What happens when the strategies we rely on to avoid pain, achievement, busyness and constant momentum stop working?
In this powerful conversation, Anna Donaghey is joined by April Day Garcia, author of The Room to Be Brave: Sometimes the way forward begins with going back, to explore how avoidance can hide in plain sight, especially for high-functioning people disguised as success.
April shares how chasing achievement and belonging led her further from herself, with alcohol acting as a quiet form of escape. When a period of forced stillness changed everything, she began the deeper work of healing, returning to the “rooms” where old beliefs began.
This episode offers a hopeful reframe: avoidance isn’t failure, it’s protection and real change starts not with becoming someone new, but with coming home to who you already are.
Here are the Highlights:
00:00 Intro: Rethinking avoidance with April Day Garcia
00:45 The art of avoidance and the illusion of achievement
02:27 April’s memoir mapping unravelling through literal rooms
05:11 Running from the pain, and chasing achievement
09:33 How avoidance can sometimes look like high performance
11:31 No room for vulnerability, linking emotions to old, unsafe moments
13:49 Alcohol’s role in numbing, postponing, and belonging
16:50 Avoidance creates new problems, emotional costs rise
20:35 The clear rupture: seeing darkness reflected in family
23:07 Having a breakdown broke the cycle, and led to giving up alcohol
38:09 The hardest rooms: confronting your own mistakes and shadow work
41:55 Old beliefs aren’t yours and reclaiming your true self
44:12 Redeveloping your rooms and rewriting your story
52:36 Choose your hard, start with one room
54:04 Healing isn’t failure, sometimes your truest self is waiting in the rooms you feared most.
Anna’s book "What Are You Thirsty For? Rethinking Alcohol and The Life You Want", is now out in the world for you to buy!
Order your copy, access her free tools and explore her coaching programmes at: https://thebigdrinkrethink.com/
The Thirsty For More Mindset Lab is Anna’s ‘inner circle’ - a calm, thoughtful space where conversations continue, patterns are explored, and things begin to make sense. Find out more at: https://thirstyformore.substack.com/
If you appreciate the podcast and would like to show a bit of love, you can donate the cost of a coffee here. It helps support the time and care that goes into making the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/bigdrinkrethink
About the host Anna:
Anna is a certified Alcohol Mindset Coach, trained by Annie Grace of This Naked Mind. Drawing on her own journey out of alcohol addiction, she now helps others explore and control their drinking. With a career spanning 25 years as a Strategist in the Advertising industry, she combines her own lived experiences, with great insight into what makes us tick and what influences us to behave the way we do.
Connect with Anna:
Website: thebigdrinkrethink.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/annadonaghey
Instagram: instagram.com/bigdrinkrethink
Produced by winteraudio.co.uk
About April Day Garcia:
April Day Garcia spent years in forward motion - busy, capable, and running without knowing it. As a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant, Reiki practitioner, and self-described chronic over-doer, she was excellent at moving through life while avoiding the rooms that needed her most.
Sober since August 2024, April has been doing the harder work: going back into the experiences that shaped her deepest beliefs about herself, sitting in those spaces long enough to heal them, and discovering that who she was on the other side had been there all along. Her debut memoir, The Room to Be Brave: Sometimes the way forward begins with going back, is the story of what it means to stop running - and be brave enough to go back.
Connect with April:
Book: https://a.co/d/01NvRuC9
Instagram: @theroomtobebrave
Website: https://www.aprildaygarcia.com/
