Emotional Sobriety During Divorce: A Game Changer With Master Life Coach & Addiction Recovery Specialist, Colleen Kachmann

In this enlightening episode, we dive into the concept of emotional sobriety with the insightful Colleen Kachmann. Colleen, a recovery-certified Master Coach and author of *Life Off the Label: A Handbook for Creating Your Own Brand of Health and Happiness*, shares her expertise on how emotional sobriety can transform your life.

Episode Highlights

1. Understanding Emotional Sobriety
2. The Seven Core Skills
3. Practical Advice and Inspiring Examples
4. Creating a Healthier, Happier Future

Guest Spotlight: Colleen Kachmann

Colleen is a distinguished health coach with a MSc in health coaching and a BS in education. Colleen specializes in helping women bypass the stigma often associated with sobriety by focusing on the crucial relationship with oneself. Her Emotional Sobriety program is a cornerstone of her approach, featuring seven core skills that promote emotional wellness through awareness, a growth mindset, and more.

Colleen's unique integration of emotional intelligence, positive psychology, and coaching empowers women to embrace their own power and redesign their lives. Her practical advice and inspiring examples offer listeners valuable insights into achieving emotional sobriety and fostering a healthier, happier future. Tune in to gain profound insights into emotional sobriety and learn how to start your own transformative journey with Colleen's expert guidance.

Connect with Colleen:

• TikTok
• Instagram
• Foundations of Emotional Sobriety Free Course

Journey Beyond Divorce Resources:

• Book a Free Rapid Relief Call
• Follow JBD on Instagram

A word from our sponsors:

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We’re grateful for Soberlink’s commitment to enhancing the recovery process and providing valuable resources to our listeners. Learn more about how Soberlink can make a difference in your journey at www.soberlink.com/jbd.

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We’re grateful for TalkingParents' support in simplifying co-parenting and enhancing communication for our listeners. Discover how TalkingParents can bring clarity and organization to your co-parenting journey at www.talkingparents.com/jbd.

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Emotional Sobriety During Divorce: A Game Changer With Master Life Coach & Addiction Recovery Specialist, Colleen Kachmann

Folks, we’re talking about emotional sobriety during divorce and how it’s a game changer. My guest is Colleen Kachmann and she helps women bypass the stigma and dramas that society associates with sobriety by focusing on what’s important our relationship with ourselves. You can read all about her in the bio. Another interesting fact about Colleen is, she scuba dives and swims with sharks. Welcome, Colleen.

It’s so good to be here, Karen. Thanks for having me.

The Genesis Of Emotional Sobriety: Finding Clarity Amidst Second Divorce

We could go into the whole story about sharks, but I’m going to let people sit on the edge of their seat with that one. I’d love to dive in with you sharing with our audience how your journey into emotional sobriety, which is what we’re going to be talking about collides with the beginning of your second divorce.

I had quite a bit of a drinking problem. I was always a normal drinker. I was always a happy drinker. My first divorce, I would never have said alcohol was the reason I got a divorce but certainly alcohol didn’t say the damn marriage. When I looked back, I could see when I got honest that it wasn’t all him, let’s just say that. I made friends with him. We have four kids together, my first husband and then I remarried. I quickly found myself married to somebody who I thought was a complete opposite and yet having the exact same fights like word for word, “What is going on here?”

I did the same thing I did in my first marriage, which was just try to drink through it. By the time COVID came around, I was a heavy daily drinker drinking every single day. I thought I was drinking to cope with my life. I thought my marital problems were what I needed relief from my stress but bottom line, when I finally was like, “These marital problems are big enough. I need to get the heck out of here. This is not working.” I knew better than to go through another divorce drunk. I remembered the guilt, the shame and the second guessing myself. I didn’t have the power.

Having a drinking problem is a bit of a part-time job to say the least in terms of taking your focus away. I didn’t want to go through that again. I was like, “Time to pull my big girl panties up. I pulled my big girl panties up just in time for the world to shut down. There was nowhere to go. Luckily, my now ex-husband is a very nice man. He was also a neurosurgeon. He was never home. I realized that hurrying up and getting another divorce wasn’t going to make me less lonely or unhappy. Loneliness is not cured.

If you’re lonely in your marriage, getting a divorce doesn’t cure that. I realized, if I can’t be happy in this life I’m not going to be happy anywhere and throwing my life into chaos because I have to get another divorce because I am not happy where I’m at. I realized that I needed to do the work on myself and I was safe. I wasn’t under any abuse. I decided to quit drinking. I hold the big girl panties up, put the bottle down and started taking ownership.

