Wild Sobriety

Blind Spot #3 Stop Fighting Cravings - Do This Instead (5 Part Series)

• Mary Wagstaff

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You can quit drinking and still feel like you’re battling yourself all day. In this episode, I talk about the blind spot most women miss — the power of self-talk — and how the words we use can either fuel cravings or dissolve them in seconds.

I share how I learned to stop fighting my mind and start speaking to myself with compassion instead. When stress stacks up, judgment adds pressure until the body wants relief. But the antidote isn’t more control — it’s safety. I walk through how to use calming thoughts and small, honest choices to rebuild self-trust and make peace with the part of you that just wants comfort.

✨ Takeaways:

    •    How self-talk fuels or frees your cravings

    •    Simple reframes that calm your nervous system fast

    •    Why compassion is more effective than control

    •    The truth about rebuilding self-trust, one choice at a time

    •    What happens when you stop forcing change and let growth unfold

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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 chips process. Welcome to Wild Sobriety, Feminine Freedom Beyond Alcohol. Welcome back. In today's video, I am going to reveal to you the third blind spot that is secretly sabotaging your sobriety and your all of your efforts at quitting drinking diligently. I know that you are thinking about this day in and day out. And this third blind spot is the criticism that you have been giving to yourself secretly, the words that you say to yourself when you are by yourself. And those words are the words that are in your head. Hi, if we haven't met yet, my name is Mary Wagstaff. I'm a holistic alcohol coach for women. I have brought all of my work over here to YouTube and I am thrilled to introduce wild sobriety to you and create a community here. And because I'm getting to know you here and we're getting to grow a community, something that I wanted to share with you, this little insight tip about me is that I own a farm. My family and I purchased a farm in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon just about a year and a half ago. And I spent the entire summer, it was crazy, growing flowers to sell. And right at the end of the season, we discovered that we had a different product, which is pesto. It's a funny little insight to insider view into my life. My husband had been trying to grow basil for about 12 years. We've had a garden everywhere we lived, and the basil just never did great. And where we are is in the high desert, and it is just sun, sun, sun. And I made a spiral herb garden and I planted some basil and it took off. It's like these tiny little bushes right now that he has been pruning like bonsai trees. We have made pesto in the past with various things, and he created this beautiful recipe. It's nut free, dairy-free, gluten-free, allergy-free. And we're calling it Dad's Garden Pesto. And we could tell you a little bit more about dad. I'm sure he'll make a guest appearance on the channel at some point. But it is a hit. Just like with anything, even our journey into sobriety, we have to be open for the how. We went into this farm deciding we're gonna grow flowers, we're gonna grow vegetables, we're gonna see what happens. Flowers was our main focus. We're gonna do the market, we're gonna sell on the property, we're gonna not have a lot of expectation. And this is what I want from you too for your journey so that you can see what lands with you. This internal criticism is sabotaging because you are carrying yourself around all day, every day. You are in your thoughts. So the words that you say to yourself when you're by yourself are literally happening all day, every day. And I have mentioned this before in a previous video that words are spells. The words that we say create an actual vibration in our body that's called an emotion, and those emotions create sensations. When we try to beat ourselves up or judge ourselves or compare ourselves to anyone about our journey, that vibration in our body isn't positive. And what happens when we start to add, we start to compound negative emotions. Well, we want to find relief from that. We will inevitably end up having a drink. We kind of say, screw it. There's all of these other things in life that you do not have control over that are gonna drain your battery of resiliency throughout the day. And the one place that you do have control are the words that you say to yourself. I've been there, all my clients have been there. The regret, the shame. How could I do this again? I'm never gonna be able to quit drinking if I could only drink like this person, so on and so forth. And those actual words, I can't, I'll never be able to not drink. I'm always going to want to drink. That alone, how could I have done this again? What does that feel like in your body? And right away, I want to tell you my free guide, you have to get this and you have to try it and use it, is called 60 Seconds to Calm. The link is right here in the notes. It will help you find relief quicker than it takes to pour a drink. One of the key phrases in there is nothing has gone wrong. When you say those words, I just want you to say them out loud to yourself. Nothing has gone wrong. What happens? You can use that in any moment. One of my favorite thoughts I say to myself is if this is the worst thing that happens to me today, I'm still doing really good. So you have to get on the phone with customer service, be on the phone. I was on the phone for two hours a couple of weeks ago with the printer company, or someone cuts you off, or it's raining when you were gonna have a party. This is all low-hanging fruit that we have to learn to brush off so that we can, we have to simply watch our mind and notice the perspective and the angle at which our thoughts and the words that we say are taken. Now, this isn't about bypassing, this isn't about toxic positivity. Although as I move through my life, I'm really not sure how if there is any real pot toxic posity. Now, if you're never willing to look at the shadow, never really willing to confront the story and avoiding things, but I think we can always be positive. One of my clients uses her thought, this is for me. Everything is for me. What a gift! What can I learn from this? And so just like we decided to let the farm show us what was available and what was going to be easy. I want you to try on some new thoughts. I want you to try on words. And that's what the free guide, the 60 seconds to calm, is going to be. And not just around your relationship to alcohol, but to every other relationship in your life, to your relationship to money, to work, to your spouse, to your children. Because all of these things are going to compound, and your battery for resiliency is what is necessary to grow that capacity so that when it does come time where you would have habitually have a drink, you can handle it. And