What are you supposed to do when family members don’t support your decision to drink less or to stop drinking? Maybe they think you’re being too uptight or restrictive. Maybe they think you’re rejecting family traditions or trying to make a point that you’re somehow better than them.

This is episode 484, and today I’m answering a listener’s question about family members that just don’t get and, frankly, aren’t supportive about your decision to change your relationship with alcohol and what to do about it.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit from the inside out. We’re challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink and why it can be hard to resist temptation. No labels, no judgment, just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking. Now, here’s your host, Rachel Hart.

Today, I’m answering a listener question from Stephanie. Here’s what she wrote.

“Rachel, I’ve been following your work for a while, and it’s genuinely changed how I relate to drinking. I now make it a conscious choice rather than a default. Thank you for that. I’m writing because one situation still feels unresolved. My stepparents treat drinking as the cornerstone of socializing, and declining a drink reads to them as a personal offense. More than that, their culture frames wanting to stop drinking as something worrying, not something to respect or simply accept.

When I visit them, I don’t drink, but the judgment and disapproval are palpable and constant. They live far away, so visits mean several days together. Recently, I decided to stop seeing them altogether. I didn’t want to spend that much time around heavy drinking and that persistent feeling of being scrutinized. But I’m starting to wonder if that’s just avoidance. What I’m really struggling with is the middle path, seeing them occasionally without needing their approval and being genuinely okay with their judgment. I’d love to hear your take on this.”

Okay, so, first things first, I just want to acknowledge that, of course, their disapproval feels really hard for you, maybe even painful. Not because their judgment about your decision not to drink around them is correct and not because you do somehow need their approval in order to feel good. I think it feels hard because we learn the idea of belonging from our family.

A family unit communicates very early on to the brain, “Hey, you are one of us. We are part of a unit. You belong to this family.” Not only that, but we learn, “Hey, in this family, this is how we think about things. This is what we believe. This is how we make our way through the world, and our way is the right way.” So your brain has a long history of not only caring about what family members think from a very young age, but also believing that in order to belong in the family, you have to fit a certain mold.

And in some families, that may include the role of alcohol. So maybe you grew up watching how adults incorporated alcohol into family dinners or gatherings or important moments. Maybe it felt like a rite of passage when you were finally old enough to join the adults in your family and drink with them, or old enough to drink with your siblings. And so when you decide to step outside of the mold and change your drinking, you’re not just necessarily changing what’s in your glass. I have worked with so many people who tell me it really feels like they are violating an unwritten rule about how their family operates.

And I want you to consider that because I will tell you, it’s not easy when someone in your friend group is unsupportive of your decision to drink less or stop drinking. That can be a painful experience. But when it’s a friend, there’s probably a part of you that also thinks, “Okay, well, I can always make new friends.” Now, you might not want to make new friends, but it does feel like an option for your brain. But we don’t usually have that thought when it comes to our family. People don’t often think, “Well, I’ll just get a new family.”

And yes, there is the idea of having a chosen family and you creating and deciding who your family is to you rather than just accepting the family you were born into. But for most people, when disapproval comes from our family members, it feels more charged than when it comes from friends because when family members are unsupportive, it can trigger this fear and grief in a way that feels very different because I think it taps into these early ideas that we learned about belonging and what it means to belong.

So I just want to start there, acknowledging that, yeah, this can feel hard, and hard in a way that can be different from what you might experience with an unsupportive friend. What I think you need to do is really learning how to make the distinction between feeling rejected by family members from actually being rejected by them. Because these two things are not one and the same, although the brain often wants to make this leap.

Your family members may genuinely dislike your choice not to drink. They may make comments about it. They may complain about it. They may wish that you would go back to drinking the way that you used to. But from everything you wrote here, it sounds like their home is still open to you. They still want to spend time with you. So we have to really be careful and notice if our brain is jumping from they don’t approve of what I’m doing to they don’t approve of me, and then by extension, I somehow am either no longer part of this family or no longer belong.

And I get it. It would be so much easier if they just said, “You know what, I don’t understand your choice. It really doesn’t make any sense to me, but you know what, I love and I support you regardless.” But that’s not what you’re getting here. That’s not what you have in this situation. What you’re getting is their disapproval. But there’s a difference between wishing you had someone’s approval and needing their approval in order to feel good about your choice.

Because here’s the thing. What if they aren’t rejecting you? What if they aren’t even actually disapproving of your choices? What if they’re just confused? So they’re not wrong, they’re not being unsupportive, they’re not trying to undermine you. They’re simply just confused. I really like flipping this around when someone doesn’t understand or support a choice that I’m making. Flipping it around to view it from the place of, “Oh, I think that person is just confused.” Because then you’re making their actions, whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re saying, then you can easily make it about them rather than what the brain wants to default to, “Oh, it’s about me, right? It’s about what I’m doing.”

