Drinking to Cope with Trauma: Johnny's Story of Why Alcohol "Worked" Until It Didn't
- Apr 21
- 9 min read
When Johnny went back to his childhood home to help his brother redecorate the bedroom they used to share, he started peeling wallpaper off the wall behind where his bed had been. Underneath, in his own handwriting, was a message from almost a decade earlier.
"My name's Johnny. I am eight and I want to die."
He stood there reading his own suicide note. He was already a survivor of years of physical abuse, emotional torture, and witnessing his father's violence against his mother and siblings. Drinking to cope with trauma is what kept him alive long enough to grow up, find a way out, and eventually do the real work. This is the part of recovery nobody wants to say out loud: for a lot of people, alcohol isn't the problem. It's the solution to a problem they don't know how to solve yet.
On this episode of the Sober Motivation Podcast, Johnny walked Brad through a story that starts in a violent home, runs through five years of professional wrestling, and ends with him pouring his last whiskey while crying on the couch the night before he quit drinking for good in 2020. Along the way, he shares a framework that reframes how most of us think about relapse, cravings, and why we drink in the first place.
The Unpopular Truth: Alcohol Actually Worked
Most sobriety content starts by telling you how awful alcohol is. Johnny refuses to do that.
"A lot of people don't like me saying it," he said, "but alcohol does that. It works. Is it the best option? Absolutely not."
For Johnny, alcohol wasn't a character flaw or a bad decision. It was emotional outsourcing. He grew up watching his mother get spat on in public for being in a mixed race relationship. He witnessed his father rain down violence on his family with household objects. His father held his head underwater. He was locked inside things. The psychological torture was sometimes worse than the physical, hearing his father say, "I'm not gonna hurt you now. I'm gonna come for you in the night."
At 17, after he finally threw his father across the room to stop another attack, Johnny moved out. He was alone. He missed the chaos, because chaos was the only thing that had ever felt familiar. That's when alcohol showed up as a companion.
"That loneliness went away when I had alcohol with me, no matter what it was."
The therapist he eventually started working with said something to him that changed his whole frame on it. She told him, "Congratulations for finding a way to stay alive."
Because here's the thing nobody says: drinking to cope with trauma is a survival response, not a moral failure. It's emotional regulation by the fastest available means. It works on day one. It keeps working for a while. And then one day, it stops working and becomes the new problem.
If you're reading this and you drink every night to quiet something inside you, Johnny's point isn't that you should feel bad about it. His point is that you're doing what a lot of people do when they don't have better tools yet. The work isn't hating alcohol. The work is building those tools.
It's Not Self-Sabotage. It's Self-Soothing.
One of the most common things Johnny hears from clients now is, "Every time I get close to success, I self-sabotage." He thinks that label is doing real damage.
"I don't believe in self-sabotage," he said on the podcast. "You know how to be the person you were before. You're really good at it, because you've practiced for many, many years. You don't know how to be this new person, and everyone's reacting to you differently. You feel differently. Everything feels different. And that is creating anxiety. How do you deal with anxiety? Well, you drink. So it's not actually self-sabotage. It's a way of soothing."
This reframe matters because self-sabotage implies you're broken. Self-soothing implies you're using the only known tool you have. Once you see it that way, the task isn't to stop sabotaging yourself. The task is to learn new ways to soothe.
That's the real work of early sobriety. If you find yourself reaching for alcohol right when things start going well, that isn't evidence you don't deserve good things. It's evidence you don't yet know how to be the version of yourself who has good things. And that version is learnable.
The Four A's: Johnny's Framework for Behavioral Change
Johnny is writing a book on what he calls the Four A's, the stages he walks clients through when they're trying to change something real in their life. If you're stuck in the loop of knowing you should quit but not knowing how to start, this framework is a good place to begin.
Awareness. You can't address anything you can't see. A lot of people spend years in denial about what alcohol is actually doing in their life, or what they're actually using it for. The first move is honest observation.
Accountability. Where in this situation can you take back your power? What are you outsourcing to other people, to circumstances, to the future? What's actually in your control?
Acceptance. What can you not do anything about? Johnny is careful here. Acceptance isn't forgiveness or condoning. It's drawing a line under something and refusing to let it run your life anymore.
Action. Once you're aware of the problem, accountable for what's yours, and accepting of what isn't, you have to move. Change gets created through doing, not thinking.
Most people get stuck between awareness and action. They know something needs to change. They may even know exactly what. But without accountability and acceptance in the middle, action never happens. The drinking continues because the emotional work underneath it never gets done.
Cravings Aren't Real. They're Reactions.
This is the line from the episode that stops most people mid-scroll. Johnny doesn't believe cravings are what we think they are.
"Cravings aren't real," he said. "They're reactions. I'm having a difficult emotion. I don't know how to have that emotion. I don't want to have that emotion. So I'm gonna drink alcohol. That's gonna work and that's gonna solve all the problems."
The craving isn't for alcohol. The craving is for the feeling to stop. Alcohol is just the fastest way you've found to make that happen.
If you've ever wondered why the urge hits hardest at specific times, like 6pm when the kids are finally down or right after a hard conversation with your partner, it's because cravings are tied to emotional triggers, not chemical ones. You can read more about that pattern in Why Do I Crave Alcohol at Night? The Honest Reason Behind the 6pm Wine Pour, which digs into what your brain is actually asking for in those moments.
