Today’s Untold Story isn’t anonymous. Lou Stokely runs Recovery Juice, an award-winning cold-pressed juice business in Essex, and she’s five years sober. Here she writes about a controlling marriage, the drinking that came with it, waking up in rehab with no memory of getting there, and the one small daily habit that started everything else.
“I’m sat indoors waiting for you.”
That was the text that arrived at 9pm on any night I went out with my friends, even though I was never expected home before midnight. If I went out, I was tracked.
I was in a controlling marriage for seven years. He was never violent towards me. He didn’t have to be. I was a financially secure, confident woman. He couldn’t knock me down, so he wore me down. Bit by bit, text after text: long essays on why I was a terrible person, every mistake I’d ever made dragged up whenever the opportunity arose, relentless questioning, going through my phone and my emails, fake suicide letters to manipulate me. Mood swings and interrogation, round and round. It was never-ending.
My family despised him, so we drifted further and further apart. When my dad died after a long illness, the guilt of that distance was crushing.
He broke my spirit. I felt like he’d taken my soul.
I’m not the woman you’d picture in this story. I have two degrees, and my first career was in nutrition: I qualified as a nutritional advisor and later a natural juice therapist, trained by Jason Vale. Then I moved into a senior role in property. I worked until three days before I had my twins and went back three weeks after, while my littlest was still in NICU.
The shield
I’d spent years studying exactly what a body needs. Then, for seven years, I did the opposite. By the end I was drinking two or three bottles of red wine a day. When that stopped working, I turned to drugs and prescription medicine, anything to self-medicate and blot out the misery. During lockdown my GP put my sertraline up to 200mg, the highest dose they’d prescribe. Nothing helped, because none of it touched what was actually wrong.
I tried to stop drinking several times, and every time he made it harder. I understand why now. I was easier to control when I was drunk and depressed. And whenever I talked about him leaving, the answer was the same: I couldn’t kick him out, because he had no money and nowhere to go.
Free, and then not
Eventually I found the strength to do it anyway. I kicked him out.
The relief was enormous, and it led somewhere I never saw coming. I had a celebratory Prosecco with my friends, and before I knew what was happening, I couldn’t stop. Over the next few months I spiralled out of control, and then I crashed completely. My brain went into meltdown. I had what I now know was a dissociative episode, and I remember nothing of the last three weeks of September 2021.
The first thing I remember is waking up to a male nurse about to stick an enormous needle in my backside. I was terrified and sore, and I had no idea where I was. I was in rehab, somewhere outside Milton Keynes. I’d already been there two nights and had two injections of thiamine, the vitamin B1 they give people coming off alcohol. Later I found out my mum had paid a small fortune for me to be there. She had, quite simply, saved my life.
While I was there, the head psychiatrist diagnosed me with pTSD, with a small p. PTSD with a capital P, he explained, is what people experience after war, enormous trauma or a life-threatening injury. The small p is more like paper cuts. One hurts, a lot, but you can tolerate it. Get cut over and over again, and eventually your body can’t take the pain. My mind had shut down to protect me.
A girl of extremes
When I was 19, a counsellor told me I was a girl of great extremes. I agree with her. For most of my life, my house has either been a tip or had every drawer meticulously organised, depending on the week. I either didn’t exercise at all or I was up at 6am every day for the gym. I worked myself into the ground at school and university for the best grades, constantly pulling all-nighters to perfect essays. When I drank, I drank to excess or not at all. I never found the middle ground.
So once I understood where I was and why I was there, I decided I was going to absolutely smash rehab. For once, my all-or-nothing streak was going to work in my favour.
The first week or so I was a wreck. Hyper, loud, disruptive, unable to sit still or eat, refusing to come out of my room. Then on day ten, something shifted. The world looked a bit clearer, my head was a little quieter, and I was ready to get to work.
I stayed 28 days and loved every second of it: the people, the staff, the group sessions. But rehab is a bubble, and you’re fully protected inside it. We were allowed phones, but I didn’t use mine, and my ex had no way of reaching me. When I left, I cried my eyes out. I wanted to stay where it was safe. But I was desperate to see my four children. My teenagers had lived through the mayhem and watched my slow, then rapid decline. My twins were only three and had no real idea where Mummy had gone.
Recover loudly
Coming home was daunting. Nobody knew where I’d been, and I had a decision to make: pretend nothing had happened, or recover loudly. I chose loudly, so that other women wouldn’t have to suffer quietly.
In rehab I’d read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it gave me some of the best tools I’ve ever found. When you’re at the bottom, the temptation is to overhaul your whole life in one go: new diet, new exercise plan, new social life, new hobbies. Then real life gets in the way. One habit drops off, the others follow it, and you’re back at square one. So I did what the book suggests and started with one change.
