A Personal Story My journey from alcoholism to sobriety, recovery and the bench By the Hon. Sarah L. Krauss It was a busy morning in the Housing Court at the Kings County Courthouse in Brooklyn, N.Y. As I waited to take my seat on the bench as the assignment judge that day, I surveyed the scene. This court hears landlord/tenant disputes and housing violations, only one of many courtrooms that handle a variety of civil cases in the building. More than 300 litigants waited to have their cases assigned for trial; all of them were seeking their day in court. Standing at the doorway of the courtroom, I reflected on how I had come to be here as a civil court judge. My reverie took me back to another time when I stood at the door of another room where a meeting of recovering alcoholics was in progress, and I recalled wondering how I had ended up there as one of them. My background had all the classic signposts for this journey into alcoholism -- an Irish heritage, an alcoholic father, assorted alcoholic aunts and uncles. But when did this happen to me? How had this happened to me? Like many young girls, I started drinking at parties with my boyfriend in suburban Detroit, where I grew up. Unlike most other adolescents, though, I experienced blackouts at 14. Despite this horrible side effect, what was far more important to me was the way alcohol made me feel -- freer, happier, less gawky, more like I belonged. I married young, became a mother at age 17, and continued to drink. While I usually drank until I was drunk and often did things I was later ashamed of, drinking was still fun and thrilling. Orange juice and vodka was an exotic concoction to an inexperienced teen-aged mother who was suddenly in charge of another human life. Drinking also made my marriage more bearable. Curiously, while my marriage was disintegrating, I found that a drive, a desire to achieve and an ambition to succeed had been ignited in me that was caused, in part, by the realization that I would eventually have to take care of myself and my young child. This drive spurred me to go back and finish high school, then enroll in college, and to start working full-time to pay for my tuition. When my marriage finally ended, I started raising my young daughter all alone. After graduating from college magna cum laude, I applied for and was accepted at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. While taking evening classes at law school, I began working full-time in a bail program with the Wayne County Circuit Court. In a short span of five years, I had transformed myself from a naive, dependent wife, into a disciplined, motivated superwoman. I could do anything! But in spite of my new confidence and drive to succeed, I continued to drink; I still needed to drink. Now I drank to relax, to relieve the stress of constant studying and working and the pressure of all those classes. So what if I was hung over occasionally and short-tempered at my job? I deserved a little fun. So what if my school attendance fell off? I could always make it up. So what if stops at a bar became an increasingly frequent, evening-long activity? So what if I stumbled home long after midnight, leaving my sister to care for my daughter by default? So what? I was a single, working mother who planned to join a noble profession -- I was going to be a lawyer. I was on the ladder up, a trailblazer, a woman on fire. After three and a half years, I graduated from law school in 1975, and immediately moved to New York City where I held a variety of jobs in city and state government, and finally with a judge in the New York Supreme Court in Brooklyn. There, I had a new boyfriend, new friends, and what I hoped would be a new relationship with my daughter and my drinking. This time, I told myself, I would take the upper hand and control how much and how often I drank. (I didn't know yet that trying to control your drinking was a sure sign of alcoholism.) But that didn't happen. I recognized that my drinking was out of control, and people were starting to tell me that I might have a problem. Maybe, I thought, but I found a quick solution to deal with them. Anyone who mentioned my drinking was cut out of my life forever -- cleanly, swiftly, sharply. These people were replaced by new "friends" who drank like me. And I spent less time with my daughter, boyfriend and old comrades. Things continued to worsen. I shifted the blame for everything wrong in my life -- for my need to drink in the first place -- on to my boyfriend, the weather, my boss, the grocer, the bank teller, even the mayor of New York City (at the time, Abraham Beame). Now more and more people were telling me I had a problem, so I stopped drinking in public. I stopped going out, preferring to spend more and more evenings alone in the privacy of my home. I was safer there, too; I had recently become afraid of where I might end up in a blackout if I went out drinking. At this point, I found it was me telling myself that I had a problem. That's when I realized I couldn't stop drinking. I was addicted. So I started going to therapists and psychiatrists. The counseling caused me to stop and start drinking many times. The years it took to finally stop drinking completely wreaked havoc in my relationships. My daughter left home at 20 and moved all the way across America to escape. I was asked to leave one job. At the next one, I managed to work fairly steadily, but my behavior was such that people, like my daughter, stayed far away. At my sister's insistence, I agreed to enter a five-day hospital detoxification program. I was afraid if I refused, she, too, might leave. Once in detox, the doctors convinced me that I would benefit by going to a rehabilitation center. So I did, spending a month there. When I returned to