[Photo: Jennifer S. Altman for the New York Times]
Once consigned to Hollywood entourages to keep celebrities on the straight and narrow (and out of rehab), sobriety coaches, also known as sober companions and recovery therapists, are being hired by well-heeled mothers from the Upper East Side to the beachfront homes of Boca Raton, Fla.
...Jeanne, a remarried mother who shares custody of her 11-year-old daughter with her ex-husband, said that she never slurred her words at cocktail parties or got pulled over for drunken driving. But on a recent family vacation, she heard the words she dreaded most: “Mom, you’re drinking too much.”
“I was my daughter’s age when my dad came out as an alcoholic,” said Jeanne, a marketing executive, who spent her youth going to Alateen, an offshoot of A.A. meetings for teenage family members. “I never thought that would be me,” she said. Rehab was not a viable option. “What working mom can be away for 30 to 60 days?” she added. “And how would I explain it?”
So she hired Natasha Silver Bell, 38, a sobriety coach on the Upper East Side, who is a divorced mother and former addict. Jeanne has been seeing Ms. Silver Bell once a week for the last four months, paying roughly $2o0 for an hour sit-down session, which also grants calling or texting privileges. “I liked that I could do it without disrupting my schedule,” Jeanne said.
Since she started seeing Ms. Silver Bell, Jeanne said she has not had a drink in months, feels more clearheaded and energized, and she does not fall asleep when reading bedtime stories with her daughter.
www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/fashion/mothers-find-a-helping-hand-in-sobriety-coaches.html
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