Codependency, People-Pleasing, & The Path To Self-Awareness

What I noticed as I did the work is that I was my own primary source of suffering. I resented my husband at the time because he had no trouble asking for what he wanted or doing what he needed or saying what he needed to say. He didn’t wait for my approval. He didn’t need me to say okay for his decisions. Any fight we had, it was me following him around bitching at him. He just went about his day and went about his life. He had no intention of changing his behavior to please me and that just killed me because I’m a full-time people pleaser and I need approval.

What I can say honestly now even though with the divorce is he didn’t never ask me to change either. It was all happening in my head. When we did get in an argument, I would be upset and sick for days. I had so much anxiety and brain fog. My thought it was all him, but what I realized is that the reason I had been drinking was I was a raging codependent. As I went through thinking I was an alcoholic, then I discovered I’m a codependent then I’m a perfectionist. Emotional sobriety is where you’re no longer intoxicated by your own bullshit. You’re uncovering your own power by taking full responsibility for what the problems are.

I had always thought I was independent and sassy. I was scuba dive with sharks. I put on a great performance pretending not to give about nothing but inside I was just hyper aware and concerned about everybody else’s feelings and opinions. I thought that I needed to get everybody to agree with me and then also get my brain to allow me to do all the things and be all the things so that I could feel better. This is the crux of it. I’ll finish the story here but the bottom line is, most of us operate with this idea that we have to do and get things so that we can feel the way we want to feel.

With emotional sobriety, it’s the opposite. I have to feel the way I want to feel and then I go out in the world and freaking do it. Years later, fast forward, I went through sobriety then I reintroduced alcohol. I became who I am now a drinking coach. I had done every single thing I could to create a relationship that I could be a part of, let’s just say that. One day, I realized the only thing holding me in this marriage is my fear. Fear of hurting the man who was kind. He was kind to me. He gave me my space. Fear that if I let myself do what I needed to do to be happy that somehow, I would destroy everybody else’s happiness.

I was afraid of displacing his kids and my kids. We had seven kids together and I didn’t want to be blamed for breaking up the blended family. I spent twelve years trying to put together. I was afraid of the stigma of going through a second divorce. What kind of woman would that? What will people say? I was super afraid of losing my financial security. He was a neurosurgeon and I was a hobbyist coach. I thought, “What if I lose my house? What if I can’t afford a vacation anymore?”

I was afraid of regret. What if I wake up alone in realize that would have been better than nothing? All of the uncertainty just not knowing what my life was going to look like. When it finally dawned on me that it was my fear keeping me stuck and thinking I had to figure stuff out and do stuff. I literally laughed out loud because now I have become a master at emotional sobriety. I know that fear is a feeling, not a fact.

In that moment what allowed me to leave my marriage in peace and love for both my ex-husband and myself was to ask myself, if the next year’s going to be hard because life is always hard. Staying the same is hard. Not changing is hard. Not doing what we need to do as hard. If the next year was going to be hard, did I want to struggle within this marriage or did I want to struggle getting out of it? What did I want the consequences of my struggle to be?

I knew having the skills of emotional sobriety that one year, I was going to be happy no matter what because I already was happy. I didn’t need to get the divorce to be happy. I would needed to be willing to face my challenges head on and then give myself the option what I want. What do I want to struggle for? Happiness is not never having another problem. It’s knowing that you can freaking handle the problems and the answer was quiet and clear in my body. It was time to go. That’s what I wanted to struggle.

I wanted to figure out how to support myself. I wanted to figure out how to do what I needed to do without stepping on my own air hose, is what we say in scuba diving. Instead of second guessing myself or taking an opinion poll from all the kids, all my extended family, and all my friends and explaining why I was doing what I was doing and wasting all of my precious time and energy worrying about all the things that could go wrong and all the reasons I probably shouldn’t done this or I should have already done it. Maybe I’m late and I’m too old and focusing on all that. I said, “How do I move forward?”

I asked the 2025 version of myself, what does she need for me and she said, “I got you. I’ll handle it. We don’t have anything to fear. You got this. Run, forest. Run.” I just took the first step and that’s emotional sobriety. It’s taking action. In order to have courage, there has to be fear with it. Emotional sobriety is realizing you’re the source of your own problem and that means you’re the solution to all of it as well.

Emotional sobriety is realizing that you're the source of your own problems—and that means you're also the solution.

What a beautiful story and for the reader, you’ve just touched on so many things that each and every reader has been experiencing. The first thing I want to say is, I call them the terrible triplets, co-dependence people, pleasing and perfectionism. You wrap those three up and you could be completely stopped in your tracks and overwhelmed. The issue of fear, I don’t think that there’s a person who listens who wouldn’t say, “It’s such a big transition, divorce.”

