Yasmin Goetz smiling outdoors with her mother

Meet Yasmín

This is my story. I'm telling it because yours might look something like mine.

I'm Yasmín Goetz Ramírez de Arellano, the founder of New Habits, New Hope, an addiction prevention and recovery brand based in Orlando, Florida. I'm two years sober, a recovering alcoholic, a former business consultant, and a single mother.

This page is my full account: a fight with alcohol that started long before the house fire, the 13 months away from everything that it finally cost me, and the simple method I now share on the New Habits homepage and in the shop.

If you're looking for something that works alongside AA and faith, not instead of them, this is where that method came from.

What I Believe

Yasmin Goetz with a group of friends at a party in Miami in the nineties
Yasmin Goetz during her consulting years
  • A craving is a request for relief. Give it something else and it settles.
  • Shame has never made anyone stop. Putting it down is the first step, not the reward.
  • You are not powerless. The more you understand it, the more of yourself you get back.
  • Small and immediate beats big and expensive. A mint, a page, a piece of candy.
The burned-out interior of Yasmin's house after the fire

We are not all that different

Alcohol was in my house before I knew what to call it. I grew up in Puerto Rico with two parents who drank, and drank heavily, and neither one of them ever thought the word alcoholic had anything to do with them. That is where this starts. Not in 2017.

I moved to Miami at 19 and did the eighties and nineties there the way plenty of people did. I tried pot, I tried cocaine, and I put both of them down without much trouble. Drinking was the one that stayed, and that is still the part I find strange: the illegal things turned out to be the easy ones to walk away from. Alcohol was legal, it was on every table I sat at, and nobody ever takes you aside about a glass of wine.

So I quit and started again, over and over, for most of my adult life. It cost me legal trouble. It cost me customers. It cost me friends who were finished watching. In between all of it I moved to Houston, then Orlando, built a consulting career from nothing, and raised my son while I did it. On paper I had everything a person is supposed to want.

Then, in January 2017, the house I was living in caught fire. It burned my lungs, and it burned that version of my life down with it. The fire did not start my drinking. It found me already fighting it, and it took away the last of the room I had been using to keep that fight quiet.

There was no single rock-bottom moment, just pain and a choice to reach for wine instead of painkillers. I told myself wine was the smarter one: natural, not addictive. A glass to take the edge off, then a glass because the day was long. I was a professional, a mother, someone who had it together, and that belief is exactly what let it get loud again, until the drinking caught up with the rest of my life and I was arrested.

I spent 13 months in jail. The women in there called it camp, and once I understood why, so did I. They were carrying far more than I was, and they are the ones who taught me the thing none of the expensive programs ever had: sweet works better than salty, candy works better than chocolate. Something small, something immediate. It got me through one night, and then the next. My son is the one who said I should build something out of it, so this isn't only my idea. It's his too.

Yasmin Goetz, two years sober, with her son at a Christmas lights event in Orlando

Two years later

Today I'm two years sober. AA and my faith got me here, and so did something much smaller: one replacement at a time.

What that looks like on an ordinary day: somebody offers me a cigarette, I say no, and I have a piece of candy instead. I move my body, even if it's only a walk. I go to AA. I read my Bible. It isn't clever, but it works.

New Habits, New Hope is me handing you that same small piece of it.

Your story doesn't have to end where mine almost did. Start with one small habit.

You don't have to do this alone See what helped me