Star-Telegram/August 12, 2007 Former addict using experience to help others achieve sobriety By MELISSA VARGAS Star-Telegram staff writer She woke up and felt herself lying in a closed casket. The ruffles lining the inside felt smooth on her face. Paige DeHart is glad that it was only a hallucination. But it spooked her into a realization: Drinking binges, cocaine snorting and promiscuity would kill her. DeHart, 45, has been sober for the 16 years since. Now she's passing the keys to her sobriety on to others. The Bedford mother of two daughters and a stepson recently wrote a book based on a journal she has kept since she was 16. She has also led recovery meetings at her home, at churches and at the Tarrant County Jail. She said she hopes her story of relapse and recovery will teach others that alcohol and drug addictions can't be sugar-coated. "Recovery isn't luxurious like you see on TV with Lindsay Lohan," DeHart said. "Addicts are selfish, and the best way to help is to be brutally honest with them so they learn some humility. She needs to be scrubbing toilets." Addiction DeHart started using drugs and alcohol when she was 13 and growing up in Fort Worth. Her weight of 200 pounds had damaged her self-esteem, and drugs made her feel confident, she said. Before long, DeHart became popular in her circle of substance abusers. When she turned 19, she discovered that she could lose weight by forcing herself to vomit after eating. After she whittled down her weight, DeHart began a life of promiscuity, serious drug use and deception. Numerous abortions followed. "Alcoholics and addicts are a lot like small children who stand in the middle of the room with their hands covering their eyes," she wrote in her book Unmasked: One Soul's Journey From Anonymity to Identity. "Since they can't see, they believe that they are invisible." DeHart began going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in 1986. After a few months, she decided she was cured. She began to drink socially again and to dabble in narcotics -- a major recovery no-no. She was a full-blown addict again for five years until her hallucination of being dead in May 1991. Always in recovery DeHart gave birth to her daughter Laurel, who is now 20, and later married a man named Randy whom she met at an AA meeting. They have been married 15 years and have an 11-year-old-daughter together named Hope. DeHart decided to break away from AA and start a church. She received training in pastoral counseling, and she and her husband became ordained ministers with the Diocese of St. Paul the Apostle under the Anglican Province of Christ the Good Shepherd. The couple began One Hope Church in west Fort Worth and later founded a small-group ministry called More Than Conquerors Through Christ Jesus that serves the Tarrant County Jail. With inmates, the DeHarts mostly listen, she said. "They all think they are the only ones who have done horrible things," DeHart said. "When I go, I always start by talking about the time I was so high and my infant daughter was crying. I shook her so hard that I broke her arm. It was a terrible thing, but it always brings out someone from the audience who thought they were the only ones capable of it." Despite nearly two decades of sobriety, DeHart still attends at least three Christian recovery meetings a week. She is most thankful that she has been able to stay sober. Her husband was laid off in January, and the bank foreclosed on their home. The family will move into an apartment this week. DeHart has all the ingredients for a relapse but says she isn't interested. "The whole experience is hard, but it has brought my husband and I closer," she said. "I wouldn't have been able to have all of that if I weren't sober."