She was on top of her game with 30 years as a successful businesswoman and a career that spanned three continents. She had very senior roles and oversaw 150,000 people. And, although she did not drink at work, she was an alcoholic throughout her entire career.

Meet Carol, a high-powered businesswoman who talks of after-work dinners when she had blackouts and/or fell asleep. It was not uncommon for her to drink and drive: “I joined an enormous company in a foreign country (UK) which also celebrates drinking and did very, very well. We had a driver so there was never a problem with drinking and driving.” She moved to India where the family had a driver as well: “I never drove at all when we lived in India.”

Growing Up: “I know I have the same storyline as may alcoholics: I was a particularly sensitive child. I remember my father telling me I was moody.”

“My mother was alcoholic. I think my first really horrific memory of alcoholism was when my mother tried to take her own life. I was 11 and was afraid, as you can understand, of losing my mother entirely. But I had already been trained to understand that mommy had a problem, but we couldn’t really talk about it very much. I was so sure I would never be that.”

She had a privileged upbringing: “For a period of time my father made tremendous amounts of money. By the time I was 12 we were living in Point Grey (Vancouver, British Columbia) in a very large house.” Despite these physical comforts Carol never felt like she fit in. When she was 15, she moved in with her sister who was seven years older: “There was a sense that nobody was going to look after me, so I have to look after myself.” She says that played a role in her alcoholism. When she was 19, and drunk, Carol tried to commit suicide, repeating behaviour of her alcoholic mother.

Carol worked in the restaurant business part-time while going to school. She attended the British Columbia Institute of Technology and graduated magna cum laude. She says she was an alcoholic by this point: “So even though I drank all throughout I did really well in school. Then I got hired right away and did really well. I just did really well in my work.”

“I drank all throughout and I drank differently than everybody else. And I was very focused. I was blessed with a brain.

“I cannot tell you how I got away with it. I would pass out and fall asleep at work dinners. They would wake me up and take me home or put me in a cab. There were restaurants I couldn’t go back to in Vancouver.

“I think my story is tied up in being in a high-powered, high-performing environment, which is male-dominated. I have a low voice. I’m confident, I present well, and I’m sort of mannish in a way. I don’t cry easily. I’m strong outwardly. In fact, I’d say I’m scary. A lot of people have said that I’m intimidating.

“I can’t believe that through all that I did my brain was intact.”

Life at Home: My family was getting more and more hurt and alarmed.

“My husband (George) was living with an alcoholic. My daughter had an alcoholic mother, so there were lots of fights and tears, and my solution to being confronted was to leave so I’d go and stay in a hotel.” In England, George stayed home with their daughter while Carol went to work: “We didn’t have much of a marriage and why would you? He was very angry, and I was not present, not accounted for at all. Little did I know I had a really serious inability to love myself let alone anybody else.

“With the progression of the disease I was not sleeping well. My daughter, by the end, had just given up. She had withdrawn from me,” just as Carol had withdrawn from her own alcoholic mother.

“One of the worst moments is when George said to me one day when we were living in the UK, ‘I don’t work for you, you know,’ because that is the way I was treating people in my life.”

“My drinking was obviously a problem at work.”

After moving from continent to continent Carol was back in Canada in an important position with a large corporation. She got so drunk at the 2011 office Christmas party that her husband left and her colleagues had to put her up in a hotel: “So I woke up in a hotel, in the morning, in my dress, and I had no idea how I got there. I saw an addictions doctor who gave me a report that said I was alcoholic which I put in a drawer, in a little-used chest in my bedroom.”

The pivotal event, says Carol, was a conference in the US where she was a speaker and receiving an award. She drank too much at the reception after being honoured: “I can’t remember a flash of it.”

Gift of Desperation

“I woke up the next morning in that hotel room and knew that I couldn’t do this anymore, that I had lost dignity, respect, credibility. I’d hurt absolutely everybody, but most of all I’d hurt myself. By then thoughts of taking my own life were pretty common.”

She was in the depths of despair: “The unworthiness that I felt was just bottomless and there’s nothing anyone can say, there’s nothing anyone can do to convince you that you’re okay as a person when you feel that way. Whether it’s the twin diseases of depression and alcoholism, who knows which comes first. I don’t know but I knew my husband was going to leave me. I came home and told my husband I need help. The next Tuesday, September 24, 2013 she booked in at Edgewood treatment centre in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Rehab Realizations

Carol had resented her husband and blamed him, but this thinking changed in treatment. As she did her self-discovery work, she was able to see her role in their relationship and realized it had taken courage for George to stay with her: “It’s a miracle to me that he stayed with me. We’ve been married 27 years.”

After seven weeks in treatment she was ready to leave: “Thank God, I really did get it. I really did.”

Advice for the successful businesswoman who is an alcoholic:

Carols thinks women alcoholics are more stigmatized than men and women should not be afraid to be vulnerable and ask for help: “Women like me are perfectionists. Perfectionists don’t show any sign of weakness. We want to control everything because we feel so worthless. I want to try to look perfect on the outside, so you don’t realize what a mess I am.

“I would say that a 12-step meeting is a good start. And I’d like to say to other high-functioning alcoholics, ‘You can have a high bottom.'” Carol says although she managed a lot of people and had a really high-profile job, she was still an alcoholic. Her advice to other women in similar situations:

“Get help getting sober.”