Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point.

—ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

I hit bottom on August 16, 2014. It was Sam’s birthday. I had rented a beautiful house in the week leading up to it, on the beach in Malibu. It had wraparound decks and stunning views of the waves roaring and crashing just below. I had planned this trip for two months, my first ever vacation trip with just my two sons.

I had wanted these ten days at the beach to be a balm, a salve to all our pain. I had wanted us to be happy even though we were now three instead of four. Looking back, I shudder at how high I pinned my hopes for this trip: how much I wanted to erase all the pain and heartbreak and loss and betrayal I had felt, and had inflicted on my children. What I should have done was steel myself for the hard times that would also come far away from home, even in paradise.

For Sam’s birthday, I had carefully selected an iPad Mini and wrapped it in shiny gold paper. I had planned to bake him a vanilla coconut cake, his favorite, and had bought eight blue candles—and a red one for luck—to put on top. But on that bright sunny Saturday, with the salt from the ocean thick in the air, eight years after I brought my freckle-faced redhead into this world, I was drunk. I was upstairs, throwing all my clothes into my suitcases. The dresses I had planned to wear to dinner with friends, the bathing suits I packed to surf with the boys, the flip-flops, the sandals, the sun hats, the cashmere wraps—all the things I meticulously laid out six days ago, I now shoved back in with abandon. Downstairs, my friend Dana loaded the boys into her car to take them to her house to play with her daughters while they waited for Marc to fly from New York to pick them up. My brother, Chris, who had flown down from San Francisco with my sister, to save me yet again, waited to drive me to a detox facility in Pasadena.

In two short hours I traded those thousand-dollar views of the Pacific Ocean for a tiny room in a Las Encinas lockup. I had a single bed and a small window that was bolted shut. There was no door to the tiny bathroom, no hooks on which to hang towels out of fear that someone would try to hang themselves. There was a single fluorescent overhead light buzzing faintly, and the sharp, cloying smell of industrial detergent.

Every hour, day and night, an orderly would open the door and shine a light to see if you were in your bed (at night) or still breathing (day or night). Once I sobered up, I spent every waking hour outside in a small common courtyard. I was told by one of the staff that this place was once called the Marilyn Monroe Center, because it was here that she would come to privately detox. If true, the place was definitely showing its age.

Outside, where I spent the next four days, there was a collection of picnic benches. Styrofoam cups and used paper plates sat on tables, and in the desiccated grass were cigarette butts… mounds of them. All matches and lighters had been confiscated upon check-in, so hour after hour I sat and watched person after person stand in front of a rusty metal box mounted at eye level on the wall and lean their face in close. Embedded inside it was one of those old-fashioned cigarette lighters, the kind you would see in an old Buick in the 1970s. I was sure one of those smokers was going to ignite his eyelashes instead of his Marlboro Gold. And that is how I spent the week of my son’s eighth birthday. Instead of watching Sam blow out his birthday candles, I was watching nameless addicts light up their smokes.

I had plenty of time in those four days in Las Encinas to think about what I did when we arrived in Malibu. I had worked the first day of our vacation, on Monday, shooting an interview for a story that would air that week on 20/20. I was scheduled to record the audio for my script on Friday, from the house, so it could be fed via satellite to New York and edited into the story. But when the crew arrived to our Malibu rental that day, I was under the influence, unable to properly read the script. A few days before, while shopping for groceries, my cart loaded with fruit and cereal and chips and salsa, I had found myself wheeling it past an enormous display of wine. I stopped in front of it, gazing at all those bottles. That would make me feel better, I had thought. Just one bottle, just one glass tonight. Then, forgetting every hard lesson I had learned, I reached out and picked a nice California chardonnay.

That night, I drank more than half of that bottle. The following night, after draining it, I looked around the rental house for more. I could not drive to the store again—I had sipped a glass and a half already. I would never dare drive after drinking—a singular moment of lucidity in an otherwise insane episode. I opened every cabinet, searched every shelf. Finally, way in the back of the pantry, next to a container of margarita mix, I found a bottle of tequila. Hard liquor was not my thing, but it was all there was, so I poured myself a glass. The tequila was strong—too strong. Very quickly my head was spinning, and I had to go to my room to lie down. The boys and our nanny were already asleep, thank God, but by Friday, I was hopelessly ensnared… it was clear to everyone that I had relapsed.

This time, my bosses at ABC had had it. The network had stood by me through two lengthy stints in rehab and through two relapses already. This time, I nearly lost my job. But most crucially, I had hurt my children—deeply. As I sat on that picnic bench and watched the smokers light up I wondered bleakly if they would ever forgive me, ever trust me again.

I had two visitors during those four days in Las Encinas—my sister, Aimie, was the first. She flew down a second time from the Bay Area to offer her support and her love.

“Beth, you have got to stop doing this.”

“I know, I know,” I said miserably. “I have really messed up this time. I may lose everything and everyone.”

Aimie looked around the yard, taking in the depressing scene in which I was now a player.

“You have to fight for yourself. This has to be the most important thing you do.”

I was deeply grateful she came, and when she left, it was really hard to see her go… her small back, her head held high. She had not had an easy time of life, either—she had had her own painful divorce to go through. She had gone through it without drinking herself into oblivion and, I realized in that moment, had done it without sufficient support from me.

I called out to her as she reached the locked door to the outside world. “Bye, Aimie! I love you!”

She turned and waved. “I love you, too.”

My second visitor was someone I had just met on my trip to Malibu. He was an actor and director who had gone through his own highly public battle with alcohol. He had taken me to a meeting in Malibu with other alcoholics, at the beginning of my vacation, before I fell into the bottle. He had come that Friday morning, too, when it all fell apart, and with my brother and Dana had helped get me to this facility. When they talk in recovery about alcoholics helping other alcoholics, this man’s name should be at the top of the list. He arrived in Las Encinas on my third day, and he brought someone with him. Her name was Polly.

