SUMMARY KEYWORDS

drinking, midlife, perimenopause, sobriety, alcohol, hormones, sleep, mood, stop drinking, stopped drinking, sober, not drinking, alcohol-free, sobriety starter kit, community, connection, life changing, support, moderate, coping skills, coping mechanism, women, brave, rebuilding, life, mixed emotions, early motherhood, recovery, married, mom, kids, mental health, quit drinking, quitting drinking, mantras, people pleaser, anxiety, boundaries , navigate, remove alcohol, archetypes, rest, pause, regulate, regualtion, releasing, taken stock, Hormone Replacement Therapy, Doula, Menopause Doula

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Kate Baily

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a bus, how to sit with your emotions, when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

Hey there. Welcome back to the Hello Someday podcast. If you are a woman in midlife and it’s been feeling intense lately, you are not alone. For a lot of women right now, it looks like one minute you are moving between work and family and all the responsibilities. And the next, you are wide awake at 3:00 AM and wondering why your body and your mood seems to be changing overnight.

So, if that sounds familiar, today’s episode is for you.

[00:02:00]

I’m talking with my friend Kate Baily, author, speaker, coach, and menopause doula about why midlife can feel like a perfect storm and how alcohol is making it so much worse.

 

You might remember Kate from past episodes. She co-wrote, Love Yourself Sober and Love Your Sober Year, and she’s also been on the show talking about Sober October.

 

So, if you want to hear any of those, you can go back to hellosomedaycoaching.com/47 Or hellosomedaycoaching.com/136 or hellosomedaycoaching.com/233.

I love Kate. We’ve met in person, even though she lives in the U.K.. She’s 9 years sober and deep in her own midlife transformation.

 

So, today we’re going to dive into

hormones and alcohol consumption.

Why drinking can amplify symptoms of hot flashes, weight gain, mood swings, poor sleep.

[00:03:00]

Why sobriety is a midlife superpower that helps balance hormones, improve sleep, and boost energy.

How stress and overwork are the other big culprits and what to do about them and why?

Community is essential when medical care doesn’t always give women the full picture.

So, Kate’s here to share the real tools that work in the messy, beautiful reality of midlife. So welcome, Kate.

 

Hey, lovely to see you, Casey.

Hi. I’m excited you’re back. I always love talking to you. So, we’ve talked about alcohol-free living and motherhood, but now your work has evolved to focus on midlife.

 

So, what inspired you to make the shift? And I want to hear about how your experience guided your work.

Yeah, well the simple answer is that I entered perimenopause, menopause transition, went through the midlife. You know, I’m in the midlife transition myself and sort of, so it kind of grew my work, grew up with me, I guess.

 

[00:04:00]

And, you know, If it’s happening to us, it’s happening to the women we know, right? We are not in a container, are we? We’re not living on an island. So, I noticed that the people in Love Sober community, the women I was speaking to, at my yoga studio and then clients, were also coming as well with these very specific midlife transition themes, you know, and where they may have had felt like water type sobriety. Maybe they were suddenly wobbling or they’d gone, or they’d gone back to drinking or they were turning up and just saying it’s just not working anymore. And that would be that kind of early 40s piece. So, the signs were ones that I could not ignore.

 

Yeah, that makes total sense. I have seen that in my groups as well, and in my work, I just turned 50 and so this episode is something I’m super interested in because I’m in the middle of it myself.

So, you are a menopause doula, and I have to admit that I have never heard about that before. Of course, I’ve heard of doulas when you’re giving birth. But can you explain what that means and how you support women with that work?

 

Yeah, and it’s, so, it’s quite new in the U.K. I think. And again, there is that of need.

So, a menopause doula, it’s like a kind of the doula that we know when we’re pregnant – helping women through a process. And it’s a nonmedical support professional. So, you work alongside with lifestyle, with helping women to, identify the symptoms that they might be experiencing. Make some sense of it or decode the confusing information that might be out there.

