“Thomas, my showrunner, was like, ‘OK, great,'” she continued. “He sent me a nice little article. And then I went to Beaver Creek, skiing with my family. It was a disaster. Detoxing on a mountain is not a great idea. Detoxing with seven children, not fun. I was psychotic. It wasn’t pretty.”
Moreover, Braunwyn explained that she asked another Bravo star for advice as she embarked on this new chapter, saying, “I had this moment of: Call Captain Sandy [Yawn, of Below Deck: Mediterranean]. Because her girlfriend Leah [Shafer]’s a friend of mine. And I called her because I knew she’d been sober for 30 years.”
“She talked to me and she said, ‘Look, you have to own this on television because it’s going to make you accountable,'” Braunwyn recalled of their conversation. “And I’ll never forget these words: ‘You had no problem getting drunk on camera. Why are you having a hard time getting sober?’ And there was a lot of shame around that.”
“I didn’t want to go to support meetings. I was embarrassed,” she admitted. “I thought, in a weird way, I was better than alcoholism, almost. ‘Oh, no, I’m fine. I can do this on my own.’ But she really just put me in my place and said, ‘You don’t want to talk about this because then you have an out. If you own this on television, you don’t have an out.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my god, she’s so right. She’s so right.'”