Elle Magazine

Alicia Potter

Every night, while her young son slept, Mary Day drank. She didn’t always get drunk, but she downed enough alcohol – three or more White Russians a night – to make her worry. Worry that she couldn’t relax without it; that she wasn’t able to stop; that she was endangering her son. Three years into this ritual, Day vowed to quit. But she didn’t call her doctor or a rehab clinic or her local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. “Sitting around with a bunch of people who drank and talking about it didn’t appeal to me,” says Day, a thirty-eight-year-old, no-nonsense accountant. So she chose what she believed to be the quickest, easiest path to sobriety: She called Rhonda Lenair, an “energy healer.” …One year later, she hasn’t had a single drink.