For all this yummy mummy knows, the only therapy sessions I’ve seen have been on The Sopranos

I was having coffee with a friend outside at my local cafe when she told me she’s got a therapist on tap for her teenage daughter. It was all rather alarming; they had just received a bill and it’s £100 a phone session. The daughter was averaging two or three times a week during the stricter lockdown. My yummy mummy friend asked her: “Are you in crisis?” And she said: “No, I’m just bored.”

The daughter also racked up bills for a sports masseuse at school, and when the mum pointed out that she didn’t do any exercise her daughter said: “Whatever.”

Apparently she’s hacked their Uber, Amazon and Deliveroo accounts: the mum’s phone keeps going “ping, ping” to show the rider is on the way – but to her daughter’s exclusive co-ed private school. “Yes she wanders around the golf course smoking cigarettes with her friends,” the mum told me. She’s just bought her son’s uniform for Eton – it was £2,000.

My friend kept saying “you have all this to look forward to” – but I can’t see how. Lola has just got into a local church school. OK, it’s where David Cameron sent his children and it’s off High Street Ken – but when I checked out the uniform, it’s going to cost me £40 if I push the boat out with all the logos.

“Do you do therapy?” the mum then asked me.

Why... do I look like I need it?, I thought to myself, feeling a twinge of paranoia as I sipped my cappuccino. Do I look like the mad woman in the attic or something? Is it the fact I’m a single mum – and my two children’s dad died before my children were born using his frozen sperm? Do they think I”m in bits every night – sobbing into my pillow – as they order sushi with their husbands and brood of brats?

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t have a therapist. Do you?” For all she knows, I’ve only seen therapy sessions on The Sopranos – rather than endure the daily grind of group therapy and one-to-one sessions I did in rehab and aftercare.

I’ve had more therapy than most people have had hot dinners. What did I learn? That I am OK – warts and all. That nobody else can fix me. It was an inside job. And my family is dysfunctional. That’s it in a nutshell after years and years of therapy. I hadn’t wanted to go at first but it’s unavoidable when you arrive at a rehab.

My mum had been a therapist later in life – perhaps I drove her to it – and whenever we saw one of her clients pass in the street, my mum would hide me in a bush because she didn’t want them to know anything about her life. “I must be a blank book,” she would tell me. My dad had to come home from the office through the garage door and stayed in the kitchen until her final client had left.

I will never forget that day in rehab when I realised that therapy was not the cure: “What do you mean this is an ongoing process? I spat. “How ongoing are you talking – weeks, months? A year?”

“It’s a daily reprieve,” the rehab counsellor told me.

“But you are not answering my question!” I said, nearly sobbing. “Will I have to go to 12-step meetings forever?”

We all do it. You walk in the door and think a few weeks or a month is going to do the trick; or once you unearth a painful childhood memory you will no longer be an alcoholic – but no! There is no cure. I nearly fainted. Plus I can’t drink? Even on my birthday? I had no idea then that as I worked the 12-step programme, and as time went on, the desire to drink would literally be removed. How else would I manage it for 21 years? I’m not holding on by my teeth – teetering on the edge of a relapse every Saturday night.

But then I wanted to run away from myself – from this reality. “Do you know what ‘fear’ stands for?” asked the counsellor? “F*** Everything And Run.” Yes please, I thought. But I chose instead to “Face Everything And Recover”.