Happy going without a pint

Lotta Dann, a mum of three and wife of TVNZ political editor Corin Dann, revealed her battle with alcoholism last year.

Lotta Dann realised she had to make changes when she drank a bottle of wine and hid it from her husband. She is three years, seven months and one week dry today.

The mum-of-three and wife of TVNZ political editor Corin Dann revealed her battle with alcoholism last year, after three years of anonymously blogging about it. She chose a public television interview to admit she was behind the web diary Mrs D is Going Without.

"I had one person in mind, an imaginary figure, a person like me who was miserable and feeling alone," she remembers.

"I thought 'I'm doing it for that person, if that person can see it's possible to get out, I'll have succeeded'. I was nervous but I stayed focused on that one person and thought 'who cares what happens to me'?"

The response to Dann's interview with TV One's Sunday programme was virtually instant, enormous and unanimously positive.

"The night I went on TV crying, I had 40,000 hits on my blog and more than 400 emails from strangers with their stories, all of them saying 'I'm just like you'. It was overwhelming, so unbelievable."

Dann had her last drink on September 5, 2011. She was functioning but aware her drinking was getting out of control. She realised how harmful it was becoming when she drank a bottle of wine at home alone, then hid it from her husband who had taken her sons to Scout group.

"When I woke up, I was horrified. I was being deceitful and thought 'that's it, I'm not going down this road'. Once I'd got wine in me, I had no control."

Dann now has a part-time job moderating the website LivingSober.org.nz, which started last August. It is funded by the NZ Drug Foundation, National Addiction Workforce Development Centre Matua Raki and the Health Promotion Agency. Dann had approached the addictions sector for website links to include in her book, Mrs D Is Going Without, and found a need for more online information. The website is free to join and has 1,800 members.

"There are lots of people there right now getting sober," Dann said. "People who knew in their own heads they had a problem, the hidden boozers who don't front up to their GP, let alone counsellors, the ones holding down their lives but secretly feeling guilty and miserable."