[00:06:00]

You know, it might look like putting the team around the woman like to, you know, are encouraging allies, you know, and for that, we need a language and we need a framework and we need to understand it in order to then ask what we need. So, it’s that really holistic kind of piece that involves community, lifestyle and sometimes liaising with the, the medical profession as well, who, you know, they don’t receive a lot of training generally. Our GPs here are general practitioner doctor, I think they have half a day on menopause training in med school, and they have very few training, specifically in alcohol. So ,it’s almost to fill the gaps in and help to communicate with healthcare professionals.

Yeah, I totally agree, and I’ve talked with guests about this before. Actually, if anyone is interested in listening to a different podcast on sex and menopause and hormones and that transition after.

 

[00:07:00]

This podcast episode 279 is another one that we dive into with this topic, and one of the things that is interesting about it is we talk about how little training doctors and medical professionals have on this topic and the reasons why, but it is pretty hard to find an expert in. These are in podcast episode 279. There are suggestions of different places you can go, like specifically online doctor services in the US that you can reach out to, so that’s helpful. It is really important to find someone, a doula, a doctor, people in your lives who are well versed in what’s going on, and it’s kind of amazing that a lot of doctors don’t know about this.

[00:08:00]

I feel like in the last maybe 2 or 3 years, I’ve seen a lot more books and a lot more people on podcasts and information talking about perimenopause and menopause, but I think it’s, it’s just another indicator of how much women’s health has been ignored. The fact that we go through perimenopause and menopause for a decade.

 

Mm-hmm. Nobody was talking about this 3 years ago. Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. It’s something that could get us very, very, very angry and quite rightly so. And so, I kind of comfort myself within, I know in terms of the UK, and I feel like us as Gen Xers, we are shouting loud about it and things are changing.

I know in the UK and now that there are menopause doulas and there are places and information services that are now, you know, much more publicly available. So, but it’s been a long time coming right.

 

[00:09:00]

For all the reasons like, you know, let’s you know, it’s a kind of hashtag, don’t get me started on the patriarchy.

Oh my God. I think you can’t go through midlife transition and not go there.

 

Yeah, absolutely. I feel the exact same way. One of the things that you’ve said to me that I love is, you’ve said, midlife is often a portal, not a crisis. So what makes this time in life such a turning point, especially for women who are sober or questioning their drinking?

 

Yeah, so when I say, it’s a portal, not a crisis, I want to caveat that in that it feels like a crisis. It feels like a crisis when you are not being supported, when you don’t know what the hell is going on when you’re suddenly hit by the hormone truck and you’ve got to catch up on all the information and it feels like a crisis when we have, when we are still expecting ourselves to perform like we did in our 30s.

[00:10:00]

 

When we have these really big foundational health shifts going on, so it can feel like a crisis, but with the right support, with the right information, with community around us with. Allies, and that can be with, you know, family members. It means with things shifting at work for us with correct accommodations and adjustments for us.

Then there’s also this other aspect of it, which I feel is really beautiful, really empowering. As the estrogen drops, the fucks drop with it. The giving a fuck, excuse my French, can often go with that. And that, there is Science behind that, you know, that caring hormone. And it’s like, we start to shift and I believe that, you know, aging is a privilege and if we want to at this point, we get to take a bit of an audit because we can’t not, if we carry on like, we’ve been doing. It literally can implode.

[00:11:00]

So, we have to. It’s almost like nature forces us to kind of go, okay, honey, what’s working? What isn’t? Let’s get rid of the stuff that’s not working. Let’s bring in more of the stuff that isn’t, so we get an opportunity to actually start being a co-creator.

In this kind of transition aging process, I believe in a way that I do think men don’t. They just go careering through it and buy cars and my husband bought a motorbike and then is knackered all the time. They just go through their own midlife crisis. But they don’t go through all the hormonal changes.

No. And I don’t think, then they go through the emotional side, which actually can provide, can just yield a lot of the gifts, which obviously we’ll go onto later.

