Have you ever had someone complain about your drinking? Maybe they think you’re drinking too much, maybe they’re worried about you, maybe it’s affecting your relationship in a negative way, only to have them turn around and complain when you’re not drinking? This has happened to me so many times with both friends and also in romantic relationships, and I will say it is so easy to write off this behavior as someone being unsupportive or just impossible to please, but every time I did that, I actually missed the bigger picture that helped me unravel my own relationship with alcohol.

This is episode 482, and I’m going to help you get curious about this contradiction that we see in others and show you how it can reveal something important, not only about how people are socialized to think about drinking, but also the internal clues that you need to help you figure out how to have a different relationship with alcohol.

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.

So here’s something I found in my own journey, and I hear from my clients all the time. Sometimes the people who complain about your drinking still want you to drink. So the very same person who tells you, “Listen, I think you drink too much, or I’m worried about how much you’re drinking. I don’t like who you become when you drink,” they may also be the person that doesn’t want you to completely stop.

I had people say all of those things to me, and I also watched some of them when I told them that I was taking a break from alcohol say, “But you’re not going to stop drinking forever, right? It would be nice if we could still have one or two when we go out.” Or even sometimes, “I miss being able to drink with you.” And if you’re like me, you are probably left thinking, “Wait, what? I can’t win. You don’t like it when I drink too much, but you also don’t like it when I don’t drink at all. I’m just trying to figure out what’s right for me, and now I have to navigate what you want?”

I remember feeling so incredibly unsupported when I’d have conversations like this with people in my life. And here’s the thing. I think the standard advice that we get in this situation, it isn’t always that helpful, because that advice often says, “Well, listen, if they don’t have your back, then they’re not a real friend or they’re not a good partner.” It basically tells you to write this person off. And sometimes maybe that’s what’s going on. There are some people who truly aren’t supportive of your efforts to change.

But some of the people in my life who said these things to me, you know what? I’m still actually very close with them. I didn’t want to write them off, but I also didn’t want to feel like I needed to drink in order to keep them happy. So I want to give you another way to think about what is happening when you encounter this with friends or family members or romantic partners. Otherwise, you might miss something really important that will actually help you in your own journey.

When someone says, “I wish you could still drink,” or “I wish you could just have one or two,” or “You’re not going to stop drinking forever, right?” There’s a really useful question for you to explore in these moments. Now, you might feel comfortable asking the question I’m going to give you to the other person. So you might be able to have a conversation with them, but you also may not be and that’s okay too. You can still use it. You can actually explore this question internally just by stepping into their shoes and imagining how they might answer it.

But either way, when someone complains about your drinking, and then at the same time turns around and doesn’t want you to stop, I want you just to ask, why? I wonder why it’s important to this person that I still drink. I wonder why they care. I wonder what they imagine will be different if I did drink in this moment or if I didn’t.

And I want you to notice the tone in my voice. This isn’t about being defensive. This isn’t the energy of like, “Well, why do you care what I do?” It’s about truly getting curious, because the answer might tell you something not only about them, but it might also reveal something important about you. And I just want to acknowledge that I know how hard it is in these moments not to get defensive. I certainly was super defensive at first myself.

When someone in your life says, “Hey, I don’t like how much you drink, it’s affecting me, it’s affecting our relationship, I’m worried about you,” that can be a lot to take in, especially if you already carry a lot of shame about your drinking, which I certainly did. In these moments, when someone is approaching you, your brain doesn’t hear, “Hey, they’re bringing this up because they love me and they care about me and they care about our relationship.” Your brain probably goes to something more like, “Oh, they think I have a problem,” and that kicks up a lot of shame. And shame understandably leads to a lot of defensiveness.

And so I think it’s really important to remember that all of us, every single one of us, has behaviors in our relationships that can negatively affect the people we care about. The person saying this, pointing this out to you, they’re not perfect themselves. No one is. Now, again, these behaviors don’t always show up around alcohol. Sometimes they show up around work or money or stress or how someone handles their anger or their emotions, but no one is immune from this. No one shows up 100% perfectly, 100% of the time in all of their relationships, and our behaviors will sometimes have negative consequences for another person. That is just universal.