Johnny's insight flips the whole problem on its head. You don't have an alcohol problem. You have a problem with your emotions. When you learn to regulate your emotions, alcohol gives you up. You don't have to give it up, because it no longer has a job to do.
That's why he says the fastest way to understand why you drink is to stop drinking. The person he worked with early in his own sobriety told him, "If you want to know why you drink, stop drinking." Once the alcohol is out of the way, the emotions underneath have nowhere to hide. That's where the real work begins.
Why Two Years of "Failing" Was Actually the Point
Johnny's sobriety date is 2020. But he'd been flirting with quitting for two years before that. Sober October. Dry January. Making promises to himself and breaking them. For most of those two years, he felt like a loser.
"I felt like the biggest loser ever," he said. "Why can't I do this? Why can't I be like my friends?"
Now he looks back and sees those two years as the most important part. Every relapse taught him something he never needed to learn again.
"The next day after a relapse, you are the most vulnerable you will ever be," Johnny said. "When you're vulnerable, you don't have the energy to tell yourself lies anymore. You don't have the energy to make up stories and creative narratives. You're only dealing with what's true, because you're in pain. And pain is real."
He compares it to a baby learning to walk. The baby doesn't fall down, stand up, and think, "Maybe walking isn't for me." It stands up, falls down, and tries again. Each attempt strengthens the muscles that eventually carry it across the room.
If you're in the middle of that messy, relapse-filled stretch of trying to quit, you're not failing. You're building the muscles. Every time you try and fall short, you're collecting information about what triggers you, what doesn't work, and what you need to address next. Brad has covered this exact pattern in She Had More Day Ones Than She Could Count. Here's What Finally Made Sobriety Stick., which is another story of someone who needed many attempts before one of them turned into a life.
The only way to actually fail is to quit trying.
The Night Johnny Said Goodbye
When Johnny finally decided he was done, he didn't do it cold. He planned it like a breakup.
That Saturday night, he decanted a nice bottle of red wine, used the special glasses, and milked it. His wife went to bed and told him she'd leave him alone, because she understood he needed to say goodbye properly. He finished the wine. There was some whiskey in the kitchen and some coke. He knew when that last whiskey was gone, that was it.
He walked into the living room with the drink in his hand, put it on the table, and cried. Just sat there and cried. He didn't fully understand why in that moment. Looking back, he says it was grief. The loss of something that had genuinely helped him survive, even if it had long since turned on him.
"I'd almost outgrown it," he said.
The next day he had to start learning how to live without his oldest companion. Alcohol was everywhere. Heineken ads on shopping carts. Beer stacked at supermarket entrances. But he kept going. Three years later, he was doing this podcast as a certified coach helping other people do the same work.
The 20 Pound Note
Johnny closed the episode with a story from when he was 17. He had four jobs. He didn't have any money. He was walking home crying, not suicidal but wanting to give up, because life felt unmanageable. He didn't even have five pounds to put gas on the card so he could heat his flat.
He turned a corner and saw a 20 pound note just sitting on the floor.
"There'll be moments in your life where you really, really, really want to give up," he said. "But that moment just before you give up could be that moment just before you find your version of that 20 pounds. So never ever give up."
The opening of this article is about an 8-year-old boy who wrote on his wall that he wanted to die. The closing is about a 17-year-old boy who found 20 pounds on the ground the night he wanted to quit. The 45-year-old version of Johnny is now a coach helping other people survive their own emotions without alcohol.
None of that was guaranteed. All of it was built one honest day at a time.
If you're using alcohol right now to cope with something you don't know how to carry, you're not broken. You're surviving. The next step isn't to hate the tool that got you here. It's to start learning the tools that will get you the rest of the way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people drink alcohol to cope with trauma?
Alcohol works as a fast-acting emotional regulator. It numbs the nervous system, quiets intrusive thoughts, and provides temporary relief from feelings the person doesn't yet know how to process. For trauma survivors especially, alcohol can act as a survival tool during a period when no other coping skills are available. The issue is that it stops working over time and becomes its own problem.
Is it self-sabotage when I relapse right after things start going well?
Johnny argues it's self-soothing, not self-sabotage. When life starts changing faster than your nervous system can adjust to, anxiety spikes. Drinking is the fastest known way to calm that anxiety. The task isn't to stop sabotaging yourself. It's to build new tools for handling the discomfort of becoming a new version of yourself.
What are the Four A's of behavioral change?
The Four A's are Awareness, Accountability, Acceptance, and Action. Awareness means honestly seeing the problem. Accountability means taking ownership of what's in your control. Acceptance means releasing what isn't. Action means doing something with what you've learned. Most people stall out between awareness and action because they skip the middle two steps.
Does every relapse mean I'm starting over?
No. Johnny describes every relapse as a lesson that sharpens the next attempt. The day after a relapse is often when people are most honest, because they don't have the energy to keep lying to themselves. That honesty is what eventually turns into sustained change. The only failure is quitting the process entirely.
How do I stop using alcohol to regulate my emotions?
Start by stopping, even briefly, so the emotions underneath can surface. Johnny was told early on that if he wanted to know why he drank, he needed to stop drinking. Once the alcohol is out of the way, the real emotional work can begin. Therapy, coaching, and community support help you build the regulation skills alcohol was substituting for.
Want to hear the full conversation with Johnny on the Sober Motivation Podcast? Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if Johnny's story hit home, share it with someone you know who might need it. Sometimes the 20 pound note on the sidewalk is a podcast episode that shows up at the right time.
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