No Effective Mental Defense — Had the House, the Kid, the Husband, and Drank the Champagne Anyway – Chris S.
About This Speaker Tape
Chris shares her story of growing up in a violent Italian household on Long Island before moving to the San Fernando Valley at age two. She describes feeling like an outsider from early childhood — obsessing over brownie sizes in the school cafeteria line at seven — and finding her first relief from alcohol at eight years old at a bar mitzvah. By junior high her nickname was "Lush," and she wore it like a badge of honor. She progressed through pot, cocaine, meth, and daily drinking through her teens and twenties, crediting drugs and alcohol with keeping her alive through suicidal depression she wasn't allowed to express at home.
She first walked into AA at 19 and accumulated six sobriety dates over the years, cycling through sponsors she never called. She got sober from drugs in September 1992, married a normie, and broke her three-and-a-half-year sobriety when her husband offered champagne the day she came home from the hospital with their newborn on New Year's Eve 1995. She describes the Big Book's "no effective mental defense" playing out in real time — she had the house, the husband, the baby, and could see no reason not to drink. For seven years she drank "kind of normally" while earning degrees, then her drinking escalated through graduate school.
Her bottom came in Las Vegas after an affair, sleeping in the same hotel room the man had just checked out of while her husband and kids were there. She got sober July 29, 2005, found her sponsor through a friend at Stepping Stones in Santa Clarita, and has stayed sober since. Early sobriety brought a painful divorce, an affair with a married man in AA that became public, suicidal ideation so severe a friend told her to write her kids' names on her palms, and the slow work of learning to feel everything without a drink.
Chris describes finding her husband in AA — a man with 32 years of sobriety whose presence transformed her sons' lives. She built a career as a marriage therapist working with transitional-aged youth at Sober College, where she finally learned to take direction from a boss. Days before this talk, she learned the company was closing, but was headhunted for a position beyond anything she expected, with a recommendation letter from the staff psychiatrist that moved her to tears. She closes by saying she learned to say good morning in the rooms of AA, something she never learned in a family where people just hit each other.
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