I’m a former therapist and coming to terms with my alcoholism helped me recover. Here’s how I got sober.

The author (not pictured) had to come to terms with her alcoholism to find help.

By the time I was 30, I had been worried about my drinking for a dozen years.

It seemed strange to me that what began with the idea of having a cocktail before dinner (a grown-up, civilized, innocent, commonplace thing to do), a Manhattan, Mother’s favorite, carefully measured with the silver jigger made to look like a very big thimble, then poured into the crystal green-stemmed glass which, along with the jigger, I had inherited from my grandmother; its liquid glowing a honeyed gold, with a maraschino cherry resting on the bottom — it seemed strange that this idea of the pretty drink would “somehow” end up with me drunk, saying and doing things I would regret, endangering myself (and others) if I drove, which, at times, I did, one eye closed to better see the white center line on a country road; at times, falling down, and by a miracle not hitting my head, nearly daily suffering the dry mouth, throbbing headache, and general misery of hangovers, or even having no memory of what I had done the night before.

Why did “it” keep happening when my intention had been just to “have a drink”? I thought of it that way — that “it” was “happening,” and I could not yet see that I was the actor, the person who made “it” happen; and yet, it did not happen to everyone. It seemed that others — not by any means all, since by that time I was married to a heavy drinker — could have that nice cocktail in a pretty glass, admire it, enjoy it, and stop. Or maybe even have another, but then stop. Why couldn’t I?

I didn’t realize I was dealing with alcoholism

I really knew nothing at that time about alcoholism. An alcoholic, I thought, if I thought about it at all, was a man lying drunk in the street. I was 30 years old, healthy, mother of a little son, educated.

True, I had heard my father tell the story of his father — a dentist whose specialty was repairing the jaws of men kicked by horses, and a binge drinker, who had once locked himself into the garage with a loaded shotgun, necessitating my half-grown father to call the police. But that was long before I was born. It had nothing to do with me.

True, I had heard vague comments about my oldest brother, the one who disappeared and about whom I wrote in my memoir, “Missing,” having had, among other serious issues, problems with alcohol. But that, too, had nothing to do with me.

True, I was aware that certain members of my family of 10 “drank too much,” got argumentative, maudlin, nasty — or sometimes very funny — but they weren’t alcoholic, weren’t like that drunk man lying in the street. Everyone I knew drank, some of them more than I did. But I was, deep down, worried about my drinking. I knew there was something different about my interest in, my “relationship with,” alcohol.

Back when I was 26, already divorced after that brief early marriage and raising my son alone, I’d found a counselor at a local mental health center and in the course of talking with her about my loneliness and unhappiness (it was two years before Mother smoked herself to death), I had shared my worries about my drinking.

“If your hostess put a bottle of wine on the table, would you need to pick it up?” she’d asked me.

“Of course not,” I’d replied, and she’d said, “Well, you’re not an alcoholic.” Later, of course, I saw that she was as ignorant of alcoholism as I was — alcoholism is not, unfortunately, a required course in mental health educations — but I was only too glad to have a professional tell me not to worry. But I did continue to worry.

Five years later, and into that second marriage, I made an appointment with a trained alcohol counselor, recommended by my best friend, to talk about my husband’s drinking. The alcohol counselor listened, and then asked me to tell her about my own drinking, which I did.

“If you want someone to tell you not to worry about your drinking,” she said, friendly but no-nonsense. “You’ll have to find someone else, because I am telling you that you are right to worry about it.”

She loaned me books and pamphlets about alcoholism, and that night, after I’d put my little son to bed, I’d poured some scotch into a glass to keep me company as I read them.

Reading what she loaned me, and then talking with her in more sessions, I learned that I was not too young or too healthy to be an alcoholic. And she said something that enabled me to utterly change my life (and the lives of my son and future daughter): she said alcoholism was like an elevator and I could get off at any floor. That drunk man lying on the street whom I had visualized as a “real” alcoholic was at the end of the elevator ride, on the bottom.

I did not have to ride the elevator all the way down.

Identifying my alcoholism allowed me to get the support I needed

I learned that my episodes of forgetting what I had done the night before had a name: alcoholic blackouts. And the “it” that I had not understood was alcoholism, something I could manage, like a disease, which is the simplest way for me to view alcoholism. I could see myself in everything I read about alcoholism, and I could see the road ahead if I did not stop drinking. My own behavior while drinking had illustrated, vividly, the ugliness of repetitive drunkenness. I did not want to be like that — or even worse. Here was a way — stopping drinking — to save myself from “it.”

But I was “only” 30. What about the whole life ahead of me? Weddings and parties and Champagne, and those beautiful green crystal glasses filled with the glow of a Manhattan, its magnified cherry on the bottom; what about the salted rim of a chilled margarita glass? How was I to live without ever having a drink again?

Because my counselor and the literature she’d provided to me made it crystal-clear that the only way for me to stop “it” was not to drink. Alcohol was, for me, poison. I must not have one drink, ever, of any sort. She explained that alcoholism was progressive, and progressed even when you didn’t drink. She told of people who hadn’t had a drink in many years yet again had become captive, had even proceeded to die from it, when, believing themselves cured, had again begun to drink.

And then, one evening in May, the counselor took me to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, this particular meeting a fairly long drive from my small town in New Hampshire into another even smaller town in our neighboring state of Vermont. The honesty, good cheer, and friendliness of this “fellowship,” especially the laughter, often over the most painful or embarrassing things, was a tonic.

I saw and heard from others who had also experienced “it,” and were living examples of how to change, how to escape the dangerous cycle — living examples of what I learned to call Sobriety: not drinking, one day at a time, facing reality and being completely honest (“My name is Cornelia and I am an alcoholic”), making amends, turning to others for help and helping others, going to meetings, and a lot of simple but very useful slogans (“people who don’t go to meetings don’t hear what happens to people who don’t go to meetings”).

I loved that meeting, and I thought I would go home and have a drink and think about it. But we took a wrong way on that dark country road, and by the time we got to my house, it was very late. I decided I wouldn’t, after all, have that drink.

One day at a time, thanks to my fellow alcoholics and thousands of meetings, I have not had another one. Not having another one is what has made it possible for me to live the life I am writing about in this memoir. Being sober has been the key to every day of every year since that first momentous AA meeting.