Are You Drinking Too Much? A Wake Up Call for Women

a problem. Alcohol is being glamorized Wine Wednesdays, girlified, bottomless mimosas sold as a lifeline to sanity, wine glasses that say wine is cheaper than therapy. It's a normalization of heavy drinking. How much is too much? I could down a bottle in like an hour and a half. These are the new faces of alcoholism, and they're not who you'd expect. The teacher of the Year, a New York attorney, a corporate vice president. So us the four questions that

could save your life. That's my kryptonite. I cannot be around vodka. It's a Red Table wake up call. The real livers coming in. Those are real livers. One of the reasons why this particular show was really important to me is because wine for me was like kool aid, because like I was a you know, a brown liquor drinker, voka, Like I was a hard liquor drinker, Like I could drink almost anybody under the table. Damn yeah, Will specifically. Now Will is a lightweight, but I mean I used

to be a hard one to keep up with. When I moved to red wine, I considered myself like, oh, this is better. This is better for me, because they say the red wine is good for you, you know. But drinking red wine for me was like drinking glasses of water. It wasn't even like so I not drinking it, like you're like, I'm like goo, Google, alright, where's the next? Because I'm used to that hard hit. I was drinking hard in high school too, And when I got out here,

I was doing cocktails. So ecstasy, alcohol, weed, WHOA, what a combination. You were having a good old time. Let me tell you. I was having me a little bit. I was like, this is not cocaine, this is not heroin. I wasn't doing things that I thought was addictive, but I would do those three together. That was my cocktail. Your threshold becomes so high that what it takes for you to to get to the place you need to

get to. It'll take me two bottles to get to Okay, If I do ecstasy, weed and alcohol at the same time, I'm gonna get there faster and I can keep the high going because then I can just keep drinking because I know ecstasy is gonna last me about three, four or five hours. The weed, you know, that's just gonna keep me just smooth, and then the alcohol is gonna keep it going like I could just keep taking drink, drink drink. Yeah, oh my god, I'm not like that

sounds intense. Listen, that sounds like I would everybody. No, you know what that stressing under a recovery and my family that it's not accepting on the fact that addiction run. But I get it, literally, I got it quick. Like once I I was going for that third bottle of wine, I said, you've got a problem. And it was cold turkey that day that day, that day, I just stopped. Wow and never since. No. I mean I had, like I've had a glass of wine here and there, but

I cannot touch rock. I cannot touch drum drums. Another one. No dark liquor I'm never forgets. In New Orleans with Will, they had these lavender vodka drinks. I'm like, I haven't had vodka in years. Let me tell you, I had that lavender voca drink. I had one, I had a second one, and I was craving for a third one. I haven't stopped thinking about that drink till this day. Stopped thinking about that drink till this day. But that's when I realized. I was like, Jada, you can't play

no games. And when I see vodka, even when I opened up the refrigerator and they have those vodka spritzers in there and I look at it, that grapefruit vodka combination, I'd be like, and let me tell you the kind of discipline I have to put in because just because I have a problem with vodka, I can't tell you can't have vock in the house. I'm not doing all that. But I think also I'm a binger. Yeah, I'm a binger. Your grandmother was when it's time to nal grandmother was

we're gonna go right. So I wasn't the type of person that was drinking every day, you know. I was like a weekend party girl, totally you know what I mean. So it was like, yo, Thursday to Monday morning. Yeah, Thursday to Monday morning. I would go like just but it never got to the point where it interfered with your being able to go to work. Did you ever? There was one incident. I had one incident that was

an eye opening incident for me as well. I had one incident or nutting, Professor, I passed out when you told me that's the makeup trailer, That's what I never told me that that passed out. I went to work high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy. Lord had mercy, and I passed out, and I told everybody that I had taken I must have had old medication in a vitamin bottle. Think, oh my god, But I tell you what I did, though, got my ass together and got on that set. That was the last time,

like I take heed. I would never do something like That's why I was on you always. I stay on because Jaden and Trey, because I grew up with my mother who was a heroin attic. And still it didn't sink into me that any mind altering substance. I don't care what it is. All y'all young people talking about weed is from the earth, and I like this. It's a gate. You know, it's a year, all of this from the damn every year. You know, I know my body and it's taken me a long time to understand

