Patricia Heaton Reveals the Event That Caused Her to Get Sober

Everybody Loves Raymond‘s Patricia Heaton is three years sober as of July, 2021, and she’s now revealing the event that caused her to quit alcohol for good.

While appearing on Elizabeth Vargas’ podcast about addiction, “Heart of the Matter”, the 63-year-old actress shared her story.

Click inside to read what happened to Patricia Heaton…

She said she drank frequently when she starred on Everybody Loves Raymond, but things got worse when her kids grew up and left home.

“My kids were out of the house [and] I just noticed that if it was 5 p.m. and I don’t have anything to do the next day, I would start drinking automatically,” Patricia said on the podcast. “Then I would be waiting for it to be 5. Then I would go to lunch with friends [and] have a drink at lunch, which I never, ever did before… I really started looking forward to drinking and thinking about it in a way that I hadn’t before… If we went out to dinner, I would have two cocktails before the meal and then at least two glasses of wine and then maybe an aperitif. If I was with really good friends that I knew well, I would have three cocktails before dinner.”

She then described visiting her son in Nashville for a birthday dinner and bringing bottles of wine.

“We drank while we were making dinner,” she explained. “We drank while we were eating dinner. We drank while we cleaned up. And then we were drinking while we were all playing this board game. There were like 10 of us there: three of my sons, and then their friends. And I was just filling my glass with red wine throughout the five or six hours that we were together. I don’t know how many glasses it was, and I felt completely sober and fine. I was making a joke to the table, and I started saying, ‘You know, in our family it’s a tradition…’ And I could not pronounce the word ‘tradition.’ I tried three times, and I couldn’t say the word.”

She continued, “My son at the end of the table says, ‘Oh great, Mom. You can’t even talk.’ And I was so humiliated in front of my sons and their friends. God knows that that’s all it takes for me — for that kind of sense of their mom looking drunk in front of them.”

She added, “I thought… ‘What is happening in my brain? What is the alcohol doing to my brain where the synapses are misfiring to the point where I can’t say this word?’” she said. “It’s almost like having a stroke or something. And it shook me up. I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s it’… It had every element that I needed. It had a logical element and had this ‘oh my gosh, my sons have seen me drink too much.’”

She said at breakfast the next day, she told a friend, “Well, you’re the first person I’m telling this to, but this is my first day of never drinking again.”