Sober Sis Blog

Written By Jenn Kautsch

I Kept My Word to Everyone Except Myself

How broken promises around drinking quietly eroded my confidence and the rebuilding that helped me trust myself again.

There was a point toward the end of my drinking days when I would wake up in the morning and make myself a promise that I already suspected I wasn’t going to keep. “I’m not drinking tonight.” There. Decided. Done. I meant it, too. Morning Jenn was very sincere. Morning Jenn had plans. Morning Jenn had coffee and good intentions and possibly a green juice somewhere in the mix, because apparently that helped balance things out in my mind. She was responsible and was getting things done. She was absolutely, positively not drinking that night.

And then 5:00 pm happened.

Or book club happened. Or Wine Wednesday happened. Or somebody invited me to happy hour. Or the kids had school projects and I was cooking dinner again… which, I’m sorry, can we just acknowledge how many times a person is expected to come up with dinner over the course of one lifetime? Or it was Monday and I felt anxious and blah from the weekend. There was always something. And slowly, quietly, almost without realizing it, I started breaking these little promises I had made to myself. Not tonight. Just one. Only on weekends. I’ll start Monday. Tomorrow will be different. They seemed like small things in the moment, but eventually those small things added up to something much bigger.

I stopped believing myself.

That realization was incredibly uncomfortable because I have always considered myself a woman of integrity. If I tell you I’m going to show up, I show up. If I tell you I’m going to do something, I do it. I care about being trustworthy and absolutely dependable. I care about my word meaning something. But somewhere along the way, I had created this strange exception in my life where my word mattered when I gave it to everybody else, but apparently it didn’t have to matter when I gave it to me.

Toward the end, I could hear myself calling myself out on it. I would say, “I’m not drinking tonight,” and somewhere inside me another voice would almost immediately answer, “You’re lying.”

Oof. That was hard.

Not because drinking on a random Tuesday night was the worst thing I had ever done. It wasn’t. The deeper disappointment came from the disconnect between what I said I wanted and what I kept doing. There was morning Jenn and evening Jenn, and those two women seemed to have entirely different plans for our life. Morning Jenn wanted clarity, energy, integrity and change. Evening Jenn wanted to clock out, numb out and please, for the love, stop thinking about everything for a while. Living with those two competing versions of myself was exhausting.

And somewhere in that loop, I lost more than confidence around alcohol. I started losing confidence in me.

Self-Trust Usually Doesn’t Break All at Once

I think we imagine losing trust as something dramatic. Somebody tells a giant lie or flat out betrays us. Something happens and suddenly the trust is gone. But my experience with self-trust was much quieter than that. There wasn’t one morning when I woke up and thought, “Well, yesterday I trusted myself completely and today I do not.” It happened gradually. One tiny compromise at a time.

That’s why I think the ordinary days matter so much more than we realize. It’s the Tuesday nights. The boring Mondays. The random Wednesday when nobody is watching. It’s the little promises that don’t seem important enough to count. We tell ourselves, “It’s just tonight,” and technically, yes, it is just tonight. But when “just tonight” happens over and over, something begins accumulating underneath the behavior. We’re teaching ourselves whether our own word can be trusted.

Maybe yours isn’t alcohol. Maybe you keep promising yourself you’ll take the walk, go to bed earlier, drink the water, make the appointment, stop answering work emails at 9 pm, get off your phone or finally create that boundary you know you need. You say you’re going to do it, and then you don’t. Then you say it again. Then you don’t again. Eventually, the problem isn’t simply that the thing didn’t happen. The problem is that some part of you has learned, “We say things around here that we don’t actually mean.”

That does something to a woman’s confidence.

Alcohol did that to me in a very specific way because I started believing I couldn’t handle certain parts of life without it. Boredom? Need a drink. Stress? Need a drink. Anxiety? Definitely need a drink. Girls’ night? Obviously. Dinner out? Of course. A hard day? Wine. A great day? Also wine. I had practiced outsourcing discomfort to alcohol for so long that I began believing I simply wasn’t capable of doing hard, boring, stressful, uncomfortable things without something in my glass.

But that wasn’t true. It was learned. And if I had learned to distrust myself through repetition, maybe I could learn to trust myself again the same way.