Yeah. I mean, I think that much like quitting drinking or taking a break from drinking, reevaluating your relationship with alcohol or moving into sobriety, you really need people who get it.

 

[00:12:00]

Yeah. People who’ve been through it or people who are going through it at the same time, because much like stopping drinking, people who aren’t going through it. Just don’t get it. And I remember I had my first hot flash and I was sitting on the couch and my husband was sitting there too, and I was just like, oh my God, what is happening? And you know, texted my group of like 7 girlfriends and was like, Holy shit. Is this what a hot flash feels like? Is this what it is? But of course, my son and husband were right there, so I was like. Oh my God, I am feeling this.

This is crazy. I’d never felt it before. And one, they didn’t get it, but two, and of course my son was like 14, so I don’t blame him, but it became a joke, like he pretended to help me up the stairs, like I was elderly and my husband laughed and I was just like, What the actual fuck.

But even our mothers who went through perimenopause and menopause, you know, 20 or 30 years before us, they didn’t have the information either.

 

[00:13:00]

Right? And it’s also 20 or 30 years removed. So I think it is really important that we talk with our girlfriends about it, but also that we talk with experts who can provide more information. In addition to the Me Too compassion we get from our friends.

Yeah. Yeah. And I do, I feel like that’s really important too. Like this good quality information is, is really key. We’ve got, ’cause knowledge is power and what we’ve got. If we haven’t got attitudes and opinions here, we’ve got foundational health stuff going on, and if we are not informed, we can’t then advocate for our healthcare needs with that. So, I think that’s going to be the foundation.

[00:14:00]

Yeah. We don’t realize how big it is, right? No, we don’t. We don’t realize how big it is. It’s, you know. Hey, we have hot flashes and we are more emotional and we’re having trouble sleeping or whatever else, but we don’t realize when we’re going through it that this is actually something that we need support and care for.

Yeah. Absolutely, and it’s, it’s really key for all of those, those reasons that you mentioned before as well. This kind of, I mean, you, it’s a funny example isn’t it, of your son helping you up the stairs, but I feel like you’ve got this kind of macro level and micro level going on, so we’ve got. You know, society telling us we can’t age, we should look like a 20-year-old supermodel.

[00:15:00]

You know, we’ve got all of this kinds of, oh, we, we must be, you know, we finally made it into the workplace, so you can’t possibly take time off because of you’ve got, you know, menopause symptoms. We also are worried, probably worried for our job. So, we’ve got kind of a macro level, so we’ve got a, you know, and that’s shifting in the UK as well in terms of, you know, there’s a legislative thing that needs to happen and there’s activism around that.

We’ve also got it kind of on a, you know, on a micro level within our own families and with our friendship groups. And I feel like one of the really important points about being, now that we have. Groups emerging and structured and menopause doulas and menopause doula groups. We have like the menopause cafe, things like that.

Is that if it’s not guided, ’cause sometimes we’ve got this in sobriety groups I think as well. So, we need people further ahead, don’t we?

[00:16:00]

Who can give hope and reassurance and we need people who are going through it to go, what the actual fuck with us? But these containers, they can be. We don’t want to get into that.

Oh my God. Just a moan fest. It’s so bad. And I’m, it’s so awful.

Yeah. And we’re just going to feel so bad because that’s disempowering. So, it is like, okay, well yeah, well let’s, what are we going to do about it though? ‘Cause it’s not going away. So, we’ll need that. It’s much like sobriety and quitting drinking in that you deserve real solutions.

 

Yes. Not just other people being like, oh my God, I’m on day one again. Like you need people, like you said, who are further along to walk you through it, but who also have expertise.

Yeah. And for a lot of traditional sobriety spaces, the midlife transition is missing.

 

Yeah. So true. Yeah, and I mean, I think we know how don’t we, we’ve gone through this period where, I mean the online space for has been great for female sobriety, for women’s sobriety because before that there were just traditionally male recovery spaces, which were not.