Fear stops me in my tracks on so many different friends. The last thing I just want to comment on is life is hard and divorce is particularly hard. We often talk about, if you can be in pain anyway, use it to fuel a transformation. I’m hearing all of those things in your story, which is so beautiful, so congratulations. What a huge decision to make. While everyone else was picking up a bottle in the beginning of COVID, you were putting yours down.

I drank every single day for over fifteen years. I never ran out of reasons or ways to justify. That ate me from the inside out. I wasn’t who I was pretending to be. I was putting on a damn good performance. Nobody would have known how much I was drinking but I was rotting from the shame. That’s the three, what do you call them?

The three triplets.

The Societal Neglect Of Emotional Processing

It’s, how do we get that way? We spend our whole lives learning and being taught how to manage our behavior and we have to put on this front so that people see. That’s how we’re rewarded. That’s how we think we’re going to get what we want but what happens is that we never learn how to process our emotions. I would have told you that I was managing all of my emotions and everybody else’s but I wasn’t. What I was doing was suppressing any emotion that didn’t fit with the identity of myself image.

Anything weakness, shame, and fear got stuffed down there. I don’t care what your poison is. By the time you’re in midlife, your unprocessed emotions, you are emotionally constipated and it gets bigger. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball underwater and pretend you’re not holding a beach ball underwater while also helping everybody else with their beach balls. What I you realize is that once you learn how to process your feelings, then you can walk through life. You’re not afraid to feel nothing. I’m not afraid to fail at my business.

I’m not afraid to fail it another marriage because I know that the feeling is being caused by my own response and healing the shame that we carry around with us because we’re afraid we’re not good enough. That’s the ultimate skill. It’s to be able to be your own best friend and heal your relationship with yourself so it’s always safe for you to be you even when you’re left holding the big pile of steaming crap. You are not afraid to feel those feelings.

There are so many heavy and uncomfortable difficult feelings that come with feeling like you’ve made a mistake, you’re in the wrong marriage and you’ve been searched your spouse or your kids well or whatever the case may be. I had a guest on a couple of years ago. She wrote a book on emotions and I’ll never forget what she said, especially hard emotions. Her name was Karla McLaren.

She said, “Emotions serve two purposes to inform and to guide. Whether it’s skilled or shame or regret, it informs you like where you might be out of a lineman and guides you back. The problem is people then invite it in to spend the life instead of saying, ‘Thank you very much. You can leave now.’” I would love to dive in to your emotional sobriety. If you could just talk to the reader before we dive in because you’re talking about alcohol but we’ve talked offline that one can pick their poisons. Can you just address that so that anyone who doesn’t have a drinking problem can still hear and understand everything that we’re about to discuss.

Alcohol was just how I dealt with the emotions. Emotions are caused by thoughts and your beliefs. A belief is any idea that at one point somebody told you that and you no longer question it. It feels true in your body where feeling your feelings gets a bad rap. Is most people are thinking about their feelings? They’re sitting in that pity party stew and stirring it around or self-judge and self-criticizing yourself and beating yourself up over and over because you think that the way you feel is telling you the truth. “There is something wrong with me. I’m not good enough.”

Processing your emotions all it means is you’re able of bringing that thought up into consciousness. You’re looking directly at it and you’re saying, “That is how I feel in this moment but truth is the experience.” It’s not an idea. There’s no words. Words represent truth just like pictures can represent a sunset. It’s not the sunset. The ideas in the words in your brain are not the truth. They’re just the truth of the moment. The same man does not stand in the same river twice. You’re always changing. Your truth is always changing and where we get stuck is that we hold on to a truth that was true at one point like, “This marriage is perfect. I want to live in the rest of my life with this person.”

Your truth is always changing, and where we get stuck is in holding on to a truth that was once true.

Things change. The more you try to pretend like it hasn’t changed, the more that requires for you to suppress your emotions. What we do is to cope with our emotions. We eat. We drink. We keep ourselves busy at work. Some people use drugs and shop. All of any form of self-sabotage, anything that you’re doing that is working against you that you should do less of but you’re struggling not to. It’s because it’s meeting a need.

It’s allowing you to bypass or ignore or prove a feeling wrong. Why do we people please? It’s because we’re afraid we’re not good enough. If they say that we are good enough, then we can feel good enough. It’s simpler than we think it is and where we get stuck as we don’t have the right tools. We don’t understand what our feelings are telling us. They’re not telling us the truth. They’re telling us one truth and a lot all the things can be true.

Defining Emotional Sobriety: Separating Fact from Fiction Through Core Skills

Your program is so brilliant because you’ve boiled it down, clarified it, and codified it into seven core skills. I’ve never heard anyone talk about emotional sobriety before. As soon as I heard you say that, it just resonated 100%. My dad was an alcoholic and my ex had his own drug of choice. I know that throughout my life. There’s so much that I’ve been exposed to and I am recovering people pleaser, a codependent, and an perfectionist. I’m excited about you sharing with me and the reader what is this emotional sobriety and why is it core skills? That’s an interesting thing. Core skills that can take us from being run by our emotions. Maybe the tail of the dog to back and you see it in control.

