Wild Sobriety

The Real Cost Of Sobriety Nobody Talks About (and Why It’s Easier Than You Think)

• Mary Wagstaff

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If you’re waiting for sobriety to be easy, you’ll be waiting forever.

I say that not to discourage you — but because the moment you stop chasing the quick fix is the moment real freedom begins. There’s always a cost: either the short-term comfort that keeps you small, or the long-term peace that expands every part of your life.

In this episode, I’m breaking down the three brutal — but liberating — truths that changed everything for me and every woman I’ve coached

If you’ve ever thought:

  • “I just wish this were easier.”
  • “My partner still drinks — how can I do this alone?”
  • “I’ve tried everything, what if I fail again?”

Then this episode is for you. I’ll show you why the “other side” of drinking isn’t unknown — it’s the most familiar place you’ve simply forgotten how to access.

I created something special waiting for you inside the Community.

It’s called The Permission Protocol —
 a five-part journey to help you rethink everything you believe
about the pleasure that’s possible in sobriety-

The best part is, it’s entirely free to you. JOIN US HERE!


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

Wild Sobriety Is Now On YOUTUBE! Please come over and subscribe!

NEW Free Mini Course: The Permission Protocol-a five part journey to help you rethink everything you believe about the pleasure that is possible in sobriety and the radical freedom that it requires to get to the other side.

