The Stay at Home Drinker - Ulrika Tells her Story

This week on Sober Awkward, Vic and Ulrika tackle a drinking style that often flies completely under the radar, the stay-at-home drinker. Vic was the loud one. The social one. The drinker making questionable decisions in public and collecting stories she’d rather forget. Ulrika was different.

Her drinking happened behind closed doors. No bars. No dance floors. No one telling her she’d had enough. Just a sofa, a glass of rum, a familiar routine, and eventually a habit that quietly became something she relied on to get through the day.

Together they explore how alcohol can slowly shift from something we enjoy to something we need, why drinking at home can be so difficult to spot, and how secrecy, shame and isolation create the perfect conditions for alcohol to tighten its grip.

They talk openly about lockdown drinking, parenting, anxiety, blackouts, hidden bottles, emotional dependence, and the exhausting cycle of drink, shame, hide, repeat.

Along the way, they also cover builder-induced toilet disasters, panty liners, digestive biscuits, and why Ulrika accidentally traumatised a team of tradesmen by forgetting to shut the bathroom door.

If you’ve ever found yourself pouring a glass because the kids are finally asleep, because work was stressful, because you’re lonely, overwhelmed, anxious, bored, or simply because it’s become what you do every evening, this episode is for you.

This is an honest conversation about the drinking nobody sees, the shame nobody talks about, and the moment both Vic and Ulrika realised they couldn’t keep doing it anymore.

Because sometimes the most dangerous drinking isn’t happening in the pub.

It’s happening quietly on the sofa.

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📘 A Thousand Wasted Sundays

Victoria’s brutally honest and hilarious memoir about motherhood, anxiety and ditching the booze.

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A Year of Trying (and Failing) to Be a Better Parent—Vic’s funny and painfully relatable memoir about the messy reality of motherhood.

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