The litmus test to invite the reader in, you said who is this for? If you are not actively managing your emotions, not your behavior. The woman who can still smile and put up with the most shit wins. No, that’s not it. You are managing your behavior, but if you are not managing your emotions, they are managing you. If you don’t even know what that means, welcome. Let’s talk about it.

Let’s dive in.

I’ll put this in the context of how I developed them. They’re not specific to alcohol use disorder but the way I say when I bring women into my program. It’s like if you get emotionally sober, if you learn and master the seven course skills, the side effect of you being emotionally sober is that you will drink in a way that gives you pleasure and you’re proud of always even when you’re alone. Versus if we don’t work on the drinking, we create the person who drinks as the way you want to drink.

Being emotionally sober means that you are no longer intoxicated by the stories you’re telling yourself. You can separate fact from fiction. I have seven core skills that I’ve identified over multiple disciplines and modalities that if you learn these skills, and that’s the nice thing. How do you solve all of your emotions? How do you fix all of the problems? When people come in with a drinking problem, I just say, “All you have to do is be a student. Can you learn these skills? I will teach you the skills.”

Being emotionally sober means you're no longer intoxicated by the stories you tell yourself. You can separate fact from fiction.

There’s seven of them that I’ve identified and I lay them out in alphabetical order to help people remember them more easily. It’s A through I. A, the first one, the most important skill. If you take nothing else away, A is awareness. It is the ability to distinguish between what’s happening inside your mind, your internal world and then what’s happening on the outside world. You can take full ownership of your thoughts that are causing your feelings and creating your perception of reality.

Everybody’s got their own reality. If a bunch of people walk into a party, an artist sees angles, colors, lights, and shading. A musician hears notes, harmony and the rhythm. A lawyer is seeing loopholes and liability. Somebody with alcohol use disorders is like, where’s the bar and who’s drinking? Is anybody noticing that I’m drinking? The dieter is like, how many calories are in the bacon wraps? Everybody’s having a different experience.

In the same party, everybody’s living a different life and living a different reality. Awareness is the ability to distinguish what is neutral, which there aren’t that many neutral facts. What is neutral versus what the story you’re telling yourself is. That’s awareness and that is 80% of it, if you didn’t get none of the other skills. The ability to own the story you’re telling yourself and what you’re choosing to pay attention to.

In terms of how our brains and bodies work, we get eleven million bits of information coming in to our bodies, but we only register in our brain 40 bits, 11 million to 40. Your power is a human being. Your consciousness is your ability to choose what you’re paying attention to. When you become aware that you’re spending all this time worrying about what some human thinks in their brain versus creating the life that will give you what you want.

You only got 40 bits of focus in any given second. You have to choose in becoming aware of what you’re focusing on. The story you’re telling yourself about it is key. The second thing is the second most important is I say body. Being aware of your body and being able to dedicate 20% of your attention at all times to what’s happening in your body because your feelings are telling you the quality of your thoughts. There’s a simple litmus test. If you are having a shitty feeling or you are feeling anxious, that’s not telling you about the outside world. That’s telling you maybe you should ask a different question or maybe you’ve got a story that isn’t working.

It’s telling you about the quality of your thoughts. It’s like driving a stick shift. You got to learn to drive your body, feeling the tension on the clutch and listening to the engine and feeling how high the RPMs are. If you spend 20% of your focus and invest it in awareness of what’s happening in your body. You’re not going to miss the red flags on that first date. You will be aware that your body just told you something. Instead of suppressing it and plowing through, you’re aware that you’re feelings are intelligently telling you what you think.

Now they’re not telling you the truth. They’re telling you what you think then you invited up to say, “Do I want that to be true? Do I need to pay attention to that or is that what my mom told me in second grade? I’m not going to do that.” Learning how to regulate your nervous system and live in a regulated state. The reason that’s so important is because your emotions are like your eye glasses. Whatever you’re feeling is causing you to perceive the world. If you are anxious, you see anxious things. If you are judgy, you see judgy things. If you’re pissy, everybody’s pissing you off.

If you are able to exist and choose emotional states like calm and confidence and you solve for your emotional state, then you go solve your problems in the real world. When I’m scared, I don’t let that version of me think about problems. I don’t let her make decisions. I don’t let her speak for me. I feel her feelings. I comfort her, but I do not operate in my life unless I am feeling calm, connected, and clear and all of the emotions that allow me to think like the highest version of myself.

