Why Am I Keeping Score?

Send us Fan MailYou didn’t drink every day. You could take a break. You knew people who drank more. So why would you think you had a problem? Matt and Steve both used those arguments to explain away what happened when they did drink.Matt remembers being able to stop but hating how much he wanted to keep going. Steve could go stretches without drinking, then find himself back in a pattern he hadn’t intended. They talk about the mental gymnastics that made their drinking seem reasonable—and how comparing themselves to someone worse off kept those arguments alive.If you’ve been wondering whether your drinking is “bad enough” to change, there’s another question worth asking: What happens when you drink, and what are you finding reasons to overlook?The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailYou can be the person who handles a crisis, figures out what needs to be done, and keeps everything moving—and still not be okay.After a week of uncertainty at work and another unexpected crisis at home, Matt found himself doing what he's always been good at: solving problems. But underneath it all, he was struggling more than the people around him realized.In this episode, Matt and Steve talk about the pressure to keep functioning when you're falling apart inside, and why more than 12 years of sobriety doesn't mean mental health struggles disappear. Matt opens up about experiencing suicidal thoughts, finally telling people what he'd been carrying, and reaching out to his therapist and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Asking for help didn't make his problems go away. But it was a step toward no longer facing them alone.Content note: This episode includes discussion of suicidal thoughts and mental health distress. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States for free, confidential support.The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailSometimes the resentment starts with something real. You feel dismissed, unappreciated, overlooked, or like you’re carrying more than your share. But then the story starts growing. You keep score. You build a case. You start deciding who’s right, who’s wrong, and who should have done more.In this episode, Matt and Steve talk about how quickly hurt can turn into resentment, and why being justified doesn’t always make you feel better. They get into retaliation, feeling taken for granted, the pull of moral superiority, and the recovery work of asking a harder question: what am I doing with this feeling now?Because even when the original hurt is legitimate, the assumptions, scorekeeping, and resentment that come after it are still ours to deal with.The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailHave you ever cared about something so much that you started to resent it? You keep showing up, taking responsibility, and doing what needs to be done. But when it feels like nobody else is putting in the same effort, something that once mattered to you can start to feel like a burden.This week on Sober Friends, Matt and Steve talk about a struggling Monday night AA meeting and the frustration that comes with trying to keep something alive. Steve shares why he feels responsible for the meeting's future, while Matt reflects on how his own priorities have changed. The conversation moves beyond AA into work, family, and the expectations we place on ourselves.How do you know when you're taking on too much? Are other people expecting too much from you, or are you putting that pressure on yourself? And how do you step back from something you care about without feeling like you're letting people down? It's a conversation about resentment, responsibility, and learning that caring about something doesn't mean you have to carry it all yourself.  The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailHave you ever been enjoying something good, only to find yourself already worrying about when it's going to end? Maybe it's time with someone you love, a relationship that's going well, or a period in your life when things finally seem to be falling into place. Instead of enjoying what's happening, you're already preparing yourself for what you might lose.When Matt's son came home from college for the weekend, the excitement of having him home quickly turned into sadness about having to say goodbye again. That realization led to a bigger question: Why do we sometimes start missing things before they're even gone? Matt and Steve share their own experiences with anticipating loss, worrying about the future, and trying to protect themselves from pain that hasn't happened yet.For those of us in recovery, these feelings can be especially uncomfortable when alcohol is no longer there to numb them. We talk about fear, acceptance, and whether constantly preparing ourselves for disappointment actually makes anything easier. We haven't figured out how to stop worrying about what comes next, but maybe recognizing the pattern can help us spend a little more time enjoying what we have right now.The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailYou had a plan for the day. Now someone needs you to drop everything, another arrangement falls through, and you’re scrambling again. At some point, one more change feels like more than you can handle.Matt shares a weekend that pushed him past his limit and how ADHD and autism affect his response to disrupted routines. Steve recognizes his own version: offering to help, then getting frustrated when it interrupts his plans. Both talk honestly about letting frustration build—and feeling like they have to explode to be heard.Alcohol once helped them change how that pressure felt. Handling it sober means figuring out when to step in, when to say no, and what helps before frustration takes over. The conversation also turns to the ways perfectionism can keep simple recovery practices out of reach, even after years without a drink.The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailWhat happens when you’ve stopped drinking, but your brain still wants guarantees?Matt and Steve talk about the need to research, plan, anticipate, and control what happens next — from work and money to cooking dinner and doing projects around the house. Underneath it is a harder problem: uncertainty. If you can figure everything out ahead of time, maybe you can avoid getting it wrong, wasting your time, or feeling like you failed.Recovery doesn’t make that instinct disappear. It gives you a different way to respond to it. This episode is about learning to tolerate not knowing, letting other people do things their way, and recognizing that progress can mean handling life differently even when the old thinking still shows up.The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailWhat if the problem isn’t that you haven’t figured out how to drink the right way?Suzanne Warye, host of The Sober Mom Life and author of The Sober Shift, joins Matt to talk about the exhausting work of trying to control alcohol, wondering whether you’re “bad enough” to quit, and realizing that you don’t need to hit someone else’s rock bottom before deciding drinking isn’t working for you.Suzanne also shares why traditional recovery language never quite fit her, how she moved from seeing sobriety as deprivation to experiencing it as freedom, and why there can be more than one way into an alcohol-free life.Learn more about Suzanne, The Sober Shift, and The Sober Mom Life at:https://suzannewarye.com/The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailWhat happens when something that helped save your life starts to raise questions?For many people in recovery, there can be an uncomfortable tension between gratitude and honesty. You can believe that AA, meetings, and the recovery process have given you something valuable while still having questions about parts of the program, the language, or the way recovery is sometimes presented.Matt and Steve talk about what it means to question recovery without rejecting it. They explore the difference between healthy curiosity and resistance, why questioning can actually be part of personal growth, and why one person’s path to recovery does not have to become everyone’s path. Sometimes the most honest question is not “Why am I struggling with this?” but “What can I learn by being willing to ask?”The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.

Send us Fan MailI’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m showing up. I’m putting in the work. So why does it still feel like I’m falling short?Matt and Steve talk about the nagging belief that you should always be doing more—at work, in recovery, and in life. That leads them into a bigger question: are you doing things because they actually help, or because you’re trying to prove you’re doing recovery the “right” way? Prayer, meetings, reading, routines, productivity—even good habits can become boxes to check when the purpose gets lost.Recovery isn’t about performing it perfectly. Eventually, it becomes about learning how to live: handling difficult days, treating people well, taking care of yourself, and building a life you no longer need to escape from.The Starter | Music, Memory & the Songs We KeepYou hear a song, and a memory opens up. Personal audio essays by Stephen Hollowell.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the show📫 Get more honest conversations about sobriety delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to The Sober Friends Dispatch, our weekly newsletter where we go beyond the podcast to share real strategies for alcohol-free living. Join our community by clicking here.