When you’re going through hell, keep going.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

I fucked up. There really is no other way to put it. It’s profane, and my mother won’t like the language, but what I did was profane. I came home, and I drank. Again. I hurt my children, whom I adore, again. I hurt and enraged Marc yet again. Why on earth would I do this? Why would I risk everything, undoing all I had accomplished? All I can guess is that I was not yet ready to stop. I did not yet know how to live my life without numbing myself. I was not yet ready to do anything, to go to any lengths, to stay sober. If that sounds insane after everything I had been through and that I was putting my family through, well it is. It was insane. And selfish.

Within four days, I was back on an airplane, heading back to Tennessee.

I cried and pleaded not to be sent back. I made promises that no one, not even I, believed I could keep. But Marc made it clear I had no choice, and he was right. He took the boys and left for a concert upstate. I was alone, at home, and I probably would not have made that flight had it not been for my producer and friend, Terri Lichstein, and my brother, Chris. He flew out from San Francisco to be with me. He was gentle and loving. In that moment when I hated myself so much for what I was doing—and felt so hopeless about my inability to stop—my brother was a godsend. He was firm and calm. Chris and Terri insisted I go back, that I must return to the Center, and try harder this time to make it work. Chris flew with me back to Nashville. When the plane landed he was supposed to put me in a car to the Center and head back home to California. But he couldn’t bear to do it. He rode with me to the rehab, sitting in the backseat with me, rubbing my arms and my back, comforting me.

I don’t think I had ever felt closer to him. And while it was my brother who saved me that day, my sister and my mom and dad also surrounded me with their love and support over the next months. They stepped into the void. I could not have survived without them.

I returned to the Center with my tail between my legs. Early on, one of the administrators at the Center called me in for a meeting. We sat together in a small room. He was about my age, and he looked at me levelly before he started speaking.

“I used to be a judge here in Tennessee,” he said. “I had a huge, promising career as a lawyer, a wife and kids. I had it all, and then I nearly lost it because I couldn’t stop drinking.”

I studied him. He seemed so put together, so calm, even serene, as he told me his terrible story. He seemed free of all the guilt and shame I felt crowding around me.

“I am a drunk, Elizabeth, and so are you.” I recoiled. His words felt like a slap in the face. “You may think you’re special, or different, but you’re not. You are just like me, and every other person here, trying to stay sober.” I started to cry. He continued. “You need to take this chance and make the best of it. Many, many people relapse. You are not the first, and you will not be the last. The question is what are you going to do about it.”

He was right, on so many levels. I was not the first person in the world to leave rehab and drink—not by a long shot. But I felt like I was. And now, I was right back in the same house, living under the same strict rules, feeling just as despondent and isolated as ever. I knew that this time I had to fight to save my life.

One of the first things I did was to try to alleviate the yawning abandonment I felt by being at the Center. I could not make it go completely away, but I began reaching out to people who would support me and talk to me: my parents, my brother, my sister, and my friends Dana and Michelle. I figured out that I could call my own work voice mail and access messages from that living room phone at the Center. I asked everyone to leave word for me on it. I could call it every night, if I made it to the phone sign-up sheet in time, and in five minutes I could hear what felt like a week’s worth of love and encouragement.

My mom in particular left a message almost every single night. Echoes of those lunch box notes she would give me in third grade when I was tormented at school by the class bully. My priority still was calling Zachary and Sam, trying as best I could to connect with them, and that took most of my allotted phone time. But those other messages now left me better equipped to handle the heartbreak of the calls home.

One night, as I sat listening to my messages, I heard an unfamiliar voice. It was a friend of my sister’s. She was in recovery. Aimie had given her my number.

“Elizabeeeeeeeethh! How are you? Hang in there! But hey, don’t you know? Getting sober is so much harder than staying sober. Why do you keep doing the hardest part over and over?”

I had never looked at it that way. I have thought about that message almost every day since I heard it. Why had I stayed in that terrible spin cycle, over and over, emerging battered and disoriented, and then climbing back in for another go? Quitting is so very hard. “I’ll stop tomorrow” is the worn-out refrain. But it feels herculean to resist drinking on day one. It’s only once you have days, weeks, or months of sobriety under your belt that the siren call to drink is much less potent. It is easier to reject the temptation to drink if your mind is clear and you’re not hungover or feeling hopeless because you drank the night before.