what works best for me. But it's imperative for me to stop smoking every year for at least two months. This is my fourth year doing it now, I know. But I think the day that you decided to do it all together will be a very be day for me. I think they'll see something's different it is. I think that's awesome. You know, now I get it. You know, everybody has their journey. I'm grateful that that's all you dealing with because when I was your age, I was

doing alcohol. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I'm trying to I mean, I'm like you was much worse than me. It can get really messed up. I would always want like if you guys saw something in me that was like, oh, that's a downward spiral that is going to catch her real quick. That's why you have to trust the eyes around you because you won't know. And that was the thing with me. Don't think that people didn't try to

tap me on my shoulder. Don't think that when I was at Debbie Allen throwing up all over her house that she wasn't like, Hey, I had to reach my rock bottoms. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to just see how crazy I wish I could have too. So I'm gonna yank to as well. Oh my god, I think back on my life. I'm like, I'm a walking miracle. You are no doubt about it. You are a walking miracle. People would not believe this one is too. Yeah, I guess I'm just kind of

a little funny duddy on the side. Thank you God. Right now, we have doctor Jessica Mellinger, and she is a liver disease specialist at the University of Michigan who has witnessed shocking trends over the past year. Thanks for talking about this topic. It's a good one. Yeah, tell us what you've been seeing. We've been seeing astronomical increases in hospital days for young women with alcohol related liver disease, something we previously kind of thought happened mostly just in

middle aged men. So just really really surprising. Wow, more women are drinking more heavily, women are starting drink like men, you know, and so they're starting to get liver disease. Have you been able to identify when this uptick is that really happening in a woman's life in the forties and fifties is still kind of the biggest chunk of people that we see with this, but the rates of women in their twenties and thirties and early forties are

starting to really catch up with that. Wow, I've seen a lot more of my peers, specifically during the pandemic um drinking a lot more. What we do find is that a large percentage of the population of young people eighteen nine year olds almost one and four are reporting that they had an alcohol use disorder in the last year. That's that most severe form of addiction, right, That's not just I misused alcohol once in a while, and that younger age group, we're just seeing those numbers go up

and up and up. I've definitely seen friends and family members become excessive drinkers over the pandemic, and it's really hard to talk to people about it because I think that women are targeted in a certain way in the marketing of how you know, like wine Wednesdays and it's been difficult to even talk to people that have had

tesseive drinking issues. I think you're absolutely correct that that's exactly what's happening, is that we have a culture that is really kind of promoting drinking as just what you do to, you know, end your day to cope with problems. When I walk through hospital gift shops, there's alcohol paraphernalia. There's wine glasses, there's shot glasses, wine purses, if you can believe this, you know, a purse that you has a little spigot on it that you can you know,

put wine in and hide it. And I think it's kind of a normalization of heavy drinking, and it's a normalization of using alcohol in a way that is kind of a coping mechanism. Yeah, Like it's okay to drink alcohol when you're depressed or board or feeling lonely. That's the thing to do. Yeah. And I've seen it when you know, shopping out in the stores. You know the wine glasses that say wine is cheaper than therapy. You know, there's this, yeah, this normalization of it, this normalization and

glamorization of it. You know, you watch TV. You see women relaxing with big glasses of wine. And we're not talking about little glasses. Yeah, big glasses. What are some of the signs of the liver disease. The signs can be pretty dramatic. And I was able to arrange to have a couple of livers brought in for you guys to look at. Oh oh oh oh, those are real livers coming in. Those are real livers. Okay, okay, those are really well, you know games, she's a nurse and

so I want to see this. Well, we're gonna see it because here we are. Okay, so that's a normal liver. Oh that's really bad. You can see the normal livers, nice and smooth, and the liver that serotic looks really lumpy, kind of bumpy, shrunken, And that's scar tissue. That's scar tissue that's kind of marbled all through that liver. What's happening is just like if you get a cut on your hand and it gets red and then you have

a scar. The alcohol is irritating your liver. And when people do get liver disease symptoms, it could be you know, your eyes turning yellow, your skin turning yellow, your belly kind of swelling up with fluid, people will bleed heavily. They'll help you vomiting blood, getting confused. Prior to that, you might just feel kind of maybe nauseated, not want to eat as much, you just kind of don't feel good.

