Lots of folks picture alcoholics and addicts as homeless people who live under the bridge.
Tammy Roth has never been homeless, nor lived under a bridge. In fact, she was a super successful Nashville businesswoman who eventually got two master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University and started counseling people with addictions – all the while drinking alcoholically herself.
Now, Tammy, with five years sober, has put out a memoir,High Bottom: Letting Go of Vodka and Chardonnay, available now at Amazon.com.
“High bottom” is an expression for addicts/alcoholic who may have never been arrested or fired or publicly humiliated or homeless.
“I didn’t know I was an alcoholic because I didn’t have many external consequences,” she said in an email interview. “Mine were all internal. I was an emotional wreck.”
Tammy thinks there are lots of other alcoholics out there just like her, wondering, just like she did, whether they have a problem with alcohol and/or drugs.
Tammy’s book is a thoughtful, well-written look at her life and how alcohol and insecurity sucked her into a hole. It didn’t leave her homeless — but it did leave her hopeless and contemplating suicide.
“I think there are a lot of high functioning alcoholic women that can relate to that horribly depressed feeling that is hanging on the day after,” she wrote.
Tammy grew up the daughter of a bread delivery man and her family bounced around from Hopkinsville, Ky., to Nashville, to Clarksville, to Paducah, Ky., to Clarksville again. Her parents, married young, split when Tammy was a teenager.
Then Tammy herself got married at 18 and divorced by 25 after she started college classes and began to have success in the insurance company world.
Enter alcohol, in a much bigger way.
“I wanted to be carefree and fun, maybe even a bit wild. I didn’t know how to do it on my own,” Tammy wrote in the book.
“Alcohol provided a quick release from the rigidity, but I took it to the extreme. I would end up sloppy drunk and not at all like what I was shooting for.”
The more success she had – and it was substantial — the more Tammy drank, and she decided a career switch into counseling might rectify her drinking problems. Spoiler alert – it didn’t.
The book goes on to detail how Tammy eventually found her way into a second marriage and into recovery, incorporating art, meditation and some mysticism along the way.
Tammy is a big thinker who details in her book how she forged her own recovery path, analyzing 12-step fellowships and literature and adding and subtracting her own touches. What does surrender look like to Tammy?
“A wrestling match?” she says.
“I will not blindly surrender and trust outside influences, so that has been a tricky part of my recovery. I have had a very hard time trusting those who have gone before me. I’ve had to disect everything,” she said.
“That is an ongoing process and definitely not something that comes easy for me. But humility and surrender continue to happen over and over. And with each time, it seems to get a bit easier.”
What you won’t find in her book are the super-embarrassing, detailed “war stories” of those nights when the drinking went way too far.
“I didn’t have crazy, dramatic stories that would leave you with your mouth hanging open. I was your garden-variety drunk,” Tammy said.
“But I also have found that when I read other people’s memoirs and I get to those stories, they can leave me reeling. I’ve often felt an emotional hangover after reading those parts,” she said.
“But the main reason is that the drunken episodes were not the hardest part of my process. It was the emotional train wreck that would occur the next day that was pivotal for me.”
Why write her memoir?
“I kept having a nagging sense that I needed to write the story. It was just a gut feeling and I kept pushing the feeling down,” Tammy said.
“But it got to the point that the topic kept popping up in various settings and more and more it felt like a story that I had to get out of me to be able to feel any peace.”
Tammy continues to do therapy and counseling for people, but this time, sober. You can find her at www.TammyRoth.com.
Thanks for sharing, Tammy.
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