Wild Sobriety

Blindspot #4: Why You Should Stop Reading Quit Lit (5-Part Series)🌹

• Mary Wagstaff

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I used to think if I just read one more book or listened to one more podcast, I’d finally “get it.” But all that information kept me busy instead of free. In this episode, I talk about the hidden blind spot of overconsumption—why filling your brain with recovery content isn’t the same as changing your relationship with alcohol.

I share how twenty years of drinking alongside a wellness practice taught me that awareness isn’t enough. Insight doesn’t rewire your brain—action does. I walk you through how beliefs create emotions, how rituals keep habits alive, and how to witness cravings in real time so the old story starts to lose its shine.

When we stop outsourcing our healing to the next expert or episode and start practicing curiosity in our own bodies, real freedom begins.

✨ Takeaways:

  • Why “passive action” feels productive but keeps you looping
  • How to plan ahead and act from compassion, not pressure
  • What to do when the drinker identity starts to loosen
  • Why support accelerates growth by exposing blind spots
  • How to turn every slip into feedback through plan-implement-evaluate
  • Learn how to say no to alcohol, deprivation free from your wild feminine self.

Get The Permission Protocol Free Mini Training-A 5 Part Journey That Changes Everything You Thought Was Possible About Quitting Drinking

The 90 Day Life Renewal is a Private Holistic Coaching Program to gracefully help you move through the resistance of change, stay accountable and honor the version of you that is done waiting. What if this year, you didn’t just set a goal…but created a living plan that actually fits your energy, your values, and your season of life?  Apply & schedule your clarity call with Mary here.

Join The 90 Day Life Renewal!

A Private Holistic Coaching Program to gracefully help you move through the resistance of change, stay accountable and honor the version of you that is done waiting. What if this year, you didn’t just set a goal…but created a living plan that actually fits your energy, your values, and your season of life? Apply & schedule your clarity call with Mary here.

Download The Permission Protocol — my free 5-part mini-course — and start practicing the skills that make alcohol irrelevant on your terms.

