stopped drinking back in 1997, which seems so, so very long ago. I was 23 years old, and I wanna tell you how that happened because it wasn't a treatment program, it wasn't a medical intervention, it wasn't even a rock bottom in the way that people usually picture it. I actually drank my last blackout intentionally. I knew exactly what I was doing and I woke up the next morning and I was just done. Not because I had enough willpower, not because I finally found the right strategy, but because something in me shifted. Something in me said, this is not. Who I am, and that is really when I see a change in the women that I'm coaching, it'll be really, really hard. And then all of a sudden it's almost like a switch flips. And I think it's the same thing. It's when they realize this is not who I am now. Now, what I didn't know at the time when I decided that that was my last evening of drinking and the next day I was swearing off alcohol for good was that it was the 10th anniversary of my grandmother's death. The grandmother who had prayed over me unceasingly when I had open heart surgery at just 15 months old. I was not supposed to survive that surgery. She prayed and I lived, and somehow on the anniversary of her death, I woke up from my last drunken night and decided to live differently. I didn't know that, but when I told my mom what had happened, she let me know what a special day that was and that my grandma was once again interceding for my life to spare my life. What happened in that moment was an identity shift. I'm not going to try harder not to drink, but something more like I'm not this, this is not who I am. Now, I went to AA early on and I will be forever grateful because it helped me. It gave me a community and a structure when I needed both, but I eventually left because I couldn't reconcile the identity I was being handed there with the one that I believed God had given me. I'm not an alcoholic. My identity is as a daughter of God, and that distinction matters to me deeply. To this day. That conviction, I am a daughter of God, became the foundation. Not a rule. Not a label and identity, and it changed everything. Now. This is where faith and neuroscience stop. Stop being two separate conversations and become one. The idea that identity is foundational to change is not just a coaching concept. It is not just brain science. It is thoroughly and deeply Catholic. The whole Christian life is built on the premise that in baptism something happened to you. You became a new creation. You were marked. You were claimed. You were given a new identity, not based on what you've done or not done, but based on whose you are. You are a daughter of God. Not a metaphor, a theological reality. And here's what I find so powerful about that in this context. The question is never can you become someone different. The question is, will you live out who God created you to be? Who you already are at your very core. The saints weren't striving to become holy. They were striving to live consistently with their identity as children of God. The striving came from the inside out, not from following rules to earn something, but for wanting to be whole. To match on the outside who they already were on the inside, thomas Aquinas called Virtue a Habit of the soul. Not a one-time choice, but a repeated pattern of choosing in alignment with who you truly are. And when you ask yourself in a hard moment, is this who I am? You are not just doing a coaching exercise, you are. Actually doing something profoundly spiritual, you are asking your soul to align with your truest self. For a lot of us, there is this deep shame story underneath all of this. A belief that we are fundamentally broken and that something is wrong with us at the core that we are the problem. And what the Catholic faith says. What I want to say is, no, no. That is not your identity. That is a wound. That is a pattern. That is something that your brain learned, but it is not who you are. Who you are was decided before you are born. And that doesn't just get revoked because you slipped up. It doesn't get revoked because you made promises you didn't keep, and it doesn't get revoked because you're still in the middle of figuring this out no matter what. You are still a daughter of God, and that is the most solid foundation you will ever stand on. Now let's talk about what this looks like practically. First, let's start with a question, not a rule. Rules are external. I won't drink on weekdays. I won't go past two. They put you in this position of compliance or violation, and when you violate them, then the shame story gets louder. See, I can't do it. I'm hopeless. Questions are internal. That's why we ask a lot of questions in coaching. 