So they can be pretty vague symptoms that don't necessarily cue you into the fact that you've got to developing liver disease problem. That's really really scary to look at. It's going to be straightforward, but that gives your reality. Is like, once you can see something like that, hopefully people will be like, I don't want my liver to look like that. You don't get advanced alcohol related liver

disease overnight. It takes years to get So if you're getting serosis in your late twenties, thirties, even forties, you started drinking really earlier. Yeah, we have to always remember too, that there's really two diseases going on here. There's an alcohol use disorder and there's a liver disease, and we don't want to forget about the first one right now.

Let me ask you, because you're using alcohol use disorder instead of just saying alcoholism, why is that we've moved a from using terms like alcoholism or addiction because people have told us that they feel stigmatized by it. Not everybody is willing to admit right off the bat that they have an addiction. So what I tell my patients is, you know, I don't care what term you use to describe yourself, just recognizing the reality of what's going on, and I just try to stick with the terminology my

patients are comfortable with. If they want to use alcoholism or addiction, then I'll use that when I speak with them, and if they don't, we don't. And so that there's a self assessment quiz for people to know if they're drinking too much. Yeah, they go by the term the cage questions. The first is do you feel like you need to cut back? Um? And this is often kind of that first sign. This is what I get asked a lot by people. How do I know I'm drinking

too much? And well, if you feel like you might be, that's probably a good sign that that you should really think about cutting back or stopping altogether. Do you get annoyed by people who talk to you about cutting back? Do you feel guilty about your drinking? And then do you need an eye opener. When you get up in the morning answering any one of those, you could be a sign that you've got an alcohol use problem. So

let me ask you a question. If I have a friend who feels as though drinking a bottle of wine by herself is okay, is that okay? I think the straight answer is no. I'd say that's a problem. And I think it speaks to something that many of us are unaware of. What is a drink? What is one thing? What one standard unit of alcohol and one drink would be a shot? One shot like one and a half ounces of hard liquor like vodka or DRISKI, one can of beer. A standard twelve ounce can of beer is

one drink four or to five ounces of wine. So there's about five glasses of wine per bottle, roughly, and many people are having much more than that. I had a patient who said she was only having three drinks a day. She wasn't certain why, she, you know, had liver disease. Come to find out that she was actually pouring about six shots worth of um of alcohol into each drink, and so she was actually having eighteen drinks at night. And if you're a woman and you don't

have liver disease. This is for people who don't have alcohol use disorder or liver disease or an alcohol medical issue. Anything over one drink a day is really too much. That's important for people to know what those recommendations are. Having more than one drink a day is too much without liver disease. For someone without liver disease, if you have liver disease, you shouldn't drink at all. But if you don't have liver disease, you should only be having one.

Wondering and there's some data to suggest that even one drink might be too much, so, but right now, the National Institute of Health recommendations are one drink a day for women to for men. And I hear a lot in my clinic people who are surprised that they have alcohol related liver disease, particularly young women who don't think that they were drinking that much. They were just drinking wine with their friends and not realizing that they're getting

through a bottle of night. That's a lot. I had to clutch my purl on the inside a little bit around I mean history, thinking about my history, you know, just that one drink because I mean I was a drink a bottle, real fast drinker. What do you think on one hour, I could down a bottle and maybe like an hour and a half to oh my god, one glass after another, one glass after another. Because you're just they're watching TV drinking gee gee, and you're not.

And I'm thinking, is red wine? It's chilled? So I'm like, why I need to keep my limits. That's not years ago. Jade is twenty two, So it's been twenty two years for me. So very good. Yes, Like the doctor is shocked at right now. She's like, so, what's the latest on red wine being healthy? So if you have any

liver disease at all, we recommend no drinking. Right. There has been some suggestion that red wine may have some cardiovascular benefits, and the data is kind of up and down on that, just depending upon which study you look at from a liver standpoint. By being a liver dog, I think certainly if you have any amount of liver disease, even red wine is really going to be damaging to you. Wow,

this has been a very informative problems. I really didn't know, right, everybody talking about how red wine, you know, if you have a glass of red wine a day that that's healthy for you. I think it's really important to just be aware of my craving. This am I going after it for you know, relaxation purposes, to get to sleep at night all the time, because that's really when I see a lot of my patients find that it sort

