Sober Sis Blog

Written By Jenn Kautsch

What If “Getting It Together” Is the Wrong Goal?

If your routines got a little loose and wine o’clock got a little too comfortable, you don’t need guilt, shame, or another set of rules to begin again.

The end of summer has a funny way of making us want to get back on track. But guilt, shame, and another set of rules probably aren’t what you need.

There’s something about August that always catches me a little off guard. Maybe it’s because I live in Texas, where the weather gives absolutely no indication that fall is anywhere nearby. It is HOT, y’all, and we’re going to be hot for a while. If I waited for crisp mornings and sweater weather to tell me a new season was coming, I’d probably be waiting until November. But you can feel the shift anyway. Kids are going back to school and college, calendars are filling up again, and of course, you can walk into Hobby Lobby and find Christmas decorations sitting next to the pumpkin spice candles because apparently we have decided summer is basically over before summer is actually over. I walked in there recently and thought, Okay, I guess we’re doing this now.

There really is something different in the air, though, and I think our bodies and minds feel it before we consciously recognize it. Summer has a way of loosening everything up. We stay up a little later. We travel. People come to visit. There are pool days and lake days and vacations and dinners out. If you live somewhere people like to visit, maybe your house has been the summer house and you’ve been feeding and entertaining everybody for the last two months. Maybe there was a little more rosé all day than you planned. Maybe your morning walks disappeared somewhere around June. Maybe bedtime got later and later, and the habits that made you feel really good in the spring slowly got replaced by, “Oh well, it’s summer.” Honestly, I get it. Summer is supposed to feel different. I love the looseness of it too.

Then August rolls around, and I think a lot of us start looking around at our lives with that feeling of, Okay, I need to get myself together. I need to start exercising again. I need to eat better. I need to get back into my Bible. I need to stop staying up so late. I need to drink less. I need to get organized. I need a routine. I need to get my life back together before fall. It happens so quickly that a perfectly healthy desire to feel better can turn into one giant list of everything we think we did wrong over the summer. Instead of looking forward and asking what might serve us in this next season, we start looking backward and building a case against ourselves.

I know that pattern very well because I spent a lot of years believing the best way to create change was to make myself feel bad enough about where I was. Surely if I could just get frustrated enough with myself, I would finally change. If I felt guilty enough about drinking, maybe I wouldn’t do it again. If I made a strong enough rule, maybe this time I would stick to it. If I could just muster up a little more willpower, I would finally become the disciplined woman I thought I was supposed to be.

My strategy around alcohol went something like this. I would make a rule for myself, something like, No wine during the week. Then I would break the rule. Maybe Wednesday had been particularly stressful, and by five o’clock, Wednesday suddenly seemed close enough to Friday. I would pour the wine, feel guilty about pouring the wine, and then decide the solution was to make an even stricter rule. Okay, seriously this time. No drinking until the weekend. Then life would happen again, because life has this inconvenient habit of not cooperating with our perfectly constructed plans, and eventually I would break that rule too.

Then came the part I was really good at. I would shame myself. Jenn Kautsch, get it together. What is your problem? Why can’t you just do what you said you were going to do? I wasn’t simply disappointed in a choice I had made. I would start turning the choice into evidence about who I was. Then, because I felt terrible about myself, I would decide the obvious solution was more willpower, another rule, another promise, another Monday, another “I’ll start next month.” Around and around I went in this exhausting little loop, somehow believing shame would eventually turn me into the woman I wanted to become. It didn’t.

I already did the recon for us, ladies. I tried guilt, shame, rules, and doubling down on willpower, and I can save you some time. You cannot shame yourself into lasting momentum.

Maybe Summer Wasn’t a Failure

This is where I think we have an opportunity to change the conversation, especially if summer didn’t go exactly the way you hoped. Maybe you had every intention of drinking less and you didn’t. Maybe you did Dry January and felt fantastic, and then somewhere between spring break, vacation, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, houseguests, and all those long summer evenings, you found yourself right back in that detox-to-retox loop. Maybe you’re already looking toward September thinking, Well, I blew it. I guess I’ll start over.

But what if you didn’t blow it? What if you learned something?