 

[00:17:00]

Yeah, absolutely. Gender appropriate. And we have to have these spaces that are gender appropriate. We also have to have a stage appropriate ones. And I do think there’s a lot of us. Gen X is again, because this, all of this like blew up about 10 years ago, didn’t it? Which suddenly a lot of us kind of were able to get sober in a way that we couldn’t access other modalities before, like these spaces.

So, we’re kind of writing the rule book, I think. And yeah, it’s going through it myself and realizing that clients were coming to me was like, oh, I need to train in this. Because if I’m just doing a mindset piece with you, if I’m just doing a habit change piece with you, but I’m not, we are not actually getting to grips with foundational health shifts and hormonal rollercoasters, then that is not, it’s not enough.

[00:18:00]

It’s got to be. We’ve got to have that in the picture, right. To support women who are going through the midlife.

Absolutely. At least be able do signposting, you know, you stopped drinking 9 years ago. Yeah, I stopped drinking almost 10 years ago and I feel like some of the coaches who’ve been around for a while versus, you know, people who are more recent in starting this work are growing up with it and are adding to their expertise about it.

That’s really, I think that’s great. A lot of the women in my community are, you know, between the ages of 40 and 60, and so going through that specific midlife transition, but also it’s the crunch time, right?

 

[00:19:00]

A lot of us still have young kids or teenagers, which require a lot of support. A lot of us have careers where, you know, at these ages, a lot of times you’re at higher levels of your career progression, which has more stress and demands and pressure, and then you’re also having aging parents who need more support or you know, who need more support.

So, it really is sort of like. The trifecta of pressure as you’re going through hormonal changes and all the rest. So, can we talk about hormones, how they impact sobriety, your stress, your cravings, your mental health, you know what’s happening in your body?

 

Yeah. So, with alcohol, we look at the liver, right?

[00:20:00]

Because we’ve got, we’ve got the fluctuation of estrogen. So, we know that. So, about 10 years before your menopause date. So, if you menopause, I’ve menopause at 53. So, that was my, when my periods had stopped for a year. So, that’s when you, postmenopausal right? For a year after, from a year after your last period. So, you can be in perimenopause for 10 years before that. So, that means your estrogen levels are fluctuating.

So, we’ve also got, obviously the sex hormones, testosterone, progesterone, but the one that we are really looking at is estrogen, which is fluctuating like madam, which will give us all of those symptoms, you know, the hot flashes, poor sleep, joint aches. You know, the brain fog, we’ve got receptor estrogen receptors in every cell in the body, so it’s really affecting everything.

 

And there’s a great TED Talk, which was signpost Dr. Lisa Moscone, that looked at estrogen and the brain because you know, the brain fog and cognitive impairment so I’ll give you the link to that so you can put it, put it in the show notes.

 

If you’re listening to this episode and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit®. The Sobriety Starter Kit® is an online self study, sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step-by-step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one-on-one coaching. And The Sobriety Starter Kit® is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it, when it fits into your schedule.  You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time. This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step-by-step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life. You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better, you’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go towww.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course.

 

[00:21:00]

Great. That’s really worth looking at, you know, in terms of, I feel like, again, not to do a, a moan first, but in order to go, yes, this is real and therefore I need to advocate for this. And then, you know, and also resource and support it.

So, we’ve got that and then we’ve also got, you know, we’ve got the cortisol piece as well, which is impacted by all the stuff that you talked about. You know, the aging parents, this kind of like impacted kind of weight that we’ve got on us. So the stress levels, we’ve got to be really kind of, we, it’s almost like we are, it’s, we are required to be superhuman, isn’t it, at this point.

So, to put our best foot forward. Alcohol impacts the liver. So, if your liver is prioritizing trying to remove alcohol because it will, it’s the poison. It won’t be metabolizing estrogen or removing extra estrogen that you don’t need. So, we really need the liver on board to make all of our hormones, the stress ones, the sex ones, all of them to be firing on all cylinders.

