Theresa Thorson had spent much of her life believing there was a solution.

If a young person wasn't succeeding in one program, find another program. If a family couldn't agree on rules, help them create rules they could live with. If you were stranded somewhere in Beijing without speaking the language, keep asking until you found someone who could help you get back to the hotel.

A problem was something to be understood and then worked.

Theresa was good at that.

What she was less prepared for was the time when the problem she needed to understand was herself.

Alcohol had been part of Theresa's life at different times, but not always in the same way. She had started drinking in college, where late nights and parties were simply part of the social world around her. When she married Jerry, who didn't drink, Theresa found that she didn't particularly need it either.

Later, during the complicated period when she fell in love with Ron while still married to Jerry, drinking returned. She and Ron sometimes went out several nights a week and drank heavily. Theresa doesn't blame Ron for that. He was drinking, she was drinking, and both were trying to escape things in their lives that weren't working.

But something interesting happened after they were together.

The drinking largely stopped.

For years, Theresa remembers, a couple of beers could sit untouched in their refrigerator. They were busy. They were working. They had things they wanted to do.

Alcohol wasn't running her life.

Years later, after Richard died, it was different.

Theresa was back in Redmond. She wasn't deeply involved in the community yet. She came to the Senior Center occasionally, but it had not become the important part of her life it would eventually become.

She was home.

And she began drinking there.

At first it wasn't something she did when she got up in the morning. She remembers starting sometime after lunch and continuing through the afternoon and evening.

There was no longer much social about it.

There were boxes of wine in the house, and Theresa could work her way through an astonishing amount. Sometimes she drank until she passed out.

Looking back, she understands that period differently from the drinking she had done as a college student or the nights out years earlier.

This was emotional drinking.

And it became dangerous.

One evening Theresa went to dinner with a man she knew from the Senior Center. He was blind, and Theresa was driving.

She had a glass of wine.

Then another.

She kept going.

By Theresa's recollection, she had consumed nine glasses before she got behind the wheel of the car with her companion beside her.

Even in the condition she was in, part of her understood that she was in trouble.

She tried to think her way through it.

Take the back roads.

Stay where the police wouldn't see her.

Get home.

It sounded like a solution.

It wasn't.

She nearly had an accident.

Then, as she approached Redmond, the police stopped her.

Theresa doesn't tell that part of the story with resentment. She doesn't complain about being caught. She doesn't portray herself as someone who was simply unlucky enough to encounter a police officer on the wrong night.

She sees it almost exactly the opposite way.

“It was wonderful they picked me up,” she says.

She knows what might have happened if they hadn't.

“I probably would have been dead from killing somebody else.”

It was her second DUI.

There are moments in a life when the solution is no longer finding a different road.

The road itself has to change.

---

Treatment followed. Theresa went to BestCare as part of the court process. Even there, something familiar in her personality surfaced.

She learned.

Theresa has always liked learning. She learned from school, from work, from travel, from the young people she worked with, from mistakes and from people who saw things differently than she did.

Now there was something new to learn about herself.

Alcoholics Anonymous was recommended.

Theresa went to her first meeting with a man she was seeing at the time.

She wasn't prepared to make declarations.

“I'm Theresa,” she told the group, “and I'm just here to listen.”

So she listened.

She came back.

She listened again.

No one forced an answer out of her. No one needed to convince Theresa of something she wasn't ready to say.

They gave her room.

By the third meeting, Theresa had heard enough.

More importantly, she had recognized enough.

“Well,” she said, “I guess that's it. I'm an alcoholic.”

For someone as independent as Theresa, there is something significant about that admission.

She had spent a lifetime believing she could figure things out. Usually she could. Give her a problem and she would organize it, question it, find the right people, make another plan, or simply keep going until something worked.

But determination can solve only the problems a person is willing to name.

This time Theresa named hers.

---

AA became an important part of her life. She came to value the program enough that when she later encountered someone who was struggling with alcohol and reluctant to attend a meeting alone, Theresa knew what to offer.

Not a lecture.

Not a command.

“I'll take you to your first meeting.”

It was much the same approach she had used with young people years before. Help someone take the next step. Don't confuse a mistake with the whole person. Don't tell someone she is bad when what she really needs is a way forward.

Theresa understood that differently now.

She had needed someone to leave room for her to reach her own conclusion.

Eventually, she could offer that same room to somebody else.

---

Theresa no longer drinks alcohol.

She can be around it. She can have parties where other people drink. She sometimes chooses nonalcoholic beer or wine. She doesn't describe herself as spending her days fighting an urge she can barely control.

She simply knows what alcohol does in her life.

And she knows what happens if she takes the first drink.

That knowledge was not acquired cheaply.

It came through years in which alcohol sometimes appeared harmless, other times accompanied difficult relationships, and finally became something Theresa used alone when she was grieving and disconnected.

It came through a night when she climbed into a car believing that even in her condition she could still figure out how to get herself home.

And it came through the flashing lights that prevented her from finding out whether she could.

Theresa's life is filled with stories about solutions.

Sometimes the solution is asking another question.

Sometimes it is trying another program.

Sometimes it is getting off the bus in a foreign city and trusting that if you keep looking, someone will eventually help you find the way back.

But there is another kind of problem, harder for an independent person to solve.

Sometimes you have to stop looking outward.

Sometimes you have to listen long enough to hear something you don't particularly want to hear.

Sometimes the next step begins with saying the words yourself.

Theresa had found the problem.

This time, the solution had to include Theresa.

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