It's all inside of the Free, Off Social Media Wild Sobriety Community. Join 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 are waiting for sobriety to be easy, you are going to be waiting forever. And this message is not to discourage you, but freedom from instant gratification for a quick fix and a short-term reward versus long-term sustainability. There is always a price to pay. And this is not to discourage you because the cost of what it's going to take for you to create simple and sustainable sobriety that actually expands your pleasure field are the skills that you're going to need to achieve and reach your potential and your goals and really have the life that you've been dreaming of that you think alcohol is going to keep giving you in every other area of your life. So the cost of staying the same for you right now is outweighing the cost of change. So truly, what do you have to lose? Most people aren't willing to pay these costs because it requires change. It requires actually having to look at what we're doing and step into the unknown. Or so youth. The truth is that the other side of the fence from drinking to sobriety really isn't the unknown. And I'm going to teach you why today. But these are the three brutal and honest truths that are going to be required of you that are going to be different than what you've been doing, because to change, change. And you have to be willing to step into the unknown. And the reason that you keep staying stuck, even to your detriment, even though it's causing you so much pain, is simply because it's comfortable, is simply because it's unknown. And unfortunately, it feels safe. But that, my friend, is a distortion. The safety that you are finding in drinking, in that comfort of the daily habit, of the daily routine, is actually limiting you and creating a lot of pain and a lot of long-term suffering. And the good news is it does not take you nearly a fraction of the time to shift to the other side of that mindset, feeling safe on the other side of the fence compared to how long it took you in the years that you've been drinking. For me, I drank for 20 years of my life. And once I started to apply these brutal and honest truths and to get real with myself and to wake up, it was a much shorter time where the switch flipped. And this is what happens to my clients within a month or two. They really start seeing the reality of what they were being blinded by for so long. Today I'm going to share with you the three costs of lasting sobriety. And I wanted to share with you a message that I just received from one of my clients who I've been working with for about four months now. And we had a back and forth in an email. And I said to her, because she's like, I'm feeling so solid right now. What is available to you now at this stage that was never even available to you before? Before drinking ever really became an issue. And this is what she said verbatim. She said, Oh man, everything is better. I'm waking up at five. I'm going to the gym before everyone wakes up and I'm in a capital good mood. My headspace feels free of other things. I'm reading books again. I have patience. And I realized it wasn't my relationship that was an issue. It was my attitude as a result of drinking. She had all this narrow thinking where she couldn't see outside of her own perspective and the residue of drinking the night before. The few times I've thought about alcohol, I asked myself why. And there literally is no good answer. And this is what we do during private coaching is we ask the question why? And we go deep until you really get an answer. Because a lot of times in your attempts to quit drinking, you're not actually answering your own questions. You're you're taking your own beliefs and your own thoughts as truth. And that is where you get stuck when you want to create any change because what you've been thinking in your mindset that has gotten you into this situation is not the mindset that's going to get you out of it. And so today we're going to change that for you. The number one cost of sobriety is radical honesty. You can anywhere in your life and to change, and especially to the other side of alcohol by ignoring it, by distracting yourself, or by pretending like it's not happened. The opposite of isolation is connection. Alcohol has kept you extremely isolated. And it is in this radical honesty by asking yourself the question what am I have I been unwilling to say? What is the truth about me and about alcohol that I haven't been willing to say? Because until you actually say that thing out loud, writing it down, admitting it to yourself, it is going to continue to run the show. It is a thought or a belief in your brain that is keeping you playing small. And it's not allowing you to really look at the truth of what's going on. So when you constantly tell yourself, I'm fine, what's actually happening is the thing that you variety starts when you stop lying to yourself. This is where so many people get it wrong. And I have to say, this is probably what makes my approach so much different. You don't start the process just by never drinking again. That doesn't even make sense. You don't just go to the gym one day and now you're competing in a bodybuilding competition. That's not how it works. You are practicing, you are building a muscle. And if you don't go to the gym for a few days and you go and have a cheeseburger or whatever, you don't disqualify yourself from the competition. You go back and you get back on the wagon. You don't lose all of that muscle tone that you gained, but it only counts if you're actually being honest. If you're digging in, if you're implementing and you are evaluating. None of the work is going to count. I don't care how many days sober you have in a row, if you aren't looking at it from the most honest, radically, brutally honest perspective that you absolutely can. And this doesn't mean exclaiming and declaring yourself an alcoholic. It means really understanding what do I really believe about alcohol? What do I really believe about myself and alcohol? What's the truth about me drinking? I didn't want to be a drinker anymore. And I was afraid to say that because when I did say it, I felt like there were people that told me that I was fine, or there's social stigmas around it, or that might mean that I don't actually want to hang out with the people that I'm hanging out with anymore because I really don't like them when I'm sober. And this might be something that feels scary for you, but you have to be willing to admit it. And like you heard in my client's testimonial, she said that there were issues in her relationship, but it actually wasn't the relationship. She was able to see the issues that came up as part of her being having the effects and the imprint of alcohol from the day before, but also that imprint is your unwillingness to be flexible. That imprint is your unwillingness to have empathy, compassion, validation, patience for everyone around you. So the impact of you not being