 

[00:22:00]

So that we can stay as regulated as possible. So, alcohol is, is just hits all of those. It disrupts the HPA axis, the hypothalamus, adrenal pituitary one. So even though we might think, oh, we’re having a glass of wine at the end of the day or half a bottle, and that helps me relax. It’s not shifting you into parasympathetic nervous system.

It’s whacking that. Hormonal adrenal system. And if we’re using it and using it, many of us have been using it for decades. It’s going to give us chronic high levels of chronic low levels. So the cortisol piece, no matter what stress we’ve got going on, is going to be much, much worse if we’ve got alcohol in the picture.

And then obviously with the hormonal, the fluctuations of estrogen. That’s a no-no for what I’ve already, you know, the reason I’ve said, then we, we, we’d be looking at the holistic.

[00:23:00]

I’m a fan of HRT. I’ve been on Hormone replacement therapy.

 

Okay. And I have been on that, so estrogen and progesterone. Yeah. Since I was about 50. So, that’s quite late on for me. ’cause again, I was discovering this quite late. But if we are, you know, having our HRT and following an alcohol-free lifestyle and looking after the stress as much as we can, then we are going to be functioning so, so much better.

 

So, I mean it’s, and it’s interesting Casey, because we know this, but I’ve been a member of menopause forums and I won’t mention which ones, but how, how much the alcohol piece is the elephant in the room. They’ll be talking about everything else, upping your protein, doing weight bearing exercise, making sure we do a yoga Nidra.

 

So, we are adjusting, you know, all of the food.

[00:24:00]

No one will be talking about the alcohol, obviously, because it’s, you know, it goes on from mom’s little helper, doesn’t it? To this, you know, the mythology of, of it being a treat. So yeah, if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have been unpicking that for a while, which is great news that you’re not just starting there, you know.

Yeah. And one of the issues with women drinking when they’re going through perimenopause and menopause is that the symptoms of sleeping poorly and stress and hot flashes and inflammation, like all of those symptoms are made significantly worse. Yeah. By consuming alcohol. And they mirror the effects of alcohol withdrawal and.

I really feel just like getting a handle on your mental health, you really need to remove the alcohol piece of it so you have a clear baseline, so you have clear views of what your symptoms are so that you can find real solutions for them.

[00:25:00]

But if you’re drinking as a coping mechanism, you’re making those symptoms worse, but you’re also masking what you are feeling based on alcohol withdrawal or perimenopause. Or menopause, and you can’t get as much help from your doctor if you have those waters all muddied mud.

Yeah, absolutely. What are some of your go-to tools for regulating the nervous system or calming the chaos when things feel unmanageable at this point in midlife?

Yeah. I’ve got some foundational practices I mean, obviously sobriety. It. Nothing exists without that because of that baseline that you talked about and that reliable witness that’s there so that you can tell whatever else is fluctuating.

[00:26:00]

There would also, I so this part about this being holistic and we are, look, we’re talking about a lot about the body, aren’t we at the moment? I feel like while I know to be true is that the body is kind of the answer. The body has to be the teacher in the midlife. So a lot of the stuff, the, the foundational practices for me, the answers are in the body.

So, my yoga practice, I’ve been practicing alongside around my sober date. So, I felt I was able to get to yoga classes and fell in love with it alongside my sobriety. So it’s been this constant companion and my yoga practice has changed from the fast hot yoga to much more yin, so much more slow restful looking after that cortisol response.

Rest, rest, rest, rest. So that’s been really important. I also spend a lot of time in nature. I have a dog, I have two dogs and I am forced to, and it’s been one of the biggest gifts is I get out to the woods and the meadows and I process there.

[00:27:00]

You know, whatever’s going on at home because there’s a lot going on in my family, like with most families, teenagers, there’s a lot going on.

And so I know that, I know, you know, and I know all the science behind it now. You know, all that kind of regulation we do when we’re. Our gaze is going to the horizon and coming back and the cross body of the walking is very good for GABA in the brain. Balancing those kind of neurotransmitters.