Body and awareness is key so that you can operate in an emotional state. Emotions are like outfits. You want to be wearing your best outfit. You don’t want to be taking insecurity around and solving your life through that. The third skill is C which is called causation, which is the ability to see how one circumstance causes the next. You have to understand that everything you do now causes tomorrow’s happiness.

Emotions are like outfits—you want to wear your best one. You don't want to carry insecurity around and try to solve your life through that lens.

You have to see yourself looking forward, what do I need to do now to cause the results I want in the future? Most of this, as you said, are chasing the tail of the dog. We’re trying to figure out why this is happening or whose fault it is. It doesn’t matter. How you respond to the situation is what causes your results in the future. I don’t want to plow through all of these.

That last one is so important. It’s like the eye on the prize. I heard someone say that if someone’s a race car driver and there is an accident in front of them. If they look at the accident, they’re going to drive right into it but if they just look at that narrow lane between the accident and the wall and where they can go. They can get past it and keep on going. That’s what I’m hearing you say that where you’re focusing your attention is so important.

If the focus, with so many of my clients, is on this high conflict person and because of he or she or I can’t and I have been able to and I’m in this place. You’re saying, what I’m hearing you say is when you own your own emotions and you’re looking forward, you can begin to craft and create the life that you desire.

That leads me to my next skill. What you’re talking about focusing on what you want is key but what we think we want is we want him to stop being an asshole or him to be fair about the money or them to let us live in the house. We think that’s what we want but if you solve differently for an emotional state, what I want is what those things will make me feel. Skip the external world and come right back to yourself. I want to feel safe. I want to feel loved or I want whatever.

When you set the emotional goal as I want to feel safe, let’s say, then you can understand the actions that you will take to cause that safety. When you fight for power, you don’t have power. Your power is your ability to feel how you want to feel regardless of what other people are saying or doing because you know that you’ll take an action that causes good results in the future. The causation component where we sit around and think that someone else is causing our misery is why we’re miserable.

When you take full ownership that I can be happy at any point if I choose that, then you realize you just have to let a lot of shit go and go cause happiness for yourself in the future. Understanding that if what you want is a feeling solving for whatever it is you’re telling yourself you want and it’s the feeling that you’re trying to create and then work on expanding your ability to live in that emotional state and not be bothered by other people.

Not need somebody else to change your feeling. If you’re in that people pleaser and codependent space, it’s quite the pivot, isn’t it? From perhaps the lifetime of doing things so that somebody will respond in a way that makes me feel better versus taking that third party out and handling yourself. What am I thoughts? How am I feeling? How do I pivot so that I feel the safety I want to feel or the possibility I want to feel?

Realizing nobody can make you feel anything. It’s just retraining your brain to think like that. I can remember when I went into this divorce thinking. I have a nice car. My ex-husband paid for all of that and it’s paid off but what if I need to get a different car? I remember thinking selling my high dollar luxury brand car. I was afraid like, “I’m going to feel bad like I don’t have that car or I could feel I’m so grateful that I’m going to get some money out of this car and now my ride to my new life looks like a used Honda Civic that’s twenty years old.”

That didn’t happen but when I realized I got to choose how I feel and it’s not the situation or the person that is causing my feelings but it’s my attitude. I can choose that and process the disappointment or the pain of grieving a loss, whether it be a material item or a relationship or just change. It’s not toxic positivity. You allow the feeling to exist it if you don’t let it control you.

The whole point of emotional sobriety is if you’re not grieving, certainly if you’re going through a divorce then you couldn’t be emotionally sober. You’re just making believe or pushing down or impacting it in some other way. I’m hearing that by being able to own your feelings and do your own personal work to experience life the way you want that, you’re in full agency as a supposed to relying on other people to make you feel better, which they don’t anyway.

Redefining Identity: Embracing Change & Potential Beyond Fixed Labels

I want to skip to the H skill, which is honesty in order to respond to that. Honesty is the ability to allow the whole truth to exist as humans. We are always trying to boil everything down into a story. This is the story of the marriage. I think about somebody who’s been happily married for twenty years and then finds out that their spouse was a serial cheater. All of their memories are now tainted because the story they want to tell themselves is that none of that was real.

That’s a story. It all was real and you experienced it but allowing the whole truth to exist is one of the key skills of emotional sobriety. It’s this and something else. A story by definition is cherry picked fast to fit a narrative. There’s a villain, hero, themes, beginning and an end. Awareness is it all time is now. Life is just now. Telling yourself a story that your past was not what you thought it was.

“He lie. He never loved me.” I hear this all of the time. All of the positive things that you experienced and felt because you found out about something. You’ve now rewritten all of that as it did not happen or it was alive or was a forest, which creates more emotional angst.

