Phil Kretzademus started a podcast focusing on self-care and quitting drinking. He shares his journey of realizing his drinking habit was a problem, despite not hitting rock bottom. A key moment was when his daughter innocently pointed out his beer consumption as getting high, leading him to reflect and stop drinking. By seeing the urge to drink as a separate persona lying to him, he found the emotional strength to quit, viewing it as expanding personal freedom rather than deprivation. This new perspective helped him maintain sobriety. Hi, my name is Phil, Phil Kretzademus, and welcome to my podcast. This is my very first episode, also happens to be January 1st, 2026, you know, so first day of the new year, consistent with the theme of New Year's resolutions that I focus, you know, the first few episodes of this podcast on self-care, but I want to focus specifically on the story of how I quit drinking and what I learned about myself as a result of that process. I also want to note that you're probably accessing this podcast on my Substack website. You can check out the contents if you're interested. The contents are more diverse than just self-care and, you know, and quitting drinking, actually. I'd say stories of that theme on the website is probably like maybe 2 or 3% of the overall content, but I want to focus the podcast on this issue, at least for now. So a little bit of background on me, at least in terms of my drinking history, just to give you some context. I mean, I'd say I'm somebody, you know, I've been drinking pretty much from my 20s through, you know, again, I'm now like in my 50s, pretty steadily. I mean, I don't think excessively in that I never had a, you know, like a crash and burn, you know, kind of a, you know, hit rock bottom kind of story that made me see the need to change, you know, but I think it was more just the slow, wearisome grind of just the habit, you know, and just feeling that I was sort of chained to it. That just became a problem for me over the years. I just felt not very good about it, and I actually would, you know, I'd stop several times over the years. You know, I would stop for 3 to 5 months at a time just to prove that I could go without beer or a glass of wine, you know, for that period, you know, that I wasn't that dependent on it, but even when I did give it up for those periods, I always felt like I was holding my breath until I could give myself permission to drink again, and then when I did, of course, I just slipped back into the habit, you know, drinking, you know, at least a few times a week, you know, sometimes once every day for periods of time, but usually not excessive amounts depending on how you define excessive, but could be one to two beers a night, you know, if it's wine, maybe like one to three glasses of wine, sometimes just one or two, but I'd say it's, you know, yeah, it was a regular habit, and what happened was as of Valentine's Day, so it happens last year, you know, it was the last day that I had a drink, you know, since now, so it's been almost a year, and it just feels different. It just, the desire to drink just sort of melted away. I can't entirely explain what happened, but I think that at least just the unique nature of this event in my life where I've been, you know, sort of struggling with this issue for many years, and then it just sort of vanished almost like in a puff of smoke, so here's the story, though, just to give you the actual story, so I'm divorced, I spend weekends with my youngest daughter, my older daughter, you know, again, now is college age, so, you know, I just see her when she's home for break or what have you, and so it happens that Valentine's Day fell on a Friday when I see my daughter, so we just had a really quiet, you know, like nothing particularly special. I just got a meal, and, you know, I think we watched a movie, you know, but I got myself a beer, you know, as well, and, you know, I felt that, well, look, you know, I'm just having a beer, and, you know, you can drink responsibly around your kids, I think, so I thought, I don't, I shouldn't be hiding this from her. I can just, you know, sit with a beer on the table, sip it along with my meal, and this particular night, my daughter, for some reason, and she doesn't normally say this of things like this, but, and I forget exactly, I mean, verbatim, how she said it, but effectively, she said, oh, daddy, you're just getting high again, you know, and she's referring to me having the beer, and I'd say that that did sting me a bit. For me, I probably, like maybe many other people, I associate getting high with other kinds of controlled substances, like maybe marijuana, you know, certainly, like maybe other kinds of hard drugs, I don't associate it with having a beer, maybe for her, because, you know, she's young, she's not even a teenager yet, she's just kind of mixing it all together, and it's just the way that she talks, but I did feel ashamed, you know, I felt like, oh, okay, I don't want to be modeling getting high in front of my daughter, at least, if that's how she sees it, and I'd say that when I was younger, I mean, even in my 30s, you know, compared to where I am now, but certainly in my 20s, if someone had said something like that, I would have gotten defensive, right, I would have, you know, and I think maybe even rightly so, I felt like, well, look, I'm not really, I'm not abusing alcohol in front of you, I'm just having one beer, I don't think that really counts as really getting high, you know, at least not in a way that sets a bad example, and I might be inclined to sort of dig in my heels, and, you know, just continue drinking, because, you know, I want to prove something to them, you know, that I'm the boss of my own world, or whatever, and I'd say that over the years, I've developed a different kind of spiritual muscle, and I won't bother to explain what it is right now, it's just a word that to me, just a phrase that just kind of makes sense, but it's that learning to recognize the feelings that you're feeling, and then step into a different space inside yourself, and relate to those feelings in a different way, and I allowed myself to consider that, well, having a beer doesn't matter that much to me, maybe I don't completely understand what my daughter meant by saying, oh, daddy, you're just getting high, but why not let the shame sink in, why not