Controlled by drink, wallowing in self-pity

Published on Friday 1 April 2005 12:01

VERONICA MAWDSLEY reached for another drink and tried to blot out her miserable life.

A bottle of vodka a day usually did the trick; enough to dull the stresses of work, the pressure of being a single mother, her two failed marriages and her plummeting self esteem.

Every sip would help a little bit more. Every glass would be a little more effective than the last.

"When I had a drink it took away what I felt, all my insecurities and my inadequacies," she admits candidly. "Unfortunately, I couldn’t control it."

When she wasn’t drinking she was often hung over, puffing on 40 cigarettes a day and wallowing in self-pity.

And there would be violent outbursts too - brought to a head with a court appearance after she smashed her ex-husband’s van with a crowbar - misery at work which ended in the sack and, accompanying it all in the lonely privacy of her council home with a half empty glass in her hand, would be floods of bitter tears.

Today Veronica is a striking 43-year-old businesswoman with a sharp black trouser suit, pink kitten heels and funky haircut. She lives in a stylish Corstorphine flat with comfy cream leather seats, original artwork on the walls and a packed diary of clients and meetings.

She is relaxed, jovial, down to earth and feisty - all without the aid of alcohol or nicotine, something which just seven years ago she couldn’t have imagined.

Nor could she have ever pictured herself using her lowest experiences to help turn around the lives of others, helping them to achieve their full potential and even - amazingly for someone who once trashed their ex-love’s motor - training others in anger management.

"The truth is, I don’t really like the taste of wine or vodka," she laughs heartily at her own expense. "But then I wasn’t actually drinking it for the taste. All I wanted was the effect."

She started to drink just like everyone else: in her late teens, heading out on the town, looking out for relationships and getting in the mood with a drink.

"But I was never a ‘normal drinker’ - whatever that is," she recalls. "I couldn’t control the drink it was like drink controlled me. Some people go out for two glasses of wine and then stop. I can’t relate to that. I didn’t know when enough was enough. I’d drink and drink and drink."

Her experiences certainly serve as a warning to many of today’s young women, whose drinking habits, binge blow-outs and whose relaxing glass of wine rapidly ends up as a bottle a day habit, have sparked an endless stream of health alerts.

For perhaps most startling about Veronica’s plunge into alcohol dependency, and the devastating impact it had on her life, is how easily it all happened.

"It starts with a drink to relax you," she says, nursing a giant mug of coffee as she sits in the comfortable lounge of her Gylemuir Road home. "At first I was drinking with my friends at the weekends, that kind of thing. I was maybe a once-a-week drinker, social occasions, weekends, but as time went on that changed."

Drink became a mask to hide her own cripplingly low self-esteem - despite her sharp intelligence she left St Augustine’s High School at 15 without a single qualification.

"At times I could be OK but mostly I was high as a kite which was my way of hiding how I was really feeling. Drink made the problems worse instead of better, although I didn’t know it at the time. The reality was I had all this stuff inside me - low self-esteem, lack of confidence, constantly seeking the approval of others - and drink was a symptom."

NONE of which was a major problem as a young, footloose woman. But once married, Veronica’s inner demons and her alcohol abuse would wreck not one, but two marriages.

"When I lifted a drink it set me off, and it all came up."

Her first marriage ended when she was eight and a half months pregnant with her daughter, coming to a violent conclusion a few months later when she angrily trashed her ex’s van with a crowbar.

"I ended up in headlines," she admits. "I was admonished in court, but was all ‘Debt-ridden wife smashes husband’s van’, all over the papers. I look back on it all and tell myself that all of that is among my greatest assets, it’s because of that that I’m where I am today."

At 26, with a baby daughter and no job, Veronica soon took further comfort in the bottle.

"I drank because I felt a failure," she explains. "I was all alone. As a mother I had expectations, and I felt inadequate. I didn’t know how to express myself and sit down and say ‘I feel terrible, I feel low’ but I didn’t really know why.

"That’s why people say ‘I’ll be OK at the weekend when I get out for a drink’."