Who would you be if you gave yourself permission to not let that taint your own emotional wellbeing? Byron Katie has four questions and one of her questions is, who would you be without that thought? When you can boil down your entire misery to coming into a certain amount of knowledge, which is just a story somebody else told you. Who would you be if you didn’t know that? That’s where you can at least stand and see I’m making a choice here. I’m making a choice to experience angst. What would you be doing? What are you holding yourself back from by suffering or creating all this suffering? It’s not the other person creating your suffering.

Pain is temporary. The moment you find out that is painful but the longer you spend focusing on that story and giving that story your power to make you miserable then that’s where you have to take responsibility. That’s what emotional sobriety is. It’s owning the fact that, “I must like being miserable. I wonder what that’s about.” Not even being judgmental of yourself. Only being curious.

The moment you discover something painful, it hurts—but the more you focus on that story and give it the power to make you miserable, the more you stay stuck. Emotional sobriety is owning the fact that, ‘Oh, I must like being miserable. I wonder what that’s about.’

“I’m afraid to move on because if I didn’t have this problem taking up all of my consciousness, I might have to go look for a job or put myself out there or feel lonely or process and move on.” Pain serves a purpose. Honestly, negative emotions are just another drug of choice, whether you’re drinking or you’re just doing in your own pity party stew. You are still not dealing with those emotions.

The saying that I’ve heard is, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” The optional suffering is what you’re talking about. That agency that we have but we don’t know we have it until we step into your core skill number one which is awareness, to get clear that I do have agency to start watching my thoughts and seeing how they’re hardwired into my feelings and making decisions.

The other thing that comes to mind, Colleen, it’s a boundary thing. You made me feel it’s your fault that where you’re breaking this basic boundary that somebody else can make you emotionally feel something as opposed to your history experiences and what have you and belief systems that make you feel it. I love this. Awareness was the first one and causation was the third. What was two? I missed that.

Rewiring Desire: Training the Brain to Crave What Truly Serves Us

A is awareness. B is body. C is causation. D is dopamine and that skill is the ability to train your brain to want what you need.

Can you just say that again because that’s an interesting statement say.

It’s the ability to train your brain to want. Dopamine is motivation to get stuff. It’s the ability to train your brain to want what you need.

That’s interesting. Give us a little context on that? How do we train our brains to want what we need?

This is where I spend a lot of time getting into what you’re saying, the story you’re telling yourself. For example, somebody who says, “I want to not drink or I want to drink less.” That is a negative goal. That’s not something you do. The opposite of drink is the side effect of what you want. Why am I saying I want to drink less? It’s because I want to feel like I’m in control. That’s an emotional state. A sense of control. What would I need to do to cause me to feel in control? There’s a lot of ways to create that emotional state.

What we don’t realize is that the brain makes habits out of everything, including our thought processes. “I want him to love me.” What you’re wanting is to feel loved. Love is a felt experience. What else can make you feel loved and then you decide what are the actions I could take to feel. I could call my mother or I could tell my son and I could experience that love. You have to train your brain to get the emotional state you want. You can get it from anywhere and anything. You just have stop telling yourself the story that there’s one way to feel that way. “I want to feel closure.” There’s a lot of ways to get that.

Without them apologizing and doing A, B, and C. I’m never going to have closure, is the story and pick yourself in a corner. What you’re saying is number four, dopamine is change the story.

You can train your brain to want things that you don’t enjoy. The surface example here is you can train your brain to love exercise. Most of us go to the gym because we want to be skinny and hot. That’s what we want. We hate the action because it feels hard and we don’t love the run. When you are running or doing your push-ups, if you focus your attention on the felt sensation that you’re experiencing in your body, that sense of hard and you tell yourself, “I love how hard this feels, or I’m learning to love how hard this feels or I’m going as God as my witness. I’m going to love that feeling.”

You can connect your attention to the actual feeling and you don’t take it farther like you have to build this in small increments but as long as you can do it and tolerate it, you can learn to like the sensations. Instead of looking at the result of what you want, you begin to attach your dopamine to the actions you need to take that feel hard and then you learn to become the person who likes to run or do the push-ups or set the boundary or say the hard thing because you learn, I like that feeling. You embrace that feeling of taking action in the face of fear.

You program your brain with language. Language is the operating system. I like when I do hard things. Most of us are like, “This suck. I can’t wait till it’s over. This is awful.” Stop telling yourself that. Anything you say that you don’t want to be true, you’re reinforcing. “I like feeling brave. I like this. I can’t wait till this divorce is over. This is awful. I love that I’m getting my life back on track. I love that in a year from now I’m going to look back and be so proud of the actions I’ve taken.”