And it doesn’t mean that we should pretend these consequences don’t matter. It just means when someone says, “Hey, I’m worried about your drinking. I’m worried about how it’s affecting us,” that’s not a uniquely damning statement about you. I say this quote to myself all the time. At this point, I don’t even really remember where I read it, but it really offers me a little bit of grace when I’m in a shame spiral about something I’ve done. I say to myself, “Listen, Rachel, you’ve not always been your best self, which makes you just like everyone else.” No one is always their best self. Everyone struggles with something. And the things we struggle with can impact the people we care most about. No one is immune from that.

The work of being in a relationship with another human being is not figuring out how to show up perfectly so that you never negatively affect each other. The work is figuring out how to talk honestly about what’s happening and take responsibility for what belongs to you versus what belongs to them, and then decide how best to navigate it together.

But here’s the thing. It can feel a bit like whiplash when that same person turns around and says, “But I don’t want you to stop drinking forever,” or “I still hope that we can have a drink sometimes,” or, “I just don’t want you to drink too much, not to stop entirely.” When I was met with this, I was always thinking to myself, “Okay, yeah, me too. But I’m just trying to figure out what works for me. I’m trying to figure out my own relationship with alcohol and why it’s so hard for me to say no and why I keep going overboard and why I can’t learn my lesson. And I don’t know where I’m going to end up, but it feels a million times harder when you are telling me the destination you have in mind.”

So let’s back up. Why would someone who doesn’t like your drinking want you to continue drinking? Let’s say that you’ve decided to step away from alcohol for a bit while you’re trying to figure everything out, and your partner says, “I just wish we could have one or two when we go out.” The most useful response in the moment is simply curiosity. I wonder why. I wonder why they want this. I wonder why they feel like it’s important to them. I wonder what they feel would be different for them if I also had a drink.

One possibility is that the other person’s desire for you to drink actually has very little to do with you and everything to do with them. A lot of people can feel really weird about drinking when the person they are with isn’t having any. We have been conditioned to see drinking as a group activity. And at the same time, to find it kind of suspect or questionable when it’s done alone.

So if they’re drinking and you’re not, it can stir up all this cultural conditioning inside of them that they shouldn’t be drinking either, or that it’s weird for them to have a drink if you’re not going to, which, of course, they don’t have to reckon with any of this if you join in and also have a drink.

Maybe they worry that you’re silently judging them. Maybe when they’re the only one drinking, it forces them to sit with their own urges and cravings, which normally they don’t have to, because you’re also drinking, so they don’t have to think twice about what they’re going to do. Maybe your decision to change your drinking is bringing up questions about their own relationship with alcohol that frankly, they’d rather not look at.

There were people in my life who I discovered were just much more comfortable with their own choices around alcohol if I was making the same one. It was easier to justify opening a bottle of wine on a random night if we were both doing it, or to order another round if we were both doing it, or to have a drink earlier in the day than we normally would if we were both doing it. And I had to learn that I was not responsible for making someone else feel comfortable with their decisions around alcohol. If you want to have something to drink, have a drink, but you have to own that choice. You do you, I’ll do me. I don’t need to order one too, so that you can feel better about yours.

This is one of the reasons why drinking less and not drinking can feel so loaded, because you’re not just changing the contents of what’s in your glass. Sometimes you’re changing an unspoken agreement that you have with the other people in your life. Agreements like, “This is just what we do together. This is how we have fun.” If we both are doing the same thing, it feels more justified. Neither of us has to think too hard about our own choices because we’re making the same choice. When you step outside of that agreement, the other person may feel uncomfortable, and that’s okay. Their discomfort belongs to them.