of gets out of hand. Right. Well, thank you for thank you for coming in school and the day you gave me some information I was not aware of at all. Thank you. Next up. Mother of three, Annie Grace was a rising star in the marketing world until happy hour turned into two bottles of wine a night. Poised, driven and ambitious, Annie Grace was just twenty six when named vice president of a multinational company. She never imagined her

after hours work drinks would nearly cost her everything. I'm so terrified, any please rescue yourself and he found her purpose after hitting rock bottom. Here for how she created This Naked Mind, a program that has empowered millions to change their relationship with alcohol. I was global head of marketing for a company headquartered in London, in charge of twenty countries flying all over the world. You know, international trips where the booze was just flowing and drinking two

bottles of wine every single night. When was the moment that made you go, WHOA, something's really wrong here. There was this one time I asked my four year old to come sit on my lap and he said, no, Mom, you smell bad in your teeth are purple. And it was just like, what is happening? Like how can I be showing up for my kids like this? And it was these little moments. I was coming back from a super boosy work trip. I've been up till three in

the morning the night before. I went down into the hotel are and said, oh gosh, I just need something. She said, I can give you a screwdriver, which is one of those little lines. If I don't drink hard alcohol first thing in the morning, then I'm still okay. I'm still not over the line. I'm I'm still not It's still not a problem. And so I said, oh,

but I'm really in pain. And I had this headache, and I said, I just have to get home to my kids, and so I ordered one and I had two or three, and I got to ether airport and I'm sitting in the airport and I'm just in tears and I'm writing in my journal and I remember writing the words, am I an alcoholic? And just really for the first time seeing that kind of in black and white. The thing was, at that point my journey, I had been trying to cut back. I had done all sorts

of things. I said, you know, no drinking till the weekend for just one glass. I had all of these rules and everyone I would break and I stopped being able to really look at myself in the mirror. Yeah, and I'm thinking, why can't I do this for my kids? You know, I'm smart, I'm together, I have it in control in all other parts of my life, but this one thing, like it has got me, and why I can't I do this one thing? And so I'm sitting there and I'm asking the question that I've been asking

for years now is what is my problem? What's wrong with me? And I had this moment that I can only describe as like some divine moment where I said, nothing's wrong with you. Find out why? Find out much changed? Oh wow, that's a good one. And so I made myself too promises. I said, you know, I'm going to stop trying to stop drinking. I'm gonna let myself off

the hook. I'm going to give myself some self compassion because this roller coaster of shame and blame and trying these rules and breaking these rules, it was losing my soul. I was losing touch with myself. I did not trust myself anymore. And I said, you know what, you've been doing the best you can with these tools you have. Give yourself passion. Take a year and find out why. And so I went on this journey and I wrote

down every single reason I drink. And I just started learning that all those reasons I was drinking, alcohol relaxes even THO it doesn't release his cortisol, a stress hormone. Wow, it does in adrenaline. That's crazy. Alcohol makes things more fun. No, it doesn't. It actually numbs your ability to feel pleasure, so that you think nothing's fun without alcohol because of all the past alcohol you've been drinking like neurochemically, that's

what happens in the brain. And so I look at this and I'm about a year later, I walk out of my office. I tell my husband, if you want to drink with me again, tonight's last night because I'm done after this. He looks at me, He's like there was no trust there, so he didn't believe me. But sure enough I really was done. You recorded um yourself doing one of your worst moments, a few minutes of boost and relax. I'm so much the hip addictions. Yeah. Wow.

You know a lot of people have those moments that I always hear people share about calling out to God in their final moments of recognizing that addiction has taken over and there's nothing that they can do. Yeah. I don't remember making those videos. I have lots of them. I was yeah, just wow. So any you have a whole program called This Naked Mind. This Naked Mind just started as my own journey. I realized I wanted my mind to be naked. I didn't want to be influenced

or controlled by anything else. Wiping your mind I love, And when I put it out into the world, it resonated. People started writing me letters. It worked where nothing else worked, where they had tried everything, and they felt it stuck as I felt. And now millions of people around the world have been impacted and helped because they're also able to feel really empowered to change their behavior from an emotional place. Wow, I hear you have three pillars that

helps you stop drinking. What are they? The three pillars are action, emotion and knowledge. Action emotion knowledge, and so you can take the action day one. You stop and then hope that the knowledge and the emotion catch up, or you can get the knowledge. And that's what I did, and I didn't even know I was doing it. I got all this knowledge called doesn't actually relax me, it doesn't actually make things more fun. And then my emotion changed.

