Getting Sober at Seventy with Tribe member Ros

I always love featuring a Tribe Member on the podcast but this week it’s particularly special as Tribe member Ros is celebrating her first Soberversary. All of those Sober Firsts are important – the first time we socialise without alcohol, the first time we go on holiday Even Sober Packing (!) – it seems to be a thing for some of our members and of course the Soberversary is a culmination of all of those Sober Firsts A whole year of sobriety is enough for most people to nail the “not drinking” part – and then to start reconfiguring their lives – creating a life they don’t want to escape from! I often say that if we really want to stop drinking we have to throw the book at it – and Ros is a fantastic example of the results you get if you do that Ros had been drinking for decades and knew that she would have to make a change so she joined the Tribe. She turned up on Day one – looking wobbly and tearful at our weekly Zoom Café. She came to Zoom every single week and it was such a joy to see her getting stronger and looking happier as time went by. Ros put the work in and as a result she only ever had One Day One.. She used the Tribe Roadmap and worked her way systematically through our 7 steps – she got connected, she did the prep, she did the work and then she moved into healing her body and mind. In this Episode Ros came from a non drinking household and apart from the odd half a pint of beer in the pub with her friends her teenage years were alcohol free As she got into her 20’s Ros left the UK and began a career in tourism – where drinking was very much part of the work hard/play hard culture. She began to drink regularly and with enthusiasm Ros lived in Mexico for a couple of years and discovered that there was a drink that was stronger than tequila – strong enough to put her in hospital in fact As she says “if it was there I would drink it” Like many of us Ros was into healthy eating and going to the gym but no way was she going to relinquish the booze! In fact she was blissfully unaware of the toxicity of alcohol and had no idea that the “low risk” limits of alcohol are one and a half bottles of wine a week. In fact the WHO now recommend that if we want to be healthy we don’t drink any alcohol at all I could do a whole episode on the toxicity of alcohol but let me just give you Russell Brand’s brilliant answer when people ask him why he’s not drinking – he simply says “that stuffs flammable you know” ;-) Thanks to our workshop Ros is now more than aware of just how much damage alcohol does She lost both her sisters to cancer and reflected back to the time she spent in a hospice with one of her sisters – there were lots of health experts coming in to talk about healthy eating but not one word about alcohol! Not a word about the fact that alcohol is linked to 7 different types of cancer and that drinking more than 3 small glasses of wine a week raises your risk of breast cancer by 15% We both agreed with the research that says it takes most people about a decade to recognise that we have a problem – and then to actually do something about it We both wasted far too long setting rules around our drinking and trying to moderate! Ros recognised that she needed help about 10 years before joining Tribe Sober but once she did everything changed for her She felt such a sense of relief that when she met other people who had the same “problem” with alcohol she realised that she was not alone in this If you’re feeling alone in your struggle then please check out Tribe Sober – we are here for you and nothing makes us happier than helping people to ditch the booze and change their life Ros took all of our advice to heart and accepted that sobriety is not something we do “on the side” or “tinker round the edges” – we have to make it a priority, forget the people pleasing and learn to put ourselves first Ros coped with her social life by taking our advice to “be an anthropologist” – learn to be an observer and watch ho