Wild Sobriety

Why Anxious Attachment Makes You Drink More (And How to Break the Cycle)

• Mary Wagstaff

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Hey beautiful Warriors of Love, it’s Mary — and this week’s episode goes deep into something so many of us experience but rarely name out loud.

Have you ever noticed that even when you’re usually grounded, there are certain relationships or moments that throw you off balance — where you start overthinking, over-explaining, or trying to control what you can’t?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

I’m opening up about a recent personal experience that cracked my heart open in new ways — and how even through uncertainty, alcohol never once crossed my mind. I share how my sobriety and the Five Shifts I teach gave me the tools to meet that moment with softness, not shame.

You’ll hear how anxious attachment and drinking can feed off each other… and why the real path to peace isn’t about “fixing” anyone else, but coming back to your values, your boundaries, and your truth.

This episode is about resilience, emotional maturity, and learning to be with yourself — even when everything feels uncertain.

Takeaways:

  • The surprising link between anxious attachment and drinking
  • How over-explaining keeps you disconnected from your power
  • Why saying “no” can be the most loving thing you do
  • What it means to find safety in silence instead of distraction
  • How to start trusting yourself again — no matter what’s happening around you

💬 I’d love to know what resonates most for you — leave a comment or message me on YouTube so we can keep this conversation going.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full episode on YouTube:
👉 Wild Sobriety — Feminine Freedom Beyond Alcohol

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast and its contents are not a substitute for rehabilitation, medical treatment or advice. It is for educational and inspirational purposes. I am not a therapist or doctor. The views here are expressed a personal opinion and based on first hand experience. Please consult a doctor if your mental or physical health is at risk.

SPEAKER_00:

