** TRIGGER WARNING: Sensitive topics discussed. If any of this resonates and you are struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at any time. **
For forty years, Colleen Clifford did not think she had a problem. She did not drink every day. She did not drink all the time. Even when she did drink, she did not always drink too much, and even when she drank too much, most mornings the worst of it was a headache and a lost afternoon. By almost every measure she had been handed, she was fine. What she could not see was that underneath the drinking sat a story she had written about herself at nineteen and never once read back.
Colleen Clifford is a mental health advocate, a suicide survivor, and the author of Life Beyond the Binge: A Commercial Fisherwoman’s Journey Home. She spent years working commercial fishing vessels in the Bering Sea, out for three and four months at a stretch in the era before satellite internet, when nobody on land had any real idea where she was or what she was doing. She quit drinking five years ago and began the work of figuring out why she had started. What she found, and what she has since built her advocacy around, is not really a lesson about alcohol. It is a lesson about the stories people accept about themselves without ever checking whether they are accurate.
The Number Is Lower Than Most People Assume
Ask a room full of people to define binge drinking, and most will describe someone else. Clifford points to the definition used by the CDC: four or more drinks for a woman, or five or more for a man, in a single sitting of roughly two to three hours. That is a lower bar than the word suggests. As she puts it, “it’s basically what we call partying.” A college gathering, a Sunday barbecue where the beers keep coming, a few shots of tequila across an evening, all of it clears the line.
This matters because language shapes what people are willing to examine. Clifford spent decades measuring herself against the image of a person who drinks in the morning and cannot stop, and by that comparison she looked untroubled. The practical thing a reader can do with this is simple and slightly uncomfortable. Count. Not to arrive at a diagnosis, and not to hand yourself a label, but to replace an impression with a number.
The 95/5 Factor and Why Self-Correction Feels Like Proof
The reason Clifford stayed in the pattern so long is a mechanism she calls the 95/5 factor, and it explains something that trips up a lot of people. Most of the time, her drinking looked controlled. She would wake after a night when she had planned on two drinks and had six, feel the hangover, and run the familiar internal conversation. You drank too much. Do you have a problem? You should slow down.
Then she would slow down. She would eat before the next party, hold herself to two, and get through the evening exactly as intended. And that success, she realized, was the trap. Each round of successful self-monitoring became evidence in her own defense. “That reaffirms your, I’ve got it under control,” she says. “I don’t have a problem. I’m good.” The 5% was the night her guard came down, when she was feeling good and had nothing to do the next day, and sometimes in that opening, something happened.
The insight worth carrying is that the 95% is not the counterargument to the 5%. It is what makes the 5% survivable enough to keep repeating. A pattern that self-corrects most of the time can persist for forty years precisely because it keeps producing proof of its own harmlessness.
The Story Was Written by Someone Else’s Reaction
Underneath the behavior was an event. Clifford does not name it in conversation, and she is careful about that. What she does describe is a shameful and traumatic experience at nineteen that she buried so thoroughly she nearly forgot it happened, and a visit to a doctor afterward that shaped everything that followed. She was young, impressionable, and looking at someone she regarded as an authority. She received a diagnosis with no counseling around what it meant, no explanation of what was still possible for her, and no direction toward help.
What she took from the room was not medical information. It was a verdict. She walked out believing she was disgusting and unlovable, and she made two decisions on the spot: she would never talk about it, and she would never marry or have children. She kept both promises for decades. This was the 1980s. There was no search engine to consult, no conversation with her mother about sex, and a generational instruction to buckle up your bootstraps and move on without asking for help. So she internalized it, and then, she says, she began making choices that reaffirmed the belief, without ever knowing she was doing it.
“I created this story and it was completely wrong. It was an incorrect story about myself.”
~ Colleen Clifford
Clifford is direct about the fact that another person could have walked out of that same room and written something entirely different. Her sister, she says, would probably have told the man off and built a whole different story around the experience. Personality and coping style determine the interpretation, which means the belief was never a fact about her. It was one available reading, chosen by a frightened nineteen-year-old and then treated as permanent.
Why Asking “Is It True” Is Only the Beginning
Clifford’s central question is whether the stories people tell themselves are actually true, and she is honest that asking it rarely does the work by itself. “It’s pretty hard to just shift a belief you’ve had your whole life,” she says. For someone who has lived inside a belief for decades, a single question is not going to dislodge it.
What worked for her was behavioral rather than intellectual. She believed that she was unlovable, so she started challenging it by being kind to herself and doing lovable things for herself, extending the same care she would give a friend or a family member. Little by little, and then in larger measure, the evidence began to contradict the story. She also notes the response she gets now that she talks about it openly. People say, what are you talking about? The belief had never been shared with anyone who could correct it. Clifford also says plainly that for some people this means working with a professional, and she does not treat that as a lesser route.
The usable principle is this: a belief that was built through experience is unlikely to come apart through argument. Choose one small action that a person who did not hold the belief would take, and take it repeatedly.
Shame Attacks Who You Are, Not What You Did
Clifford draws a clean line between guilt and shame. Guilt is about an action. Shame, she says, attacks your feeling of who you are, your sense of worth or worthlessness. That is why it isolates so effectively. A person can discuss something they did. Discussing something they believe they are feels like handing over evidence.
She also names what happened in that doctor’s office in a way that is useful for anyone examining an old wound. She allowed someone else’s reaction to form a belief that was not true. “So I gave my power away,” she says. At the time, she did not have the tools or the capacity to question the reaction she was getting. She has them now, and she can see the exchange for what it was. Naming who wrote the story, and noticing that you were not the author, is often the first crack in it.
Ask “How Is It Working for You?”
Clifford’s turning point was not dramatic. She woke the morning after her last binge and thought, this isn’t who I want to become. Then she did the thing she had never done in her life. She asked for help. She had always prided herself on being strong and independent, and she is openly proud of that decision, calling it a courageous move.
The question she keeps returning to, and the one that runs through her book, is not accusatory. It is: How is it working for you? You might decide your drinking is working, and she says that is fine. The point is to make the evaluation deliberately instead of continuing on autopilot. That is what she means by coming home, and it is not a place. It is finding the person she has always been, forgiving and accepting all the parts of it, and moving with intention.
There is one more piece of her advice worth carrying into an ordinary day. If you cannot see anything of value in yourself, ask someone you trust what they see in you, and write down what you like about yourself rather than what you wish you could change. It does not have to be large. For Clifford, it turned out to be that she makes strangers smile, that she is good at it, and that it costs nothing. Everyone has something, she says, and finding the one thing magnifies the joy in your life. Colleen Clifford spent 40 years believing a story nobody ever asked her to verify, and the work of her life now is making sure fewer people do the same.