“Elizabeth, meet Polly. This woman got me sober, and kept me sober. She saved my life.”

Polly had big brown eyes, long hair, and a warm smile. She was lovely. “It’s nice to meet you!” she said.

The three of us sat down in a pretty, secluded area apart from the common yard—a concession by the staff to my visitor’s fame.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“I am okay,” I sighed. They both knew I was lying. They knew exactly how I felt. Hopeless.

The three of us sat and talked for half an hour, Polly telling how she helped our friend get sober, telling me her own story of addiction. She had been sober now for more than twenty years. Her wisdom and her strength awed me.

“You can stay sober, Elizabeth. I have helped many alcoholics who are worse than you.” She was offering me a ray of hope I had by then denied myself. “All you have to do is follow some simple steps. If you are willing, I can help you.”

She seemed so serene, so sure. As I looked at her that day, I saw my only lifeline. I grabbed it with both hands. By the end of the visit, we came up with a plan. Polly would come home with me to New York and live with me. I knew going to another rehab was not the answer for me. Instead, this time I resolved to work with Polly every day.

Polly flew home with me two days later and moved into my guest bedroom. I returned to a very different life than the one I left, on my way to Malibu, where I turned that dream vacation into yet another nightmare. I was no longer working. ABC had agreed to give me one last chance to get it together, but this time without pay. I returned to my outpatient group. I slept every night for a month at a sober house, where I was tested daily to prove I had not been drinking. But most important, I worked each and every day with Polly.

She laid out a meticulous timeline of my entire adult life and showed me how I had used alcohol for years in an unhealthy way, almost always to escape something, or someone, usually myself. She wrote out, in wrenching detail, every episode in the last eight years when I had gone to a hospital, or blacked out, or missed work, or missed moments of my own children’s lives. It was the first time someone had laid it out for me to see, every awful episode in its entirety, and it left me shaken. We took turns reading aloud from the book of Alcoholics Anonymous, full of stories of other people who had fallen hopelessly at the feet of this disease, only to find redemption.

Over and over, she hammered it home: “You cannot safely drink. Every attempt at controlled drinking ends disastrously. Your very life is at stake.” Time and time again, she would pull out that timeline and point to it. “Do you see how powerless you are over alcohol? Where did your best thinking get you?” There was no denying my life had become unmanageable. It was right in front of me, in black and white.

But most important, Polly talked a lot about God. I am Catholic, and my parents are devout in their faith. I have always considered religion to be a personal matter, and I was frankly embarrassed when Polly started talking about prayer, and God, and how we have to turn it all over and ask for His guidance. She was unshakeable in her devotion to God. If she was aware of my discomfort, it didn’t matter to her: her faith was that strong. Maybe she just knew I had to find my way to embracing it. I had spent my life praying in times of crisis. I wasn’t an atheist convert in the foxhole, but I didn’t pray regularly, and I sure didn’t pray when times were good. Polly set out to show me a different way—and it has become a cornerstone in my recovery. When I was tearful about meeting with Marc to negotiate our divorce, she would say serenely, “Hand it over to God. He will guide you.” When I had to go to ABC to meet with the president of the news division and persuade him to give me one last chance, she nodded and closed her eyes. “Pray. God will show you what to do.”

Today, when I feel anxiety start to overtake me, I pray. When I feel angry, or resentful, or just cranky, I list every thing in my life that is a gift. And now I pray when times are good. I end each day by making a gratitude list—all the things I am grateful for that night. They can be big things like a long trip that went smoothly, or an interview I conducted at work that went really well. They can be small things, like a moment of laughter with my son, or just the way the sun sparkled on the river that evening, like a million shards of glass. And every single day, I thank God for my family, my health, my home, and a job that I still love.

I went back to work in November, fully aware there would not be another chance. I could not get back all the opportunities I had squandered, and I needed to stop looking with regret and shame over my own shoulder. I could only look forward and do my very best, every single day.

My recovery this time was different because I was not in a bubble at rehab; I was not in an alternate universe. I was home, confronted every hour of every day with what I had done. I could look into my sons’ faces and see how I had hurt them. There was no escaping it; there was no denying it. The full extent of my disease and what I had done while in the throes of it was front and center in my life. I could not run away from it, as I had run away from every uncomfortable, anxious moment in my life. I had to navigate all the consequences of my drinking—the painful divorce, the two months off work, the incredulous glances I seemed to see everywhere from people who had read the news or heard the gossip. “She relapsed yet again? Can’t she get it together?”

I took a class in Transcendental Meditation and learned how to stop twice a day, center myself, and meditate. That and prayer have helped slow down the escalation of anxiety into panic, helped me not to take every single thing in life so personally. But these tools only work if you use them every single day, several times each day. They are not flimsy tools, as I had thought during that last summer and that terrible relapse. They are powerful weapons. They gave me the power to at last say no to drinking. The power to say yes to life.

Finally, I began once again going to meetings with other alcoholics, this time without my mantle of shame. I no longer hid in the back under a baseball cap. I sat up front. I listened to the stories I heard there, of other people’s journeys and tragedies—the blackouts, the rehabs, the DUIs, the divorces, the children lost in custody battles, the livelihoods and the lives all lost to this disease. I listened to those stories with empathy and compassion, hoping someday I could learn to show myself those same qualities and gain some form of absolution. I heard their stories of redemption and victory, of how they now lived lives they never imagined possible—were happier than they ever dreamed—because they stopped drinking. And when it came time to share at the end of the meeting, I raised my hand and said out loud, “Hi, I’m Beth. I am an alcoholic.”