Confidence Comes From Evidence

This is where I think we sometimes make rebuilding confidence much harder than it needs to be. We want the grand gesture. We want to wake up and suddenly feel like a completely different person. We want to declare, “That’s it! Everything changes TODAY!” and then overhaul seventeen areas of our lives before breakfast.

I know that energy well.

But self-trust isn’t rebuilt through a grand declaration. It’s rebuilt through evidence.

Think about what happens when another person has broken your trust. If they look at you and say, “Trust me, I’ll never do that again,” you may genuinely want to believe them. But words alone probably aren’t enough. You need experience. You need consistency. You need to watch what happens next. Trust grows as their actions begin matching their words again.

Why would it be any different with ourselves?

If I had spent years telling myself one thing and doing another, I couldn’t expect one inspirational Monday morning to repair all of that. I needed to show myself something different. And interestingly, I didn’t always need to start with the biggest, hardest promise.

Sometimes I just needed to drink the dadgum water.

Seriously.

When I first stopped drinking, I spent so much time telling myself, “Don’t drink, don’t drink, don’t drink,” that drinking was practically all I thought about. Eventually I realized I needed to focus less on what I was not doing and more on what I was doing. What did I want to add? What did I want my life to look like? What could I actually follow through on today?

Drink more water. Take a ten-minute walk. Check in with another like-minded sister on this journey. (shout out to our sisterhood) Attend the workshop I said I would attend. Make a plan for the evening instead of winging it at 5:00. Go to bed when I told myself I would.

These things may sound almost laughably small compared with changing your relationship with alcohol, but that’s the point. If you’re trying to rebuild trust with yourself, you don’t necessarily start by reaching for the fruit at the very top of the tree. Start with the low-hanging fruit.

Make yourself a promise you know you can keep and then keep it.

Every time you do, you create a little piece of evidence.

See? I said I would, and I did.

Then do it again.

The 15-Minute Promise That Changed Something in Me

A few years ago, long after alcohol had become much smaller in my life, I found myself feeling off track with exercise. I wasn’t going to the gym consistently, and because apparently I cannot resist turning things into challenges, I decided I was going to challenge myself.

It was December, and I made myself a deal: I would go to the gym every single day that month. Thirty-one days. Christmas Day was the only exception because the gym was literally closed, so I did something at home instead. And because I wanted a little extra accountability, I announced the whole thing on Instagram. Nothing like telling the internet what you’re planning to do if you really want to raise the stakes.

But here’s the part that made it work: I only had to stay for 15 minutes.

Not an hour. Not until I had burned a certain number of calories. Not until I had lifted a particular amount of weight or completed some impressive workout. Fifteen minutes. That was the promise.

Some days I stayed exactly 15 minutes. I mean EXACTLY. There were days I was probably watching the clock thinking, “Fourteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds…this counts.” And it did count, because the goal wasn’t to become the fittest woman in Fort Worth during the month of December. The goal was consistency. I was practicing showing myself that when I made a commitment, I could follow through whether I felt motivated or not.

And something interesting happened. Plenty of days, once I was there, I stayed much longer. Sometimes I stayed an hour. But I never owed myself an hour. I owed myself 15 minutes, because that was the promise I had made.

By the end of the month, I had something much more valuable than 31 workouts.

I had evidence.
I had watched myself keep my word over and over and over again.

That matters because motivation is a feeling, and feelings are wonderful little things, but goodness gracious, they are unreliable teammates. Some mornings they show up early and ready to work. Other mornings they apparently call in sick without notifying anybody. If my commitments depend entirely on whether I feel motivated, I’m going to be in trouble. The feeling can come and go. The commitment can stay.

That month reminded me of something I had already learned through becoming alcohol-free: confidence comes from evidence. Sometimes you have to show yourself what you’re capable of before the deeper confidence catches up.

You Don’t Have to Perform to Trust Yourself

Almost a decade into this sober-minded journey, self-trust looks different for me now. It isn’t simply trusting myself not to drink. It’s trusting myself to stay with myself.

That distinction has become really important to me.

I was reminded of it recently in a workout class. I was at CorePower Yoga, which, if you’ve never done it, is yoga but also very much a workout. It was hot, we were moving, my wrists were tired, and I had been dealing with a headache. At one point, practically the entire room started doing inversions… crow poses, headstands, handstands, all the things.