And then when I finally stopped, it was not as hard as it had been every other time because everything had caught up. Everything was aligned at that point. Everything was aligned because, as we know, willpower, it just runs out. It becomes something that over time, if you get stressed during the day, you have less will power at home to turn down that next drink. Once I understood the science, when I's understood, you know that all the things I thought it was doing for me, it just wasn't doing.

Then my emotions changed and then I wanted it as much as I wanted. Like a glass of motor oil, I just didn't want to drink. And that was so freeing. How long have you not been drinking? Over six years? Now, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much, thank you for having with Alright, So, Jessica Duanees was Kentucky's Teacher of the Year. On the same day she won this prestigious award, she was hiding a dark, painful secret. Welcome, thank you,

thank you. So what was the secret you hiding? Yes, my secret was that while I was holding that trophy, I was feeding to end the ceremony and go get liquor and go home and black out. In that picture, I was in withdrawals and that's why I'm shiny and sweaty. It was awful. And so that's kind of like how my days were at that point. I would wake up around two am, do my lesson planning, go to school, take zan X to ward off the withdrawals, and yeah, um teach. I taught really well. I had so much

shame for being an alcoholic. I felt like I was such a terrible person outside of school that when I was teaching, I was just diving in a hundred percent. And as soon as the bell rain, I said by to the kids who I loved dearly. But as soon as I said by to them, straight to the liquor store, straight home, and I would probably be blocked out by like six seven o'clock. Way, go back to wash prints, repeat wow and your wor how much would you say

you were drinking. I was drinking at least a fifth a day for a year and a half, so I actually did end up with alcoholic liver disease. Like I'm sorry, the fifth what is it? It's like the bottle that's like this big, It's like the standard bottle. Multiple people will share some left over. I was drinking the whole thing one day. What was your rock bottom? I kind of hit two rock bottoms. I started to have like the swollen belly. I was throwing up bile. My vision

would start to get a little bit blurry. I would have people cover my classroom because they thought that I was sick, and then I had stomach issues. Know it was that I was drinking a lot, and I was having these symptoms all day. For thirteen years, I was able to work and manage the double life. But one day I couldn't get out of the house. I was terrified to get in the car and drive. I was like,

there's something really wrong. I can't even pretend anymore. So I googled and I saw that there was a rehabilitation facility. I got sober then, and I thought good. I went to college, graduate school twice, I lived on my own, first generation American, and I was like, love, I can do all this. Getting sober should be easy, right, No, you know, I lasted to the holidays and I started drinking. So I ended up in a rehab facility again. I didn't tell anybody. I hit it from my complete family,

like nobody needs. I struggled so much, and I was like it was just a rough you know, It's like it was a rough break. I was afraid of losing my job. And then my biggest, most terrifying traumatic relapse was when I was in a relationship with someone who was also a recovery. His drug of choice was heroin, and he relapsed. With everything with COVID going on, right, like, we lost our support groups. We couldn't go to work, and it was just us two in the house together.

Even though we loved each other very much, it's not enough, you know, when you're in recovery, you need to get with your people to be in your community, and we were just stuck. Jessica fell in love with her boyfriend Ian when they were in rehab together. His battle with drugs began when he got hooked on prescription painkillers after a military injury. With her own sobriety hanging by a threat, Jessica tried convincing Ean to get help. I was hiding

his disease because I was ashamed for him. I didn't want to tell anybody that my boyfriend was addicted to heroine. One day we were supposed to have like a romantic date. A texted him to get me a diet coke and I didn't hear anything. I called nothing, So I was like, God, let me go to his apartment. Thing. Knock nothing, knock nothing, knock, call the phone here, the phone ringing. I started to

get anxious, so I started banging on the door. Neighbor comes and he's like, oh, I'm going to call the police on you, and I'm like, please please call the police because something's wrong with him. And he's in there. When the police come and the rest of it such a blur. I remember the like them opening the door and they're like, there's a dead male and it was him. I fell apart and then they were like, do you have his mom's And so I had to call his mother and say that he's gone. Then I had to

call his brother. His mom came, and I never wish on any soul having to tell a mother that her son is dead. Corner finally let us in. He was blue. A few hours ago. He had just said I love you, I'm going to go to the store, and then he went from that to being gone. The corner took the body, his family went and I went straight to the liquor store straight home. After that, I got hospitalized eight times.