There was much worse to come in the form of another ill-fated marriage which collapsed after just six months, driving her to seek further solace from the bottle.

"If I thought I felt insecure before then after that I was wanting to hang myself, I felt so bad," she sighs. "I had failed in two marriages, at work as a sales person I was Mrs Mediocre who flew by the seat of her pants with a negative attitude and blamed everyone but myself.

"I went back to work five years after my daughter was born with all that baggage. I ended up losing my job because I wasn’t handling things. Did I have hangovers? Absolutely! I was on my knees and I could hardly communicate.

"I ended up with a breast tumour which was probably down to drink. Ha! I really needed a drink that day! I discovered it because I’d fallen asleep lying on a hairbrush and woke in pain. But I still didn’t do anything about it for months.

"It turned out to be non-malignant but it didn’t stop me drinking for another two years."

Finally she opened up to a friend whose suggestion that she might be an alcoholic came like a slap in the face.

"I thought that what I was doing was normal," she admits. "I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Livingston because no-one would know me there. I walked in and found all these beautiful women, fantastically dressed, and I thought I was in the wrong place. There was me, rattling, heavy smoking. Yet it turned out they were all recovering alcoholics. I had no idea . . .

"They said I’d never be able to drink again. I was like ‘You are kidding me’. I said what about Christmas - this was September - and I was all over the place."

BUT she did. Seven years later she has not touched a drop of alcohol, despite the temptations. She returned to college to pick up a business qualification, relaunched her sales career and rapidly broke sales records for every company she worked for.

"Something happened to me when I went into that room," she recalls. "I saw all these vibrant women. There were people in pain too - I was in agony, emotional, mental pain and, of course, there was the physical withdrawal. I had nightmares.

"But my back was against the wall. I had had enough. I couldn’t bear the life I had - I had nothing, I had lost my job, two broken marriages."

As she turned around her own life, soon she realised she had the potential to use her experiences to help others and set about launching her own ‘self development’ business.

Today she runs The Personal Development Company, working with business leaders, sportsmen and women, and young people with addictions helping them to overcome their low self-esteem issues. She recently completed a 10k race and next year plans to climb Kilimanjaro and train as a yoga teacher.

Today, as more and more women turn to drink, embracing a ladette culture of booze binges despite the health warnings, Veronica’s story at least has a happy ending.

For many more whose lives spiral into alcohol abuse, there may be a less pleasant outcome.

"I’m not perfect," she adds with a shrug. "But I am a lot further down the line."

• Veronica’s firm, Personal Development Company Scotland, can be contacted on 0870 460 8168.

Women are paying the price of too much booze too young

THE fun figure of Bridget Jones with her nightly tipple of chardonnay may make good cinema, but fears are growing over modern woman’s relationship with the bottle.

Earlier this week it emerged that girls as young as 11 are regularly found drunk and incapable on the streets of the Capital.

Police chiefs say young girls now account for the vast majority of "teeny tipplers" picked up by officers in the city. And they also warned that girls were increasingly behind drunken violence and rowdiness.

Last month’s Alcohol Statistics Scotland showed an alarming rise in the number of young women suffering from conditions normally associated with middle-aged heavy drinkers.

According to the latest publication by the NHS of Alcohol Statistics Scotland, there has been a 50 per cent rise in "alcoholic gastritis" in females aged under 34 - rising from 20 cases in 2003 to 31 last year.

Alcohol-induced chronic pancreatitis has risen sharply for women aged 18 to 24 - from 12 cases in 2003 to 19 cases in 2004. Doctors have reported seeing female patients as young as 21 who have developed stomach ulcers as a consequence of binge-drinking.

Ladette culture is also blamed for a jump in the number of women caught drink-driving in the Lothians. Figures released earlier this month show the number of women driving while over the limit has shot up by 60 per cent in three years.

Scientists have also found binge-drinking is more likely to lead to depression and impaired thinking in women than in men.

Even occasional binge drinkers are at risk of being sexually assaulted whiles under the influence of alcohol.