Have you ever found yourself caught in a cycle that seemed impossible to break free from? Emma Gilmour, the driving force behind Hope Rising Coaching, certainly did. Both her candid revelations about navigating the alcohol culture, her journey through neurodiversity, and the empowerment found in confronting societal standards will resonate with many. We cover her past, along with the challenges of being autistic and ADHD, and how it led to a transformation that is nothing short of inspiring.
Rethinking our relationship with alcohol isn't just about cutting back; it's about understanding the deep-seated beliefs and marketing ploys that have shaped our perceptions. This discussion helps to reveal the alcohol industry's allure, examining the empty promises of relaxation and the deflective 'drink responsibly' rhetoric. We expose the ways women have been uniquely targeted and how this has affected our collective consciousness. This episode is a call to question the narratives we've been sold and to recognize the power of education and self-awareness in rewriting our stories.
Later in the episode, Emma introduces us to the Great Aussie Alcohol Experiment, offering hope and practical support for those reassessing their drinking habits. Her insight into the value of diverse thinking paves the way for societal change, and we share how to reach her for anyone drawn to her message. This episode isn't just a podcast; it's a journey towards understanding and change, with Emma Gilmore as our guide.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
Have you ever found yourself caught in a cycle that seemed impossible to break free from? Emma Gilmour, the driving force behind Hope Rising Coaching, certainly did. Both her candid revelations about navigating the alcohol culture, her journey through neurodiversity, and the empowerment found in confronting societal standards will resonate with many. We cover her past, along with the challenges of being autistic and ADHD, and how it led to a transformation that is nothing short of inspiring.
Rethinking our relationship with alcohol isn't just about cutting back; it's about understanding the deep-seated beliefs and marketing ploys that have shaped our perceptions. This discussion helps to reveal the alcohol industry's allure, examining the empty promises of relaxation and the deflective 'drink responsibly' rhetoric. We expose the ways women have been uniquely targeted and how this has affected our collective consciousness. This episode is a call to question the narratives we've been sold and to recognize the power of education and self-awareness in rewriting our stories.
Later in the episode, Emma introduces us to the Great Aussie Alcohol Experiment, offering hope and practical support for those reassessing their drinking habits. Her insight into the value of diverse thinking paves the way for societal change, and we share how to reach her for anyone drawn to her message. This episode isn't just a podcast; it's a journey towards understanding and change, with Emma Gilmore as our guide.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
Welcome to A Dog Called Diversity. This week I have this fabulous woman Her name is Emma Gilmore and I met her a bit over maybe a year and a half ago nearly two years ago at a retreat north of Sydney and I really love the energy she puts out into the world and she talks about such interesting things. So welcome to the podcast, emma.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, Lisa. I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:
Oh, it's an absolute pleasure and you won't be able to see Emma, but she has funky, cool glasses, like I always wear, so she's rocking some pink glasses and black or tortoiseshell glasses. They're really, really cool. Emma has a bit. Her business is called Hope Rising Coaching and she's been on such an interesting journey to build this business. So I'm going to get Emma to start and tell us a bit about, yeah, journey to to where you are now, because it's been a really interesting path, I think it has.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much, lisa. It has been a really interesting path. It's uh I was just saying to Lisa before I got onto the podcast by goodness, I cannot even believe that I am here doing this and this is my job. It's so different to where I was maybe five, five or six years ago, and if somebody had told me then that I would be here as a autistic ADHD human being coaching people in changing their life around alcohol, I would have been like no way.
Speaker 1:
No way, no way. So how did you get here? What were you doing five or six years?
Speaker 2:
ago. So five or six years ago, I was working in corporate. I worked for companies like Mars and Disney and Coles um. I moved over from the UK in 2011. Before that I worked for 15 years for Warner Brothers in London. So I was all very media darling um, but very much working in the, you know, working with retailers and that in that at those days it was kind of videos and DVDs. So I was working in Soho and I had pretty pretty I would say, boozy uh experience of work.