So, sort of, by accident, I put together this kind of sensory based kind of soothing. Package. The other side of that, and now I’m mentioning sensory tools. I was at a diagnosis at A-D-H-D-A couple of years ago. And part of that is ’cause my children were, and then I was like, huh, well if they are, I’m much more a DHD than they are.

And so I realized that I had auditory processing difficulties and some sensory.

[00:28:00]

Some physical, you know, like touch hot, cold sort of stuff going on. So, I have noise canceling headphones to make things go quiet. What else? The bit of the weight, you know, my, my exercise comes and goes, I think yoga is my foundation, but some of that weight training. I do not, don’t make me run. If someone tried to make me run, I’d cry. There’s no way I am pounding away on those joints. So. There’s that, and then a sensible diet. And the last bit of that is, and this I think is a really important part of the midlife and this connection piece.

And I think my brilliant menopause doula menopause school founder calls it vitamin F. So having fun dancing. I do the, you know, all the full, the full moon dancing at our yoga studio. We’ve got that covered. And I just went to the Isle of White Festival four days. I dance solid with another sober body.

And honestly, I just feel like. With those foundational pieces.

[00:29:00]

Without those, I don’t think I’d be doing that. I don’t think I’d be able to get some of the cream that’s going on with these lovely somatic things and these rituals and these going off to festivals with, because I would, I wouldn’t have the energy.

I’d be absolutely knackered just trying to cope. Yeah. And I bet a lot of women listening to this and myself included, don’t you mentioned like festivals, equinoxes. Oh yeah. Rituals, rhythms of nature. And I am not as familiar or comfortable or haven’t participated in any of those pieces. Mm-hmm. So can you talk about like.

Those things a bit more in depth in terms of, I know you’re an advocate for seasonal living. Yeah. And I wouldn’t even know where to find a festival like you’re describing. So talk to me about that. What do you have? You have Coachella, don’t you?

[00:30:00]

Yeah, but I think that’s like for 20 somethings. I was, yeah, I thought you do a lot of drugs.

That’s just my impression. Yeah. I thought that though there were most of these people there at the Is of White Festival, which was one of those first ones. The Isle of White Festival had Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix. The doors, like when it started, it was, it’s still doing it large, but yeah. So, okay. So, but, but being serious.

The seasonal living a hundred percent. And that, you know, the book, a book I Love Your Soy Year really tapped into that. So where I’m going with this, a i, I feel like being a Brit, we are very, very seasonal beasts in England, we are ruled by the weather. And so there’s a way that we can’t kind of ignore it, and the seasons really are very marked.

You know, our winter goes on forever.

[00:31:00]

We’ve got Anglo-Saxon, you know, rituals around it, like the Yule tide, midwinter, the solstice around that. You know, Easter is still big. A lot of the Christian festivals were put onto our Celtic and Nordic framework, you know, when, when you know, the Christians came over, the Romans came in and stuff.

So, there’s a lot of that. I think it’s kind of deep. I think there’s something maybe cultural there for a start, but I feel like tuning into these bigger rhythms of nature. So part of this midlife transition is that. Maybe that we are comfortable, especially with a group of women who we can laugh about it with.

And we’ve got people ahead who are saying, it’s not dreadful. Ladies, come on. I’m still dancing. That we can look at aging slightly differently and not be so afraid of it. And. We are co-creating that as Gen X’s.

[00:32:00]

I do believe that we haven’t had post menopause models that they’re being, they’re starting now.

So, the next generation, they’re going to know all this. They’re going to be, that’s fine there. It’s not scary anymore ’cause we’ll have done it. Right. But for us, those kind of archetypes. You know, you might have heard about the ma maiden mother crone kind of archetypes. So I was reading these. Okay. I have not.

So will you quickly go through, okay, so that’s the, those things are like the ma I’m not, I’m not that woo woo. I’m super practical. So the medical stuff and the, you know, practices yeah. Some of them I’m familiar with, but yes, the crone, is it the crone and, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

So, it was, you know, the archetype, so the female archetypes are, were before they were maiden mother.

