SUCCEEDING IN SOBRIETY

TERESA J. HAS USED HER RECOVERY FROM ALCOHOLISM TO GIVE OTHERS A GLIMPSE OF HOPE.

For many years, alcohol was an important daily routine for Teresa. She was a functional, working alcoholic who didn’t think she had a problem. She would leave the country club where she worked, go drink, and be up the next day to do it all over again. To her, this was normal.

However, after 23 years with her husband and while raising two teenage boys, Teresa allowed her social drinking to cause her marriage to fall apart, which forced her to face her addiction alone. In 2002, her divorce and selling the house where she had lived with her family made her even more dependent on alcohol. “I remember closing the door to that empty house and thinking my home has become just a house,” she says.

When the boys went to live with their father just a few days before Christmas, Teresa sought out alcohol to help numb the pain of losing her family. That resulted in her fi rst DUI. For three more years, Teresa lived in denial about her drinking. She was arrested for another DUI in 2005 before she was faced with the harsh reality that her life had become unmanageable.

“My body was freezing as I sat in that concrete cell wrapping my hands and feet in toilet paper. I kept thinking, ‘How could a professional working woman and former Sunday school teacher end up here?’” she says. “My sister picked me up from jail after my second DUI and said, ‘I don’t think you are an alcoholic, Teresa.’ That was when I thought to myself, ‘No, that’s exactly what I am.’”

A friend who had achieved sobriety after seeking help for her own alcohol problem visited Teresa and encouraged her to attend 90 meetings in 90 days to break free from the stronghold of her addiction. “It took 90 days to get to know myself again — the real me that God wanted me to be,” she says.

Teresa was able to get a sponsor to go through the 12-step program that has helped her stay sober for more than eight years. “Complete strangers wanted to help me for nothing in return. Now I’m just paying it forward,” she says.

For four years, Teresa has helped support and offer hope to others who are struggling with alcoholism and other dependencies. She coordinates volunteers to take phone calls and she pays visits to people who are seeking help for what many people think is a weakness, not a disease. “I have more respect for recovering alcoholics than anyone else,” she says. “My job has given me a second chance and allows me to see God’s miracles first hand, and for that, I have never been richer.”