Eventually, Susan Laurie was concealing alcohol in almost every corner of her life.
She kept bottles in her car, inside the house and in the garage, even slipping them into her wellington boots. On some occasions, she was so intoxicated while hiding them that she later had no idea where they were. The resulting panic was intensified by the fact that she no longer wanted alcohol for pleasure — she needed it to prevent herself from becoming sick.
Drinking had become a cycle of vomiting, tremors and terrifying withdrawal symptoms. When she attempted to quit, she experienced vivid hallucinations. If she woke after passing out drunk, she would reach for another drink simply to lose consciousness again.
‘I couldn’t face being awake and facing the carnage,’ she tells Daily Mail.
Her teenage son had moved in with his father. Susan had tried rehabilitation, Alcoholics Anonymous and repeated attempts at sobriety, but each effort eventually ended with her drinking again.
At her lowest point, she became convinced that her alcoholism could have only one ending. Yet Susan Laurie had not always been consumed by drink.
Susan Laurie says her alcoholism developed in a ‘stealth-like’ way
Alcohol initially made Susan feel sociable and self-assured. That confidence accompanied her into pharmaceutical sales during the 1990s and early 2000s, when drinking was deeply embedded in the industry’s culture
‘It took the edge off’
Susan was raised in a working-class Catholic family in northern England and was the middle child of seven. She shared a close bond with her sisters, but alcohol played only a small role at home. Her parents rarely drank, and apart from occasions such as Christmas and New Year, there was usually no alcohol in the house.
Her relationship with drinking changed after she enrolled at Durham University. Having attended a comprehensive school, she suddenly found herself among students who had been privately educated at some of the country’s most exclusive schools.
‘I think the lack of confidence came from feeling sort of less than people,’ she says. ‘I can honestly remember that feeling… taking the edge off, feeling awkward or out of place.’
Alcohol helped Susan become more talkative and confident, and she quickly grew attached to that transformation. The habit continued when she entered pharmaceutical sales, a profession shaped by conferences, client dinners, open bars and after-work networking. Colleagues even joked about ‘death by minibar’. If everyone arrived for the next morning’s meeting, Susan recalls, excessive drinking was rarely questioned.
‘It was so stealth-like’
Susan cannot identify a single point at which social drinking turned into alcohol dependence. There was no dramatic morning when she suddenly realised everything had changed. Instead, by her late 30s, drinking was fuelling arguments, while friends and family were warning her that alcohol was having a damaging effect.
‘It was so stealth-like,’ she says. ‘I know now, looking back, that I went through all of the stages of progression.’
Friends told Susan they could no longer predict which version of her would appear on a night out. At home, conduct that would once have shocked those around her gradually became routine
The progression also took a physical toll. Susan needed increasingly large amounts of wine to recreate the comfort and confidence alcohol had once provided. Before long, she began waking with intense anxiety.
‘I started to believe there were problems in my life that were making me feel anxious,’ she says. ‘I didn’t realise it was my body’s reaction to the alcohol leaving my body. So then I would have a drink to take that anxiety away.’
As her tolerance grew, so did her intake. Susan could consume two or three bottles of wine and still manage to function the next day, allowing her to convince herself that she remained in control.
Her serious attempts to quit brought stretches of sobriety, but each relapse was more severe than the last. Wine was eventually replaced by spirits, and drinking was no longer mainly about feeling confident. Increasingly, it was about avoiding the physical and emotional consequences of being without alcohol.
‘He hated what I’d become’
Those closest to Susan noticed the transformation before she was willing to confront it. Friends said they never knew which version of her would appear when they went out, while at home, behaviour that once would have seemed deeply troubling gradually became an accepted part of daily life.
‘My husband now says if somebody had parachuted into our house, they would have said, “Ross, this isn’t normal,”‘ she says.
Susan became unreliable and fiercely defensive when anyone questioned her drinking. She lied to the people closest to her and became increasingly protective of alcohol, even as she could see that they were hurting.
The greatest damage was to her relationship with her son, who was then a teenager facing important years at school. Eventually, he moved out of Susan’s home and went to live with his father.
‘He didn’t hate me, but he hated what I’d become,’ Susan says. ‘No mother would choose to do that to a child, and I think that’s how I know the power that alcohol had over me.’
‘I tried everything’
Susan was trying to stop. She went repeatedly to her GP and had counselling, attended Alcoholics Anonymous and worked through the steps with sponsors. She spent time in rehab twice, the first voluntarily and the second, she says, practically ‘kicking and screaming’. Over the years, she also paid to see five different hypnotherapists.
‘I didn’t get from problematic drinking to the rock bottom, where I was dying, without trying to get sober,’ she says. ‘I absolutely threw myself into different treatment.’
As her dependence worsened and one treatment after another failed to help her stay sober, Susan became increasingly desperate. On one occasion, she paid $2000 and travelled hundreds of miles to see a practitioner who told her he could pass electricity through her body and capture the ‘bad energy’ in a crystal around her neck.
‘You will try anything,’ she says. ‘When these things don’t work, you drink on the guilt of wasting your family’s money.’
For Susan, every relapse chipped away at the belief that recovery was still possible. She had managed periods without alcohol, including months after rehab, only to find herself drinking again.
