131: Shine Health & Empowerment Coaching with Erin Shine131: Shine Health & Empowerment Coaching with Erin Shine
You're Sober! Now What?
The conversation centres on Erin Shine sharing her journey from alcohol and cocaine use to long-term sobriety, touching on cross addiction, emotional healing and living by personal values. It focuses on how women in recovery might move from simply being sober to creating lives they actually enjoy.
48:22•6 Sept 2021
Beyond Just Not Drinking: Erin Shine on Thriving in Sobriety
Episode Overview
- Stopping one drug while continuing to drink may keep the cycle going; Erin found she had to give up all substances to change her life.
- Early sobriety can be mostly about hanging on, but long-term growth needs learning to feel and understand difficult emotions.
- Cross addiction into food, sugar, entertainment or other behaviours can appear when emotional pain is still being avoided.
- Setting simple morning routines and daily intentions helps shift from reactive living to a more deliberate and satisfying life.
- Identifying and living in line with personal values, such as family and time freedom, can make sobriety feel meaningful rather than restrictive.
“Life is meant to be lived and to be enjoyed and to love yourself along the way.”
How do individuals turn their lives around after addiction? This conversation with health coach Erin Shine offers a candid look at what life can look like once the substances are gone and the feelings start showing up.
Erin talks openly about growing up as a free spirit in a strict Catholic family, sliding from party drinking into cocaine and then crack, and the moment her brother confronted her with, “What the fuck are you doing with your life?” She explains how she first tried to quit cocaine while still drinking, only to realise that alcohol was the gateway she kept overlooking. That realisation eventually drew her into sobriety and a new way of living.
Now a functional health coach, life coach, personal trainer and mindfulness practitioner, Erin works with women who are sober but want more than just “not drinking”. She shares how early recovery was mostly about hanging on and pleasing others, and how year two brought a flood of emotions she’d spent decades numbing.
One vivid story involves driving after a breakup and mentally cycling through options: a bar, cigarettes, even driving into a lagoon, before recognising she was simply desperate not to feel her pain. The chat moves into cross addiction—food, sugar, Netflix, social media—and how the body and mind can latch onto anything that blunts discomfort.
Erin and host Tamar trade experiences around body image, weight gain during the pandemic, and that familiar urge to point out one’s own flaws before anyone else can. They also talk about designing life in sobriety with morning routines, intentions, gratitude, and living in line with personal values like family and time freedom.
Erin’s big message is that being sober is just the starting point; learning to like yourself, feel your feelings, and create a life you enjoy is the real work. If you’ve ever wondered whether sobriety can actually feel good, this conversation might spark some questions about what you want your own “best life” to look like.
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