Wild Sobriety

Stop Asking 'Am I An Alcoholic?' - Ask THIS Instead

• Mary Wagstaff

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If you're a woman over wondering "Am I an alcoholic?" - you're not alone. This is the question that keeps so many of us stuck in shame, confusion, and endless Google searches at 2am.

In this video, I'm sharing the truth about labels, the spectrum of alcohol use, and why the question itself might be keeping you from the freedom you're seeking.

🌹 IN TODAY'S VIDEO:
• Why the label "alcoholic" doesn't serve women 
• The real question you should be asking instead  
• How to know if alcohol is enhancing or diminishing your life
• The grey area drinking spectrum (and where you might be)
• Your next steps toward clarity without shame or rock bottom

This isn't about diagnosis or labels. It's about giving yourself permission to explore your relationship with alcohol - wherever you are on the journey.

You don't need to hit rock bottom to decide alcohol isn't working for you anymore. You can choose sobriety as personal evolution, not punishment.


🌹Schedule A Free Private Strategy Session With Mary Today and Take Your Power Back

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Find Relief In Less Time Than It Takes To Pour A Drink: Get the Free Guide Here.

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 chips process. Welcome to Wild Sobriety, Feminine Freedom Beyond Alcohol. If you ever Googled, Am I an Alcoholic? I need you to stop right now and listen to me. Because that question, it's a trap and it's keeping you stuck in shame, confusion, and cycles that will never end. Over the next 12 minutes, I'm going to tell you why that label is not going to serve you and what the one question is that will finally set you free. But first, let me guess how you got here. It's 2 a.m., you can't sleep, and you are Googling, am I an alcoholic for the third time this month? You're looking at checklists, taking quizzes, scrolling through Reddit threads, and the more you read at 2 a.m., the more ashamed and confused you feel about your current situation. And if you don't fit the stereotype, then you're a good mom, right? You're off the hook. At least you're not Susie drinking vodka for breakfast. You show up for your obligations, but all the while you're still not happy with your current situation. In today's video, I'm going to tell you why that question, am I an alcoholic, is keeping you stuck? And the one question that will set you free. If we haven't met, my name is Mary Wagstaff. I'm so thrilled to be here. Welcome to my channel. I'm a holistic alcohol coach for women. And for over five years, I have been helping women find feminine freedom beyond alcohol. We don't use labels, we don't count days, we don't make excuses for wanting the life that we want that is the next phase of our own personal evolution. I would love to have you subscribe here, leave a comment below of what you took away, and let's get this party started with a community and sharing and supporting one another in the comments. I'm also here to make content for you too. So let me know in the comments what you would like to see. So let's talk about the truth that no one's telling you and you can't find on any forum. The term alcoholic is outdated. It was a term created in the late 1700s to describe someone simply that was addicted to alcohol. And then it was adopted by not only the medical model, but society in general. And it really started developing this kind of connotation around it. So when we think of what an alcoholic is, there is a picture that comes to mind. And of course, the AA community, which has helped and supported and saved so many lives, does use the term alcoholic as one of their main foundations and cornerstones of their method for sobriety and for recovery. But what I want you to know is that the medical model no longer uses the term alcoholic. What they use is the term alcoholic use disorder, which is a spectrum. And from all of my experience firsthand, as a once per a person once addicted to alcohol, and from helping women from all over the world and also lipping and no addicts, right? We all are addicted to something. We all have some sort of addictive addictive tendency. We live in a dopamine-driven world. So to not become addicted is actually the minority in today's world. The spectrum of alcohol use and dependency, or any addiction for that matter, has such a varying degree of reasons why one would become addicted, how addicted you are, how long a recovery process might take, and what that looks like for the rest of your life. So, just for example, some of the factors that can impact one's sobriety is the duration of use and dependency. So if you have been drinking since you were 13 years old very regularly, it might pose a much greater challenge for you to quit drinking than someone that didn't start drinking until their 40s. And I have worked with both of those people, and they both have successfully come on to the other side of alcohol and have been able to make alcohol irrelevant in their lives. Some other factors are adversity, just the demographics in which you grew up in, trauma, resiliency, and coping, the varying factors of supportive people in your life, your attachment style. All of these things have a huge impact on when you start the journey and your ability to tap more into a place of emotional intelligence and to really embody that. So some people I work with are embodiment practitioners, they're yoga practitioners, or they've been doing holistic wellness and mindset and mindfulness work for a very long time. Those people will have a tendency to make shifts quicker because they've been understanding the concepts of belief and behavior and mindset and mindfulness for a lot longer. Now, if these are new concepts that you have to learn, it might take you a little bit longer. So if you've been following me for any length of time, and if you continue to follow me, you will know that I work under the model of what I had just expressed: beliefs and behavior. It is not enough to simply just not