I went to rehab and they're a doctor. It was like, you can't deal with your grief, and so you drink to deal with it, and then you're were processing these feelings and I was like, you know what, I surrender. I'm waving that white flag. When I walked out of the facility, I resigned from teaching, and something just clicked to me. There was no amount of alcohol that I could have drink to make me feel better. At that point I stopped, Thank God, and um, I've been sober now.

It's like day one hundred sixty six, so I'm like five and a half one in the universe, and like the higher powers that be, I wrote this op ed in a local newspaper in Kentucky, and I said, this is me. I'm an alcoholic. I've been drinking forever. Like I've been struggling. I've been living this double life. And I remember the day that it came out. I was so anxious. I had actually been teaching and an all boys school, and I was like, my boys, they're not

gonna want to talk to me. They're gonna be over me their parents. But the best thing was those kids. They were like, you know, you're just teaching something different, you know, and it's just funny. Yeah, like they say that, they say that when they're just like, thank you for telling us worth it. It's been a hundred percent worth it. Every relationship I had got stronger. I think it's awesome that your students recognize that that was a teaching moment.

You know, it's a teaching moment about life. Having struggles and fallen down is it's that's part of life, you know, And it's not about the fall. It's about it. It's about to get up. But I would just say to anybody, it's like, if you're questioning it, there's probably something wrong. And the other really big thing too that I would say is you're never alone, because I feel like for as long as I kept my mouth shut, I was poisoning myself. Once I finally opened my mouth, everything came out.

I've stayed sober since I've opened my mouth, you know what I'm saying. And so I feel like people need to realize it's okay to not be okay. You keeping a secret could be the difference between you living and dying. That's real, real, real, real talk. Right there. Had to learn that the hard way. Thank you so much, Thank you. I'm so grateful for the opportunity. And that was a powerful testimony to keep doing the work, keep doing the work. Yes,

how many times did you re laugh? Scame? I mean, you know, it's debatable whether you actually want to call it relax because relaps actually implies that there has been recovery that has taken place. I would just have periods I call them of abstinence, and then I would use again. I would always run back to a different meeting to kind of sneak and kind of sneaking and get kind of comfortable there and say, oh no, I was going

to these meetings and all of that nonsense. And every time I would do that, I would feel so much relief just having admitted it and going back and picking up that one day key chain. It was such a relief. And then I was like, you're making yourself feel all that shame. Nobody feels that way about you. You just gotta keep coming back totally until it clicks. And that's the one thing, the one thing I never did well, stop going yeah, that's amazing. I just kept coming back,

and one day the light bolt went off. Oh God. When twenty nine year old Katie was ready to put an end to a decade of binge drinking and blackouts, she took matters into her own hands. A New York attorney, Katie has always been an overachiever who could conquer anything, but when it came to alcohol, she was powerless. At one point, she was drinking so much she couldn't remember the night before. Katie got sober to save her own life.

She had no idea she was about to change the lives of countless others with her groundbreaking group, Sober Black Girls Club. What did your binge drinking look like? I was studying for the bar. I had my dream job, I had my dream car. I had like a really luxury, nice apartment. Life was good, So now why am I depressed? And this is when my drinking problem as astivated to

a adduction. And this is when like binging started, literally going to work and coming back home and just feeling so empty, feeling like I haven't accomplished anything, feeling like a failure. It was just a terrible feeling and feeling that I just ran from right and then that basically turned into me binging. What I realized through therapy was that I had people telling me I was pretty and smart. I was given awards, school always came easy to me.