Speaker 2:
Um, definitely drinks after work, definitely big glasses of wine. I remember that was the sort of thing in the 90s with these huge cobblets of wine and you'd you'd have two of them. You'd be absolutely um trollied. And I remember traveling home on the tube um really desperately, always hoping that I wouldn't fall asleep and sometimes finding I did and doing, you know, going back and forth One of the until somebody woke me up. Quite dangerous really in retrospect, but it seemed fine at the time, and so I always had a pretty interesting relationship with alcohol.
Speaker 2:
Um grew up in a family who alcohol was very much part of our culture. I would never have thought, you know a problematic relationship with alcohol. I just would have thought it was very normal, my parents drunk. They were very much of that generation where, um, you know, it's kind of seen as that sort of European way of bringing your kids up, where you introduce them to alcohol so that they got a taste for it, so that, hopefully, if they then became teenagers and were going to parties and, you know, doing all the things that we did, that they weren't, you know, shocked and drinking for the first time and getting completely plastered, but it didn't seem to really have that impact on me.
Speaker 2:
I still got completely plastered and got myself into all sorts of pickles from a pretty young age and I think I was definitely part of the culture for me, growing up in sort of school and then university, university I didn't drink so much, but then more, very much when I went to work, drinking was 100% part of it was part of socialising and drinking was 100% part of it was part of socialising and fitting in and being part of the gang and you know all of that 100%.
Speaker 2:
And you know I've recently been diagnosed with autism, less recently but still fairly recently, being diagnosed with ADHD as a result, like most you know, an awful lot of perimenopausal women as a result of our children being diagnosed and suddenly being oh my goodness, all these things that they're being tested on and they're giving answers to, I feel the same way I've, I've, I've managed to mask for a long time to, to be able to convince the world, and that's one of the things that they find with female um or female assigned at birth um autism and whilst it can be regardless of gender, these, these uh types of behaviors can be um, fluid, but predominantly with women and female assigned at birth.
Speaker 2:
Humans we mask incredibly well and, I would say, taking back to that condition you're so goddamn good at masking right, yeah, um, and taking us back to that drinking culture in the sort of 90s and the 2000s, I mean drinking was another way of fitting in. You know, there's rules, there's accepted behaviours. You can sort of dampen down some of your experiences of the world, because a lot of us who are neurodivergent, or also people again who've had trauma, who are neurodivergent, or also people again who've had trauma and, and generally I think you know, women, living women or female assigned at birth, humans living in the world, that we do, we are sensitive to things like our our spidey senses are up, right, our spidey senses are up and alcohol allows us it feels like it allows us to let them down a little bit for for a while, and I know, that's a lot of why people drink.
Speaker 2:
Um, but yeah, so I was drinking, probably, and, I think, very happily, drinking, joyfully, drinking like, yes, loved my drinking life. It was so much part of my identity. I was like proud of it. I was so proud of my wine appreciation and you know I'd go to wineries and all of the stuff. Um, and I remember when I first started doing the work for myself on alcohol, one One of the things, one of my biggest beliefs, was I love the taste of wine. Yeah, it totally freaked me out when I started to play around with that belief and found it not to actually be 100% true.
Speaker 1:
So can I ask you what made you start to play with the idea that alcohol wasn't for you Like what was?
Speaker 2:
the impetus for that? I think probably there was. There was a few different things that happened. I had left my corporate marketing career and started. There'd been some trauma involved in that as well. So I was feeling a bit broken down, a little bit. I'd had a bit of a breakdown because of it. Um, and I was doing all these things to build back up my mental health. You know, I was doing yoga, I was doing meditation, I was studying to be a counselor and psych therapist because I decided that was the area that I wanted to go into and change my career. And I still kept feeling that everything wasn't quite as I wanted it to be. It didn't feel quite right. Um, I was still drinking.
Speaker 2:
I wouldn't have said I was drinking. In a way and I think this is very common. It's really important thing to talk about, because people tend to think that people stop drinking because you know, you hear people talk about, you know, oh, they must have a problem or because they're an alcoholic. That wasn't my experience and that isn't the experience of most of the humans that I work with. What the experience of most of the humans that I? I was drinking probably what most people consider a regular amount. I was binge drinking at the weekends. I wasn't drinking Monday to Thursday, but then I would drink a lot during the weekends.