I worked hard with my therapist at the Center, trying to solve the mystery of why I kept going back to what was killing me. Once again, we dug deep into why my anxiety was so terrifying to me, and how I could calm it without wine. I listened to lecturers explain that alcoholism is a disease of the mind and body… that alcoholics cannot stop drinking or obsessing about it once they start. I went to the Center’s trauma expert, who did something called brain spotting. I had to sit and stare at the tip of a stick that the therapist would slowly wave back and forth. When she explained it to me, I burst into a laugh.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

The trauma therapist looked annoyed and mildly offended. “No, I am not kidding you. Are you ready to work or not?”

Yes, I was ready to work. She made me tell her about those mornings in Okinawa—when my dad was in Vietnam and my mom left for work. She made me describe in detail how I clung to her, begged her, was dragged to the car trying to stop her, my bare feet skidding across the rocks. I could barely tell anyone that story. Every time I started I would become overwhelmed, and have to stop. At that point, the therapist made me stare at that silly stick again, and she moved it slowly from side to side. I had to keep my head still, following it only with my eyes moving. I honestly have no idea what she was doing or how it was supposed to work, but unbelievably, after several sessions, it did work. For the first time in my whole life, I can now tell the story of those panic attacks in Okinawa without crying.

There were other exercises, meant to build our trust in the world and in ourselves, and to make us believe that we could be okay. We were all led out to a small cliff one afternoon, high above a gully full of dead trees and rocks. One by one, we were strapped into a harness and told to stand on the very edge of the cliff and jump.

We all knew we wouldn’t fall—that’s what the harness and the safety ropes above were for—but trust me, it was scary. Because I am afraid of heights, I volunteered to go first. Why sit and wait and worry—just get it over with. I forced myself to look down. I wanted to feel fully afraid, and then I held my breath and jumped. For one second, the world, the trees, even I, all felt suspended in time, like a scene from the movie The Matrix. For a nanosecond it felt like I floated, and then I plummeted, my stomach lurching up into my throat. And then with a jerk, I stopped, swinging gently in my safety harness, laughing up at the sky.

My therapist also taught me how to meditate. She took Lin, Elaine, and me to Nashville one Saturday for a daylong silent retreat. No talking, just meditating.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Elaine said from the backseat of the van. “What happens if we blurt out something? Are they going to kick us out?”

“I have never not talked for a whole day in my life!” Lin exclaimed. “This is epic!” We were giddy, mostly just to be allowed out of the Center for a day.

We were on our way to the gorgeous Vanderbilt campus, where one of our first exercises was a walking meditation. We all had to walk, very, very slowly, repeating one line of the mantra with each step:

May I be calm.

May I be peaceful.

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

I put one foot out carefully in front of the other, so slowly I was barely moving. Lin and Elaine and I tried not to look at each other. We might start giggling. We felt like zombies, moving slowly and muttering chants to ourselves. But to my surprise, I liked it. We spent the day learning all kinds of meditation—standing, seated, with a mantra, and without.

I learned that day that I loved to meditate. It was the first time ever that I had been able to calm my anxiety without a drink or even a pill. Meditating would go on to become a key part of my recovery.

But the best part of the Center’s recovery program, in my opinion, is when they have family weekends. Once or twice a month, everyone’s husband or wife, children, parents, and siblings are invited to come to the Center and spend three days, learning about addiction and that it is a family disease. While the family has most certainly been profoundly hurt by the addict’s actions, the Center therapists said, blaming and shaming the addict is the worst possible thing a family can do. Many alcoholics also drink because of deep dysfunction in families, and for the family to heal, every member of the family must recognize his or her part. On the last day of the family weekend, the addicts and their family members were to read to each other a list of regrets and requests. This was done in front of a group, with everyone else watching. It was an important and emotional part of the weekend.

“Now, family members,” warned Teddy, the program leader. “This is not your chance to blame the alcoholic for every bad thing that has ever happened! You don’t get to write ‘I regret that you drank.’ It has to be something you did. You can request they don’t drink. But you have to own your own failures. Like, ‘I regret I didn’t listen to you when you tried to tell me you were unhappy,’ or ‘I regret I got defensive and lashed out at you when you tried to tell me what was wrong.’”

