How Women Use Alcohol to Cope With Grief

I almost did not write this one.

Because this is the topic that lives in the part of the story I kept hidden the longest. The part I minimized and reframed and excused until I almost convinced myself it was not what it was.

But I promised myself when I started writing, both the book and this blog, that I would tell the truth. Even when it is uncomfortable. Especially then.

So here it is.

Nobody starts out trying to numb

It does not start as a problem. That is what I want you to understand first, because I think it is important.

It starts as relief. A glass of wine at the end of a day that was too heavy. A way to turn the volume down on everything that is too loud inside your head. A way to feel something, or sometimes, to feel nothing at all, just for a few hours.

When you are carrying compounded grief, when it is deployment and loss and adoption heartbreak and identity collapse all at once, the idea of something that can quiet all of that, even temporarily, is not hard to understand. It is actually very, very human.

But temporary relief and healing are not the same thing. And the gap between them is where a lot of us quietly got lost.

Why grief makes women particularly vulnerable

Women grieve differently than men. Research has known this for a long time, even when culture has been slow to acknowledge it. We internalize. We carry. We caretake everyone else’s emotions while ours go unprocessed. We are praised for our strength and given very little actual space to fall apart.

So we find other spaces. Private ones.

Alcohol is socially acceptable in a way that grief is not. Nobody questions the wine at girls’ night. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a cocktail to take the edge off. But they might raise one at tears in a restaurant or a meltdown in a parking lot.

We live in a culture that has made it easier to numb than to feel. And grief, the kind that does not have an end date, the kind that stacks and compounds and never quite resolves, is something our culture does not know how to hold.

So a lot of us held it ourselves. With whatever we could find.

What it actually looks like

This is not always the version that looks like a problem from the outside. Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it is the woman who is completely functional. Who works and parents and shows up and is, by every external measure, completely fine. And who is also quietly drinking more than she used to. Who reaches for it faster than she once did. Who has started to notice that the line between “a little” and “too much” has quietly moved.

That woman is not broken. But she is hurting. And what she is doing is not healing her.

I say this without judgment because I say it with familiarity. I know what it is to try to quiet grief with something that only ever turns the volume down temporarily.

What I also know is that the grief is still there in the morning. Waiting.

The honest question worth asking

I am not here to tell you what to do or to diagnose anything. I am here as a friend having coffee with you, the way I write everything.

So here is the question I would gently ask, the one I eventually had to ask myself:

Is what I am reaching for helping me heal, or is it helping me hide?

There is a difference. And your honest answer to that question matters more than anyone else’s opinion about it.

What healing actually requires

Grief has to be felt to be moved. That is the hard truth. There is no shortcut through it, only around it, and going around it just means you will meet it again later, usually at a worse time, in a worse way.

Healing requires the willingness to feel what you have been working so hard not to feel. And that is terrifying. I will not pretend otherwise.

But it is also where freedom is. On the other side of the feeling, not around it.

You do not have to do it all at once. You do not have to do it perfectly. You just have to be willing to start. Find a counselor. Find a community. Find a book that tells you the truth. Find one safe person and let them in one layer at a time.

If you would like a faith-rooted place to begin, learn more about Surrender, my private community for women in this exact middle. If you want a real person walking alongside you, explore 1:1 coaching. And if you want the longer story behind all of this, read Finding God in the Trenches.

Jen’s work is faith-based coaching, writing, and community support. It is not therapy, medical care, addiction treatment, detox support, or emergency mental health care. If you are in crisis or feel unsafe, please contact emergency services or a qualified crisis support line in your area.

You do not have to figure this out alone. And you do not have to have it together to begin.