Image Credit: Pexels

As founder and CEO of Emotional Sobriety Coaching©, an intuitive drinking coach, and host of the top 1% podcast It’s Not About the Alcohol, Colleen Freeland Kachmann is changing the way women engage with alcohol. Colleen’s holistic approach helps her professional female clients, including entrepreneurs, executives and career moms, correct the dysfunctional thinking patterns that drive alcohol use disorder. As she says, “Get happy, not sober.”

A Personal Struggle With Alcohol

Before she became a pioneer in the application of emotional sobriety to curb excessive drinking habits, Colleen hid the fact that she was a heavy daily drinker for over 15 years. “I honestly thought alcohol was my reward for the fact that I could accomplish more before lunch than most people do in a week. But in the end, I was exhausted,” she reflects.

Colleen tried traditional, sobriety-based recovery methods but found that identifying as ‘someone who used to have a drinking problem’ kept her stuck in the past.

“Focusing on sobriety didn’t cure my obsession with alcohol. And I still struggled with the anxiety, perfectionism and negative self-talk that had caused me to drink in the first place.”

Sobriety Isn’t the Right Goal

Building on her personal experience, Colleen delved into researching the science behind addiction. “I studied the science of neuroplasticity, addiction and recovery,” she explained. “I learned that labeling people as ‘alcoholics’ and scaring them into believing that one drink is a life or death decision creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and increases the risk of relapse into addiction.”

Colleen has a master’s degree in health coaching and a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry education. She’s also certified in addiction and recovery as well as women’s functional and integrative medicine. From this foundation, she built her unique method: Emotional Sobriety Coaching©.

Creating Solutions for Alcohol Use Disorder

According to Colleen, Emotional Sobriety Coaching© allows clients to reduce alcohol consumption by upwards of 80%—without rigid abstinence. She combines holistic techniques with evidence-based strategies in self-directed neuroplasticity and mind-body tools in nervous system regulation to rewire the subconscious thinking habits that fuel the desire to drink.

As Colleen shared, “It’s not your relationship with alcohol that needs to change—it’s your relationship with yourself. When you see yourself as confident and in control, you drink like someone who is confident and in control. Instead of trying to fix the problem, we create the solution.”

Reclaiming Personal Power

Colleen’s emotional sobriety method does not focus on managing alcohol intake but on reclaiming personal power and the shifting of outdated belief systems. She does not consider addiction to be a disease but a symptom of the autonomy that has been lost. “Trading your drinking problem for sobriety certainly is an upgrade, but what you really want is freedom from the negative self-talk that is making you want to drink and keeping you from living your best life,” she says.

A Different Way of Thinking About Addiction

Colleen acknowledges that her approach is not for everyone. “For some people, it’s easier to just quit,” she admits. She uses a viral quiz called “Do you have a drinking or thinking problem?” to help women decide if her program would be a good fit.

“The reason I don’t advise my clients to quit drinking is because the goal of emotional sobriety is to learn from mistakes–not avoid them. This is why I call myself @thehangoverwhisperer on social media,” she explains.

Transformation is the Goal

Colleen has used her method to help thousands of professional women transform their relationship with alcohol so that drinking feels like a pleasure again instead of a soul-sucking problem. And she’s built a 7-figure coaching business in the process. She is determined to help women with alcohol use disorder elevate themselves to a higher level of consciousness where the desire to numb and dumb with alcohol simply no longer exists.

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting Irvine Weekly and our advertisers.