But there’s another possibility of what’s happening in these moments, and I think this is a piece that often gets overlooked in the standard advice of just writing someone off for not being supportive. What if they want you to drink because they’re noticing a real shift in you when you don’t? What if they say, “Because you’re more fun, you’re more relaxed, we have a better time together when you’re drinking.” Again, it would be very easy to decide, “Listen, this is just your problem, that they should support you no matter what, they should accept you no matter what. They shouldn’t need you to change who you are or to drink in order to want to spend time with you.” And again, there can be some truth to that, but there may also be some truth in what they’re saying.

And that was something huge that I had to reckon with early on in my own journey. And again, I’m not saying that just because they claim to notice a shift in you that shift is real. You’re the only person that can really assess if what someone is saying about how you’re showing up is right or wrong. It might just be an excuse to cover their own discomfort, but you can also decide for yourself whether or not there is a kernel of truth in what they’re saying.

And I know for me, especially early on, when I wasn’t drinking in social situations, I was really quiet and I was standoffish. Even in small groups, even with good friends that I had known forever. And I remember a very close friend of mine saying to me, “Rachel, you’re just not as much fun when you’re not drinking.” And I will tell you at the time, I was so hurt, I was so pissed off at him. I thought he wasn’t being supportive. I thought he was putting me in an impossible position. Frankly, I thought he wasn’t being a good friend. But I remember part of me also thinking, “He’s kind of right. I am less fun,” because two of my drink archetypes were the Mask and the Release. And I relied on alcohol not only to deal with social anxiety, but also to stop caring what people were thinking of me so that I could let loose and be a little wild and crazy and uninhibited.

By the way, if you want to know what archetypes show up for you, you can take the quiz at FindYourDrinkType.com to learn more about all eight. But I will tell you, when I first wasn’t drinking, even when I was drinking less, frankly, I wasn’t always as fun. I didn’t laugh as easily. I could be a lot more uptight and a lot more on guard because I had so long relied on alcohol, I just didn’t have other tools at the ready to help me loosen up and to help me deal with my anxiety. And it felt like this dichotomy between boring Rachel and fun Rachel. And oh, by the way, fun Rachel only comes out when she drinks.

And at some point, I realized that I had two choices. I could keep believing that drinking was the only way to access that fun part of myself, and without it, I would always be a little anxious and uptight and not that much fun, or I could stop outsourcing the job of loosening up to a drink, and I could learn how to do it on my own. Because that’s what happens with the archetypes. We’re simply outsourcing jobs to alcohol and then believing that we can’t possibly fulfill the job without it.

I needed to relearn how to do these things on my own, how to access parts of myself that I believed I could only access through drinking. And this is true for all the other archetypes too, whether you have the Upgrade or the Connector or the Reward, the Escape, the Hourglass, or the Remedy. So I could have stayed really defensive and angry with my friend. I could have dug in my heels and said, “Well, if you really supported me, you wouldn’t say that.” I could have written him off. I also could have decided, “Well, I guess that’s what he wants me to do, so I guess that’s what I’m going to do.”

But that would have prevented me from acknowledging something real. My archetypes were showing up when I wasn’t drinking, and that was the work that I needed to do the most in order to truly change my relationship with alcohol. The conclusion does not have to be, “Well, I guess I need alcohol to be fun or to relax or to connect or to have a good time or any of the other things that our brain has learned to use it for.” Your conclusion can be, “Huh, okay, that’s interesting. Maybe right now, being playful or relaxed or connecting does feel harder without alcohol. I wonder why that is. I wonder what I would need to do or how I would need to think differently in order to create those conditions on my own.”

And then, when you start getting curious, you immediately see those archetypes at work and the work that you need to do, which by the way, isn’t just about learning a new relationship to your cravings and urges, it’s about learning how to no longer outsource all of these jobs to alcohol, because when you start outsourcing all of these things to a drink, the drink starts to feel necessary. And when it feels necessary, it always makes it hard to say no and even harder not to go overboard.

