Brianna Kamienski
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Colleen Freeland Kachmann is the founder and CEO of Emotional Sobriety Coaching© and an Intuitive Drinking Coach.
She also hosts a top-rated podcast, It’s Not About the Alcohol, which ranks in the top one percent of global podcasts. Her emotional sobriety method is reshaping how high-achieving women, such as entrepreneurs, executives, and career mothers, optimize their relationship with alcohol.
Colleen’s approach stems from the observation that overconsumption is often due to the demands placed on women to be hyper-productive. She carved a niche catering to women who need to learn how to take better care of themselves. “Our needs are not actually negotiable,” she says. “When you feel calm and relaxed, you don’t need to use alcohol as an escape.”
Colleen Freeland Kachmann
Colleen secretly struggled with alcohol use disorder for over 20 years. She finally sought help in the traditional sobriety-based recovery methods. “Of course, it felt good to stop drinking. But I still needed something to take the edge off. My life was a never-ending marathon,” she reflects.
She discovered that identifying as someone who ‘used to have a drinking problem’ and should therefore ‘never drink again’ made it impossible to move forward. “Why would I take advice from people who use the past to predict the future? I know from experience that I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes.”
Colleen found emerging research in neuroplasticity to support her experience. “Brain scans of the prefrontal cortex show that self-regulation is actually stronger in people who have overcome an addiction. So the idea that ‘once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic’ is false,” she says.
Colleen holds an MSc in Health Coaching and a BS in Biology and Chemistry Education and is a certified addiction and recovery life coach. She launched her seven-figure coaching business after realizing that most abstinence-based support programs demonize alcohol.
“Periods of sobriety serve as the ‘nothing’ in the all-or-nothing cycle. You have to actually re-learn how to drink in moderation if that’s what you really want. I teach women skills that allow them to drink mindfully so they can feel confident in their ability to trust themselves again,” she explains.
Emotional Sobriety Coaching©
Colleen developed her method, Emotional Sobriety Coaching©, to help clients reduce alcohol consumption by 80% without rigid abstinence. She combines holistic and evidence-based strategies in self-directed neuroplasticity and mind-body tools in nervous system regulation that rewire the subconscious thinking patterns that fuel excessive drinking. “Alcohol use disorder is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem,” she says.
Colleen’s Emotional Sobriety Coaching© method extends beyond managing alcohol intake. It is about reclaiming personal power and shifting outdated beliefs. Colleen actively pushes back on the glorification of sobriety and the disease model of addiction. She points out that alcohol was not her problem; it was her solution, and thinking of it as a problem only made it bigger, not better. This clarification is underscored in her viral quiz: “Do you have a drinking or thinking problem?”
The Mission
Colleen’s mission is to help women to reclaim their personal power by learning how to follow their own intuition. She has a simple yet effective message: “Get happy, not sober.”
For more information, visit Colleen’s website: Emotional Sobriety Coaching https://emotionalsobrietycoaching.com.