'cause it brings out what's on the inside. Questions like, who am I? What does someone like me do right now? Is this consistent with who I am and who I want to be? You see questions engage your brain in a different way. They invite reflection rather than demand compliance. So for those of us who have a little bit of that rebel spirit inside of us, asking questions can be a gentler way to get us to open up and go down that path. Because this still gives you agency. So instead of saying, oh, I can't have that, why don't you try saying something like, I'm not really someone who does that anymore. You see? Feel the difference there. I can't have that versus I'm not someone who does that anymore. One is a locked door and one is a statement of who you are. The second thing are the small moments where your habit, no. The second is the small moment. The second is the small moments are where it's actually. Built identity doesn't get built in one defining moment of willpower. It gets built in a hundred tiny ordinary moments. When you make a choice consistent with who you say you are, you choosing sparkling water At dinner, there's a brick in the foundation you're building. You call a friend instead of opening a bottle. That's another brick. You sit with a discomfort for five minutes instead of numbing it, there's another one. See, you're building this firm foundation, one small choice at a time. And your brain is tracking every single one. So this is why I tell my clients, do not underestimate the Tuesday nights. The big moments matter. Yes, but the quiet unglamorous ones, those actually build the new habit. Now. Third, make your decisions before those hard moments arrive. The woman in my coaching group did something super smart before going into a situation she knew would be triggering. She planned ahead not, I won't do X as a rule, but I know who I am walking in here, and here's what this person does. She made the decision while she was calm before her nervous system got activated and the old patterns started screaming 'cause. Here's the facts. That is not the moment to figure out who you are. It's just not when you are in a stress response, your thinking literally narrows. You lose access to your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that makes those value-based decisions. Figure out who you are on Wednesday morning, and then take that into the hard moments. Now, if you're listening to this and you're somewhere in the middle, maybe you've tried and stopped and tried again. Maybe you've had a really good stretch and then a difficult week or event happens. Maybe you are not even sure yet what kind of change you want to make or what to call what you're doing. And let me tell you, that is okay. You don't have to have it figured out to be in the right place. The fact that you keep coming back to this podcast, to your own desire to be different, the part of you that knows there's more, that is your true identity trying to surface. There's a version of you that is not defined by this struggle. She is not far away. She is not some future self who has everything together. She is you right now making one more choice in the right direction. And here is the Catholic truth. I come back to over and over. You don't have to earn your way to a new identity. You don't have to accumulate enough good days before you're allowed to call yourself someone who is healing. You don't have to have it all locked down before God claims you as his. You start from identity. I am a beloved daughter of God who is healing. And then you let that truth lead your choices, not the other way around. That's the shift. I know it sounds simple, it's not always easy, but as someone who has lived it and as someone who has watched women in my programs live it, it's real. It is so real. Now, before I let you go, here's something that I want you to take with you this week. When you hit a moment of temptation, alcohol, food, scrolling, whatever pulls at you, before you decide anything, ask yourself one question. Is this choice consistent with who I am becoming? Not? Can I resist this, not do I have enough willpower and not have I earned the right to say no. Today just is who I am. You might surprise yourself, and even if the choice doesn't go the way you'd hoped, sometimes it doesn't. The fact that you paused and asked that question is a brick. It is evidence to your brain that a new story is being written. Do not let that go unnoticed. That is a win. Alright friends, that's what I've got for you today. If this was helpful for you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you haven't left a review yet, it takes two minutes and it genuinely helps other women find this podcast. This community matters. Every new woman who finds it matters. And if you'd like to work with me more closely, whether that's in my. Sacred Sobriety lab or one-on-one? Everything lives on my website. The catholic sobriety coach.com. You can come find me there. And if you're in the thick of it right now, still figuring out what this even looks like for you, you don't have to have it sorted before you reach out. That's exactly the best time to reach out 'cause we can talk about it. And whether you decide to work with me or not, I promise you will leave with resources and your next steps. All right. I will talk to you again next week. Well, that does it for this episode of the Catholic Sobriety Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I would invite you to share it with a friend who might also get value from it as well, and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a thing. I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and if you would like to learn how to work with me or learn more about. The coaching that I offer, visit my website, the Catholic sobriety coach.com. Follow me on Instagram at the Catholic Sobriety Coach. I look forward to speaking to you next. Time and remember, I am here for you. I am praying for you.