honest is showing up in every other area of your life. When you say I'm fine, what are you saying I'm really fine with? Because you wouldn't be here right now listening to this conversation if part of you didn't believe and desire for your relationship to alcohol to change. So when you say I'm fine, you're saying I'm fine with altering my experience. I'm fine with feeling less than amazing in the morning, I'm fine with having a drink when I don't really want to. I'm fine with limiting my potential for my relationship, for my career, for the presence that I have with my children. And none of those things are actually true. You are not fine with any of those things. So when you become brutally honest about your relationship to alcohol and what you've been unwilling to say, is that you are exposing your values. And that is what you have to look at. So when we say I'm lying to myself, well, that doesn't feel really good. But the opposite of that, that's gonna feel better, is when you say, I'm not living in alignment with my values, and these are my values, and that's one of the things that we work on right away in my private coaching program. So number one, radical honesty. The second cost of sustainable and simple sobriety that no one is going to tell you is radical responsibility. When you have to be willing to take responsibility for the life that you have, for the results that you have. And when we drink, A, we kind of just ignore the truth of what it is that we really want and why we don't have that thing. We're not really willing to say where we're not working. We're often looking outside of ourselves and creating excuses of why right now I can't start this process. Why because I'm in this relationship with someone that drinks, why because I live in a drinking culture, because I'm too stressed out at work, because of my kids. We have to claim the choices that we make in our free will in every single moment. Because even though it sounds extreme and you could get arrested for not doing it, feeding your kids is a choice, getting up and going to work every day is a choice. We do it because we don't want the consequences of not doing it. Paying your taxes is a choice. All of these things are choices. And when we realize that they're choices that we want to make because we don't want the consequences or the results of them, we take our power back. When you are focused on what everyone else is doing and not doing and how it's impacting you, you are giving your power away. And that is not what wild sobriety is all about. Wild sobriety is all about radical permission to step into a place of full personal responsibility and where you need to clean up your side of the street so that you can be in luxury in your achievements and in your setbacks. And you get to be in the pleasure of doing all of it or none of it. Because one of the things that really flipped the script for me when I took full responsibility for my drinking, and I said, I am a grown-ass woman and I'm drinking. Clearly, this is what I want to do. I can drink, I can make that choice, and I am making that choice every single day. And when I started this process of the five shifts and the permission protocol, I told myself, Mary, if you drink tonight, you need to drink and take every single consequence that comes with it. But know that right now. Know that you're not how you're gonna feel tomorrow. There's not gonna be complaining, there's not gonna be blaming, there's not gonna be shaming, there's not gonna be regret, there's not gonna be any of it. And as soon as I did that and I really claimed my full sovereignty, my full embodied free, everything changed. And sometimes we don't even know where we're giving our power away. But when we make excuses for why we can't start the process of examining our relationship to alcohol, that's the moment we give it away. Because when we say it's inconvenient to start now, we tell ourselves that we don't have the capacity to handle it. But what this process is gonna require of you is to always be in a time of inconvenience and do it anyway. I've got three dogs here right now I need to take care of morning, noon, and night. It's inconvenient for me to record this, but I'm gonna do it anyway. But anything can be inconvenient if you decide it is, but you can also decide in this moment, I have the capacity for that. And that's just gonna be part of what it is. When you have another child, you don't say that's inconvenient and I can't go to work anymore. You figure it out. When you have an extra bill added to your monthly budget, you don't say that's inconvenient and I'm gonna sleep all day. You figure it out. We figure things out, but for some reason, because this is requiring you and you alone, and there's really no one else to blame. We check out and we stop taking personal responsibility for the choices that we have, and everything becomes an inconvenience, but not this time because you can handle it. I know and I see you do it in every other area of your life. And that is why in private coaching, it is a strength. We look at the areas of your life where you are doing it effortlessly, and then we apply that same skill set and that same principle to alcohol. And it becomes so much more clear and so much more simple. But right now, that is the blind spot that you can't see. Here's something that happens with responsibility. So, this is just an example of say your partner is bringing wine home every night and they're not gonna stop, and you've asked them and you're and you're furious and you're blaming them. And I've have most of my clients, their partners drink, and their partners continue to drink, and they have to become okay with that and choose to take another path for themselves because it is your life that you are living, not someone else's. And the moment that my clients take personal responsibility for their drinking, regardless of what anyone else is doing, they stop being furious and that stops fueling their resentment, which also stops fueling their desire to drink. So look at your life and where you're blaming external sources for why this is an inconvenient time for you to start the process of radical personal responsibility around your relationship to alcohol. And once you see this, you can't unsee it. And that is why the honesty piece is so important. And they use this term in the legal system called it's like ringing a bell. So even though you know something might get objected to in the courtroom, once you say it, the whole courtroom has heard it. The judges heard it, the juries heard it, you know, the other side has heard it. And even if it might get the objection, the words are out there. So it's still going to influence what people are thinking. Now, it's not supposed to, but this is radical honesty. Once you say the words out loud to someone else, you're no longer isolated in your own little belief cave. You are trying starting to make space for why this potentially isn't even true, and how your perspective is simply limiting. The third cost