So maybe your work is about learning how to stop constantly judging how you look or how you sound instead of trying to drink over those thoughts in social settings. Maybe it’s learning how to give yourself permission to relax at the end of the day, even when there’s more you could be doing instead of outsourcing that permission to a drink. Maybe it’s about learning how to be more affectionate or more spontaneous even when that feels kind of vulnerable. If we keep outsourcing all of these jobs to alcohol, all it does is reinforce that we can’t do these things on our own. So it turns a want into a need, and that need is what makes it so hard to say no.

What if drinking was simply your brain believing it had found a magical shortcut, when really all it had found was a loop that you kept going back to over and over again? Now listen, yes, of course, alcohol does indeed lower your inhibitions. It can dampen negative emotions. It can depress your central nervous system and make you feel more relaxed. Those changes are real, but the mistake is thinking that they’re only possible if you drink, because relaxation does not belong to alcohol, playfulness does not belong to alcohol, confidence does not belong to alcohol, connection does not belong to alcohol, being silly does not belong to alcohol.

Alcohol may be one way the brain has learned to get there, and it may feel like a shortcut. In fact, it may feel like the only way you know how to get there right now, but the very nature of how alcohol works in your brain is going to mean that over time, the same amount becomes less and less effective. So you need more and more to get to where you want to go. And so when you decide to take a break, when you press pause on your drinking, you suddenly discover, “Oh, I don’t actually know how to get there. I don’t know how to get where I want to go on my own yet.”

And that can be a really uncomfortable realization. It certainly was for me, and it was really uncomfortable when other people in my life noticed it as well and told me about it. But saying, “I don’t know how to get there yet,” is very different from saying, “If I’m not drinking, I can’t get there at all.” For me, my shortcut had started to feel like a crutch, and I wanted to learn how to loosen up without needing to have a buzz. I wanted to be able to laugh and connect and be silly without needing to drink.

Now, it’s not wrong or bad to use alcohol to alter how you feel, but I didn’t like that what had started out as a want felt more and more like a need that I didn’t have great control over. And I will tell you this, learning how to unravel my archetypes, to do these things on my own, it didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. And I wasn’t going to drink in order to make other people in my life feel more comfortable, but I also decided that I wasn’t going to dismiss everything the people in my life said as automatically unsupportive simply because I didn’t like hearing it.

You can take what other people say about their desires for wanting you to drink and just be curious. That’s what I want you to take away from all of this. When someone says, “Oh, I wish you could just have one,” or, “You’re not going to stop drinking forever, right?” You don’t have to immediately categorize them as being unsupportive. But you also don’t have to make their discomfort your responsibility. You don’t have to make their discomfort mean that you’re doing something wrong, or that they too believe that you’re better if you’re drinking. You can get curious about how their desire for you to drink is reflected back in their own relationship with alcohol. You can also see if maybe there’s a kernel of truth in their observations about how you’re different when you’re not drinking versus when you’re drinking and how that might connect back to your archetypes.

Curiosity is the name of the game here. This is the skill I want you practicing, not figuring out who’s right and who’s wrong, not deciding who’s supportive and who’s unsupportive, not automatically taking responsibility for everybody else’s feelings and discomfort, and not automatically dismissing feedback because it makes you feel uncomfortable. I want you to practice just getting curious. What belongs to them and what belongs to me? And is there anything here that I want to actually pay attention to?

Because someone can want you to drink for reasons that have everything to do with their own socialization and their own discomfort. And someone can want you to drink because they notice some of your archetypes at work. Sometimes both things are true, but neither one means you have to end up matching your journey to what they think it should look like.

All right, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.

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Hey guys, you already know that drinking less has plenty of health benefits. But did you know that the work you do to change your relationship with alcohol will help you become more of the person you want to be in every part of your life?

Learning how to manage your brain and your cravings is an investment in your physical, emotional and personal wellbeing. And that’s exactly what’s waiting for you when you join my membership Take a Break.

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So, head on over to RachelHart.com and sign up today, because changing the habit is so much easier when you stop trying to go it alone.