She sits in her car overlooking the ocean and brings a cigarette to her shaky lips. She looks up at her rear view mirror with her puffy, drowning eyes and she is repulsed by what she sees. It feels as though time has stopped as she awaits his response. The fear of avoidance is killing her. She takes the last hit of her cigarette and blows the smoke at the mirror clouding her destitute reflection that stares back. Without him, she doesn’t know who she is and while he continues on living, she stops. Rose is a twenty-two-year-old alcoholic. Once she had convinced herself that her happiness could only be achieved through a man she was doomed. After her boyfriend of five years left her, the only men she had left to turn to were Jack, Jim and the Captain himself. Daniels, Beam and Morgan that is.

Lying in the guest bed upstairs, she is in agony. Her brain pulsates with an incredible force as though it’s fighting to escape her. Though the embarrassment of winding up in an ambulance from falling head first off of a bar stool the night before makes it hard for her to face her family, she cannot seclude herself in her bedroom downstairs. The fortress that holds all of their passionate encounters is now nothing but a dreary, cold dungeon that makes her sick. Huddled under the covers as a means of shutting out the world in the middle of this sunny day, her dad walks in the room. She stares at him blankly, her make-up from the night before drooping down her face, and he breaks down in tears. She has never seen him cry, and the sight guilts her with yet another broken heart by yet another man. But within a few hours none of it seems to matter. A busted suitcase of her parents’ secret stash and a fifth of Captain Morgan later, and finally her brain gives it a rest.

“If I was feeling vulnerable or lost, alcohol allowed me to be someone that I wasn’t and it helped me forget about things. But really, it just ended up making me more depressed ,” says Rose. Jane, Rose’s younger sister, believes that since she lost the attention from her ex, she needed to find it somewhere else, so the behavior was an attention getter which ended up pushing everyone away.

“I couldn’t even stand to look at her,” says Jane. “I hated her.” Rose had lost everyone in her life through her lies and destructive behavior. Her next move: hooking up with random guys. As long as someone was telling her she was beautiful, she didn’t care who it was. Some people are lucky enough to reach their lowest point and it being what saves them.

According to Executive Director Jack Kline, of Four Circles Recovery Center, women use boyfriends the same way they use drugs—to fill up an empty part of their lives and when they lose that external source, they are at a loss as they have developed rituals around the relationship to fill up the emptiness. With women, they tend to inflict damage on themselves, while men tend to inflict damage on their environment.

As she sits on the couch, she is relieved to see that Helen is clothed and her diaper is clean. Dressed in hand me downs, her long blonde locks tied back, she fixates her pale freckled face toward the tv screen. As she blocks out the strangers that sit around her, she indulges her neglected 90 lb figure with Chex Mix. She reaches her hand into the bag and the gauze wrapped around her wrist catches on the edges. She looks to her right and sees Cloe, or so that is the strangers name today, grab vanilla pudding from the fridge. Looking at her surroundings, she is unsure how she ended up under psychiatric care. And just as the reality of her situation seems as though it cannot be any more surreal, she is greeted by Cloe with a wet, slimy slap in the face—pudding. “My drinking led me to do things I wouldn’t normally do and the cutting was to feel pain instead of emotion. For that one second after I cut, every emotion would go away and I would just hurt,” says Rose.

According to Adolescent Clinical Technician Christine Shulenberger, many girls turn to addictions as a means of coping with a lack of self-esteem which is often triggered by failed relationships. Christine says she helps girls by taking a look at where their lack of confidence began and helps them realize they shouldn’t base their self-worth on whether or not a man likes them.

A trip to the psych ward and thirty days in rehab are what took Rose to realize her beauty on the inside and out. And though her story involves a lot of tragedy, she has found hope. As she packs up her things she is overwhelmed with annoyance. All she asked for was a little extra help moving into her new place, yet he treats her like she’s too fragile and incompetent to even hang a damn picture on the wall. She begins taking apart the bed frame and he interferes. “Women should never do such things,” he says. Sitting on the ground, tired and frustrated, she looks up at him and just laughs inside. For the past seven months, the only thing she has committed to is her sobriety, and she can clearly see that no other commitment that depletes her of the independence she is so proud of today is something she is going to strive for. She ignores his comment and continues taking the bed apart.

“Today, I can honestly believe that I deserve a good life and know that I am the one responsible for my own happiness,” says Rose. And never covered but always recovering, Rose keeps on living.