you don't have that one thing that just puts you over the top because you know now I can handle it. That's another beautiful thought to say to yourself. And I want to tell you a quick story. This blind spot, probably out of all of the blind spots, which I'm going to let you in on a little secret, are actually the five shifts of sustainable sobriety in my program. This one, out of all of the other ones, is what made the biggest impact in my life for my journey. It is what flipped the switch for me. I had been going on, getting pretty serious about quitting. I was, I was looking at all sorts of podcasts. I had never done that. I had started coaching. I was working with a spiritual mentor, not around alcohol, but diving deeper into the shadow work, getting curious. And I had started taking some longer breaks than I ever had before, where I would mostly just say, Yeah, I'm not drinking tonight. And then inevitably I would drink. So what happened was when I was getting very serious, I knew, like I talked about in the last blind spot, I knew what was waiting for me on the other side of alcohol. I was no longer quitting drinking. I was committing to becoming the woman that I knew I could be, that knew I was underneath alcohol, the mother that I was underneath alcohol. That was really my goal. I knew that I wanted to teach. I knew that I wanted to show up. I knew that I wanted to take all of my gifts and my passions and my desires to the next level and that I would never have the confidence to do it as long as alcohol was in the way. Not only that, but alcohol was completely contradictory to every single value that I had. And when I uncovered those, and we'll get into that in another episode, when I uncovered those, I started really leaning into personal responsibility. So when it came time where that urge came up in my day and where I had said I wasn't drinking, and then inevitably there was that little tug of war, I changed the conversation. Instead of going back and forth and shaming myself and saying, I'm always gonna want to drink, there's no way I can't drink. How could you, you're never gonna be able to do this, or having regret the next day. What I told myself instead was, Mary, you clearly don't want to stop, but you are a grown woman. You are grown. This decision is yours to make. And guess what? You've done this for 20 years. You know exactly what's gonna happen. You know what's gonna happen when you drink, you know the impact of it, you know how it's gonna feel, you know what it's gonna feel like during the middle of the night, you know what it's gonna feel like the next morning, you know what the results are of this, and you know what you really want and what your intentions have been. So if you drink, and this was the conversation I had with myself, and this is what we have to be willing to do, and even writing it down will make it that much more powerful. If you choose to drink, you need to own it because you already know. You need to not wake up. I told myself, there will be no shame, there will be no judgment, there will be no beating yourself up. You wake up and you get on with your day because you consciously made a choice. I am making the choice right now to drink and to take every single consequence and every single impact that comes along with it. And I believe that I did drink and I woke up the next day and I remembered the conversation I had with myself, and I was like, oh, okay. Wow, I don't have to beat myself up. And that lessened the impact. And guess what? When I stopped judging myself for drinking, and I actually gave myself permission from that place of being fully honest, not just screw it, you deserve it. That excuse, oh, you deserve it, you've worked so hard. No, full permission and from an honest perspective, everything changed just like that because I stepped into my power, I stepped into personal responsibility and ownership, and I told myself, nothing has gone wrong. Everyone drinks, everyone drinks, and alcohol is an addictive substance. There's nothing that you did wrong to get here, and we have to work backwards to unlearn it. What I offered myself was compassion. I learned how to have my own back. So you are replacing shame and judgment with compassion and learning how to have your own back, no matter what, with alcohol, with your emotions. And this is the feminine way. This is the way of wild sobriety. Our emotions as women that rise up, whether or not they're valid and whether or not they have a story behind them, they are real. And when we offer ourselves compassion, we can actually get to the core because right then we find relief. We don't need external validation. We don't need to explain ourselves. We actually let the energy of that emotion rise up inside of us and move out rather than shoving it down with a drink and pretending like it's not there and never really fully understanding what need we have that's not being met. In the end, your judgment is really one of the things that is fueling the craving to drink. It is compounding the negative emotions that you need relief from. Compassion alone is creating containment of your nervous system. When you offer yourself compassion, you are creating the safety that you're seeking in the world. And part of why you keep going back to alcohol is because alcohol is known. Now, we will go back to the things and repeat the things that are known to our detriment, but in some way, we feel safe. We know the outcome of alcohol. We've been there before. It feels safe because we're doing it in a group. We're doing it with our spouse, we're doing it with our partner. Compassion will override that and create that sense of containment and safety that is required to go on this journey of sustainable sobriety and freedom from alcohol. The other pivotal piece of what it really does to offer yourself compassion over shame and judgment is it starts to create that trust in yourself that has been lost through the broken promises of yourself. So even if you are breaking your own promise to yourself of I'm not drinking today, when you offer yourself compassion, it starts to build trust in yourself that I can rely on myself to not abandon me in my time of need because we don't want that from anyone else. We don't want that abandonment. That's what can create trauma in our lives, but yet we're doing it to ourselves. So we have to be willing to treat ourselves the way that we want other people to treat us. Make sure you go and download that free guide and use it. It is going to be a game changer. And I forgot to mention, there are a couple other bonus goodies in that portal that are going to help you on your journey, a meditation, as well as my perimenopause must-haves. These are other ways to ritualize and support your nervous system as we continue to age and go beyond alcohol. Make sure you subscribe. Please leave a comment in the notes here of what you were taking away, what you would love. And I would love to hear a story about you. 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.