Speaker 2:
Most of my social life involved drinking. So I'd go out and I'd meet friends and we'd go and hang out in parks and drink with our kids playing or go around to each other's houses and drink and it was all very sort of you know, nice bottles of wine and cheese Sounds lovely. Yeah, it wasn't quite, as what you know, what people's imagination is about, what you know problematic drinking is. But it was very much part of that sort of mummy wine culture. And I know, for me, trying to make friends as a person who'd come over from the UK and going kind of like stalking other mums with children in my area, one of the things that I could do would be to, you know, to offer to go, let's go out for a drink, let's go, let's have a bottle of wine with that that's, and I definitely used it as a type of currency, um, and a way of ingratiating myself with other people too, um but, I, think what?
Speaker 2:
when I was going through that year, a few different things happened. The main one was we were we're very, very sociable and I found out post um stopping drinking. I'm actually an introvert, but I was forming my life as an extrovert very, very successfully and we were having parties. It all makes sense as well. When you look at the autistic thing too, it's like okay, so there was a very big mask that was being worn in order to fit in with the world and to be acceptable or to be what you felt was acceptable, what you felt. Behaving the way that you felt was what was deemed to be the way to fit in or to be living a so-called good life. But I think the biggest thing that happened was I was having a party and my then 11 year old child. I was putting them to bed and he said to me can you not bring the wine into the room bedroom with you please when you're putting me to bed, because it makes me feel anxious. And that was the first time and it was it was.
Speaker 2:
It was just before Covid, I think it was just COVID but there'd started to be data coming out about kids and how they were feeling around adults drinking and for some reason I'd started looking at that as well with regards to my counselling degree and this sort of started to become a sort of. It was one of those sort of one thing leads to another, thing leads to another thing and I started following my nose, um, but that made me feel I didn't do anything differently. I think I probably put the glass of wine down, put into bed and thought no more of it, but it's sort of one of those things that sort of kind of kept ticking over in my head and a few other silly things had happened. Like I'd fallen over um, and I got a rose bush stuck in my neck and I know it sounds really fun. It wasn't even that I hadn't had that many drinks, like it was.
Speaker 2:
It was quite a quiet night around some friend's house watching um wine country of all the movies. Some people were drinking, some people weren't. We probably shared a bottle of wine, but somehow or other I tripped and got my neck in a, literally stumbled into a rose bush and got a bit of it stuck in my neck and it was close to my jugular and I remember going into the hospital and ended up having to stay there overnight because they were worried, because it was that close to the jugular and we had to cancel a family sort of weekend away that we were doing and then, when I left, this was a mortifying thing.
Speaker 2:
When I left my discharge notes said pissed, fell into a rose. Bush, oh no. And I remember just thinking oh god, that's awful, isn't it? Like 46 year old woman.
Speaker 1:
I'm kind of wondering if that's, you know, the right thing that nurses and doctors should be writing.
Speaker 2:
Oh, 100% not 100% not, but it was just. You know, there's lots of different little things and then I think I was going through quite a lot of anxiety as well at the time. The worst thing for me and I think this was the the. I sort of talk about those kind of incidents and they sound big, but in reality it wasn't that. That wasn't the reason why I made the decision. I would decided I'd been doing dry July, sober, october, um feb, fast, and I'd always hated all of them, and when I get to the end of them I've been desperate to, like you know, drink anything in the house yeah, yay, I'm out of jail.
Speaker 1:
I can now drink.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I'm free, I'm free, um, and then I just, but I think the thing that really got to me was I kept waking up at three o'clock in the morning feeling like I'm feeling awful about myself and I had that thing. And I just think this is so common in, you know, regular drinkers, especially women, who are using a lot of the time, are using alcohol to push through, to numb out, to suppress their experience of the world and its unsatisfactoriness, which I didn't realize at the time was what I was doing, but I was. I was unsatisfied and I was drinking in order for me to ignore the fact that I was unsatisfied in my life. And, in addition to that, I was drinking in order for me to ignore the fact that I was unsatisfied in my life. And, in addition to that, I was drinking in order for me to be able to manage the things that I had to do in my life. So if things, you know, if I had boring chores and I was completely exhausted, I could have a glass of wine and get through those chores without them feeling so hard.