Teddy was a character. He was a strapping man with a booming voice and a thick southern accent, and I think he lulled everyone into thinking he was a good ol’ boy. He was actually whip smart and could charm just about anyone to drop their defenses and listen. He was also a recovering alcoholic.

Hoping he would come and hear what Teddy had to say, I invited Marc to every family weekend. He never came. But my parents did—all the way from Reno. So did my brother, Chris. Aimie would have come, but she is a single mother with three young children and couldn’t. Even my friend Dana offered to come from Los Angeles.

Chris came first. We sat opposite each other in chairs, our list of regrets and requests in our laps.

“I regret I was not there for you more when we were growing up,” Chris said.

“I regret I didn’t ask you more about what was happening in your life.”

“I request that you stop drinking.” Then, Chris put down the paper and looked up at me.

“You light up a room when you walk into it, Beth. Don’t walk into it drunk.”

I started to cry. I picked up my paper and read what I had written.

“I regret that I hurt you. I regret that I let you and Mom and Dad and Aimie slip away from me.”

“I regret not asking you about your new business. I know it’s important to you, and I regret hurting you with my disinterest.”

“I regret that I didn’t tell you what was happening to me, how I was losing myself. I regret not asking for help. I didn’t when we were little and I was so scared (and you must have been, too), and I didn’t when we were grown up and could do something about it.”

“I request you call me more.”

“I request we try harder to stay closer.”

Exchanging those regrets and requests, first with my brother and, later, with my parents, helped clear out some of the emotional clutter that had for years kept me and my family from truly talking. When my mother sat across from me and told me she regretted that she did not comfort me in Okinawa, and that she did not stop the bullies from tormenting me for years, it was like an enormous weight was lifted from me. Her simple statement that she knew what I had gone through, and was sorry she didn’t do more, somehow eased the pain of those 40-year-old memories that I had been dragging behind me all my life, like bedraggled baggage.

Everything was on the table that weekend for everyone to explore. We drew an enormous family tree, labeling any ancestors who were alcoholic or depressed and any relatives who experienced trauma of any kind. Addicts are rarely spawned in a vacuum.

Each family weekend ended with a maze made of ropes. I went through it with Chris. We put on blindfolds and were led to a large room, which contained a series of ropes. We would have to feel our way along the ropes to find the exit.

“The rules are very simple!” Teddy boomed. “Do not let go of the rope! Do not duck under the rope! Do not climb over the rope! Do not try to walk on top of the rope! [Seriously?] Feel along the rope with your hands until you find the way out!”

We all looked at each other uneasily, some smiling, others searching around for a way out of doing this.

“If you have a question, or you need something, raise your hand!! One of us will come to you. Do you understand?” Teddy was especially thunderous on maze days.

Cue the music, don the blindfolds, and off we went. Shuffling and bumping, we were led into a large space, and our hands first touched a rope. We groped along. The ropes were stretched in what seemed to be a giant cat’s cradle. Chris and I were in the crowd, fumbling around, when suddenly Teddy shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome our first person home!”

There was applause from the staffers and residents watching. Wow, I thought. Someone did it! On and on I went, bumping into people, walking into walls. I could hear people swearing around me as they did the same thing. Teddy kept yelling every few minutes, “We welcome another person home!!” and then there was more applause for whoever figured the way out. I was beginning to feel frustrated, like I was going around in circles. How could all these other people find the way out and I could not? It was annoying to hear all that clapping as yet another person succeeded while I was still looking. I forced myself to focus. Think. Use your head. Count how many steps before turning left, stop, the wall is on the right, it must be forward. Finally, after walking into my fifteenth wall, it occurred to me. I raised my hand. Moments later I felt Teddy’s hand on my back. “Do you need anything?” he asked.

“Yes, I need help.” That, ladies and gentlemen, was the way out of the maze. The way out of alcoholism, the way out of any crisis. Asking for help. “No one can do it alone,” Teddy said, as my brother and my housemates gathered around me (they had all figured it out long before I did). “We all need help. We can’t think our way out of addiction. We can’t will our way out. The first step to recovery is raising your hand and asking for help.”