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. Hi, in today's video, you are going to learn the fourth and very important blind spot that is secretly sabotaging your sobriety. And I'm going to give you the number one tool that you have got to have in your back pocket, not only for your journey to find freedom around alcohol, but really for any change. The blind spot that is secretly keeping you stuck is consumption. And it's not consuming alcohol. Of course, we know that that is part of what's keeping you stuck, but more than anything, it's the overconsuming of tools. It's the overconsuming of maybe even potentially this video that you keep learning more, but you're not really actually applying the tools that you're learning. You're kind of in this place of feeling good, feeling positive, feeling motivated, but it's really a false sense of being productive. And what I've heard this called before is passive action. We're taking action towards what we think is our goal, but it's passive. There's no real risk, there's no real emotions or failure that we have to experience. And I hate to be the bad, the bearer of bad news, but the number one thing, and when we do it with support and evaluation, when we plan, implement, and evaluate, which is what I do in my one-on-one coaching mentorship, is we learn how to fail forward. The only way to really get unstuck from the mindset that you have created around alcohol and really your identity around it is to get curious, is to keep asking the question always and forever, what don't I know? So if you take a step back and you think, wow, I'm one person on a planet of eight billion people, your the sum of your learned experiences and what has created your beliefs is a fraction, dust of sand compared to everything else that's happening, everything else that's ever happened, everything else that will happen, everything that's happened before this moment, before you're even alive. So there are so many different perspectives. There are so many things that we don't know. And when we go out to try and consume, we really lose sight, I believe, of the process of feminine sobriety, which is amplifying our intuition, which is turning on and turning up that small voice inside of you right now that is the whisper that this just isn't working. I forgot to mention, if we haven't met yet, my name is Mary Wagstaff. I'm a holistic alcohol coach for women. And for over five years now, I have been guiding women on this journey to find feminine freedom from alcohol. And I'm here now on YouTube sharing this with you. And I couldn't be more thrilled. And the biggest part of my expertise comes from this lived experience. I lived a parallel life as a wellness practitioner and a yogi for 20 years, as well as a daily drinker. And through the lens of observation and curiosity, I was able to create what I call the five shifts process, which is what I'm sharing you right now, that we shift from this place of consumption and confusion into a place of curiosity. And curiosity means actually taking massive action. We have to just be willing to show up to say, okay, what's possible? Let's just see how this goes. And you can assess, you know, through the process of coaching, that's what we do. What's your biggest fear? How is that not true? What are the chances of that actually happening? And even if it did happen, what do you do then? So we actually answer the questions that a lot of overconsumption keeps you in confusion about. It just has you regurgitating other people's experiences and other people's stories. And the only way to actually start to build a new mindset and new pathways in your brain, because the pathways of addiction, the pathways of substance use are very strong. Not only are they intertwined with all of our beliefs that are these deep grooves in our brain, but the alcohol itself and any substance that you would consume that reinforces, has a positive reinforcement, is going to strengthen those grooves in our brain, right? So there might be some weeds in the way, there might be some sticks. But if we slow down and we use the process of the feminine way and feminine sobriety that I teach my clients, we can actually know that there's no rush. Because when we stay in this place of inaction and in confusion and overconsumption, we don't really make any headway because we have to be willing to trip over those logs to know that it's actually there. And so we can pick it up and look at it and say, oh, well, what was this stick? Chances are it was just an old limiting belief that you get to get curious about, you get to explore, you get to unpack, and you get to rewrite a new story about, and you get to just set it to the side. So addiction can really put on the blinders of what's possible for us because it really threatens everything that we know to be true in so many ways. It's kind of like the top gets blown wide open and it's a bit blindsiding when you have, you know, for me and for all of my clients, it's like this is the way that I functioned in the world. This is part of my identity. And when the tables turn and you start to really believe another new truth, you realize, oh my gosh, everything that I thought was true isn't true. What else? What else is there? So there's gotta be a new perspective, or I would be getting the results I want. So the writing is right there. And if you go back to the other blind spots about shame, we know that doesn't work. We can only so know so much, and we come back to that. My experience is only the summed sum of my lived life, right? My perspective, my knowledge is the sum of my lived experiences. That's it. And until we're willing to check out and see through the lens of other experiences, we just don't know. It's limiting. How can we know? There's so many experiences and ways of life we will never ever know. Best of intentions, and there's a whole process that I take my clients through of planning ahead of time, literally is solid gold. It will give you so much more evidence, so much more knowledge, such a bigger perspective than just not drinking alone. You could have 365 days of just not drinking. And some of you have probably been there and nothing has really changed. The entire time you were wanting alcohol, you were craving it, you were being deprived. And you could have a couple big experiences of putting yourself out there, watching the whole process of even yourself drinking, because we can step into a place of witnessing ourselves drinking, being curious about the process. Do I even like this? What's the smell? What's the taste? We can really dive into something we've completely just has been habitual that we never actually even examined, and really answer the questions and completely have a whole new perspective about something that you told yourself you really enjoyed. And when you ask yourself, well, what about this experience did I really enjoy while you're doing it? It really loses its luster. It really loses impact because our beliefs create our emotions. And so if we're only having our experience based on beliefs that just are fulfilling the habit of drinking and not beliefs on the that are fulfilling our our true desires away from alcohol, then we're gonna, we're just gonna convince ourselves that this is what we love, this is what we want. And this is a part of denial. This is a part of the journey where we're just overconsuming and thinking that we can do it on our own. And you are so capable of stepping into a bigger place of awareness. But the part that is challenging when you try to do it on your own is that you never have a third-party perspective. You never have someone else saying, Hey, what about this? And