I used to binge drink until I blacked out – now I’m a sober coach

There is a specific kind of morning I became expert at surviving. You come round slowly, and before you’ve properly opened your eyes, the dread is already there – before you’ve even remembered why. You start running back through the night. What you said, who you spoke to, whether you made a fool of yourself.

The gaps in your memory are the worst part. You reach for your phone, and you’re scared to look at it. Then you pull yourself together, get up, try to ignore the shame and anxiety and tell yourself you’re fine. Next time will be different. I told myself that for more than 20 years.

Growing up in Glasgow, drinking wasn’t something that crept into my life – it was always there. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t drink. When I went to university at 17, binge drinking was the culture, and I threw myself into it, laughing off the times when I’d drunk more than I’d meant to and treating a hangover as the normal price of a good night.

It never crossed my mind to stop. I just thought I needed to try harder to control it. In my early twenties I qualified as a chartered accountant and moved to London – and my life split neatly in two. I lived in a house share in north London. It was the height of Britpop and our weekends revolved around gigs in Camden, vodka, alcopops, the ladette culture in full swing.

Women drinking as much as men was something my friends and I were proud of. We thought we had it sussed. During the week, it was a different world entirely – investment banking in the City, champagne on a Friday, long drinking sessions. It was excess with a suit on. The venues changed, the drinks changed. The drinking never did. Whatever version of my life I was living, alcohol was the one constant.

My manager was a big fan of work nights out and his approach was simple: eating is cheating. I was five foot four and eight stone, working almost entirely with men well over six foot, and the unspoken expectation was that everyone would keep up. So, I did. Pushing through a hangover and turning up the next day was a badge of honour. I earned that badge regularly.

London was exciting and brash and I loved it. But I was also completely out of my depth in ways I couldn’t have articulated at the time. I had suffered from anxiety all my life and was determined not to let it hold me back. As a teenager I discovered that alcohol relaxed me. I felt like I could hold my own with anyone. It took me a very long time to understand that, while alcohol is marketed as a harmless social indulgence, it is a highly addictive drug. And once it becomes a crutch you are no longer in control. The pattern never changed. Only the drinks did.

The alcopops gave way to wine. I studied wine appreciation and went on wine tasting tours. I told myself I liked wine for its sophistication and taste. But I was still drinking for the effect. Travel was a passion, and alcohol followed me everywhere: backpacking in my twenties, a charity cycle ride through Rajasthan, a yoga retreat in Ibiza to which I smuggled two bottles of wine for the weekend, because the idea of going away without alcohol genuinely horrified me.

In every other area of my life, I was disciplined. I ran marathons. I ate well. I had a life coach, a career coach, a meditation teacher. But here is the part that made it so easy to keep looking away: my drinking was not an everyday thing. I wasn’t someone who needed a glass of wine every evening. What I was, was someone who – every so often, at a dinner or a work event or on holiday – would have the first drink and simply not stop. I would drink until I blacked out.

I would come home with no memory of getting there. There were incidents I filed quietly away: a mugging on a beach in Brazil after drinking; a call to the fire brigade one night when I was too drunk to get my key in the lock. I told myself each time it was a one-off. Then I tried another tactic to drink less.

These were endless. Only drink at weekends. Order small glasses. Have water between each drink. Dry January. Track your units. I read every book I could find about drinking less. Most were either horror stories about people who lost everything then found AA, or gentle guides advising sensible people to just drink a bit less.

None of it worked – I knew AA was not for me and everything else – the tactics and the drink less guidance focused on the behaviour while ignoring the cause. Finally, I had my last hangover on New Year’s Day, on a boat in Burma. I was on a week-long sailing trip I’d looked forward to for months. I woke up with the worst hangover of my life and lay there in one of the most beautiful exotic locations I’d ever been, and felt the dread arrive, right on schedule, before I’d even moved.

Something in me that had been niggling for a decade finally snapped. I decided at that whatever it took that hangover was my last. I hadn’t tried everything. I had overhauled almost every other area of my life and completely avoided this one, because life without alcohol felt pointless and miserable. That morning I stopped pretending it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know what the answer was, but I knew I needed proper help and I made one decision I’ve kept: I was never going to have a hangover like this again.

I started a 30-day break from alcohol in the summer of 2018. I told almost no one. The first Saturday night without a drink was the longest of my life. When it finally ended and I collapsed into bed fully sober I felt like I should have won some sort of award.

Socialising felt strange – too sharp without the fuzz of alcohol to quiet my busy mind. But slowly, something shifted. I started to discover I could handle the things I’d been using alcohol to avoid. I got home from nights out with a clear head. I woke up without dread. I started to notice that I was having a better time than I’d been having drunk. I started to like this new version of me.

Thirty days became six months. Somewhere in that time, I accepted something I’d have laughed at before: I didn’t want to go back. I was genuinely happier. For the first time in my adult life, I felt comfortable in my own skin. I retrained as a coach and, today, Just the Tonic Coaching has been running for six years – the name came from those early months of ordering tonic at bars and watching barmen automatically reach for the gin.

The clients I work with are not who most people picture when they hear the words problem drinker. They are solicitors, surgeons, executives, business owners – successful by every visible measure and privately at the end of their tether. They have the same patterns I had, the same false beliefs, same conviction that without alcohol life will be healthier but miserable.

That last belief is the one I spend most of my time on. Because it is wrong — I know it is wrong because I held it myself, right up until the moment I discovered it wasn’t true.

More than 90% of my clients reach 30 days alcohol-free during the programme. Not through willpower – willpower runs out – but through understanding what alcohol has really been doing for them and finding out what they actually need instead.

I haven’t drunk since 2018 and I don’t miss it. Life is happier and more exciting without it. Those are sentences I couldn’t have imagined writing from that boat in Burma, on New Year’s Day, lying in the dark and knowing I had to change but being terrified of a life with no alcohol.

If I could tell my younger self anything, it would be this: alcohol may look fun but it’s a big fat illusion. Once you see it for what it is and learn how to do life without it – that’s when things get really exciting.

• Sandra Parker is founder of Just the Tonic Coaching. Her 11-week programme helps high-achieving professionals gain control over alcohol. Visit justthetoniccoaching.com for more information