Overview
I used to think addiction started somewhere dramatic. In a bar. At a party. Around people who clearly drank too much.
Mine started in my kitchen.
The kids were finally asleep. The dishwasher was humming. Lunches were made for the next day. Everyone in the house had what they needed — except me, and I didn't even know yet that I needed anything. That was the point. I'd stopped checking.
So I'd pour a glass of wine and tell myself I'd earned it.
I had earned it. That's what makes this so hard to explain to people who haven't lived it. The wine wasn't the problem at first. It was the one moment in the day that belonged to me. What I didn't notice was that, somewhere along the way, it stopped being a reward and quietly became relief. And relief is a much harder thing to give up than a treat.
I am one of these women. I am also in recovery. And as a therapist who works in addiction treatment, I have now sat across from enough women to know my story isn't really mine alone — it's a pattern with my name temporarily attached to it.
The story I keep hearing
We've long pictured alcohol dependence as a man's problem — the guy at the pub after work, drinking with colleagues. But something has shifted, and it shows up in my therapy room and in my own life in almost identical shapes.
Some of the women I know, and knew myself as, were home with the kids. From the outside we looked lucky. Good marriages, healthy children, nice houses. People assumed we "didn't have to work." But we did — constantly. We became the project managers of family life: doctor's appointments, school forms, birthday presents, laundry, meals, remembering the things everyone else forgot. Psychologists call this the mental load or invisible labour — the ongoing cognitive work of managing a household, most of it unpaid, unseen, and unending. Recent research on this "invisible load" links it directly to emotional depletion, poor sleep, and chronic stress in women who carry it [1, 2].
My friends who worked full time had it differently, but not lighter. They finished one job and came home to start another — cooking, homework, groceries, birthday planning, being emotionally available to everyone after giving all day at the office. Studies keep confirming what these women already know in their bodies: women still carry a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and caregiving work even when they're employed full time, and this "extra shift" is one of the strongest predictors of poor sleep and declining mental health in women [3].
Whichever version of the story we lived, we shared the ending. Somewhere in the process of holding everyone else up, we sacrificed our own careers, our own ambitions, our own selves — quietly, without ever deciding to.
Eventually, something had to give. And too often, the thing that gave was us.
How it actually happens
Not dramatically. Quietly.
One glass became two. "Only on Fridays" became every evening. A bottle that lasted a week lasted three days, then two, then one. Not because I wanted to get drunk — because I wanted my nervous system to stop feeling switched on. Alcohol was the fastest way I knew to tell an exhausted brain, *you can relax now.* And for a little while, it worked.
This is exactly what researchers are now documenting. A 2025 systematic review of working mothers and alcohol found that many women describe drinking as a way to manage the contradictory demands placed on them — to succeed professionally while still carrying the bulk of caregiving and domestic responsibility at home. The same review found that mothers experiencing this work-family conflict drink more, and drink to cope specifically, not just to socialize — and that societies with greater gender equity see lower rates of this kind of drinking [4]. A related study put it plainly: alcohol functions as a "problematic panacea" for the double shift working mothers carry [5].
And then there's the culture that met me exactly where I was vulnerable. "Mommy needs wine." "It's wine o'clock." "Surviving motherhood one glass at a time." I laughed at these too, before I understood what they were doing to me. Researchers now have a name for it — "wine-mom culture" — and a growing body of evidence that it's not harmless. Studies on American and British mothers found that exposure to this content on social media shapes what women believe their friends expect and approve of, making them more likely to see drinking as a normal, even required, part of coping with motherhood [6, 7]. When everyone is laughing along with you, it becomes almost impossible to notice the moment your coping strategy turned into dependence.
Why I didn't say anything
Brené Brown has spent decades researching shame, and has said openly that she used alcohol for years to numb exhaustion, perfectionism, and vulnerability before getting sober — now over twenty years ago [8]. One of her most consistent findings is that shame survives in silence. I recognize that in myself immediately. I carried so much pressure to look grateful, capable, and together that instead of saying "I'm drowning," I said "I'm just having a glass of wine." So did my friends. So, I'd guess, did most of the women reading this.
That's the cruelty of it. Alcohol gave me exactly what I was missing — twenty minutes of quiet, a slower mind, less responsibility — and then it always sent the bill later. My sleep got worse. My anxiety got louder. My patience got thinner. My shame grew. Eventually the thing that once relieved my stress was generating more of it than anything else in my life.
What recovery actually asked of me
Recovery didn't start by taking away my coping strategy. It started by asking me a different question: what pain was the alcohol helping me survive?
For me, some of the answer was loneliness. Some of it was years of putting everyone else first until there was almost nothing left of myself. For my friends, the details differ but the shape doesn't — grief, perfectionism, burnout, the slow erosion of an identity that used to exist before "wife" and "mother" ate the rest of the sentence.
I don't think women need more lectures about drinking less. I think we need permission to admit we're overwhelmed, to ask for help, to share the invisible load out loud instead of medicating it quietly at 9pm. Because the opposite of addiction isn't just sobriety. For me, it's been finally believing that my needs count too — not after everyone else's, not if there's anything left over, but as a matter of course.
I'm still learning that. Most days, I'm getting there.
References
1. Understanding the dimensions of mental labor: the invisible load of Italian mothers. *Frontiers in Sociology*, 2025. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1683261/full 2. Unpaid Labor Predicts Psychological Distress. *Neuroscience News*. https://neurosciencenews.com/mental-load-unpaid-work-health-30466/ 3. Women's wellbeing and the burden of unpaid work. *PMC, National Institutes of Health*. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8406085/ 4. Dissolving contradictory demands: A systematic review of alcohol use of working mothers. *ScienceDirect*, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376871625001176 5. Double shifts, double trouble: Alcohol as a problematic panacea for working mothers. *ScienceDirect*. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395922001189 6. Wine-Mom Culture, Alcohol Use, and Drinking Motives: A Descriptive Study and Cross-Cultural Exploration of American and British Mothers. *PubMed*. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38066682/ 7. New psychology research sheds light on the dark side of "wine mom" culture. *PsyPost*. https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-sheds-light-on-the-dark-side-of-wine-mom-culture/ 8. Brown, B. What Being Sober Has Meant to Me. brenebrown.com, 2019. https://brenebrown.com/articles/2019/05/31/what-being-sober-has-meant-to-me/