Wild sobriety is for the woman who has outgrown alcohol and was never meant to follow the script. I'm Mary Wagstaff, a holistic alcohol coach, and after 20 years of daily drinking, I finally made alcohol irrelevant in my life, and now I help women just like you do the same through my proven five shifts process. Welcome to Wild Sobriety, Feminine Freedom Beyond Alcohol. Welcome back to Wild Sobriety, you beautiful, beautiful warriors of love. My name is Mary Wagstaff, and I'm so thrilled to be here with you here on YouTube. If you're coming in, joining from the podcast, welcome to this channel. And I'm so glad to be able to serve this new bigger audience here. Day on the show, we are going to talk about how securely attached people can slip into anxious attachment and some signs that you might be doing that. Some signs that you might be anxiously attached. And if you are an anxious attached person, if you fall more onto that spectrum than securely attached, you might already know that. But what I know is a lot of women that I work with are securely attached women, but there are certain areas of their life where they fall into anxious attachment in an effort to try to control that which is out of their control. And for you, if you are drinking, it can lead to it can be a source of why you are drinking. If you we want to solve this anxious attachment for you to step into a securely attached place where alcohol doesn't have to be the buffer for you not being able to control and not getting the results you want, if you're pushing someone away or if you're feeling an emotional despair about the way that your relationships are turning up. And if you were here for the last episode, something that I didn't say, and I really appreciate everyone listening to my vulnerable share, I really intentionally decided to share that because I want you to know that I'm human and I want you to know that I'm walking right alongside with you and learning and growing. And what I didn't express, and this is just the most important piece of the work that I do and the five shifts process and all of the seeds that I have planted along the years, and this is what I want for you is that not one time during such a soul-crushing moment and all of my figuring out where I needed to take my mind and my heart. During that time, there wasn't one moment where I thought about altering my experience. I wanted to be with myself. I allowed myself to have my emotions, I allowed myself to take lots of naps, but I didn't, and I did watch a lot of YouTube, which I have since cut off because I was filling that silence and that silence that I talked about in the last episode that's so important to strengthen the vessel, to fill that space with myself, with my relationship to my son, to the divine, to this work and the service that I'm doing, and not in these quick little dopamine fixes. And this is what is possible for you, where you can go and manage and expand your capacity for resiliency through this lens, through the lens of wild sobriety, through the lens of what I teach. And I shared on the last episode that I'm offering to brand new clients one-off strategy sessions where you get to finally find that relief of sharing your story because that is one of the biggest things that holds people back is that belief that something has gone wrong. And when we share, we're taking energy from the inside out and we're putting it on the table instead of all of this circling that's going on in our head. And the first thing that I did, and something I hadn't done in the past regarding this situation, was I finally reached out for support. I reached out to someone on Amber Hollingsworth's team who is a family addiction specialist. I work not with families, I work with women who are in a stage where they are ready to take action on their lives and they're ready to take personal responsibility. Yes, is there some stages of denial we have to go through? Absolutely. But most of the time, women are ready to say, hey, I want to look at this. I'm ready to look at this. So I had an appointment with a family addiction specialist where I shared my entire story and was able to get perspective from their expertise on to how to move forward in this dynamic with so much uncertainty and so much that is out of my control, which in the end, it always is. Where do I have control? Where do I want to put my mind? And I want to, I had forgot to say that in the last episode, but I really believe that that is such an important piece of what you get access to on the other side of sobriety that it is a leveling up of your sovereignty, of your strength, of your power, but not through white knuckling, not through gritting your teeth, not through beating someone up. And I'm gonna show them and revenge. It's the opposite. I have stepped into such a place of softness and really receptivity more by not crying, by not pushing crying to Matthew, by not saying, How could you do this? I have been more in my feminine, in this soft power than I feel like I ever have. And it feels like such a relief. And there is there moments of urges where I want to say something and text and explain. Absolutely. And this is what I'm gonna teach you here today. When you are saying yes, when you mean no, when you are compromising your values of truth and trust and morality, or when you said you weren't gonna drink, but you go along, or you use alcohol to cope when you don't want to cope. This is when this whole situation, this whole episode is the both and it's that your anxious attachment could be causing your drinking, but your drinking is also a sign of your anxious attachment. It's it's the both and and it's looking at it. And I believe that you are present enough here and open enough here to be able to look to see how it's impacting you from both sides of the spectrum. And when you say yes when you mean no, you are self-abandoning. Our values are the backbone of our experience here as human beings, and they will change. This is something that I do with my clients, where we really look at a values assessment so you can understand what it is that I want and why you can really get underneath how alcohol is compromising that. Alcohol is compromising your values. So you could be stepping into this anxious attachment with a partner who's saying, Oh, what's the