That’s such a huge and powerful pivot. I know that we’re talking about mindset in the next two because I peeked two core skills. Can you dive into that?

Shifting From Fixed To Growth Mindset

It’s in FG, moving from a fixed to a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is, “I’ve already figured it out. This isn’t going to work, or this is what’s going to work and it’s exactly what’s going to need and we’re going to do with this way.” A growth mindset is where you see that you are learning. You are in the process of learning, so there is no getting it right or getting it wrong. It is the illusion of both success and failure that keep us stuck because every time we do something and think we fail, our motivation or our dopamine drops to try it again.

There is no 'getting it right' or 'getting it wrong.' It’s the illusion of both success and failure that keeps us stuck, because every time we do something and think we’ve failed, our motivation and dopamine drop, making it harder to try again.

It gets harder and harder to quit drinking or to lose the weight or to say the thing because we think that it’s possible to fail. When you step out of it, you can look at this as a growth mindset of, “I’m learning. I’m not attached to learning this way or that way. I’m attached to treating this like an experiment and I’m going to learn from what works and what doesn’t work. It’s impossible for me to fail to learn.” That’s the goal.

It is not getting it right. It is running the experiment and learning from the results. When you move into a growth mindset, you no longer see success or failure or winning or losing. Life is not binary. If you set it up for, how do I improve? It’s like every year, they come out with a new iPhone and each year, there’s some things that were better and some things that were worse. That’s just the iPhone of the year. Welcome. Each year, the engineers are tinkering around. When you look at your own skills in life and the way you’re approaching life and saying, “Where do I want to be in a year? How do I grow in that direction?” There’s no more failure anymore. There’s just information in how you respond to that.

I love that so much. I made a business accelerator and I did a launch that didn’t go well. I remember saying to someone, “I don’t understand what I did wrong.” They were like, “What if you didn’t do anything wrong, Karen?” The thing that I’ve been playing with as I’m growing my business is experiment and put on my scientist cap.

It’s so interesting that I’ve never considered myself black and white but as you were saying that, that concept that either I’m succeeding or I’m failing or if it didn’t turn out the way I want to as if I am the creator of the universe and I am supposed to know then I must have done something wrong and I must have fail then. That whole get rid of the binary that is either A or B, which is exactly as you’re talking, what I realized I was doing. I was like, “You’re either right or wrong. You failed or you succeeded.” There’s no space to be human in that.

In this particular mindset, it makes it a lot easier to be emotionally sober because you’re no longer wondering what’s wrong with you, whose fault it is, and how bad you’re going to feel if you try that launched again and it goes worse or what are people going to think of you? if you just look at everything as a result, it’s not a good result or a bad result. Stop identifying, which is going to get us into the last skill.

Stop identifying as either a success or failure. That Chinese proverb of the farmer’s whose horse runs away and like, “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.” He’s like, maybe. The horse comes back with three new horses and they’re like, “That’s awesome.” He’s like, “Maybe.” It just is what it is. The sun breaks the leg trying to break the horse and they say, “That’s awful.” He’s like, “Maybe.” The emperor comes through collecting young men and the son can’t go because he’s got a broken leg. It’s like, “That’s the best.” If you want to get off the high and low pendulum swinging of your emotions and you just say, “It is what it is. I’m going to do the best I can.” You avoid a lot of the feelings you’re afraid to feel.

That happened to me and something else. I am loving the way you talk about this and how you’ve laid out these seven core skills. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about that last one. A little bit more of that identifies. Is that what the I is?

Identity.

This is so powerful and Brilliant. Thank you.

Addressing the Attachment To Suffering & The Need for Safety

You’re welcome. I will put it into a simple context with alcohol then I’ll give you the cheat codes of what I use. Most of us who get into the weeds with drinking think that we’re just the type of person like one glass of wine is a waist. I’m an all or nothing person. I have addictive personality. Sometimes, all habits are addictive. Everything you do turns into a habit, so knock yourself off your high horse and telling yourself that you’re identifying as an all or nothing person who can’t control your behavior creates that realty because that’s what your brain selects for. You notice when it’s true.

My cheat code when it comes to alcohol immediately start saying, “I’m a less is more person.” People are like, “What do you mean?” Have you ever ordered a small coffee? Have you ever eaten half a cookie? Have you ever watched one episode of binging the whole season? There’s equal amount of evidence. If you allow the whole truth, the core skill six, to be in existence, there’s evidence for anything. Any lawyer can tell you. They can argue either side of the case like, “Give me the files. It’s fine.”