One glass
Look at what I’d been putting into my body: alcohol, medication, drugs, takeaways and processed convenience food, hardly any sleep, no exercise. I barely left the house. I never wanted to get out of bed, or I wanted to get back into it the second I got up. The exhaustion was the worst of it. Looking back, it shocks me how actively I tried to destroy my own body. I wanted to escape so badly that it felt like the only way.
So my one change was this: the red wine went, and a morning glass of vegetable juice took its place. It felt like coming home. Juicing was what I’d done for a living before everything fell apart.
It doesn’t sound like much. But try swapping your morning coffee or a stodgy breakfast for what’s basically a plate of raw veg pressed into a glass and drunk in seconds. No caffeine crash. Just something fresh to start the day, and a sense that you’ve finally given yourself something good.
I’ve always called juicing a hack. You’d never chew your way through that much veg before breakfast, but you can drink it in minutes. One good thing ticked off before the school run, and the rest of the never-ending to-do list can wait.
I’ll be honest: one glass of juice doesn’t change your life. What it changed was my mindset. Every morning I set my intention for the day by making one good choice, and it’s amazing how your brain follows. After the juice, I didn’t want to eat rubbish. After a week, I didn’t want to break my streak. Slowly, with no wine and proper food, my energy started to come back. And once I felt better, I wanted to move. I walked. I went to the gym. I got strong.
Juice was my one change because juicing is what I know. Yours might be a walk before breakfast, or ten minutes with a book instead of your phone at bedtime. What matters is that it’s small enough to stick, and that it’s the first good choice of your day.
The part that took three years
My body was recovering faster than my head. Even feeling stronger, I was still riddled with anxiety and stuck in fight or flight. I won’t pretend otherwise: it took three years for my nervous system to calm down.
I booked a course of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), and it was the single best thing I did. My ex had very little access to my life by then, but even the memory of him could reduce me to a shaking mess. CBT taught me to take those feelings, understand them and take my power back from them. It gave me the strength to go to court, put proper arrangements in place for the children and remove every grey area he could use as an excuse to talk to me.
Now my boundaries are rock solid. Communication is about the children only, and it’s kept to a minimum. I’ve met an incredible partner who supports every single thing I do and is my rock. But I had to be in a place where I could accept that love. After seven years of feeling utterly unworthy, I had to stop hating myself first.
Full circle
Then life came full circle. That morning glass of juice grew into a juice cleanse every few months, a few days off from heavy food and my usual routine. I’d swapped three-day benders for three-day juice cleanses, and I couldn’t be happier about it. People started to notice. They asked what I was doing differently and where my glow had come from. So I started juicing for friends, then for people locally.
Three years ago I took the leap and moved it online. I called it Recovery Juice, and I don’t think the name needs explaining. That regular juice cleanse became the foundation of the business. I spent two years teaching myself to build a website, write code, run email marketing and find suppliers, putting every available penny I had back in and growing it a little more each month. What started as one cleanse plan is now 40 different products on the website. Today we deliver across the UK, and this year we won three awards at the 2026 UK Nourish Awards.
I’m now a mum of six: my own four, and stepmum to two incredible teenagers. Life is insanely busy, but it’s organised, it’s healthy and it’s calm on the inside. The girl who never found the middle ground built all of this on small, ordinary, daily habits.
Clean the water
If you’re reading this from somewhere close to where I was, here’s what I’d tell you: clean the water.
If your environment is toxic, you’re going to suffer, whatever you put into your body. Sometimes the thing that has to go is the wine. Sometimes it’s the people around you.
It might be the husband you’ve wanted to leave for years but stayed with because you worry about the effect on the children. Children thrive when their mother is happy. I’m absolutely convinced of it. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and no child thrives with a mother who’s exhausted, who’s lost the will to live, or who lives constantly on edge waiting for the next round of emotional blackmail.
It might be your friends. My old circle was full of drinkers and gossips. I spent hours moaning about men, listening to other women slag off their husbands, talking about friends behind their backs. It’s toxic. Once I stepped away from it, that made a difference too.
Without the husband, the social circle and the constant emotional stress, I haven’t missed alcohol once. I thought going from two or three bottles of wine a day to none would be the hardest thing I’d ever do. Living in misery was harder. The wine was just my shield, and once it was safe enough to put it down, I never felt the need to hide behind it again.
Little changes beat big overhauls. A small change quickly becomes a habit, the habit becomes a lifestyle, and good habits bring other good habits with them. They compound, day after day, until one day you look back and see how far you’ve come.
I’m content. I’m healthy. I’m determined to succeed, and I’m looking forward to a bright and healthy future.
Five years clean and sober. Forever to go.
About Lou
Lou Stokely is a qualified nutritional advisor and natural juice therapist, and the founder of Recovery Juice: cold-pressed juices and shots made in small batches in Essex and delivered frozen across the UK. She lives in Essex with her partner and their six children.