And I didn’t want to.

There was a time in my life when that would have been enough reason to do it anyway. Everybody else is doing it. Keep up. Don’t be the one sitting there. Perform. Push. Prove.

Instead, at 55 years old, I sat there and did a hip opener.

And I was perfectly fine.

Actually, I was more than fine. I remember thinking, I trust myself to know what I need today.

That may sound like such a tiny thing, but to me it represents something enormous. I didn’t abandon myself to match the room. I didn’t shape-shift. I didn’t override what my body was telling me because everyone else was doing something different. I stayed with myself.

And suddenly I could see how connected that moment was to my drinking years.

Everyone is drinking? I don’t have to drink.

Everyone is doing the headstand? I don’t have to do the headstand.

Everyone is going one direction? I can go another.

Nobody else is doing the thing I know is right for me? I can still do it.

That is self-trust.

It isn’t believing you’ll always make the perfect choice. I certainly don’t. It’s knowing you aren’t going to leave yourself when things get uncomfortable.

Stay With Yourself

We live in a culture that gives us plenty of opportunities to abandon ourselves. Drinking culture says, “Come on, everybody’s having one.” Hustle culture says, “Do more. Be more. Push harder.” Comparison says, “Look what she’s doing. You should be doing that too.” And sometimes our own minds join the chorus and tell us we need to perform, please, prove or keep up.

I’m becoming much more interested in another way.

What if we tried softer?

What if we stayed?

Stay calm. Stay grounded. Stay present. Stay with yourself.

If everybody around you is drinking and you don’t want to drink, stay with yourself. If everybody is doing the metaphorical headstand and your body is telling you to sit this one out, stay with yourself. If nobody else understands the choice you know is right for you, stay with yourself. If you make a mistake, don’t abandon yourself there either. Stay. Get curious. Adjust. Begin again.

For me, faith is woven deeply into this because I believe my relationship with myself is connected to my relationship with God. I want my life to have integrity vertically and horizontally. I want to be rooted in who God created me to be so that I can love the people around me from an authentic place. If I don’t believe my own word, if I continually abandon myself, if I am constantly shape-shifting to match the room, it becomes very difficult to show up wholeheartedly in my relationships with anyone else.

This isn’t about becoming self-reliant or convincing myself that I can handle everything alone. Quite the opposite. Part of trusting myself has been learning when I need support. I didn’t have accountability or a sisterhood around me during some of my loneliest drinking years. I was having all those negotiations inside my own head, making deals with myself and then quietly breaking them. Finding women who understood the journey mattered. Asking for help mattered. Trusting myself enough to admit, “I don’t think I should do this alone,” mattered too.

And none of this requires perfection.

I have rebuilt trust with myself, but I still make mistakes. I still let myself down sometimes. The difference is that I no longer interpret a mistake as evidence that I cannot be trusted. I know how to come back. I know how to repair. I know how to stay present instead of abandoning myself when things don’t go exactly according to plan.

That, to me, is freedom.

So if you’re reading this and thinking, “Jenn, I don’t trust myself anymore,” I want you to know that you don’t have to repair everything today. In fact, please don’t make rebuilding self-trust another giant performance project.

Start smaller.

What is one promise you can make to yourself today that you can actually keep?

Drink the water. Take the ten-minute walk. Text the friend. Go to bed. Show up for the meeting. Make your evening plan. Keep the promise.

Then tomorrow, give yourself another little piece of evidence. And another. And another.

Small commitments create small victories. Small victories repeated over time create something much bigger. They create a woman who begins to hear herself say, “I’m going to do this,” and believes it.

Because perhaps rebuilding self-trust isn’t about becoming a brand-new version of yourself after all.

Maybe it’s about learning, little by little, not to leave the woman who’s already there.

Stay with her, Sis.

She’s worth keeping your word to.

Ready to Start Rebuilding That Trust?

If you’ve been stuck in the “not tonight…okay, maybe tomorrow” loop and you’re ready to start doing something different, I created a free guide just for you. The Sober Sis Free Guide will help you take an honest, grace-filled look at your relationship with alcohol and start making small shifts toward feeling clearer, more confident and more like yourself again. No labels. No forever decisions. Just a really good place to begin. Grab your free guide here → https://sobersis.com/free-guide