Episode 83 | Sarah Drage — The Doctor, the Car Keys & What Happens When You Finally Get Your Dad Back and then lose him again...
Sarah Drage grew up in West Yorkshire, the eldest of three daughters to a man who was, by her account, genuinely ahead of his time — forward thinking, emotionally open, taking his girls to business meetings in the nineties, teaching them to be independent and articulate and to challenge the world around them. He also drank. Not obviously at first — whiskey, a glass here and there — but enough that Sarah noticed, from a young age, that there were two versions of her dad. The one she adored. And the one she tried to avoid.
By the time she was a teenager she knew what it was. She tried everything. She poured his drinks down the sink and topped bottles up with water — not knowing that removing the alcohol from a physically dependent person could trigger a fatal seizure. She tried confrontation. She tried tough love. She tried overachieving, becoming the first in her family to go to university, as if her own success might give him a reason to stop.
In 2015, after a family holiday where he arrived drunk and volatile, she gave him an ultimatum: rehab or no contact. He agreed. He detoxed. He got sixteen months sober — the best sixteen months the family had had in years. She got her dad back. Then his father died. And within four months so did he.
Thirty hours after being admitted to A&E, at 59 years old — one week before his sixtieth birthday — Steve Drage was taken off life support. He didn't recognise Sarah in the wheelchair. He asked if she had his car keys because he wanted to check the girls were okay.
Sarah is now a NACOA ambassador, a social media manager and one of the most honest voices on what it means to grow up in the shadow of a parent's addiction. This episode ranges from the mechanics of alcohol dependency to social media addiction, emotional resilience, the manosphere, and why she now believes stigma was never really the problem.
You can find Sarah on Insta at:
https://www.instagram.com/sarah_drage
You can find Nacoa at:
https://nacoa.org.uk/
The Lancet report by Professor David Nutt (2010)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract
Inside the Manosphere - Louis Theroux
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