that's really the power of coaching is that from a neutral place full of love and compassion and complete belief in your ability to change, it's like when you have a friend that you see making the same mistake over and over again. They keep dating the same kind of person and going, like, why do I do this? Right. And you just want to shake them. This is what happens when you step into a coaching program, whether that's just even through a course or a new perspective, but you're actually doing the work because my course, the sobriety starter kit, has all of these questions for inquiry that help you go deeper. It has ways of taking action out in the world. And of course, when I work one-on-one with my clients, we don't really try to change the circumstances. We actually change the mindset and the behavior. And while honoring your own cyclical nature. So it's really important that you understand overconsumption can be a place that you can get stuck in for years. Now, everyone's journey is so different, and that's the other place of curiosity that you really have to step into when it comes to getting support, is what is it actually gonna take for me to make this change? I think we can underestimate. And there's another video that I will have about really the spectrum of addiction, the spectrum of sobriety, too, because it is all over the place and it has it's based on so many factors. So for yourself, and this is a personalized approach I take with my clients, you have to be really willing to ask yourself, what is it gonna take for me to make this a long-term commitment? And that was one of the other blind spots. We're not just quitting, we're committing. And what is that really going to look like? And that is a place where you need to be willing to be really honest with yourself. And it doesn't mean that you have to have a coach forever or go to meetings forever, but there is a deeper connection to yourself that you have to create, a commitment that you're willing to create in some capacity. And looking at all the areas of your life, we have to be willing to look at that. We have to be willing to clean up our side of the street in all of these areas for us to really have that groundedness to know that there's not even what circumstance would really trigger me to drink again and to be able to future focus because each season is gonna have its own set of thoughts, its own set of beliefs, and its own set of circumstances. And you really want to set yourself up for success because you're putting all this work in. I don't believe any time without alcohol is ever wasted or any time even searching. And so I want to say that I don't believe by you being here now or reading a quitlet book or listening to podcasts is a waste of time, but it's keeping you in the cycle instead of getting out into your life and living your life. It's keeping you stuck in the alcohol story. And what I want you to do is to go out and use your heart and your intuition and your heartfelt intention and get really curious about your beliefs and trying to disprove them. Without the embodied action and the evidence and the massive action out in the world in your life, it's not going to stick. You're gonna go back into that fight or flight mode. You're gonna fall back into that rut in your brain the second that you're triggered, the second that something stressful comes up or there's a celebration. There's, I call it the get out of jail free card. You have to really dig deep for what's that sneaky little objection that's gonna be lurking around the corner waiting for me. And you have to be willing to do that ahead of time. That really is truly what's possible for you on the other side in this journey of wild sobriety. And what I mean by that is it is your birthright, your wild essence, your truest nature to be in the pleasure that it is to be human, even through all of the pain, through all of the heartache, and through all of the challenge, because we cannot ascend to higher states of evolution without the descent. It would not work. We wouldn't appreciate it, and it would be like receiving something that we didn't earn. Now, I don't believe that we have to pay to, we don't have to pay a price to live a life of happiness and harmony, but we do have to have contrast in order to do so. The real freedom comes from testing, practicing, failing, and learning. It really is the process of evaluation, implementation, and creating a plan for yourself. And this is where the real freedom lives. And you will have this process and these tools to do again and again and again in every single area of your life. But the cool part is that you're actually planting seeds. And I was just reflecting on some heartache that I had many, many years ago in my late 20s, and how I always said have said it was the best work I ever did for myself because there was points of begging and pleading, and how could you do this? And I didn't see it coming. And it was, I was completely blindsided by it. But I did the deep work of sitting with my emotions and letting them move through me, really witnessing them, really feeling them, really validating this in this embodiment and this somatic practice is something that I do with my clients so that they can really have that felt experience of honoring their emotions, the thing we think we're gonna solve when the person says, I see you, I forgive you, I'll fight for you, or I'm sorry, or the thing we think that's gonna solve when we have that drink, right? And oftentimes we have that drink because we're waiting for that person to solve the problem for us, right? And what I want you to know is no one's coming to save you. There are is support that you have, and you have the divine that you are connected to, but this journey is yours and yours alone. And when we do that deep work of really owning it and honoring it, it's like we own it, we win it. It's ours. And since that point in my life, I believe that was such I was drinking at the time. And I believe though, even though I was still drinking, I was doing the work during the day, feeling my feels. And I really believe that did plant seeds that helped me move through my journey of sobriety with greater ease. And now I'm kind of in a state of heartache again. And something that I'll be sharing more on our channel is I've really recently stepped into a place of kind of being on the other side of addiction in a place where I wasn't ever before. And I had had some, seen some addiction in my life, but uh never as an adult really was someone that's near and dear to my heart and being so close and being on the other side of the depths of what can really happen to an addicted mind that you know I didn't necessarily have to go through, and a lot of my clients did don't necessarily have to go through, although we all do go through phases of denial, painful, or at least to move through each challenge with more grace. If you are taking something away from this, I would love for you to subscribe to my channel, like this video, share, and please check out the rest of this series. Also, if you are wanting to go deeper in your journey of sobriety, in the there are many, many resources in the comments below. And I would love to hear from you. So please leave a comment. I will answer each and every single one. And I want to make content to serve you. So please let me know what questions you have, how I can serve, and we will start doing live streams very soon. And there will also be an invitation to a community where we can come and gather and be in a group setting to share. So I wish you such a beautiful day, and I'll talk to you soon. 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.