When you start identifying as the person you want to like, the cheat code for alcohol that I say is, “Start identifying as a less is more person.” You’ll notice that it’s true. It will start feeling more true because you only get 40 bits of focus per minute and you move the ball down the field. The greatest identity of all, the cheat code for all of it is to just start identifying as a dynamic ever-changing human being who has the potential to experience the full range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

This idea that, “You would never cheat. You would never say such a nasty thing.” Until you’ve walked in their shoes, you had no idea what you would do. Telling yourself that you’re not, that’s part of your emotional suppression is saying, “I would never.” You can feel every single human being got the full package of emotions. You can feel which ones you prefer. That’s your personality and your habit, but you can experience murderous rage and you can give your life in the right moment selflessly.

You can feel anything. If you identify as somebody who’s always changing, you don’t get attached to any one truth of any specific moment. I am guilty because I cheated or I am worthless because someone cheated on me. Those happened in the moment and I am a dynamic ever-changing human being who has the potential to experience all of it. That’s what we’re here for in Earth school. We are here to experience life.

If you identify as someone who's always changing, you don't get attached to any one truth or any specific moment.

That’s beautiful. What do you say to the person whose heels are dug in? Have you ever had someone come to you? I’m thinking of someone who came to us and no matter what conversation we had, she was attached to her suffering. Her words were, “I don’t want to suffer anymore,” but her decisions and her actions were, “I can’t detach from these beliefs and these ways of being.” You have this gorgeous program. Is there a key that the prison door for the person who is uber attached to the way they’ve been living life?

I would answer that. There’s probably two tiers. The woman that you described who’s so attached to her suffering, I would soften her own responsibility. You can only process things from a state of safety. B, body, nervous system regulation. It’s not safe for her to let that go. This situation that is happening around her for whatever reason, her own trauma in the past. It’s all inside her own body but she needs help. She’s not the problem. She doesn’t have the skills to do it. She’s living in a dysregulated nervous system.

If she said, “You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want help.” What I heard you say is she said I want to end my suffering. Her inability might be looked at as a skilled deficit and we have a growth mindset about this because the second thing I would come at you is pull your big girl panties up and realize you’re making a choice to cling onto this story. You can make the choice to keep the story but until you are able to feel safe in your body, the choice doesn’t exist.

What I would say is if someone wants to let go and they can’t, then some energy work and some nervous system regulation. There’s tons of modalities out there but don’t assume that you’re the problem. If you’re listening and saying, “I want to stop suffering and I can’t.” My friend, there’s a skill gap here. That’s it. Don’t stop looking until you find the right modality. If the student is ready, the teacher appears. If you want to let go of it and you can’t, assume you’re dealing with the skill deficit. Find somebody that can help you create a sense of safety where you can let stuff go.

I love that. Beautiful. I dig your program and your seven course skills. Can you tell our audience a little bit about your program? I know you have a free gift for them as well.

I have a one-year long program for women smart, successful, and high-achieving professional women who are we bit in the weeds with alcohol. You’ve done all the things, tried all the behavior change and you’re ready for a permanent solution. The side effects of my program include 80% reduction in your alcohol but the goal is emotional sobriety. I also teach mindful drinking. I’m not sober. You can’t learn to drink in moderation when you’re sober or drunk. We do a lot of mindful drinking work in the program.

It’s a year-long program because you don’t change your mind or your habits in one day. You change the trajectory of where you want to be in a year. Change is slow. Trying to perform perfectly in this moment and be a success and a failure. That approach is not working. I have a program for women who want to reduce their drinking, get emotionally sober, and become their own best friends. I have an show called It’s Not About the Alcohol, which is where I’d start. I’m on TikTok and Instagram as @HangoverWhisperer.

I have a website called Recover With Colleen and I will give you, Karen, a link for a free audio course called the Foundations of Emotional Sobriety. If you want to start there with me, it’s not alcohol-based at all. If you want alcohol, I have a lot of other things for that but this is just a general helping you work through some ways to take your power back. That’s a good course for that.

Thank you so much for that very generous gift.

Thank you.

Colleen, this has s been spectacular. Thank you for sharing your program and your journey. I love that you swim with sharks.

Me, too. I can’t wait to get back in the pool. With divorce, I’ve not been taking any scuba trips but on back.

It sounds like you’ve been figured lately swimming with sharks for a little while and found a way to stay safe and all waters, which is awesome and that’s what we hope all of our readers and clients. Thank you so much for joining us. Please reach out and check out Colleen’s website or social media. Certainly, grab the free gift. We’ll be back again real soon with another episode. You take.

Important Links

• Colleen Kachmann on TikTok
• Colleen Kachmann on Instagram
• Karla McLaren
• It’s Not About the Alcohol
• Emotional Sobriety Coaching
• Foundations of Emotional Sobriety Free Course
• Book a Free Rapid Relief Call
• Follow JBD on Instagram
• Soberlink
• Talking Parents