Celebrating 7 years of Sobriety

summary

In this episode, Katie Wrigley reflects on her journey to sobriety as she celebrates seven years of being alcohol-free. She shares the drivers behind her addiction, the health challenges she faced, and the mindset shifts that helped her commit to sobriety. 

Katie emphasizes the importance of addressing underlying issues driving addiction and highlights the joy and presence she has found in her life since becoming sober. Through her experiences, she encourages listeners to engage in their own personal growth and recovery journey.

takeaways

• Katie celebrates seven years of sobriety, reflecting on her journey.
• She discusses the drivers of her addiction, including insecurity and anxiety.
• Health challenges, including a knee replacement, prompted her to reconsider her drinking.
• Katie emphasizes the importance of mindset in overcoming addiction.
• She shares how sobriety has allowed her to enjoy life more fully.
• She encourages listeners to confront their own addictions and seek help.

Resources

• Website
• Book your mini session
• Learn more about Cognomovement
• Try Cognomovement for yourself!
• Book a call with Katie

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:00.888)
Welcome back to another episode of the Catapult Effect. My name is Katie Wrigley and today, actually tomorrow, we're gonna be official on the dot. I'm going to be celebrating seven years of sobriety. And this episode is talking about what were some of the drivers when I was drinking as well as what this sobriety has given me. So stay tuned, it's coming right up.

Thank you so much for joining me. As always, I really appreciate that you took the time out to listen to this episode when you have so many choices of what you can listen to on the internet. Thank you so much. As I mentioned in the intro, tomorrow I celebrate seven years of sobriety. Yay! And I'm super, super psyched about that because there was a time in my life where that did not seem possible. I remember sometime around the year 2010.

I actually tried to take a year off of alcohol, I made it 100 days and called it a win. I could not make it 365 days. I want to talk about what some of these drivers were and what my state of mind was back when I was drinking. And I didn't even realize that I had a problem until after I stopped. But I've talked about my story a few times, but I don't really go into detail about what hell it was.

between my ears and I want to be a little bit more open about that not because I want to go back there but because I think it's important to understand that I get it. I get what drives addiction, I get what drives anxiety, I get what drives stress. I was the biggest stress ball I knew. I still run a little on the intense side but nowhere near where I used to be and what's interesting is now I actually do work that really taps into people's lives in a deep way and

That quote unquote should be more stressful to me, but it was my corporate life where nothing was life or death. That was so much more stressful. And it wasn't corporate that made it that way. It was my mindset. And it was one of the drivers that kept me drinking. So if you looked at my life, going back 10 years ago, 10, 11 years ago, on the outside, it looked amazing.

Katie Wrigley (02:22.348)
I was taking really cool vacations. was going to Australia with friends. I was driving a Porsche. I was jumping out of airplanes. Not well, but I survived it. And on the outside, my life looked amazing. I had a lucrative career. I had all these kinds of opportunities. I got to meet really cool people. That has been one of the amazing things of both careers is I've got to meet so many cool people that it would not have met otherwise. But inside, it was hell.

to be me. Absolute hell. I was so insecure with who I was. I didn't really trust that people were going to like me to be me. And I talk about this in a lot more depth in my upcoming book that's coming out later this year or next year. Still working title on it. But that insecurity, not to mention the anxiety that was with me all the time. And sleep.

Yeah, if I had sleeping pills or I drank or smoked myself into a stupor, sure, then I slept fine. But on my own, completely sober, sleep just didn't happen. And it was hell to be me every day, even though on the outside everything looked great. Inside it really wasn't. I was so insecure. And drinking really helped me mask that.

It allowed me to let go of my inhibitions and have fun at levels I wasn't capable of doing at that time because I was so uncomfortable in my own body. And the initially, the urge to stop drinking came, it was just gonna be a year and it came from wanting to improve my health because this was when I was disabled. All that stress, anxiety, being hell in between my ears for decades really, all of that.

is what led to the eventual disability when I had my knee replacement. I'd already been in huge amounts of pain. I had been on crutches for the better part of 18 months. That was about 12 months at that point. I'd had multiple knee braces. I went from knee scope to knee surgery very quickly. Health was really declining. And again, a lot of that was because of the mindset that I was in and I was ignoring all the signs from my body. But that knee replacement and it...