Speaker 2:
That was really. I mean, when it comes down down to it, you can talk about the glamour stories of the rosebush in there and I call them glamour stories of the rosebush but and my kid but reality. The reality was it was a daily, you know, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday, waking up at three o'clock in the morning wishing I'd drunk less, beating myself up for drinking as much as I did and wondering why I was such a successful person on paper and yet I was feeling like so terrible about myself and not really loving myself.
Speaker 2:
I would suggest I was hating myself yeah and that was when I made the decision to stop for a year, and then, within two weeks, I decided to stop for a year. Within two weeks of stopping to a year, I came, I did that particular belief. I worked on that particular belief, which was I love the taste of wine, and it blew my mind because I suddenly realized that I didn't actually love every single glass of wine that I had. In fact, I probably loved one glass of wine a month. That really I, because, because the way dopamine works is it. It's, it makes you want things, and so it gives you a rose tinted glasses of what a thing is like, because it wants you to do the thing, to have the thing right, and so when I was drinking, I'd have particular brands of wine that I loved.
Speaker 2:
But I remember and I sincerely remember this because it was in January 2020 and I was running down the beach because I used to run then. I'm not a runner now, but um, and I was reflecting on the last time I'd had a really good glass of wine. I remembered exactly when it was and I remembered the bottle and I remember I was in the pub with my friend and it was just before Christmas, and then I went oh my god, that was the last time I had a really good glass of wine, but that was like on the 9th of December and I drank right all the way right through to New Year's Eve and that was the wine I remembered. All the rest were a little bit disappointing, like I'd have this imagination of what they tasted like, but when I actually put them to my mouth and put them in my mouth they didn't taste as good as they, and then my mind just went well, if that's not true what else then?
Speaker 2:
the whole world opened up for me. So that's kind of the story of how I got where I got yeah, and how do you like.
Speaker 1:
So how do you go from realising that maybe alcohol is not the best thing for you to saying I'm going to help other women understand what's going on for them and why alcohol may not be the right thing for them also?
Speaker 2:
Well, I think initially I wasn't interested in this at all. I was just literally training to be a counselor and psychotherapist and this was something I was doing alongside it. Once I'd got two weeks into unpicking and unraveling my beliefs around alcohol and found that most of the things that I believe to be true about alcohol which which is, which is the case for most people Once you start unpicking, you know alcohol relaxes me and you find out actually no, it floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol and does the absolute opposite. You know, and you start to realize that the things that you've been kind of conditioned to believe about alcohol are actually not true. I found that incredibly empowering and I and I thought, well, if I'm going to be a counsellor and psychotherapist anyway, this has been a problem for me and it's something that I struggled for probably about a year, two years, to to to get sorted. Within two weeks I was like I want to study this, so I then signed up to do this as a side side course along with my counselling and psychotherapy degree, and then I just got so passionate about the more I learned about it, the more I understood how we have been conditioned as a nation, particularly women to believe that you know the alcohol companies. It makes total sense. Of course they're there to make profit. But the marketing specifically to women started in the 90s and it started with things like you know, your sort of alco pops. We used to call them back in the day and it was basically what happened is a marketing guys in the in the alcohol companies went you know, oh look, we've got a whole gender that we haven't really marketed. Huge market share growth that could be for us. We've got almost. And so they went after us hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. And they still are.
Speaker 2:
And the I. What I always say is I have absolutely no issue with people drinking. Like all of my friends drink I'm the only non-drinker in my friendship group. Drinking is fine, drink as much as you like. Belief that there's a problem with the person. So you know how all of the drink marketing has on it drink responsibly, which is a, a tagline run by drink aware, which is a. It sounds like it's a non-for-profit but it's actually funded by the alcohol industry and the purpose of it is to put the onus on the drinker as opposed to the substance.