Around Sober Sis, we talk about these moments as data points because I think that’s such a healthier way to look at the places where things didn’t go the way we planned. If you drank more than you wanted to this summer, that’s information. If you noticed that houseguests make you want to drink more, that’s information. If vacation drinking followed you home, that’s information. If you discovered that having absolutely no routine makes you feel more anxious instead of more free, that’s information too. Maybe you noticed you drank because you were lonely. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe you were overwhelmed from having everybody in your house all summer. Maybe it was simply what everybody else was doing and you went on autopilot.

All of that is worth noticing because you’re learning yourself, and I don’t know about you, but I spent enough years judging myself. These days, I’d much rather get curious. What happened there? What was I actually needing? What made that situation harder? What helped? What didn’t? What would I like to try differently next time? Curiosity gives us somewhere to go. Shame just keeps us standing in the same place, staring backward.

I think this is also where the distinction between guilt and shame becomes really important. Brené Brown has talked about this beautifully for years. Guilt says, That wasn’t a good choice for me. Shame says, I’m not good. Those are two completely different messages. Guilt can actually be useful if we allow it to be a signal instead of a place we set up camp. For those of us who are women of faith, I think about conviction this way too. Sometimes there’s that little nudge from the Holy Spirit that says, Hey, this isn’t aligned with who you’re becoming. Let’s turn and go another way. That’s not condemnation. That’s an invitation.

Guilt can be like the blinker on your car. You notice something needs to change, so turn on your blinker and make the turn. Boop, boop. There it is. You don’t have to sit at the intersection for the next three months beating yourself up about how you got there.

You don’t need to turn one choice into an identity. Maybe you made a choice you regret, but that does not mean you are a regret. Maybe you got off track, but that doesn’t mean you’re incapable of finding your way back.

Maybe you’ve tried this before, but that doesn’t mean this time can’t teach you something the last time didn’t. That’s where grace comes in, and frankly, I think we could all use a little more of it.

The Kind of Structure That Actually Creates Freedom

I’ve also had to change the way I think about structure because for a long time, I thought freedom meant having fewer limits. No schedule, no restrictions, do what you want, stay up late, have the wine, skip the workout, figure it out tomorrow. That sounds like freedom until you live that way for a while and realize you don’t feel particularly free.

One of the things we talk about inside my Alcohol-Free Lifestyle course is healthy boundaries, and I also like to call them loving limits. I love that phrase because it completely changes how I think about structure. A loving limit isn’t a punishment. It’s a guardrail that helps me live the kind of life I actually want to live. I have an Oura Ring now, and it tells me all kinds of things about myself, including when my body would really prefer that I go to bed. I can ignore it. I’m a grown woman. Nobody is coming to my house to arrest me because I’m still watching television at midnight. But I’ve learned that when I honor some of those limits, I actually have more freedom the next day because I have more energy, more patience, more clarity, and more of myself available for the people and things I care about.

The same thing happened for me with alcohol. The structure I once thought would make my life smaller eventually gave me so much more room to live.

That’s why I think this end-of-summer transition can be so valuable. Maybe the wheels came off a little bit. Maybe the routine disappeared. Maybe the boundaries got fuzzy. You don’t need to punish yourself for that. You can simply put some guardrails back up, not because you’re in trouble, but because you love yourself enough to create a life you can actually relax inside of.

I think sometimes we make this harder than it needs to be because we decide everything has to change at once. We need a new meal plan, a new workout, a new morning routine, no sugar, no alcohol, a 5 a.m. wake-up time, a journal practice, 100 ounces of water, twelve new books, and perhaps a completely new personality by Labor Day. Sis, no wonder we’re exhausted before we even start. You don’t need a new life. You may just need a reset.

Yes, I have a program called the 21 Day Reset, but I’m talking about something bigger than a program here. I’m talking about the mindset of beginning again. I think I hit the reset button almost every morning of my life. I wake up and yesterday is gone, tomorrow hasn’t happened, and I’ve got new challenges, new decisions, new joys, and new opportunities to be present. I find myself coming back to God and saying, Okay, thank You for new morning mercies. Thank You that the sun came up again. Thank You that there’s still breath in my lungs. I’m still here.

You’re still here too, which means we get another day. Another chance. Another beginning. I’m still growing as a wife. I’m still growing as a mom to adult children. I’m growing in my friendships and in my faith. I’m growing as a woman. Growth means I’m going to need a lot of fresh starts, and I don’t think that’s evidence that I’m doing something wrong. I think that’s part of being human. We begin, we learn, we get a little sideways, we notice, and then, by the grace of God, we begin again.