Katie Wrigley (04:47.904)
should have been a success but it made pain worse and I developed some other pain conditions coming out of that. These were not helping my addictions. I went way deeper into cannabis definitely going past medicinal use even though that's what I told myself I was doing. I was really numbing because it was just it was miserable in my body. After that knee replacement I would wake up every morning in a panic and I wasn't drinking right after that because I was taking opiates for a while to help with pain.

but alcohol was something that was still fairly regular. And that wasn't the only addiction. I had also imbibed in cocaine. I had definitely had a cocaine problem. Co-obious amounts of weed. And I would try most other things. Heroin was my line. I wasn't going to touch that. But I did take opiates that weren't subscribed to me, prescribed to me, which is just a step off of heroin.

Sleeping pills, yes please, one of them, anything that would sedate I was pretty much on board with if could get my hands on it. And that wasn't the only way that I numbed. I also like to hide myself by a very active dating life, although I didn't date them for more than a night if you get my drift. But 2018 with that knee replacement, that...

really opened my eyes and I started to look at my health differently, especially when I tried everything the traditional medical system was suggesting and it wasn't working. And that was terrifying. I was in my early 40s and I wasn't sure how this was going to scale for a long life if I was going to be under that much pain. From limping that long, about 18 months again, my back got so

thrown out whack and all the injuries in my back got exacerbated during this time. so back pain, neck pain, my arm went numb a lot and that leg pain was just excruciating. So when I started to work with a wellness coach and actually I got sober like a week or two before we started working together, it just made sense in large part because I have this condition called hemochromatosis and

Katie Wrigley (07:08.504)
That's a very complicated word for saying that I don't metabolize iron. But the liver is the first organ that gets affected by high iron. So it's really not a good idea to be thrown alcohol on top of that. Plus it increases your iron absorption. So it was going to be working against me if I was going to be drinking. So I initially decided I was going to go for one year and that was it. And it was for health reasons to see if it would help my pain. It did help my pain and it gave me

so much more on top of that.

So it made me realize that I had actually been drinking to escape. And how many of you can relate to that? Where you've had a tough day and you just want to have a drink to just help make it better. And there's no judgment. I had to get disabled before I started looking at my stuff.

But how many of you who are listening have to have that drink at the end of the day? And what is it giving you when you have that drink? What it was giving me was it gave me an out. It tasted good, but it also made my problems not seem like they were as big. And I got an escape from dealing with them for a few hours. The problem with my drinking, I thought that I didn't have a problem because I drink that frequently.

I drank maybe once or twice a week. And when I was really abusing cannabis, that was actually more of what I did. And I really didn't drink in a big volume. But those first 90 days that I declared that I was going to stay sober were really, really tough. And they wouldn't have been tough unless there was some draw to alcohol or I hadn't actually been that honest about how much and how frequently I was drinking.

Katie Wrigley (08:57.07)
The other piece is that very rarely would I stick to the drink number that I said I was going to have before I started the night. I would say I would maybe have two or three. Very, very rarely did I stick to that. And to be fully honest, and I'm really not proud of this, there were many times I should not have been behind the wheel. Thank God I never hurt anybody else. And that was pure luck, or you can call it the fine intervention.

that is part of your belief system, I believe it was, so many times I could have gotten in big trouble for what I was doing. And I am so grateful and so blessed that I never hurt anybody else and I never actually got caught on the times where I was driving and I'm sure I was above the legal limit. Again, I'm not proud of that at all. I'm just really lucky that I survived those years. The other big thing that came out

as I started to get sober, is I started to look back at some of these big events that I'd gone to. Like I went to one of Motley Crue's farewell tours. You know, they had several of them. I went to the one in 2014 and I don't really remember it because I was so hammered. I went and saw Chelsea Handler, saw her twice. Once sober, once not sober. Don't really remember the show where I wasn't sober. everybody, I do remember everybody laughing really hard, even harder than they did.

At the first one, no idea. Same thing with Foo Fighters. Went and them twice. Once when I was sober, once when I was not. And the time when I was not, don't really remember. But there's a really cute picture of me double fisting drinks. Alcoholic, both of them. Yeah, but I don't remember. And so I had spent this money and this time and this energy going to these experiences that I went to because I wanted them to enhance my life.

and I have no memories of them. And all of those things together, the numbing, the escape and the difficulty and the inability to stop at a limit.

