My Sobriety Story with Alle

A journey through abuse, addiction, and healing

This series showcases personal stories of addiction recovery and sobriety. Today’s edition features

Alle C. Hall

, an author in recovery for 35 years. Alle’s autobiographical novel, As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back, has received 16 honors, including first place in The National League of American Pen Women’s Mary Kennedy Eastham Prize. Her short work has appeared in Dale Peck’s Evergreen Review, New World Writing, Tupelo Quarterly, Litro, Another Chicago, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Find her newsletter at:

An Alle Alert!

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When and how did you get sober?

I got into 12-Step in 1988, in Tokyo, though I came into AA through the back door. I started in Overeaters Anonymous (OA) because food had always been my most obvious compulsive disorder—clear to me as an addiction as a teen in the early 1980s. My first week at college, I decided: this is it! I will no longer binge and purge. And. I. Could. Not. Stop.

I knew I had reached the last house on the street, but there I sat on the doorstep—so desperate, so sad, so unwilling!—until I moved to Japan without a job and limited funds. There was nothing I had to do but scour the English-language dailies for work.

The first week of doing so, I saw a tiny little ad: “Are you worried about food?”

What turned out to be three years in Japan began with English-speaking OA as my primary community. When I was ready to look at my alcohol use, AA was there as the logical next step. I felt no shame in joining. A fair number of OA members were what were called “twice blessed”—a term whose understated sarcasm always rubbed me the wrong way.

“Cross-addicted” feels more accurate. And to bring all my addictive cycles into understanding, I had to accept my underlying trauma.

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What was the turning point in your decision to get sober?

For me, getting fully sober meant understanding cross-addiction: its causes, its consequences, and the recovery options.

For most of my life up until that time, I lived with compulsive and addictive behaviors, depression, and undiagnosable, migrating pain. They could plague me all at the same time, but most often, they rotated. So when I started an antidepressant, I felt less depressed but my food went haywire. When I went traveling, my food got better as soon as I hooked up—which I always did. When whomever brought out the predictable hash or mushrooms, I never used… but I didn’t leave.

Today, I call that cross-addiction: food issues go into abeyance, cue the Al-Anon issues and love addiction.

Speaking of cross-addiction, I started AA because one night, I had two beers. On the train home, I felt binge-y, so I hopped off and made a call. The person on the other end—also in recovery from bulimia—said, “Your voice sounds different.”

A pull-down menu dropped before my eyes:

• My food was improving and suddenly, I was having beer at a party.

• While I didn’t party addictively, the only (let’s just call them) relationships I’d had were with the cute guys in the corner with long hair, a spliff hanging from their lips, and “I will ruin your life” written all over them.

I stopped drinking.

Not long after, I came across a cassette tape called “Permission to be Precious.” On it, Pia Melody outlined codependency with humor and crystal clarity. She shared how to heal through addressing unresolved trauma and addiction. That process came to be called The Meadows Model, as it was developed by Pia and Donna J. Bevan-Lee at The Meadows trauma and addiction treatment center. Six months after hearing the tape, I checked myself into The Meadows for a five-week stay.

To begin the process, we were asked multiple times a day to identify our feelings, using the six the model kept us to: joy, pain, shame, guilt, anger, and loneliness. I committed to the model’s five components of lasting recovery: moderation in behavior and emotion, expressing wants and needs, good boundaries, appropriate self-esteem, and owning your reality. For me, the last meant I needed to understand the five forms of child abuse: emotional, sexual, physical, intellectual, and spiritual.

Then I had to accept that I’d been put through each one.

I was taken through trauma resolution, returning the pain and fear and all those feelings except joy. I was taught to give it back to the individuals in many generations who’d passed it down. In particular, the generation most recent to mine.

There was a lot of bataka action.

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What surprised you about getting sober?

I was an incest survivor.

Some survivors are in touch with the abuse all along. Usually, their abuse starts later in their childhoods. It smashes into them, shakes them all around. They know it is wrong. Those of us groomed from an early age learn not to question the abuse. We survive by using coping techniques. I displaced the reality of my life with a vision of a perfect one—one that never involved my family.

In this vision, I was a beautiful blonde girl who got picked up from elementary school every day in a white Lincoln Continental limousine. The chauffeur handed me a pretty glass bowl of Jolly Rancher hard candies. I ate only the apple flavor. Each day, I wanted only one.

I never wanted only one of any food. Today, I call that compulsive overeating as a coping mechanism.

As I went up in age, so did my weight. Bulimia began at 17. OA came in at 23. Three years into the program, I was willing to face the truth of my childhood.

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What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered on your recovery journey?

Accepting God.

It took a year in the program to understand a God I could relate to, who had in its consciousness a plan for me that did not have me employed peeling potatoes in some horrible, boring town for the rest of my life.

Letting go of that fear, I came to trust that God having beautiful things in store for me did not make me unique among humans. Taking into account that some of our paths are more traumatic, more horrifying than others, I would hope that we are all capable of at least a better life.

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What are the biggest benefits or gifts of sobriety?

I have emotionally and physically healthy children and a loving, generous, encouraging, and supportive husband. Sure, we have our differences, our fights. For goodness’ sake, we’re married. Still, I—and my children—could have ended up in a much different place.

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What words of advice would you give someone who’s considering sobriety or newly sober?

Never give up. All you need is provided for, and you are safe. Be well and go with God.

Alle during her daily tai chi practice

Want to share your sobriety story?

Thank you for sharing, Alle! We look forward to connecting with you in the comments.

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