When AA and rehab failed, Susan turned to hypnotherapy
One statistic she remembers being given in rehab had lodged itself in her mind: that only three in 10 people with alcohol dependence as severe as hers would survive. As Susan continued to relapse, she became convinced she would not be one of them.
‘I’d sort of just accepted that I was going to die.’
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‘I’m an alcoholic and I don’t want to die’
Susan had reached the point where she no longer expected anything to work when, during another attempt to stop drinking, she found herself searching online for help. She was in a bad way and beginning to withdraw when she came across the website of therapist Tim Phizackerley.
Susan had tried hypnotherapy five times before and her family had heard countless versions of her promise that she had found something new and this time would be different. Still, she filled out the short contact form.
‘I think I just put, “I’m an alcoholic and I don’t want to die,”‘ she says.
Tim replied almost immediately, but told Susan she would need to be sober before he could see her. She detoxed at her sister’s house, knowing her sister would not allow her to drink.
Susan is now 11 years sober and helps other women who are struggling with alcohol
Susan knows now that what she did was dangerous. Given how dependent she had become on alcohol, she says she should have gone through a medical detox.
She knew what withdrawal could bring. There were shakes and vomiting, along with terrifyingly vivid hallucinations which, for Susan, always took the form of spiders.
When Susan eventually arrived for the appointment, she spent most of the day with Tim.
She describes the treatment as a combination of hypnotherapy and regression, along with PSTEC, or Percussive Suggestion Technique, a method Tim developed involving recorded words, clicks and tones and simple finger-tapping exercises.
Much of the earlier part of the session was spent exploring the feelings that had sat beneath her drinking for years, including that old sense of being ‘less than’ other people. It wasn’t until later in the day that they turned specifically to alcohol.
By the time Susan left, she was exhausted. After everything she had tried before, she had no way of knowing whether this time would be any different.
‘I hadn’t thought about alcohol’
Nothing dramatic happened when Susan left Tim’s office. There was no sudden revelation and, after so many previous attempts to stop drinking, she didn’t allow herself to believe this one had worked either.
It was only later – Susan can’t remember whether it was days or a couple of weeks – that she realised she hadn’t thought about alcohol at all.
‘I remember thinking, “oh my God, I have not thought about alcohol,”‘ she says.
For years, alcohol had occupied almost every part of Susan’s day. She had worried about where it was hidden, whether she had enough, when she could drink and what would happen if she couldn’t. Now it simply wasn’t occupying her thoughts.
Susan believes the treatment had removed the compulsion to drink that she had been unable to overcome through willpower alone.
‘It was like a miracle,’ she says. Eleven-and-a-half years later, Susan has not had another drink.
The long way back
Stopping drinking was one thing. Repairing the damage Susan’s drinking had caused took much longer.
Her family had lived through too many relapses to know whether this time would last, so there was no great celebration when Susan stopped drinking. Her son was away at university by then, and she knew another speech about how everything would be different wasn’t going to repair what had happened between them.
Instead, she gave him space. She visited occasionally and otherwise kept her head down, retreating into what she describes as a ‘cocoon’. Rather than trying to convince the people she loved that she had changed, she let them see it for themselves.
Over the months and years that followed, trust slowly returned. Her son is 31 now, and Susan tells him something she couldn’t have known during those darkest years: ‘You weren’t the reason why I had an alcohol problem, but you were absolutely the reason why I’m alive today and sober.’
Susan was also working out who she was without alcohol. For years she had been known as ‘Sue the drinker’, the loud one at the party who would still be there at the end of the night.
‘I didn’t really know who I was,’ she says, although underneath that uncertainty was a quiet confidence that she wasn’t going to drink again.
‘Don’t give up’
In 2019, Susan published From Rock Bottom to Sober Forever, laying bare the drinking, the relapses and the treatments that hadn’t helped her stay sober. She didn’t write it to promote Tim’s approach, she says, or suggest there was one answer for everyone. Susan is quick to point out that AA works for some people, while others find their way through different treatments.
What Susan wanted was to reach those who, as she once had, were beginning to believe there was nothing left to try.
‘I know what it’s like to give up hope,’ she says. ‘My message really is, don’t give up. Keep trying, because there will be something out there that will work for you.’
Since it was published in 2019, Susan says the book has sold more than 5000 copies, largely through word of mouth.
Her work now focuses particularly on people with severe alcohol dependence. Susan knows from her own experience how vulnerable people can become when they are desperate for something to work, and she advocates for greater regulation of private alcohol treatment and greater accountability for treatment outcomes. She also speaks to workplaces and community organisations about alcohol, drawing on parts of her own life she once worked hard to hide.
‘The real me’
Eleven-and-a-half years after her last drink, Susan says sobriety has given her something she once believed she needed alcohol to find: confidence. More important, though, is having the trust of her family again and knowing that the person they see now is what she calls the ‘authentic me’.
For years, some of what kept Susan drinking was the fear of facing what she had done and the belief that the people she loved might never forgive her. Sobriety gave her the chance to discover otherwise.
‘The people who matter will be kind,’ she says. ‘The people who love you, love the real you. So don’t let that fear keep you drinking.’