The Secret Months Nobody Talks About

Everybody talks about January. January gets all the attention. New year, new you, Dry January, resolutions, fresh planners. Everybody is suddenly drinking green juice and cleaning out their closets. But after working with thousands of women over the years, I’ve become convinced that two of the most important months of the entire year are actually August and September.

Hear me out because I think these are the secret months.

Summer is winding down, but the holidays haven’t started yet. We’re in this little bridge between the two, and I think we underestimate how valuable that window can be. October arrives and suddenly we’re off to the races. Halloween rolls into Thanksgiving, which rolls into Christmas parties, travel, family, food, traditions, stress, expectations, and a whole lot more opportunities to drink. Then January arrives and everybody looks around at the aftermath and says, Okay, NOW I’m going to get it together.

But what if you didn’t wait?

What if instead of limping into January exhausted and frustrated with yourself, you used August and September to build something now? What if September didn’t have to become the month you punish yourself for summer? What if it became the month you practiced becoming the woman you want to be when the holidays arrive?

I love thinking about it that way because it changes the whole energy of the season. The woman you want to be this fall isn’t going to suddenly appear on October 1. She’s being built through the choices you’re making today, and I don’t mean perfect choices. Good grief, please don’t hear me saying you need to become perfect. I mean practice. You go to the party and bring the alcohol-free drink. You notice wine o’clock and try something different. You go to bed a little earlier. You take the walk. You tell the truth to a friend. You open your Bible. You come back to the community instead of disappearing because you had a hard weekend. You practice, and then you practice again. Eventually, the things that once felt awkward begin to feel like your actual life.

Something came up during the live workshop that I think is worth mentioning because I see this all the time. A woman asked whether she needed to do another Reset before moving forward because she was still struggling. I understood the question immediately because we live in a culture where we’re taught that we have to master one level before we’re allowed to graduate to the next. Finish this, pass the test, check the box, then you can move forward.

This journey isn’t always like that. It’s not always linear, and it certainly isn’t A plus B equals C. Sometimes moving forward means going deeper while you’re still figuring things out. Sometimes you don’t need to start over. You need to begin again from where you are, and there’s a big difference between the two.

I’ve watched women make multiple attempts. I’ve watched women struggle, learn something, try again, struggle again, and then eventually something clicks. That’s why I’ve said for years that the only way to fail on this journey is to quit trying. If you’re still here, you’re still learning. If you’re reading this after a weekend that didn’t go the way you hoped, you’re still learning. If you’ve done Dry January, gone back to drinking, tried again, stopped again, and you’re wondering why everybody else seems to have figured this out except you, you’re still learning. Don’t erase everything you’ve learned because you had another data point. Take it with you. That’s growth.

So as summer starts winding down, I don’t want you to ask yourself how quickly you can get your life back together. I think there’s a better question: How do I want my life to feel this fall? Do you want to sleep better? Do you want more energy? Do you want to be more present? Do you want to wake up without immediately trying to remember how much you drank the night before? Do you want to walk into the holidays feeling grounded instead of already exhausted? Do you want to trust yourself again? Do you want to look alive, Sis, in your own life?

If the answer is yes, you don’t need to wait for some magical Monday, September 1st, or January 1st. You don’t need a dramatic declaration or twenty-seven new rules. You certainly don’t need another shame spiral. You can simply notice where you are, appreciate what this summer taught you, and decide what the next right step looks like. Turn on the blinker and make the turn. Then tomorrow, if you need to, begin again.

That’s the beautiful thing about grace. We get to keep beginning again.

A Little Invitation Before You Go

If you’ve been reading this thinking, Yep, summer was fun, but I’m ready to feel like myself again, I’d love to invite you to join us for the next 21 Day Reset. We’re not going to shame you for what happened this summer, and I’m not going to ask you to make some big declaration about forever. We’re simply going to spend 21 days stepping off autopilot together, looking honestly at what alcohol is doing to you instead of what you’ve been told it’s doing for you, and giving you the tools and support to try something different.

You don’t have to get yourself back on track before you join us. You don’t have to prove that you’re ready, and you definitely don’t have to have it all figured out. That’s kind of the whole point of a reset. You get to meet yourself exactly where you are and begin again from there.