Sober Sis Blog

Written By Jenn Kautsch

You Were Never Meant to Do This Alone

What a hotel room full of sober-minded women reminded me about friendship, freedom, and finding the people who just get it

I’m writing this fresh off our Sober Sis West retreat in Palm Springs, and I keep thinking about one particular moment. Picture a hotel room absolutely FULL of women. And when I say full, I mean we had women sitting all over sofas, standing against walls, squeezing together wherever we could find a spot, and at one point we were using the ironing board as our “boardroom.” 😂 Very sophisticated operation we have going here at Sober Sis. We decided to go LIVE from the retreat because I wanted the women in our community back home to see what sisterhood actually looks like. Not the polished version. Not everybody lined up perfectly with matching outfits and perfect lighting. The real version. Women laughing. Women crying. Women talking over each other. Women helping me when I completely forgot what I was saying. Women who came from different places, different backgrounds, different seasons of life, and somehow ended up squeezed together in one hotel room in Palm Springs because at some point each of them decided to get curious about her relationship with alcohol.

And here’s the part that gets me. Most of these women didn’t know each other before Sober Sis. They weren’t lifelong girlfriends who decided together one day, “Hey, let’s stop drinking and fly to Palm Springs.” Nope. They came into this community individually, many of them wondering if they were the only woman having the thoughts they were having. Is alcohol taking more from me than I want it to? Why is this becoming so hard? What would people think if I stopped drinking? Do I really need to change? Can’t I just figure this out myself? And maybe that last question is the one I hear most often, especially from the kind of women who find their way to Sober Sis. We are capable women. We figure things out. We take care of people. We make the plans. We solve the problems. We get things DONE. So naturally, when we start questioning our relationship with alcohol, many of us think, I’ve got this. I’ll just cut back. I’ll make some rules. I’ll handle it myself.

The Lonely Part Nobody Talks About

What we don’t expect is how lonely changing your relationship with alcohol can feel. Think about it. If drinking has been part of your friendships, your marriage, your dinners out, your vacations, your celebrations, your girls’ nights and your Friday nights, deciding you want to do something different can suddenly make you feel like you’re standing outside the circle looking in. Your spouse may still drink. Your friends may still drink. Nobody around you may be asking the same questions you’re asking. And suddenly you’re wondering, Who do I talk to about this without making it A THING? Maybe you don’t identify with having a “drinking problem.” Maybe nothing dramatic happened. Maybe you simply know, somewhere deep down, that alcohol isn’t helping you live the life you want to live anymore. But even saying that out loud can feel vulnerable.

One of the women at the retreat, Jamie, described this so beautifully. She said it took her a long time to realize she didn’t want alcohol in her life anymore because she felt like she was the only one. Then she found Sober Sis and discovered something completely different. She was surrounded by women who wanted her to succeed, women who understood, and women who weren’t judging her. Women she didn’t know when she started had become her Sisters. And as I sat there listening to her, I thought, That’s it. That’s exactly it.

“Sometimes the most powerful thing another woman can say is: Me too.”

There is something that happens when another woman tells your story before you’ve worked up the courage to tell it yourself. She says, “I used to negotiate with myself every night too,” and you think, Me too. She says, “I thought wine was the only way I knew how to relax,” and you think, Me too. She says, “I didn’t think my drinking was bad enough to stop, but I knew I didn’t feel good,” and there it is again. Me too. All of a sudden, this thing you’ve been carrying around privately isn’t quite so heavy because you’re not the only one carrying it.

Shame Loves Isolation. Sisterhood Doesn’t.

I kept a lot of my struggle with drinking private. I didn’t want to talk about how much mental energy it was taking or how conflicted I felt about it. And that is one of the sneaky things about shame. It convinces us that hiding is safer. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t let anybody know you’re struggling with this. You should be able to figure this out. What will they think? So we tuck things away. Sometimes literally. I joked during our live that there were times I could tuck the wine behind a cookbook and wait until people weren’t around to really “get my drinking on,” which is apparently a phrase I invented live from Palm Springs and may never need to say again. 😂 But the truth underneath the joke isn’t funny. Hiding keeps us isolated.

Then you walk into a room like the one I was sitting in that day, and the whole thing starts losing its power. Not because everyone has the exact same story. They don’t. Not because everyone agrees on everything. They don’t. But because there’s empathy in the room. Real understanding. Not the kind where somebody pats you on the shoulder and says, “I understand,” when you know they really don’t. I’m talking about the kind where another woman looks at you and you can tell from her eyes that she has been there. One woman at the retreat, Virginia, said she’d lived alone with these feelings for decades and thought she was the only one. Finding women who truly understood was a huge relief because, in her words, “They’ve got me. And I got them.”

“They’ve got me. And I’ve got them.”

Isn’t that what we all want at some level? To be known without having to explain every little thing? To be able to show up on a hard day without pretending it’s a good one? To celebrate something wonderful without worrying that you’re bragging? To say, “I’m struggling,” and have somebody answer, “Okay, Sis. I’m here.” That’s what starts happening when we bring things into the light. The shame storm begins to lose some of its power because shame has a much harder time surviving in a room full of empathy.

Connection Is Good. Sisterhood Is Something More.

One of my favorite moments from our live came when Julie said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. She said she knew she needed connection when she joined Sober Sis, but she didn’t realize there was a difference between connection and sisterhood. You can find connection lots of places. At the country club. At church. In a neighborhood group. At work. But sisterhood is something deeper. I think sisterhood happens when we stop simply being around one another and start allowing ourselves to be known by one another.