my job, my boss was hesitant to keep me on. He didn't want an alcoholic working for him. He finally kept me on, but his reluctance fueled my desire to stop drinking for good in much the same way my divorce motivated me to finish school so many years before. It has now been 14 years since I've had a drink. My life today is unrecognizable from the old one. Today I live by a set of spiritual principles that have seen me through the many difficult days of recovery. My recovery process has not only put my life back on track, but I have healed and grown in ways far beyond anything I could ever have imagined in an alcoholic haze. I have a close, loving relationship with my daughter. I have sober, caring friends. I have a busy life and a career that continues to amaze and astonish me. I am happy and relieved of the stress and worry that plagued me in the years that I drank. In sobriety, I've become active in bar association activities. After being mentored by a woman lawyer who also worked in the courts, I was elected president of a local women's bar association and later secretary and vice president of the Women's Bar Association of the State of New York. As my recovery continued and my confidence increased, I joined other bars, including the New York State Bar Association's Committee on Lawyer Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. Working with the committee gave me the opportunity to help others in our profession who suffer from the disease of alcoholism. This work has been more than just personally rewarding; it has also provided an opportunity to serve in another legal structure. In 1994, I was appointed to the American Bar Association's Commission on Impaired Attorneys, which has allowed me to be involved nationally with lawyers and judges who want to help alcoholic lawyers resolve their problems and continue, or return to, the practice of law. After participating in bar association activities, I began to explore the possibility of becoming a judge in New York City. But much to my dismay, the application forms for appointment to the bench included questions about treatment for alcoholism. Having recognized the need for honesty as a principle of my recovery, I was prepared to, and did, answer truthfully. But when I was interviewed by the committee having the authority to recommend my appointment, no one asked me about this aspect of my background. It seemed that such problems, even when exposed by the applicant, were not discussed and dealt with in the open. I was not appointed that year or the next time I renewed my application, and I didn't know whether my past had anything to do with my not being appointed. Undaunted, I decided to run for an elected position on the Kings County Civil Court. In early 1994 -- the 12th year of my recovery from alcoholism -- I decided to run for the Civil Court bench as an insurgent Democratic candidate. Having very little political support, I ran against the regular Democratic party candidates. My entire campaign, with the exception of the person hired to manage it, was run by the people I had met during my recovery. To say that the experience of my recovery gave me the courage and strength to do this is an understatement. The kind of emotional support I received from my friends in recovery, as well as from the members of the state bar's lawyer alcoholism committee, was beyond any that a political committee or party could have provided. We alcoholics learn, as an essential part of our recovery, to put in the effort and let go of the results. The only times I felt tearful during that long and arduous year of campaigning was when I focused on what would happen if I lost the election. But when I put this fear into perspective, I said, "so what?" I still had my job, my friends, my life. I found that the alcoholism recovery principles worked even under the most stressful circumstances. They gave me the energy and the attitude to finish the race. In November 1994, I won the election. I am now a sitting judge. My first year and a half on the bench has been exciting, challenging and rewarding. The opportunities to be of service to others have been too numerous to recount here. Let's just say that alcoholism is rampant, not only in our profession but in society as a whole. Every day I see how the results of the disease bring so many people into contact with the legal system I am now a part of. As a member of the ABA's Commission on Impaired Attorneys, I encourage any of you who think you can help address the problem of alcoholism and drug addiction among lawyers to get involved in your local or state bar association lawyer's assistance committee. Most bar committees have both recovering alcoholics as well as non-alcoholics as members. In particular, if you are a woman lawyer in recovery, please get involved. We've learned that many women lawyers who need help are too terrified to seek it. They believe that identifying their problem to others will hurt their career. But the more women lawyers in recovery participate in this outreach effort, the more likely we are to succeed in helping women reach full recovery. I can only hope that reading this personal story of my alcohol abuse and subsequent recovery will encourage someone to reach out for help themselves, or to another lawyer in trouble, or to offer assistance to the bar association in their community. The risks I face in writing such a public account will be more than worth it if one life is saved as a result of someone reading my own journey from alcoholism to sobriety, recovery and the bench. Reprinted by permission. "A Personal Story," by Sarah L. Krauss, Faye A. Silas (ed.), Bar Leader, May 1996, Copyright (c) 1996 by the American Bar Association. Tennessee Bar Journal November/December 1998 - Vol. 34, No. 6