big deal to have a drink? Can't you have one? Or friends that say this. It could be even for me, I knew there was dishonesty. I knew there were other things and values that I didn't love. And was I trying to maybe make some excuses for it? Sure. But this was when I was saying, saying yes to being okay with that without any accountability, without any sort of repair trying to be done and brushing it under the rug, wanting to move on from it. That is compromising my values. And when I'm not living and we're not living in alignment and integrity with our values, we will become anxious because our values are what ground us. When we know we are in integrity and every decision we make is from that place. And this isn't about what movie do you want to go to or oh, sure, I'll have Thai food when I want a taco, which I'm saying, make sure you get your tacos too. But there's a difference between going with the flow and really compromising the core of who you are. It's sometimes we just think we're being nice, sometimes we think we're just trying to go along to get along. But what we're doing in the end really is people pleasing. And I, until this moment, never really saw myself as a people pleaser because I don't do it in any of my other relationships. But and that's the thing, you might not have an anxious attachment style in other relationships, but it might be one where you're trying to really get control, where you're trying to figure it out and really want the outcome to look a certain way, or your nervous system is simply just dysregulated enough that it's the thing that's the closest to you and it's happening. It's like we treat the people we love the worst because they're there all of the time. And unfortunately, this is where this anxious attachment style can come out. So, this is the first sign is that you are compromising your values, and there are many more signs. I am not an expert on attachment theory, but it is a fascinating world of study, and I highly recommend looking more into it because I will be sharing more about it. But I do believe that this is the source of a lot of women's drinking, why they're drinking. Because if you weren't compromising your values, you wouldn't be drinking because alcohol negates every single one of your values. And I would show you that when we do a life intention creation session. Overexplaining is the next sign that you may be slipping from a securely attached place into an anxiously attached place. One of my favorite lines that I've heard over the last couple of months is no is a complete sentence. That's it, right? No, I even think about this in my relationship. I'm oh, what am I gonna tell people? What's happening? It's no, not now. I don't even need to tell anyone anything. I don't need to explain. I don't need to, and that's why I really tried to keep things brief when I was telling you all about what happened. But I I did want you to understand what can happen in the face of addiction and my own life updates, because I think it's good to share some personal to have a personal connection with you all. But no is a complete sentence. Feeling the need to justify your choices and long explanations. And I think women do this because they want things to be fair. I am a Libra rising. Fairness and being misunderstood are probably the scariest things to me. I hate the feeling of being misunderstood. Now, I don't think that this necessarily came from some way that my parents didn't show up for me or some abandonment wound. But I guess in ways, if people are discrediting what you're saying, that can feel like abandonment if they're not trying to understand your perspective. And I do remember times as a little kid feeling like I was screaming into the void, feeling like people were laughing at me when I was really trying to be understood and have found myself in my relationship, my intimate relationship, feeling that same way where I'm pulling my hair out of my head as, oh my gosh, you're you're not getting it. You can't see me, and then going on and on and on and on. But when you're a securely attached person, you don't need to do that because, and I've said this on the show before is the only person that needs to understand is me. And that is someone else's journey to take care of the rest. I can step into another perspective to see someone else's perspective, to see that it's not about me, to see where why they might be doing what they're doing and not make it about me. Well, they are capable of that too. Or they'll ask questions if they want to understand more. But when we overexplain, we really lose credibility. So this is another sign that you have slipped into more of an anxious attachment. This often comes from anxiety about being misunderstood or abandoned. So they're gonna leave if they think this this is something's wrong, right? And it's like trying to control the narrative, which is the third sign that you are slipping into anxious attachment or you're in anxious attachment, which is trying to control the uncontrollable. So efforts to fix or manage someone else's behavior. And this could be that I've got to overexplain, I've gotta make sure that they understand. But even telling other people what to do or what they should do, giving people really unsolicited advice about their life better than they do for themselves. This is the biggest way to create a distance of intimacy, actually, is to not trust, especially an adult. And we can even do this with children, is that they don't, why you know better than they do for themselves. And in a lot of ways, it's because you think that you're right. And you're, if you're not in control, then everything's gonna crumble and everything's gonna fall apart. And what I experienced from my own journey of the last, especially this last year, and even when we were on the road traveling a little bit, was that the more dysregulated my nervous system came from inconsistency, from moving, from really natural things that can dysregulate your nervous system. And then all of the added pressure, having to guide decision making, and then not having necessarily that supportive other that I thought was there for me. I was the more dysregulated I became, the more I was slipping into anxious attachment, which completely makes sense. When you're regulated, when you feel really good and