Speaker 2:
And the substance we know, you know, and again, we take risks with everything we do in life and that's totally fine and that's not an issue for me. For me, the issue is when we put the responsibility on the human being and make the human being feel like there's something wrong with them, when they become addicted to an addictive substance, or when they drink more than they set out to and they and something happens. They make a fool of themselves and we're like oh, look at you, you're, you can't handle it. We make the problem the person and not the intoxicating, addictive substance. And then what happens for the people who do then become it becomes a bit of a problem, like it did for me is they internalize that the problem's theirs instead of realizing that the problem is there's a substance that they've been conditioned to believe is the elixir of life, and life isn't good, we can't have fun, we can't celebrate, we can't commiserate without it. And therefore, because we care so much about connection as human beings if they are, you know, if they come out and say I'm struggling with this what also happens is because it's been othered and the Drink Responsibly campaign works very well to make people not want to be part of that group, the group who can't drink responsibly, the naughty ones, the bad guys, um, they want to be part of the good group, the ones who can drink responsibly, the good guys and you hear so much like people talk about.
Speaker 2:
They're like, you know, um, you know there's those. There's people who can drink and there's people who can't drink. It's like no, drinking alcohol is bad for everybody. If you choose to drink it, that's great, fine, but let's not all pretend it's an innocuous substance.
Speaker 2:
It's not an innocuous substance and what then happens is people, the humans and that's where I get really passionate, because of my autism and my ADHD means that it's my hyper focus uh, yeah, project, and I get, I care so much and it breaks my heart. All the humans that come to me and said you know, I wish I could drink like normal people, but it's my, you know, and they and they think there's something wrong with them and they're bad and they're weak because they they can't manage a substance that is, its only job is to make you want more of it, because that's how chemically it works in your body, and they make themselves bad and then they don't seek help and they sit for ages and ages in shame when there shouldn't be any shame yeah, and you know what, as you were talking, I think I think there's two, there's two faces of drinking alcohol.
Speaker 1:
One is what is portrayed in the marketing from alcohol companies, which is the fun, the celebration, the oh it's summer, yeah, dancing, all of that, you know kind of stuff. So that's one face, but of course, that's drinking responsibly. The other face is the homeless man who is, you know, walking around the streets with no shoes on but has a bottle of beer or a bottle of vodka or rum in each hand, um, and that's all he ever seeks in life. So there's, yeah, there's nowhere to go with that, right? No, no, you can't be in the middle.
Speaker 2:
You can't. And yet that's where most people die, like I. You know, some people are very alcohol's not their thing, right, it's not a big deal for them. They might have shopping, might be Everyone's got a thing. Alcohol's not a big deal for them. They might have shopping, might be everyone's got a thing. Alcohol is just another thing, right, it might be shopping, it might be work, it might be um gambling, it might be me um social media, whatever we use to escape our feelings, um to get a bit of a break from our feelings. Everybody's got a thing, but it's just for some people. Alcohol's their, you know, is their thing, but it's actually. It's a huge amount of people.
Speaker 2:
I think 60% of Americans wish they drink less than they do, and that's just people who've come online and said they, they do. So I think, regardless of whether you decide you don't want to drink or you decide you want to cut down on drinking or you decide you're quite happy with where you are, it's, it's not unusual for people to want to cut down. And I think the issue comes for women, particularly in perimenopausal midlife. Women in midlife, because alcohol starts to impact us much, much, much more. Oh, yes, and then all the connections to, you know, alcohol.
Speaker 2:
Actually now the World Health Organization says there's no safe amount to drink. The Cancer organization says there's no safe amount to drink. The cancer council say there's no safe amount to drink. The heart foundation says there's no safe amount to drink. And yet we're all like beating people up and making people feel uncomfortable for wanting to take a break from alcohol and saying things like you know oh, I didn't know you had a problem. It's like well, can't I just not want to choose not to drink because like, yeah, it's not, it's not making me happy anymore, it's taking more than it's giving. It's yeah you know, I don't want that.
Speaker 2:
I don't want the health consequences.
Speaker 1:
You know it's yeah, I often think about where brewing alcohol came from or creating alcoholic drinks came from, and for the most part, it came from a society where maybe water wasn't safe to drink or, you know, by creating alcohol, by brewing beer, by creating wine, we were preserving food and we were also making water safe to drink. Yeah, yeah, and we've gone from something that in some way was a necessity to something that is now so ingrained in our culture. I think about during COVID and as Australia was going into lockdown the lines outside the Dan Murphys and the liquor lines because there was this desperation that we may not be able to get our alcohol anymore.