learn something from that feeling, right, and I'd say that, you know, without really judging it, without judging her, but just, okay, explore the feeling, don't reject it, just take it in, you know, and when I allowed that to happen, a little later that evening, I actually developed this conversation with myself about this habit of drinking, I saw it as a nice little treat to myself, perhaps, that just enhances, you know, an experience, you know, the experience of watching a movie, the experience of just trying to wind down at the end of the week, but I don't really need it, and I began to relate to that part of myself that was telling me, oh, it's okay, just have a beer, as something other than me, and it's something that actually was lying to me, like, actually, I do recall really getting actually inside myself very almost adamant about the fact that I was lying to myself, and the idea, or just that phrase, okay, it's a lie, that's a lie, it's not true, I don't need this to relax, somehow, something clicked in me with that, where I just, it gave me the emotional energy just to stop. I didn't know how long I would stop for, but at least that night, I was like, okay, I'm done, I'll stop, and I think what's interesting to me about this is, and I think many years before, I was actually reading some posts online somewhere, I don't know, just some message board, where people were sort of sharing their stories about maybe not giving up drinking, but how they began to control their drinking more, and sort of reflect more on it, and they talk about the urge to drink as if it was an alter ego, like another personality inside themselves, and they would give it a name, like, you know, if a guy was named Dave, he would call his beer-drinking alter ego, you know, Larry or Chuck, you know, oh, that's Chuck again, telling me to have a drink, and it was kind of just an interesting little anecdote at the time, but in this moment, you know, many years later, with my daughter on Valentine's, I began to see that that actually kind of works, like, as a mechanism, like, as a way of processing your feelings about drinking, like, basically, I was able to begin to relate to this urge to drink as another part of myself that really wasn't myself, wasn't part of my true self, you know, I could almost, like, have a conversation with it, like, instead of seeing it as an impersonal impulse, I could anthropomorphize it, right? I could sort of say, okay, this is another person, like, another part of myself that I relate to as a person, and I can just say to that part of myself, you are lying to me, right? Somehow, just for the next several days, that just, in my head, going over and over and over again, it's a lie, it's a lie, it's a lie, you know, you, this other part of me, you are lying to me, stop lying to me, I don't need to have a beer to relax, that actually was, you know, really gave me, again, the emotional energy just to stop for a few days, and then a few days became a few weeks, and I realized, actually, I didn't even have, something about the combination of the shame, and the way I was, the new way that I was conceptualizing, you know, the urge to drink, you know, like, instead of normalizing it, as it's my right to drink, you know, you know, and I've given myself all these excuses and reasons to do it, I began to see the, like, stopping drinking, not as me denying myself something I wanted, but as me actually enlarging the space of my own personal freedom, like, my own liberty, you know, so I didn't feel like I was losing anything, if anything, I felt like I'm recovering this part of myself, like the space of peace in myself, it doesn't need a beer to relax, I can just relax on my own, but I will end with this one intriguing analogy. What also sort of clicked for me was that what I was doing, like, the way I was relating to this other side of myself, you know, that I was saying no to, that I was calling a liar, is sort of similar to what a lot of the ancient saints, you know, that I would read about, you know, from some of my, the books that my dad used to read, but we used to read together, the way that they would talk about, you know, resisting the temptations of the devil, right? And, again, this might seem, again, for some people who are listening a bit out there, I think for other people, it might make a lot of intuitive sense, and it's worth noting, of course, that alcohol recovery groups, many of them do, you know, at least historically, have relied on faith-based principles, you know, sort of like you do have to surrender to a higher power, you know, the idea of, you know, so the idea of you controlling the urge to drink by seeing yourself as involved in this relationship with powers that are greater than you, and that becomes a way of actually overcoming your own urges, you know. For me, what this was about was really recognizing the urge as something external to me that I could push back on. I didn't necessarily say to myself, oh, that urge is coming from the devil. I understood after being able to conceptualize the urge in that way and push back against it, I could see how labeling, personifying the urge as this other force that doesn't mean you well, you know, this other force that is really trying to trick you into something that, you know, that you shouldn't be doing is actually, at least for some people, for me certainly, it was a very effective cognitive framework. You know, it was a very effective way of getting me to completely change my way of thinking about what it meant to give up drinking. I do think that what I've described is part of the reason, maybe not the entire reason, but part of the reason why I have a different experience of giving up drinking than at other moments in my life when I tried and, you know, and couldn't sustain it for very long. So, very sorry for over-talking. I'm going to stop here. I hope you found this story a little bit interesting. In the forthcoming podcast, I plan to upload one of these a week. I'm going to sort of peel back the layers a little bit of this story and kind of introduce you to other aspects of my life story and other just methods, spiritual practices, also insights from social theory. I happen to be a sociologist by training that I've used to inform my regimen of self-care, right? So, just thanks for listening and good morning, good evening, you know, good night for now.