grounded and stable in life, how do you show up? Do you still show up in this place? Because that can be someone's tendency to that coping mechanism where there's always anxious, where it's like, oh my God, why didn't they call me back? You're always checking your text messages. You can't wait for someone to respond to you. That's not me. I'm actually very securely attached to all of my relationships, if not a little bit avoidantly attached. With this one in particular, because it was my sense of security and safety, and someone I thought that was were a team and protecting me and all these things, I was I was slipping into more and more into anxious attachment. So alcohol or numbing becomes a shortcut for you when that anxiety feels overwhelming, when you can't control the outcome of someone else. Use alcohol to control, because even though once you drink, you might not actually be in control of what's happening in your body. However, in that moment, you know what you're getting with alcohol. Alcohol is a familiar place to be, even if you're not getting the results you want. And that's why it's so hard to change it. The dopamine that we get from over explaining, from that sense of control, from filling that void of silence is a way that we feel safe in hearing our own words. And when we interrupt that, you're ungrounded for a moment. But it's very easy to come back to center. And when we try to control anything outside of ourselves, and I've talked about this so much on the show, the word uns living in these uncertain times, they throw that around media outlets and duh, it's always uncertain times. That's such a silly thing to say because you can have certainty in you and in your connection to the divine and in your ability to receive. But as far as controlling anything outside of yourself, that is not up to you. And the more you try to grasp at that control, the more anxious you're gonna become, the more ungrounded you're gonna become, and the more you're going to move away from that which you truly desire, from the outcome that you truly want, and the more you're gonna end up drinking because you are so fearful of the unknown. But where we want to get you, and where you can get with the journey of the five shifts and wild sobriety, is that you can get to that place where no matter what happens, I've got me, I've got my back, I'm resourced, I'm resourceful, and I can feel into uncertainty and be in uncertainty with certainty. The first place to do that is to get very comfortable with silence, is to not continue to fill those gaps, to fill that void, to be able to be with yourself. And this is a practice. But the question that I want to ask you if you do anything this week, it's to spend a little time without the socials, without the podcasts, without the music, even. And without even necessarily reading and maybe writing down a few things, what's the worst thing that can happen? What happens often is that place of silence can become it's almost too peaceful, where we are so our nervous systems actually get addicted to the chemicals that are released in anxious states, in states of chaos and uncertainty that we continue to repeat those cycles and we go back. And I saw this when there was this break, and we and both Matthew and I finally stepped out. I could see that we both had become addicted to it because it wasn't like he hadn't been answering my phone calls for the last six years, right? Like if I would call and I was maybe emoting when I could have been supporting myself, he could have simply just not answered the phone. But the the body starts to get used to those cortisol levels and the dopamine that comes from that. And what I've learned also about insecure attachment styles is that when dopamine isn't really all that useful of a of a chemical that we want to just be seeking dopamine all the time. Dopamine is to be used sparingly. What we really want to reach for are more secure, sustainable, long-lasting chemicals like oxytocin, for example, not things that are gonna spike and drop. And we can produce that inside of ourselves. We can produce that with our animals, with our children, when we're slow and we're soft and we're intentional and we're present. Those are the type of chemicals. And there's there are other chemicals. Serotonin is one. When we're working in in teams with another, with other people, and we're solving problems together, we're having fun together. This is when these other chemicals are released and create a sense of safety and comfort that is sustainable and longer lasting versus cortisol, adrenaline, dopamine. Those are getting spiked and then they're dropping, but you get addicted to them and you're going to need to produce them more often. And that's why sometimes these we can spiral in these anxious attachment cycles with someone because we're spiraling in what's called dope novelty dopamine cycling. So you're just constantly reaching for that, and that can become just as much of a drug. And then on the other side of it, you're using alcohol to come down from that and to go to sleep because you can't function like that all the time. But there is a solution, and the solution is needing to get comfortable in silence, needing to get comfortable on your own and using the five shifts process that I teach in my course. It says the sobriety starter kit. This is all about making sobriety simple and through my private coaching mentorship. And the first step to find out more about that is to schedule your new client strategy session. And I would absolutely love to talk to you. Everything you need is in the description below. I hope you have a beautiful day and take one more step towards recognizing when you fall into these anxiously attached patterns and how I can step. If I was a securely attached person, what would I do? Would I over-explain and remember no is a complete sentence. Thank you, my beautiful wild women, for being here. If you are loving the show, I want to invite you to come on over to my YouTube channel, Mary Wagstaff Holistic Wellness. And don't forget to download the free guide, 60 Seconds to Calm. This is gonna help you find a relief from any emotion in less time than it takes to pour a drink. Have a beautiful day, and thank you so much for being part of this community. It wouldn't be the same without you!