Katie Wrigley (11:07.118)
All of that made me realize, especially the difficulty stopping, that alcohol had more of a hold on me than I thought. And when I started to approach that first year that I had committed to, it got easier. After those first 90 days, it got a lot easier. And by the time a year came around, I was starting to waffle on whether I was going to allow it or not. And I talked to a couple of people I trusted, asked for their input. And I've actually since then learned through some of the things I learned in the heroic app.

which I'm huge fan of, that there's a lot of science behind it that when we 100 % commit to something, meaning I'm never gonna do this again, it's actually easier than I'm gonna have it every once in a while, a 97, 98 % commitment. Now it may feel like giving yourself an out is gonna be easier to commit to, but it's not. When we draw that bright line, and this was the same advice I got, is it's probably gonna be easier to just continue not to drink?

then it'll be to try to keep it under control. And if I'm really honest with myself, looking back at that, yeah, I would have been a hop, skip, and a jump before Mondays were a special occasion. And that was my excuse to drink. I can drink on a special occasion. it's Monday. It's a special occasion. Let's drink. So didn't really trust myself to bring it back again. As the years have gone by, it's gotten easier and easier. I have actually taken a sip of something.

that was at it was a totally safe party. Took a sip of something, realized it alcohol and it spit it back out again and rinse my mouth and spit again so I didn't get in any of that alcohol. I've been so committed to it and to staying sober. One of the things that I have realized in this commitment is I don't want to start again on day one. I don't want to start that count again and

To be honest, on some of the tougher days, that is what keeps me using the tools that I use now with Sober and not going into cannabis or something else to be able to know.

Katie Wrigley (13:19.094)
A lot of the mindset work that I did has allowed me to have this piece in the body. And like I mentioned, I had a lot of addictions plus sugar, plus TV, plus you name whatever distraction that keeps you from really being present. As Brene Brown says, I had the poo poo platter of addictions. And that was important for me to understand about myself is that that may always be my default. And when things get tough,

I'll still for a split second be like, sometimes I wish I hadn't given up drinking, but then I use one of the tools that I've acquired since doing this mindset work and I get through the challenge much easier, much faster and with a hell of a lot less suffering, sometimes with no suffering at all versus what I used to go through when I did this, when I was still drinking and using all of these tools to try to escape. We have to address.

the underlying thing that is driving these addictions. Otherwise, you will go from addiction to addiction to addiction to addiction. And they may get better, like mine did. Maybe they're less and less harmful the more you do this. But you're still doing something to escape the current mode.

Even though I'm big on identity and things that are strapped into our identity, and I believe all of us are way more than these labels that we put on ourselves, I still identify as an addict because this continues to help me stay into this healthier mindset that I have worked so hard to acquire. I mean, it would be really easy to just dump everything I've done for the last seven years, go out, get drunk, get high, whatever.

and go back to that old life, or at least it feels like it may be easier on the surface. But then I remember how shitty I felt all the time when I was in that life. All the masking because I was so miserable about who I was. I had no self-esteem. I didn't see my value as a person in doing this work to be able to stay sober, which is piece of cake at this point. And

Katie Wrigley (15:27.672)
building my confidence, understanding and seeing and owning my value, and being able to help other people get unstuck. I'll take that any day of the week, any day.

But I need to remind myself of what the default would have been without that mindset work. And so I'm always aware that I have the propensity to be addicted and I'm constantly watching myself. In the last several months, not even sure when, would have been around the end of February. So sometime around January, February, I stopped getting high at all to relax anything.

And then at the end of February, when I got COVID, I started to switch over to therapeutic THC and did an episode with Angel McClellan. She's the cannabis expert in Maine who I worked with. And now I only take cannabis at a therapeutic dose. I haven't been high since I started working with Angel. So it's been about five or six months. And again, it's been easy not to get high in part because thanks to her, I understand some of the downsides of the industry.

and some things that may be inadvertently attached to the plants that are pretty toxic, pesticides, arsenic, those kind of things. But it's easy to just do the therapeutic cannabis now and use my healthy tools. If I'm stressed, I'm gonna go for a walk. I'm gonna take a break. If my mind is racing, I'm gonna be in silence and I'm gonna let it run and process out whatever it needs to. I'm gonna grab my Cognum Movement Ball.

And I'm going to help move through any of these patterns that are making me feel stuck or that I can't continue to push through. And I keep my eye on the prize. The thing that is the most important to me, other than taking care of and being there for my family is the work that I do with my clients. That is my number one priority outside of my family is to show up a hundred percent for my clients. And so I'm continuing to do this work for myself because the more work I do,

Katie Wrigley (17:35.886)
the more space I have and the easier it is to hold space for other people who want to have the same in their lives. So sobriety has given me a lot. Looking in the rear view mirror, I can see how messy my life was. And I actually needed to hire two coaches at the time, one to help me with life in general and one to help me with health because I was so unhealthy by the time I got there in 2018 that I really needed help.