That distinction really landed with me because we live in a world where we’re more “connected” than we’ve ever been. We can see what somebody ate for breakfast, where they went on vacation and what their grandkids wore for the first day of school without ever actually talking to them. We can have hundreds or thousands of online connections and still feel incredibly alone. Sisterhood asks something more of us. It asks us to show up. To let ourselves be seen, tell the truth, listen, encourage and to say, “Keep going,” when another woman can’t quite say it to herself yet.

One of our women, Rena, called it unity without uniformity, and goodness, I love that. We’re not all the same. We don’t have the same backgrounds, personalities, families, stories, politics, churches, ages or experiences. That’s not the point. We don’t need uniformity to have unity. We can bring our differences to the table and still say, We’re in this together.

“Sisterhood isn’t about being the same. It’s about knowing we’re in this together.”

And I think that matters even more as we get older. Donna, one of our longtime Sisters, talked about how important it has become for her to be around women who are still interested in growing. I loved that because THIS journey has always been about so much more than alcohol to me. Alcohol may be what gets our attention. It may even be the first domino. But eventually the questions get bigger. Who am I becoming? What do I want this season of my life to look like? Am I still growing? Am I using my gifts? Am I present for the people I love? Am I awake to my own life?

That’s when sober-minded living starts becoming less about what isn’t in your glass and much more about what IS in your life.

Sometimes We Have to Borrow Each Other’s Courage

There was another woman in that hotel room named Karen who shared something that I thought perfectly captured how sisterhood grows. When she first joined, she recorded her first video from a dark hotel room under the covers and didn’t even show her face. I mean, come on. If that doesn’t describe vulnerability, I don’t know what does. 😂 She didn’t come barreling into the community shouting, “HELLO, NEW BEST FRIENDS!” She started where she could. Quietly. Carefully. And over time, she realized that whatever she was going through, somebody else had probably been there and could help show her the way.

That’s the thing. You don’t have to arrive brave. Sometimes you borrow courage from the woman who’s a few steps ahead of you. You watch her navigate a vacation alcohol-free and think, Maybe I could do that. You see her go through a hard season without reaching for wine and think, Maybe I could do that too. You hear someone say she feels better at 60 than she did at 50 and something inside you wakes up. Then one day, without even realizing when it happened, YOU become the woman somebody else is watching.

“You don’t have to arrive brave. Sometimes you borrow courage from the woman a few steps ahead.”

That’s one of the most beautiful things about this whole Sober Sis journey. We keep going and growing, and then we turn around and reach back. The woman who once needed someone to say, “You’ve got this,” becomes the woman saying it to somebody else. That’s paying it forward. That’s sisterhood.

Maybe Alcohol Was Only the First Domino

As that phone made its way around my hotel room in Palm Springs, woman after woman shared what sisterhood had given her. A place to be herself. Permission to relax without drinking. Support through weddings and hard days. Real friendships that don’t revolve around alcohol. A voice after years of living in the shadows. Personal growth. Courage. Grace. Gratitude. A place to celebrate the wins and a place to bring the ugly stuff too. One woman said she realized she could have true friendships that didn’t center around alcohol. Another said the woman she is today is completely different from the woman who first joined. Another talked about finally finding her voice.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that laughing and crying and passing the phone around, I thought, This is why we do this.

We may come through the door because we’re tired of thinking about wine. We’re tired of the 3 a.m. wake-ups and making rules and breaking them. We’re tired of promising ourselves we’re going to do something different and then wondering why we didn’t. Alcohol gets our attention. But what if that’s only the beginning? What if questioning our drinking becomes the doorway into questioning all kinds of things we’ve been doing on autopilot? What if it wakes us up to our friendships, our faith, our health, our marriages, our purpose, our gifts, our time, and the way we actually want to spend this one beautiful life?

Mary said something during the live that summed it up perfectly: “Alcohol is really the first domino. It leads to just this big, beautiful life.”

“Alcohol might be the first domino. But the real story is the life waiting on the other side.”

That is what I wish I could tell the version of me who thought changing my relationship with alcohol was going to make my life smaller. I thought I was losing something. I had no idea how much room I was making. Room for real connection. Room for women who would become Sisters. Room to grow. Room to use my gifts. Room to laugh until my stomach hurts in a hotel room in Palm Springs with an ironing board serving as our conference table.

There’s a Seat for You, Sis

If you’re reading this and thinking, Well, that’s wonderful for them, but I’m not there yet, I want you to know something. Neither were they. Every single woman in that room had a beginning. Many started exactly where you might be today. Curious. Unsure. Nervous. Wondering whether they belonged. Wondering whether they could really change. Wondering whether they even wanted to.

Beth, one of the fiercest and most tender women I know, looked right into the camera during our live and said something I wish every woman reading this could hear personally: “You belong here.”

Maybe you don’t believe in yourself yet. That’s okay. Maybe you’re not sure you want to stop drinking forever. You don’t have to solve forever today. Maybe you’re doing a 21 Day Reset simply because you want to drink less. Start there. Maybe you haven’t told another soul that you’re questioning your relationship with alcohol. Start there. Maybe the idea of joining a group of women makes you want to record a video from underneath the covers with the lights off. Apparently, you can start there too. 😂

You don’t have to show up polished. You don’t have to have the right words. You don’t have to know where this road is going. You just have to be willing to take the next step and let somebody walk beside you.

Because changing your relationship with alcohol can feel lonely.

But you were never meant to do it alone.

And somewhere out there is another woman who needs to hear you say, “Me too.” 💛

Ladies, if you’re looking for THIS kind of connection, check out Our Sisterhood Here.