Nicole Letourneau says that when things get difficult, instead of wishing she had a drink, she now thinks “ thank god I’m not drinking right now.”
The lawyer who works with the Ministry of the Attorney General in Ontario spoke with People First Radio about her experience recovering from alcohol addiction.
Letourneau says she had been using alcohol to self medicate anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
“ I did well in law school, but I didn’t do well with the environment. You’re constantly being compared to your peers. You are graded on a strict bell curve, in relation to your classmates, and that fosters a really competitive environment that really worsened my anxiety,” she said.
“I started having panic attacks and that’s when I started getting help to deal with my anxiety, and then ended up being diagnosed with ADHD.”
Letourneau says when she started articling, she started drinking alcohol every day. A few years later her dad had a two year battle with cancer. She says complications from surgery left him in the ICU for an extended time.
“ For a period of a couple of years, I really was just working and going home and being with my parents and I used alcohol to deal with… the stress of that.”
She says things came to a head during the pandemic.
“ It really sort of fell off the rails for me when I didn’t have to be in public and I didn’t have to pretend to be sober.”
Eventually her manager at work told her she would be going on a leave of absence.
“ I ended up getting a doctor at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto” she said. “I worked with them and tried some different medications and I did a intensive outpatient program a couple of times. I did several medical detoxes and I found an addictions counselor that has helped me tremendously.”
Years before things came to a head, Letourneau had asked for a leave from work but was turned down:
I had done a secondment at another branch and when I came back at the end of 2018 to my home position, I met with my manager at the time. I had just separated from my ex-husband, and so it was a really hard year for me, professionally and personally. There was a really steep learning curve and I didn’t feel like I had done particularly well during my secondment…what I didn’t tell my manager was that I wanted to take a couple months off to do this intensive outpatient rehabilitation program. I just said that I was really struggling with my mental health. And that was the response that I got, and it was essentially that, you know, they needed me back at the office and I couldn’t get time off just because I was sad. And that was pretty crushing…I don’t tell that story to villainize this person, I don’t think that they’re a bad person, and I don’t think that they were a bad manager. They didn’t know the extent of the issues that I was dealing with, and kind of did the best that they could with the information that they had. And they were apologetic and I have since talked to them…but the result of that was just feeling like I was trapped. I was already feeling like that and I didn’t really have any options. And my only option to keep doing what I was doing, and I tell that story to sort of demonstrate that you really don’t know what someone is going through.
Letourneau says in the legal profession, people are trying to present a facade of perfection.
“To admit to a vulnerability, particularly in an adversarial system,can be perceived as a sign of weakness. But really, I think that it’s a sign of strength to be able to admit to vulnerability and struggle, which really is the cornerstone of human connection, and shared experience.”
“ I think that people really have appreciated seeing other people share their stories because it’s exhausting to pretend like everything is okay when it’s not.”
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