And I had just done debt consolidation, so finding two coaches around that seemed counterintuitive. And was the best thing I could have done. I wound up being laid off from my job the next year and was able to pay off my debt in a year and a half instead of in the four years that we had planned. So that was pretty awesome. And I was able to pay for those coaches. And it was the best financial decision that I had made because those two women helped really launch me in the right direction.

I was able to see that I can have just as much fun without alcohol as I could with alcohol. And being more secure in who I am and knowing that sometimes I just want to watch and look around and witness what's happening and other times I want to be more of a part of it. And a lot of it has to do with my mood, but none of it is coming out of a place of feeling insecure anymore.

It's coming from a place of confidence and of rational choice and deciding when are my times to be seen and heard and when are my times to hang out and be supportive of someone else. But I can have actually even more fun now because I remember what's going on. A good friend of mine got married almost to the day actually two years ago, almost to the day today. And a couple friends of mine and I, we all came to her wedding to support her. We're all good friends of hers.

and we were dancing our butts off. Now, two of my other friends were out there way more than I was, because they were in much better shape for dancing than I was. But all of us were sober. The next day, talking to the family about it, they were shocked that none of us had a drop of alcohol on our system, because they didn't think that people could have that much fun when they were sober. And that's one of the other things that makes sobriety challenging for us, is that it's so widely accepted and encouraged.

Katie Wrigley (19:59.15)
and utilize pretty broadly so people feel more comfortable and relaxed in these social settings versus doing the work to be comfortable and relaxed when they're sober in these settings. But I remember that wedding so clearly and I was present with my friends and I was enjoying every minute because I was sober. And I went to see Elton John with my parents and the person I was dating at the time three years ago. I remember every bit of it because again, I was sober, I was present.

Enjoyed my time in Alaska right up until I got COVID. My recent trip to Norway, fully present. Sometimes I'd kind of drop off, get a little bit of me time because we were around each other a lot and I had amazing company there to enjoy. But even with the most amazing company, we all need breaks sometimes. And as an introvert, I tend to need more breaks than others. But I got to enjoy beautiful scenery. I took in as many sights as I could. Amazing conversations with people. And I remember it all.

And yeah, some of them had drinks. No one got drunk. And that's a line for me. Could I have had a drink? Sure. But then I would have had to start my sobriety count over again from day one. And I don't want to tempt myself. It's easier not to drink and to stay 100 % committed to that than it is to go back to what I was doing.

And it's much easier to be me today than it was before. There's peace within my brain and between my ears. Even though my house is smaller, my car is no big deal. I don't have a flashy Porsche anymore. I'm not jumping out of airplanes and doing crazy shit that garners all sorts of attention. And I'm more comfortable and more secure in who I am today and the work that I'm doing and the value that I give as a human being than I've ever been before. And that is a gift.

I could not have gotten without sobriety and without doing the work to make sure that I wasn't going to continue going addiction to addiction to addiction. And it took me a while. Sugar was another addiction, but stopped drinking seven years ago. And I shared earlier that it was not even six months ago yet that I was still getting high on occasion. So it was another six and a half years.

Katie Wrigley (22:19.426)
before I was ready to let go of my favorite vice of choice, which was cannabis. And that was more of a mixed bag because I used it to sleep and I used it for pain and I used it for other things. And I also abused it and used it as an escape. And now I take very little cannabis at all and only enough to help put my body into homeostasis and to help me sleep at night. But I was able to sleep in Norway without cannabis.

So I don't actually really need it anymore. And I definitely don't need it at a psychoactive dose. It doesn't have any numbing going on with me at all anymore. And I'm really, really freaking proud of that. And I love how much more I can enjoy life and be present. And the last thing that I gave, I don't have nearly the amount of regrets that I used to have. I'm still human. I still do things I regret, but they're nowhere near.

where they were when I was still drinking. So thank you so much for joining me today and hearing about my path with sobriety and how hellish it was to be me before I started doing this work. And doing this work, I can't stress this enough, best thing I've ever done for myself. And if you choose to do this work for yourself, I give you mad kudos. It's not for the faint of heart, and it's gonna be some of the best work you'll ever do.

and it will be the best thing you can do for yourself too.

Until next time, please be well.