Speaker 2:
And I drink it's not like I'm saying I don't drink but, like I was noticing some of those thinking you know what's like, what's going on for a society, that that we need this well, that was particularly as well the time that, for women we were especially I was based in Victoria and in Victoria we were homeschooling, and it was all these mummy wine memes going around, you know, and it was all just very, very sort of of course you need to drink in order to be able to cope with your situation whereas in reality and this is the big turnaround I think for all of the alcohol stuff is let's stop marketing it to women as a way to manage our stress and let's look at why we're so bloody stressed out, because while we're numbing and suppressing our experience of life, that's unacceptable, which is what I was doing.
Speaker 2:
we're not actually dealing with the problems, and that's one of the things that really gets to me. It's like one of the things that happens with alcohol is it keeps us stuck accepting, because every time we feel bad, we realize something's not good, we drink to get away from that experience, and so what happens is we just stay stuck in this experience. That's not acceptable for so long. It's a really good way of keeping everybody suppressed and down and not achieving their potential.
Speaker 1:
Yes, yes, how do you think about alcohol? So I certainly get the interplay with alcohol and perimenopause. I mean, it means I can't sleep. Well, I will pretty much always have a hangover and feel like crap, even if I have a small amount of alcohol now, which was never the case. Yeah, and it depends on the person. But for a lot of women in perimenopause and menopause it's an issue. But then when you add in ADHD and autism, Depends on the person. But for a lot of women in perimenopause and menopause it's an issue, Definitely. But then when you add in ADHD and autism, what is that interplay like?
Speaker 2:
Well, I think I mean, when we go into perimenopause, our ADHD and autism symptoms or symptoms, that's not the right word but our traits, our characteristics are special. It's harder for us to mask, it becomes, and it's a bit like it's harder for women to put up with stuff too, because the oestrogen goes, and the oestrogen is our nurturing hormone.
Speaker 2:
It's the hormone that keeps us loving everybody once it goes, we're just like everyone but you know what I mean it's like it allows us to not eat our you know our young it's been some days, emma.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's been some days exactly um, but it was the same with work as well, and quite often what happens to women when they go through menopause is the estrogen goes and that ability to it allows us to push through, it allows us to suppress, it allows us to put up with a lot, and similarly it has a similar impact on the. You know the symptoms of adhd and some of the I hate saying symptoms, it's really the wrong word but um, it means that things that are signs of adhd and autism can be amplified and it makes it harder for us to mask. So it's harder for us to keep up the pretense because our bandwidth isn't as um long. Lisa, have you frozen hello?
Speaker 1:
I lost you there oopsie are we back. Hello, yes, we are sorry, I don't know what happened there that's okay, um, do you want me to just carry on?
Speaker 2:
yes, please, yeah, sorry so, um, I was just talking about autism and ADHD and how, in perimenopause and menopause, it is harder for us to mask and symptoms like brain fog, lack of focus, memory loss, things that are very common ADHD symptoms become exacerbated because they're also symptoms of perimenopause and menopause and perimenopause.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly so, it's one of those things. It's so interesting. I mean, like alcohol, I would suggest that most of the people who struggle with problematic alcohol either um are diagnosed or undiagnosed neurodivergent or have some kind of trauma. Now, trauma for for a female, assigned at birth, is kind of a it's like a condition of play, you know, it's like you know, we don't go through life without having some kind of trauma and you know, when we're talking small t trauma, that's kind of again another sort of rite of passage of being a human being in the world. You know, not necessarily being cared for in the way that you might have wanted to be, or not being picked up when you were crying, or you know all these things that are just kind of almost like conditional of living in the culture that we live in, where we're not actually able to, you know, look up, you know pick up our babies and hold them all the time. And you know, because it's just not possible in our cultures.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so it's, it's inevitable that human beings are born with a level of, because, as you know, when children are little like that, they and they may need they don't get their value shined back in their, in the eyes of their caregivers.