So these are really, look, it’s puberty, it’s childbirth and it’s menopause. It’s just literally, those are our big life transitions.

[00:33:00]

And so, there are those, the archetypes of those that are, you know, if you are interested about that, you know, you can look at the moon, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like moon as well, the triple moon goddess.

That’s, so it’s, it’s kind of there in all of those. Would it be like sort of neopagan wicker things, but it’s pretty mainstream now. You’ll find a lot of it on Instagram. That, that it’s, I read somewhere actually that all of that is really trending at the moment. There’s a lot of this stuff all, all over Instagram.

So what was I saying? So, but I was just recently reading, so there’s a great site in the UK for that. I get my collagen from, that’s the other thing I get, I get really good quality collagen. And oils, Omega-3 oils and I have cacao at night from a company called, and I will give them a plug ’cause I think they’re great.

They’re called, Ancient and Brave. And if you’re a Brit, Davina McCall is their kind of flagship woman. So, you’ll know her.

[00:34:00]

But they have just written a blog and it had a fourth archetype, and now this is what I’m interested in. So I feel like we’re shifting the narrative. So now, we’ve got Maiden, we’ve got Mother, then we’ve got Queen, and then we go into Crone and this queen thing is us in our midlife. So now, we are living longer and quite rightly, there’s got to be a shift there with our archetype. So, that’s like 45 to 60 odd, 65 is what is where they’re, you know, talking about that. So, and, and if anyone’s scared of the word crone, ’cause it’s conjures up all these kind of scary images of witches.

I have been reminded recently that that comes from the word Corona, which was. Is it Latin? It’s got French roots. It’s got Spanish roots for Crown.

[00:35:00]

So this is coming from these positive Models of aging, of us reaching our wisdom years, you know, so leaning into archetypes, leaning into wider cycles, and finding something that feels good to you on that kind of spiritual, doesn’t need to be religious.

Maybe you tap into that all with nature. Maybe you find it creatively, but there’s something about giving room to that, which I hear. All the time in our community, people are just hungry for processing life, connecting with things on a slightly deeper level maybe. Yeah, I know you’ve created this group experience that runs from the fall equinox to early December. So, tell me about what that is, but also why this season?

Yeah, so I’ll be honest. I mean, if you kind of Google the archetypes and the seasons, ’cause this a seasonal element. So, spring being maiden, summer being the mother energy, four being that, that kind of queen age.

[00:36:00]

So, I wanted to do it seasonally because it just, and it feels really good. And I also think one of the reasons why I did it is sometimes when we go inward.

In the Autumn, we talked about this last year, you know, you, you sort of tend to retreat indoors as the weather’s closing in. It can be a naturally introspective time. So I just think supporting that from a sobriety point of view is kind of really important. So with this, with this group program, obviously sobriety is the, is the, is the foundation.

 

It’s for women in recovery or women who are sober. And running through to that kind of early December. I have another program that runs them, but that’s a whole other story. So, but I do think sort of supporting this end of the year is really important as we go towards the holidays and we go through Christmas and dah, dah, dah.

 

So there’s that. And then, the program itself looks at some of the pillars that we’ve talked about in, in this episode already.

[00:37:00]

And the first being, we rest, we have to pause to replenish and to take stock and do a bit of an audit. So with that, I just, we, we meet, it’s a group call and we, we use coaching tools and we use the group forum to share experiences and reflect together essentially, and then set personal goals.

 

So, and, and I use Coaching models and Positive Psychology. Things to make us feel good. And we do somatic practices as well to calm and regulate the nervous system. So, there’s all of that. It’s like, okay, it’s about, if you know, like we assembled the sober toolkit. It’s like this is the sober midlife toolkit.

 

It’s got to have the rest, it’s got to have, it’s got to have those two’s. Then we go through to the second module, which is about releasing once we’ve taken stock. There’s a lot of things hanging around in my experience that weren’t working anymore, but that maybe just were just habitually hanging on and I was really ready to let some of them go.

