Rock Bottom to Recovery: A Sobriety Journey That Could Save Your Life

Two cookies at a summer acting camp, then a mirror she could not unsee. Emily spent college alone with food before residential treatment reset her plate.

Her mom called on April 1 to say she had drunk the night before, then said April Fools. Jenna stayed calm, and saw how far Al-Anon had rewired her reactions.

At 13 he started hiding how he managed his diabetes. Mark M. on the years of secrecy, cocaine and whiskey that followed, and what finally broke it open.

At 39 a nurse refused to send him home and he was in surgery within the hour. Lucky Church on the eating and drinking he never counted as an addiction.

Nobody told her her father had moved out. She knew because she ran upstairs and his alarm clock was gone. She spent years learning to trust that feeling again.

Told by friends to drink twelve, she measured twelve ounces of whiskey into a cup, because that is what a perfectionist does. She was sick within minutes.

For four weeks she drank vodka from a water bottle in front of her own therapist. Then a flood took the apartment she was not in, and doctors warned her family.

She said she had field hockey practice, then drove to a Detroit trap house in her school uniform. At 19 she walked into an intervention in her own living room.