Finding Levity in Sobriety - With AudreyFinding Levity in Sobriety - With Audrey
Sober Awkward
College chaos, motherhood and the fine art of taking the piss out of yourself!
55:42•30 Aug 2026
Laughing Through the Shame: Vic and Audrey on Sobriety and Self‑Deprecating Humour
Episode Overview
- Alcohol can feel ‘fun’ until motherhood exposes the guilt, low patience and anxiety hiding underneath.
- Comparing yourself to a partner with an off switch can delay facing your own unhealthy relationship with drinking.
- Mommy wine culture and social media can normalise using alcohol as a coping tool for parenting stress.
- Humour is helpful once some healing work is done, but joking through hangovers can stop you taking the problem seriously.
- The mental space sobriety takes up at first gradually shifts into self-acceptance, growth and more grace towards yourself and others.
“To me, the humour is a sign of healing.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? This episode of Sober Awkward brings together two women who use jokes and knob gags to talk about some very serious stuff. Victoria Vanstone chats with Audrey, host of the Dry Humor podcast, about how comedy, motherhood and mid-range drinking can collide in unexpectedly painful ways. Audrey shares how her drinking shifted from wild college nights and boozy advertising jobs to IPA-fuelled happy hours with a baby in a high chair.
She recalls rebranding breweries as “doggy places” so her children wouldn’t know they were drinking venues, admitting, “I started feeling that internal battle of this doesn’t feel fine to me.” Vic relates with her own tales of zigzagging home with a pram after steins of beer and the crushing shame of parenting through hangovers. Together they talk honestly about mum-guilt, mommy wine culture and the way alcohol can become an answer to shyness, stress and identity crises.
Audrey describes reaching a crossroads where it felt like a choice between her family and alcohol, and the surprise that sobriety still took up massive brain space at first. Yet she now sees that space shifting into growth, saying, “To me, the humour is a sign of healing.” A big thread is self-deprecating humour: does laughing at yourself help you heal, or just let you avoid hard truths?
Vic admits that joking about her drunken chaos kept her from taking her drinking seriously for years. Both agree that the laughs are healthiest once the deeper work has started – therapy, support groups, and saying “the quiet parts out loud” so shame loses its grip. If you’ve ever thought sobriety means the end of fun, this candid, sweary chat might make you rethink things. Could finding levity in your own story be the first step towards changing it?
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