 

[00:38:00]

One of the things was that the running group, I really didn’t want to run anymore, but I felt like I should. So, let’s have a look at the should’s and let’s get rid of some of those. Is there, have I got the energy to people please? Do I care what? My brother-in-law thinks really? So, it’s a bit like prior, get your priorities in order and kind of shed some of those should’s.

So, we’re working with that in the kind of second part of this, regulation being a really important part as well. We talked about that. That’s the psyched around hormones around cortisol. And I’ve got a menopause tracker. Because some people might be joining this, they might be post menopause or like me, and then we have a post menopause party and then, but you might be like early menopause or you know, perimenopause.

 

So, a really good tool, we need to track our data.

[00:39:00]

So, I have a fabulous resource from the menopause school, from my menopause school training. Excuse me, which has all the symptoms and then food, mood, diary. Planner tracker and we go through three months. You get that right at the beginning, and this is a three month, 12 week program. There’s a reason for that. It’s a season, so yay or the woo, but also we need to track our symptoms for 12 weeks to be able to go to the GP and say, this is my data.

 

This is what it is. So that’s good evidence for, for when you have to advocate for your healthcare needs to your 12-year-old doctor. Then you know the ones, yes. We look at values, we root, look at values, strengths. We haven’t got to this part of our lives without a lot of skills, a lot of strength. So it’s a real, this is about celebration and identifying and revisiting our core values and those things that are really important to us.

Next, just before we end, we look at that ritual piece that we’re talking about, and I really love.

[00:40:00]

The word ritual. I feel like these, it’s kind of routines and boundaries work, but routines can feel quite restrictive. Rituals can feel kind of creative and looser and a bit of creativity with them. So ,that’s why we call them that.

 

But it’s really about establishing a rhythm of practices that really support you. And that’s up to you. ’cause we get to choose. We’re all supporting each other, choosing exactly what’s going to work for us. And then the last bit, the rise. How do we want to go forward? You know, meeting our future self, our sage, having a little look about that, and how do we want to, you know, what do we want to take forward with us as we go towards our, you know, our, our next chapter or, you know, step up.

We are like, it’s almost like stepping across the threshold that everyone told us to be scared of. And it’s like, well actually, how do I want this to feel? How do I want? What am I taking with me?

[00:41:00]

So it’s that pos, it’s a container for us to really establish where we are and what we need now, and to imagine in the company of like-minded others what the next bit could possibly hold for us.

Yeah. That sounds fantastic and there is so much included in your program, all the different phases. When is the next one beginning?

So, this is September the 21st is when the gate’s open. I’ll be sending the information out, but we actually have our group calls on a Monday night at 7:00 PM GMT.

So, that’ll be Lansing in the States different times. But you can put your time zone calculator on that one and see if it works. They’re all recorded as well. So, if you like that kind of, group, but sometimes you just want to get the information and maybe you’re shy and you just want to watch and you can contribute.

We have a chat in between, so that you can connect with the others.

[00:42:00]

So things are recorded for catch up. So with this as well, I do this process in my coaching as well, my one-to-ones, and sometimes that suits people more. You know, there’s the midlife doula hat with one than my one-to-one sobriety coaching.

So, you know, some people prefer groups, some people prefer one-to-one. So that’s, that’s all there as well.

Thank you. That’s awesome. How can people follow up with you if they want to learn more?

So, you can go to lovesober.com. All the information is there, all the different pages, and you can book a free discovery call with me.

If anything, you know, you want to chat through any of the programs that I do or the coaching, yeah, just feel free to reach out and book one of those calls. There’s a link there and that’ll book you in. This is my favorite topic, sobriety and midlife are my special interests.

 

Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about this topic. Mm, thank you so much.

[00:43:00]

Thanks for having me on, Casey. It’s always a delight.

 

So, thank you for coming in. I appreciate that.