Speaker 2:
They internalize that and, instead of believing that there's a problem with the world and their caregivers weren't able to to look after them in the way they needed to be, they, they make themselves the problem. And that is almost, I would say. I haven't met a single human being in my life that doesn't have some of those, yeah, impacts of that sort of early childhood experience which leads to us looking, and often as well, we've not been allowed to have our experience of our emotions so often when we were younger, we were told you know, we're either, and one of the things they always say, I think, about autistic and ADHD humans is you know, it's that experience of both being too much and not enough at the same time, yes, um, which makes me want to cry every time I hear it, but I think it's so beautiful and so true to my experience and so true to most humans, those experience, um, and so we weren't allowed.
Speaker 2:
You know our emotions, our behaviors were inconvenient to the adults in our world and this is where you know we kind of come into this compliance-based parenting and the impact that has on our generation, generation before us, and you can see the amount of human beings who are drinking just to manage their emotions and that's why most people drink. It's not about being the person in the ditch with the bottle in a paper bag out. I had a terrible day at work and I don't know how to manage that in any other way. This person really pissed me off and I don't want to say anything because that would be rude or I might lose my temper or I might lose my cool, and so I will drink instead. That's why people drink and we kind of almost shimmy over the reality of the situation by making it this whole. They've got a problem and that's an alcoholic and it's like no, actually you're distracted from the real issue, which is humans are struggling.
Speaker 2:
Life is bloody hard, we haven't learned how to deal with our emotions and we're needing to use alcohol or shopping or gambling or social media or work or exercise or diet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah to manage the fact that our experience of the world is not acceptable. And for autistic, adhd and human beings with trauma, our experience with them are, particularly when we start having children, especially if we've got high sensory experiences. It's just the only way most humans I work with are like how do I turn off the noise of all of the people wanting all of the things, all the attention, all the freaking time? You know when do I get to put my headphones on and go off into my room and go? You know, get some time out. It doesn't happen for women, so they drink in order to get themselves through the things that they think they have to do in order to have a good life.
Speaker 2:
And that's the saddest thing for me about alcohol, and that's the piece I'd like to change. Is this idea that, number one, that humans are the problem they're not. And number two, that while we're making all this silly song and game about alcoholics and we're ignoring the fact that women are being marketed to by alcohol companies specifically made to feel that they're the problem when they find that they can't manage it, or that's taking control, and it's also stopping women from standing up, learning how to be in our own standing. What does Brene Brown? You know, don't puff up, don't shy away. Stand your sake. You know, stand your sacred ground is to actually say this is not acceptable, I'm not happy, I'm having to drink in order to be in my life, and that's the real problem yeah, what are the ways that you work with people and help people around this topic?
Speaker 2:
So I have a. I've run a 30-day Great Aussie Alcohol Experiment three times a year. I've got one coming up in June.
Speaker 1:
Ooh, I love that name.
Speaker 2:
Great Aussie Alcohol Experiment. That's very much for people, wherever they are on their journey with alcohol. It's not about stopping drinking, it's an experiment. It's a come in with an open mind. Challenge some of these beliefs that we have about alcohol. Take a 30-day break and see what happens right. That's kind of what the Aussie Alcohol Experiment is and it's a group program. Happens right and that's kind of what the Aussie Alcohol Experiment is and it's a group program. I also have like an evergreen version of that, which isn't kind of managed or coached by me. It's just like the daily videos and journaling prompts that people can do as well, so that's available on my website too.
Speaker 2:
And then I have a membership group, which is for people who have decided that they want to stop drinking for a longer period of time, like three months, six months a year. They're not in that am I, aren't I going to drink phase, and that's running all the time as well. That's called Be the Lighthouse, which is a lovely group of human beings.
Speaker 1:
Nice, and how can people find you?
Speaker 2:
My website is Hope Rising Co. Rising coaching. Or if you want to get hold of me on social media, I am at hope rising coach brilliant.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much, emma I we've now had, I think, three or four conversations, and every time we have a conversation I learn a little bit more and you challenge my beliefs around alcohol a bit more, which is really helpful, and then I go away and I think about it and yeah, so thank you.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for being open to listening to me and having me on. I really appreciate it. It's lovely.
Speaker 1:
It's my pleasure. I'm all about sharing diversity and that's, you know, diversity about thinking and you know how can we change the cultures that we're in around. All sorts of things, including alcohol. Yeah, thank you, my darling.