So maybe your stepparents are genuinely confused. They truly don’t get why someone wouldn’t drink. They truly do not understand how or why someone would socialize without alcohol. They cannot imagine themselves ever being in the position of saying, “Hey, you know what? I think I want to drink less,” or, “Maybe I want to stop drinking,” or, “I should change the role of alcohol in my life.” They cannot imagine doing that, and they can’t imagine anyone doing that without that person having a serious problem with alcohol.

All of this can be true, right? They can be confused on all of these fronts, but it doesn’t mean that their opinion is right. It can just mean that they don’t get it. So in that case, when you step into the place of them being confused, maybe it feels a little bit easier not to get defensive. Maybe it feels a little bit easier to be like, “I don’t need to explain myself. I don’t need to make sure that they get it. I don’t even need to secretly wonder like, ‘Maybe they’re right and maybe what I’m doing is weird.'” I just need to accept that on this topic, they’re confused about my choices, and that’s okay.

That doesn’t mean you have to clear up their confusion. This point is really key. It’s not going to get you anywhere if you say, “Yeah, they’re confused and it’s my job to fix it.” It just means you stop making their comments, their reactions, their remarks mean something about you, and instead, make it mean something about them.

And the other thing is, right now, you feel like they disapprove of your choice not to drink, but they may very well feel like you now disapprove of their drinking. So their brain might be interpreting your decision not to drink as, “Oh, she’s rejecting us. She thinks we’re doing something bad. She thinks there’s something wrong with how much we drink. She’s judging us.” Now, again, I’m not saying that this is true. I have no idea if they’re actually thinking any of those thoughts. But sometimes just running the thought experiment of, “Oh, I feel like these people are judging me, but what if they feel like I’m judging them?” Sometimes just that thought experiment can be really useful.

Another thought experiment that can be really useful is to step outside of the context of drinking and consider this situation using a different scenario. So let’s use money, for example.

Imagine that your family has very strong beliefs about money. Lots of families do. But let’s pretend that your family believes that money is meant to be enjoyed. When you’re together, you’re expected to stay somewhere fancy, to eat at expensive restaurants, a form of entertainment is going shopping and buying luxury goods. So in this hypothetical family, spending freely is part of enjoying life. It’s part of how the family connects with each other. And maybe at some point you decide, “You know what? I don’t really like spending my money like this. I don’t actually get that much enjoyment out of buying stuff.” Or, “The enjoyment that I get is short-lived,” or, “I enjoy it for a little bit and then I regret it when I see the credit card bill.” Maybe you just decide you value saving more. Maybe you just like being more intentional about your spending.

But imagine in this scenario, your family’s saying, “Ugh, why are you being so cheap? You can afford it. What’s the point of having money if you never enjoy it?” Now, all of these comments doesn’t mean you need to change. They can disagree with your choices without it meaning that they are rejecting you. And I think it’s useful with this example because we can flip it around too. Maybe the family prides themselves on being incredibly frugal. They never eat out. They buy everything on sale. They save every possible penny. To them, being miserly with money is a virtue. And in this family, you may decide, “You know what? I actually want to spend more money. I want to stay in nicer accommodations sometimes. I want to go out to dinner occasionally and not always eat at home. I want to buy something simply because I want it and not wait for it to go on sale.”

So in these examples, the disapproval can go either way. The family can think that you’re spending too much, they can think that you’re not spending enough. In both cases, your family members could be equally certain that your way is the wrong way and their way is the right way. In both cases, they could disapprove of your choices, but that doesn’t make them right. And their disapproval doesn’t mean that they’re rejecting you, because you can still love and care about someone and consider them family even if they make choices you wouldn’t make, and vice versa.

This idea that the only way we can belong in a family is if we all agree on everything, if we’re all in lockstep, I just don’t think that is right. Because when you disapprove about someone’s choices, it isn’t information about the other person. It’s information about your beliefs. So when your family disapproves about your choice, it’s not information about you, it’s information about them. And just because a set of beliefs comes from family members doesn’t mean that those beliefs are correct.

Someone’s certainty that you should drink more doesn’t make drinking more the right decision for you, just like the certainty that you should save every penny doesn’t actually tell you what you should do with your money. Those choices are up to you. So this is what I want you to consider. Your family’s certainty on the right way to do things, whether it’s about alcohol or anything else, it doesn’t have to turn into uncertainty about your own choices.

And this is where I think it’s really easy to get tripped up. So someone has a strong reaction to our choice and suddenly we start treating their reaction as a problem we need to solve. We want them to change their mind. We want them to agree with our position. We keep making good arguments or trying to explain ourselves. We just want them to get it.

