SOBER RETHINKING
She was a high-powered working mother fueled by malbec and beer. Determined to quit, she figured out how to give up booze without the 12 steps — and she says you can, too
U P until about three years ago, Annie Grace would end her stressful workdays as a vice president of a global-marketing company with a glass of malbec, filled to the top, often the first of five in her daily ritual.
By the time she tucked her two children into bed and kissed her husband good night, her teeth were purple, her breath was thick with the smell of booze and, often, an empty box of wine would be in the trash of their Evergreen, Colo., home. Some weeks, she and her husband would plow through 12 boxes.
“I was not the mom I wanted to be,” Grace, now 39, tells The Post. “I wanted to be giving my family the best of me and I was giving them the absolute worst.”
She realized it was time to make a change in 2013. On a family vacation, she took her kids to see the London Eye Ferris Wheel. Two bottles of beer she carried with her to help her get through the day fell out of her purse and sprayed all over her children.
It was then that she decided she needed to stop drinking, but she didn’t turn to Alcoholics Anonymous. She decided to do it all on her own, a process she details in her new book, “This Naked Mind” (Avery).
In the year following the London Eye incident, Grace researched alcohol’s ill effects and journaled about why she was drinking in an effort to dismantle the assumptions that she had made about the substance — that it was calming her nerves or making her more interesting. In fact, she found out, it didn’t do any of that.
“I realized it wasn’t the alcohol itself that was fun,” she says. “I just believed it was fun, so I was miserable without it.”
After a two-week period of withdrawal symptoms such as having trouble sleeping, night sweats, anxiety and restlessness, Grace became completely sober using her mind-over-matter technique. She says she could even have the occasional glass of wine now, if she wanted to, although she has no desire to.
“I just haven’t wanted to drink in more than three years,” says Grace, now a mother to three children, ages 9, 6 and 6 months.
Grace’s philosophy flies in the face of many commonly held recovery techniques, such as needing to declare oneself an alcoholic and that once you quit the sauce, you can’t have a drop of it.
Others have found success with the approach. In 2014, Grace started a blog and podcast, ThisNakedMind.com, which she estimates receives 100,000 visitors monthly and has helped some 4,000 people stop drinking.
Her book assesses the common reasons people imbibe — alcohol helps relieve stress, it tastes good and it makes social situations fun, for instance — and dispels their effectiveness with research and personal anecdotes.
“Some people describe it like a magic trick, but it’s very scientific,” says Grace.
But some in the recovery community don’t agree.
Although doctors still don’t know much about why people get addicted or how to prevent it, they do see a clear genetic linkage; it’s often that problems arise, not due to a lack of willpower, but rather because of the traits people inherit when they’re born.
“When I talk to patients about the genetic predisposition, it does wonders because it allows them to conceive of their illness as a medical problem that they didn’t choose, and then they can start focusing on their treatment,” says Tim Brennan, director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai West in Midtown.
Grace is quick to warn that she’s not a physician, and that her book isn’t for the 10 percent of excessive drinkers whom the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says are physiologically dependent. Those drinkers should see a doctor instead of buying her book, she says.
Her message, she says, is for the 90 percent of heavy drinkers who can still function without alcohol but may need a wake-up call before they hit rock bottom.
“If we’re sitting there saying, ‘I think I should cut back,’ the main option right now in society is you would go to Alcoholics Anonymous and you’d have to take on all that shame, all that label, all that illness,” Grace says. “By the time we’re ready for that, something pretty horrific has had to happen.” (A spokesperson for Alcoholics Anonymous says the organization “would have no position on Ms. Grace’s book.”)
For people such as Grace, who was a high-functioning heavy drinker, she says that her method works.
“I don’t count days and I don’t even call myself ‘sober,’ ” she says. “I just feel like I’m making conscious choices about drinking every day based on knowledge of what I want.”