of sobriety that no one wants to talk about is radical self-acceptance. And this actually may be the hardest one of them all. We have to be willing to look at ourselves, to look at what we've been covering up, the problems that we've been solving with alcohol, the things that we haven't been willing to say, the grief that we haven't processed, the shadows of our past, of our trauma. Now, I don't think you have to dig up everything and solve that in order to get to the other side. I think we get to the other side from the present moment life you have, and it makes looking backwards much, much easier. But there is this radical acceptance of the present moment. Maybe you're not in a great mood. Maybe you don't want to play with your kids, maybe you're not turned on by your husband. And that is your authentic self. When we drink, whether it's one or 20, you are altering your authentic experience inside and in the world. You are putting a veil over reality. You're dulling your senses, you're inhibiting your thoughts, and you are accepting breadcrumbs, essentially, of life, because you're saying this thing that's not really that fun that I'm doing, or this way that I feel, I'm just going to mask it. I'm just going to put this balm over it so that I can just be okay with it. That's just like running around saying, I'm fine, when none of the things that you're doing around alcohol are actually in alignment with your values or the life that you want to live. And we have to be radically honest. When we are in a state of discomfort or resistance or anger or frustration, there is so much more pleasure available in those circumstances because we actually have an opportunity to find release, to find relief naturally, to find catharsis, to solve the problem versus burying it, masking it and numbing it and just pushing it back to the side for it inevitably to come back and probably even stronger. And for many people, there are things that we don't want to look at. There are ways that we people please or we don't have a sense of self-worth in certain areas, but we cannot solve those with new beliefs and new understanding and taking massive action if we aren't willing to confront that, if we aren't willing to have radical acceptance of our authentic experience right now. And a way that I really like to look at this is think about what you would tell your daughter, your son, your sister, your best friend, that she is whole and holy in this moment, that there is nothing about her that needs to be healed, that there is only moving forward, that she is a perfect expression. We are perfectly imperfect, which is just perfect. We are miracles. The miracle of life is awe-inspiring. And if you don't feel like that, if you're like, wow, that person's a hot mess, and we can't take a step back and really honor someone's humanity, then that's an that is a reflection of ourself when we're judging other people. And of course, we do it naturally, but typically it's because there's something about ourselves that we're not willing to accept. And one of my teachers, Kelly Brogan, she says, the most, the highest form of feminine empowerment is never judging another woman's process. And I think the highest form of just respect, mutual respect, is never judging another person's process because we just don't know. And I've just been through a really devastating, kind of eye-opening experience in my life and my own personal intimate relationship that really impacted me on a personal level. And I was actually the target of a lot of anger and resentment for something that I didn't actually do. And I held space so radically and honestly and accepting of myself, of what I was going through, that when I was able to move through that without numbing it, without even thinking about changing it, what happened was so beautiful and so miraculous is that I was able to hold this detached, compassionate space for the other person that had actually treated me. It's not from a place of righteousness or martyrdom, but it's really a place of divine expression. It's like, how do I want to see this through the eyes of divinity for the complexity and the frailty that is our own human experience? And in the end, it just feels so much better to be able to say, wow, I can see you and your suffering. Now I get to hold my own boundaries and how I want to participate in that, instead of blaming and saying, How could you do this to me? And from that perspective, there's just so much more room and space for everyone to grow, for everyone to feel safe enough to feel, to be honest, to accept these radical truths of honesty, of personal responsibility, and of full self-acceptance. And when we do this, this is what creates the container of safety. And that is why the container of a coaching program or a coaching community that is going to hold this for you is going to help you find your footing and the belief in yourself until you feel really good about doing it on your own. It's the practicing. I worked with a personal trainer for three months before I started going and really doing all of the things on my own. And now I go and I make up all of my own routines at the gym. So it's the same thing, it's no different. But we have to be willing to look and be brutally honest about our beliefs and what we've been making alcohol mean about us so that we can drop the story I shouldn't have known. How are you gonna know to do something that you've never done before? You have to be willing to do something new. And I would love to be the person to help support you do that. I have opened up some space in my calendar for a free private coaching strategy session for you. And we're gonna explore these places in your life where they feel really challenging. Because the first thing that everyone says to me when they come into these containers and even into a consultation is I've never said this out loud. I've never shared this with anyone. And this is what a coach does. A coach is in their own experience, not judging you, holding a hundred percent belief for your ability to change, to transform, to grow, and seeing you from that detached compassion. No matter what you do or don't do, I'm good. I've got me. So this is all for you. This is someone holding your hand in the darkness, building that bridge with you every step of the way. So everything you need to know is in the description below. I am so thrilled that you are here, and I will see you next time. As a thank you for being such an important part of this podcast, I want to gift you my brand new free mini course, The Permission Protocol. It is a five-part journey to help you rethink everything you believe about the pleasure that is possible in sobriety and the radical freedom that is required to get to the other side. And it's available for you right now inside of my free wild sobriety community where we can hang out, support one another, and grow by honoring our authentic expression as women. Everything you need is right here in the description. I will see you inside of the community.