At the Downtown Women’s Center’s fifth annual spring luncheon on Tuesday, Laurie Dhue, a media advisor, former Fox News Channel anchor and spokeswoman for Minnesota-based Hazelden Treatment Center, described her struggle with alcohol addiction that led her to sobriety six years ago.

Dhue, who spent eight years with Fox, has made a mission of putting a face on addiction.

Dhue described her drinking years as a dark mix of blackouts, an overdose and moments of sleeping in a fetal position at her office while recovering from hangovers.

“The more professional success I enjoyed, the worse my addiction got,” she said. “I had external things, but I wasn’t living life. I was merely existing. I knew how to package myself, but I couldn’t look in the mirror without shame and disgust.”

For Dhue, the turning point to her “double life” was her sister’s pregnancy, and a desire to become a part of her niece and nephew’s lives. Now sober, Dhue and her boyfriend have become foster parents to a 15-year-old boy named Andrew.

“Addiction touches every single family,” she said. “Its tentacles reach far and wide, but there is so much joy in recovery.”

​More from the Amarillo Globe News