![\"TammyRoth\"](\"http:\/\/www.nashville.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/TammyRoth-207x300.jpg\")
<\/a>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.<\/p>\nThen 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.<\/p>\n
Enter alcohol, in a much bigger way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to be carefree and fun, maybe even a bit wild. I didn\u2019t know how to do it on my own,\u201d Tammy wrote in the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlcohol 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The more success she had \u2013 and it was substantial \u2014 the more Tammy drank, and she decided a career switch into counseling might rectify her drinking problems. Spoiler alert \u2013 it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
\u201cA wrestling match?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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\u2019ve had to disect everything,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
What you won\u2019t find in her book are the super-embarrassing, detailed \u201cwar stories\u201d of those nights when the drinking went way too far.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t have crazy, dramatic stories that would leave you with your mouth hanging open. I was your garden-variety drunk,\u201d Tammy said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I also have found that when I read other people\u2019s memoirs and I get to those stories, they can leave me reeling. I\u2019ve often felt an emotional hangover after reading those parts,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why write her memoir?<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d Tammy said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tammy continues to do therapy and counseling for people, but this time, sober. You can find her at\u00a0www.TammyRoth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\nThanks for sharing, Tammy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s degrees from Vanderbilt University and started counseling people with addictions \u2013 all the while drinking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"TammyRothBook\"](\"http:\/\/www.nashville.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/TammyRothBook.jpg\")
<\/a>Now, Tammy, with five years sober, has put out a memoir,High Bottom: Letting Go of Vodka and Chardonnay<\/i>, available\u00a0now at Amazon.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n