But what if they don’t? And they never will? What if they continue to disagree with our choices? Should the strength of their disagreement have any bearing on what you ultimately decide to do? A huge part of changing your relationship with alcohol is learning how to let someone else have the wrong idea about you. You don’t have to constantly correct assumptions. You don’t have to convince other people that your choices are good or valid so that you can feel good about your decisions. You can decide that a family member’s certainty about how they think you should live your life doesn’t have to turn into uncertainty in your mind about what’s right for you, or uncertainty that maybe you don’t belong anymore.

And that really brings me to the second part of Stephanie’s question about avoidance, because she wrote, “If I’ve decided not to see them because I don’t want to deal with their drinking and their judgment, am I just avoiding the situation?” And my answer is maybe, but you’re allowed to decide that you don’t want a relationship with someone, even someone who is a family member. You’re allowed to decide that you don’t enjoy spending several days around heavy drinking and decide that a particular relationship isn’t one you want to invest in, even if there are family ties. The goal isn’t to prove that you can happily tolerate anyone’s behavior or judgment or that you should just because they are family.

The goal is to decide if you actually want a relationship with someone and then figure out how to go about it in a way that feels good for you. So it’s not about telling yourself, “Oh, I should spend time with them because they’re family,” or asking, “Am I a bad person if I don’t visit?” Or even telling yourself like, “Shouldn’t I just be able to handle this?” It’s about asking first and foremost, do I actually want a relationship with these family members?

Now, the problem is it can be really difficult to answer that question when, at the same time, you’re telling yourself that you also need their approval. So let’s for a moment just take their approval out of the equation. Imagine that they’re just never, ever going to understand your choices. They’re never going to approve. They will continue to think that your decision not to drink is strange. They’ll continue to see it as a personal offense. They will continue to wish that you would drink with them. They will never understand your choice. And their drinking will remain unchanged. So nothing changes, right? Except you no longer need their approval. And because you no longer need their approval, you don’t need to explain yourself. You don’t need to convince them that you’re correct, and you’re not constantly wanting them to get it. You just accept that they are confused.

If we take needing their approval out of the equation, would you want to see them? If the answer is yes, that’s useful information. Maybe you do want a relationship. Maybe what you’re trying to get away from isn’t necessarily them or their drinking, it’s the discomfort of feeling like you need their approval in order to be happy. And that’s a whole other thing that then you can start working on.

Maybe the answer is no. Maybe it is, “You know what? I don’t really want to see them.” Even if you don’t need their approval, you don’t particularly enjoy spending several days with them when everything revolves around drinking. It used to be appealing, but it’s not anymore. That’s useful information, too. There might also be a third answer. You might decide, “You know, I do want a relationship with them. I just don’t want this version of the relationship we currently have. I want to see them, but I don’t want to spend, you know, an extended period of time staying with them at their house. I want to go out to dinner with them, but I don’t want every single activity to revolve around drinking. I want some connection, but I also want more space.”

There is a middle path that can open up when you tell yourself, “You know what, I get to decide what I want this relationship to look like.” Wanting a relationship with someone doesn’t mean you have to accept the current format of your existing relationship. So maybe you visit for less time, maybe you stay somewhere else, maybe you meet on neutral ground. Maybe you suggest activities that don’t naturally turn into an excuse for them to drink. Maybe you focus on connecting with them more over email or text or FaceTime rather than in person. And maybe you just give yourself permission to leave if your time with them starts to be too focused on drinking.

And then finally, maybe you just stop feeling like you need to explain yourself, right? And just allow them to dislike your choices and be confused about them. There are a lot of possibilities between you got to spend several days together exactly as you always have and avoid them for the foreseeable future. I really think the deeper skill here is learning to see that someone’s disapproval is information about them, not information about you. It doesn’t mean that their comment suddenly feel wonderful. It certainly doesn’t mean that you have to spend time with people that you don’t want to be around. It just means you practice having your own back and standing by your decisions that are right for you, even when others don’t get it. It means that you focus on giving yourself your own approval first.

And that is the bigger skill that we all need to practice, not just around alcohol, but really everything in life. Doing what’s right for you and having your own back regardless of what others think. Let them believe what they believe about what it means not to drink. Let them be totally confused about your choice. Because no one’s going to get through life without people disapproving of our choices sometimes, including those closest to us, including our family members. But just because your brain has learned belonging from your family, that doesn’t mean you have to continue to seek out their approval or mimic their behaviors in order to actually belong in that family.

So Stephanie, I hope that helps. Thank you for sending in that question. And if you are listening and you want me to answer one of your questions on the podcast, you can submit one for consideration at RachelHart.com/podq. That’s P-O-D-Q. All right, everyone, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.

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