drink alcohol. If that were the case, so many more people would be so much more successful with alcohol. Our beliefs shape our reality. And if we never dig into the beliefs that we have around the self-concept of what alcohol means to us in our lives, in all the areas in which we have engaged with alcohol in all of the ways we have formed pathways in our brain that have created associations with alcohol, we will never get to the bottom of our addiction. And I feel like it's really important to be able to use the word addiction from a really neutral place, from a very non-judgmental, neutral place, because I was very, very addicted to alcohol and I no longer am. Many of my clients were addicted to alcohol and no longer. I do believe the more time you have in between and you are using your brain from a new perspective, that that strengthens new pathways. If I was to have a drink tomorrow, I would not fall back into old patterns that I that I have been in because I now associate alcohol and myself concept with something completely different. For me, not drinking is like someone that's being a vegan that just has no interest in eating meat. There's no deprivation. And so if I was to have a drink tomorrow, which I have no desire to have a drink tomorrow, I wouldn't be back at square one. And that is true for most of my clients, absolutely. And this is not the traditional model. This is not what most people will tell you. They will tell you you have to work your sobriety for the rest of your life. And I just don't believe that that is true for everyone. So our beliefs are created through a repetition of thinking. And thinking and thoughts are words, they are sentences in your brain that you say on repeat again and again and again. So if you have a story or a concept of what it means to be addicted to alcohol, that you are now this stereotype of an alcoholic that's a problem. Well, we need to really unpack is that actually true? And not only is it true, but is it useful? It's just a word and a fact. It's not, if you look it up in the medical dictionary, it is actually not used anymore because we know that there is a spectrum of use independency and addiction. The degree of addiction is individual to every single person, and there is not a one size fits all approach. But I do believe that we all create desire and attachment through our thinking and through our beliefs. So we have to choose the words that will be the most useful to us. Now, maybe calling someone calling themselves an alcoholic really helps them anchor in, this is not for me. I cannot drink. I don't believe that for myself. I believe you are a grown woman. You can if you want to. Alcohol is the thing that will never change. But you can change your understanding of what it is that you actually want. So for me, coming to terms with the fact that I was addicted to alcohol is just like saying I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm happy, I'm sad. These are facts of being human. And if we don't allow ourselves to be human, then you're really doing yourself a disservice because honesty creates awareness, and awareness is the first step for change and growth. So you have got to be willing to disarm some of the words. Now you could do the same with the term alcoholic if you felt like it was useful. I believe every single human becomes addicted to something. They form a strong habit with something. This is actually means your brain is working correctly because this is actually how we learn through repetition and reward, or we would have to learn the same things over and over again. So choose your words wisely and look at the stories that you're telling yourself for why you're looking up alcoholic at 2 a.m., but then you're relieved when you realize, oh, thank God, I don't meet that specific criteria. Or you always find some reason why it's not that bad. And so this is where you take your power back. Even if it's not that bad, do you like the results that you're getting? And this question, my friend, is the only thing that matters. This is the question that is going to be so much more useful to you in reclaiming your power from alcohol and finding the empowered choice to move beyond alcohol into the life and the self-concept that's going to serve you and motivate you to reaching your goals, to living the life that is extraordinary and to actually enjoying the life that you have already created for yourself because I know that you are a get it done woman, that you are the woman that everyone comes to for all of the things because you are a badass. I already know that about you. So the question that you want to replace, am I an alcoholic with is am I getting the results that I want from alcohol? Because here's the good news you can't change alcohol, but you can change yourself. There is no amount of moderation, bargaining, trying to figure it out, strategizing that will ever change the impact the alcohol has on you. And the one and done, the one and done moderation myth is just that. And we will talk about that in another video because the reason that no one has one and done is because Frank, after one drink, you feel like shit. You weren't feeling good, and then you took a drink and you're it completely zapped all of your energy. And as you age into the best years of your life of wisdom, of maturity, of emotional intelligence, of awareness, of power, of control, it stops becoming useful in any area because you are sovereign, because you are making the empowered choice to decide what kind of woman do I want to be from this point into the rest of my life. If you haven't checked out the 60 seconds to call, this is your guide to find relief in less time than it takes to pour a drink. So for any urge, emotion, craving, freak out, I want you to download that. The link is in the description and tell me what worked for you. And if you come up with your own cheat code, I would love to know in the comments below. Thank you so much and have an awesome day. 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 and 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.