And then when that was all taken away and I was put into the setting where this nine to six setting, where now I don't have anyone telling me giving me compliments. I'm not I'm not a star, I'm not shiny, especially when you're in settings where like you're the only black person doing certain things, like the focus is on you. Through therapy, I realized that, like Kat, you never had

self esteem. Your self esteem was based on what people thought about you and your awards and your afflishments, and now that you're done with all that, you don't know who you are. I became deep pressed. But I'm glad that you talked about your feelings of low self esteem, because at the end of the day, part of doing the work is getting at the root of what is really causing you to drink or causing you not to

want to deal with your feelings. And for you it was a low self esteem and it was that for me as well, you know, and never really understanding where all of that came from. I still don't understand to this day. We all deal with that to a certain and I think that we we all find different ways.

Do you remember what I said about being addicted to reactions? Yeah? Literally, was like, That's why I'm connecting with you so much on this because I'm like, I feel you like needing validation and and arriving off of that validation is Oh, that's a dangerous cycle. What was your lowest point that you looked at yourself and said this is a problem. Within one year, I lost my job, my hypaying job.

I can't afford my hYP paying apartment, I can afford my hyping So I lost basically all those things in one had to move back home with my parents. A lot of my relationships were basically problem So at this point I have to like turn anywhere to be like Katie, what is wrong with you? Like if all this stuff is happening, it has to be you. There's something that you are doing. And it was extremely hard for me because as black folks, we keep a lot of stuff inside.

But at that time, I thought I was the only person going through this. So I never met anyone at that time that I thought had an addiction. I didn't even know what an addiction was. In my head. It was like older white men and big bellies, No clew what I was going through, and I just knew I needed help. So I started to go see a therapist and she said maybe should take a breaking drinking. And I looked at her, like what are you walking around? Why are you bringing up alcohol? What does that have

to do with me? Like like like that has nothing to do with me, Like it's not in my family. No one drunks at home. So after a couple of sessions, I gave into the idea like you know what, Like she's right, drinking is the cause I think every time I drink, something bad or negative actually does happen. One of the suggestions my therapist gave me was to go to a twelve step program, so I went I was the only black person, so that like threw me off, and that just really rubbed me the wrong way. So

it was the culture that you did. I just didn't. It didn't make sense to me. I felt like there were rules I had to follow and there were things I had to agree on, and if I didn't agree on certain things and I wasn't doing something right, I wasn't doing sobriety right, I couldn't get with it. I

could not understand that. So then I created Silver Bacos Club, and then when the pandemic hit, we really expanded because folks needed meetings and they felt like the meetings they were going to online, they didn't feel like they belonged. They felt like they couldn't talk about certain issues. But I don't know if you did twelve Stop, but there was a point where you couldn't talk about outside issues. And what is an outside issue? Can you please tell

me what that means? That means you can't talk about race. So when Judge Floyd passed away, I was actually at a twelve Stop meeting, but I went to both support of friends. We're talking about it. We're really upset and I'm at this meeting, but there's no sense of the spear of anger, of sadness, like everyone is pretending or acting as if a black man has not just been killed on national time. I'm grieving and you all are just having a wonderful time. And I wasn't the only

one person who was feeling like this. There was a girls all around the nation was feeling like this. And that's why we decided to create our own meetings. If you need to go to rehab, go to your rehab, but on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and Sundays, we're gonna get together. That's beautiful. Like I'm literally sitting here going wow, Like that's so important, Like the fact that there's so much as women of color that we see in this world that isn't designed for us and catered for us.

I'm just sitting here. I'm being very very quiet, but I'm just trying to listen and understand because that has just not been my experience. It's almost like finding a therapist, you know what I mean, Like sometimes you just have to keep going until you find the right one. I'm just sorry that you had that experience. Yeah, I've definitely felt what you're talking about. It was just culturally didn't fit what I needed, and I felt very much an outsider.

And so because of my specific experiences of being a black woman and the traumas that I was coming with, that certain programs that I would go to couldn't relate and there weren't hardly anyone in there that looked like me either. Yeah, you know, and so I totally did it. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Yeah no, Thank you for the Black Girl Sober Club. Thank you for sharing your story with Thank you for having beautiful testimony we both have on black turbans today. It's the

name of the game, it is. That's how you succeed. Okay, to join the Red Table Talk family and become a part of the conversation, follow us at facebook dot com slash red table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode of Red Table Talk podcast produced by Facebook, Watch, Westbrook Audio, and I Heart Radio.