Nadia Sawalha broke down on today’s Loose Women as she recalled the heartbreaking time she had to help her husband overcome his alcohol addiction.
Opening up to her co-stars Andrea McLean, Kaye Adams and Linda Robson, she admitted that she was an “enabler” and she had to give her partner, Mark Adderley, an ultimatum before he finally sobered up.
The 52-year-old confessed: “It took me a couple of years to realise that Mark wasn’t just a party guy or a heavy drinker. He was just an alcoholic.
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“There is a real difference between somebody who drinks and somebody who is an alcoholic. I had to be able to say to him, ‘No more’.”
“It’s such a hard thing to be honest and say that we’ve got a major problem here. I was enabling him. I was helping him be an alcoholic by covering for him because nobody knew he was an alcoholic except me.”
They share two children together, Maddy, 14, and Kiki, nine, who are everything to the couple. Nadia said that she made him give it up for the sake of their girls.
“I said: ‘You won’t spend one more night in this house if you don’t get help for alcoholism’.”
When her fellow panellists asked her if she ever thought about leaving Mark, she replied: “No matter what happened between us I knew he had the most incredible heart of gold and the drinking was a symptom of other things like depression.
“But I also knew that I wasn’t going to live with him if he carried on. He might not have survived.”
During that emotional time, Nadia also said she shut her friends out of her life, including her Loose Women co-star Kaye Adams.
Kaye said: “We didn’t talk for three years. I didn’t know what had happened to a certain extent, it was an odd situation.”
It was at that moment that Nadia broke down and started welling up.
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“I still feel really guilty. If anybody’s watching this who is living with an alcoholic, you’ll know it is so all-consuming.
“[Mark] was a high functioning alcoholic so nobody at work knew, but I did neglect my relationships.”
Kaye reassured her pal and said there were no hard feelings, and said: “You did the right thing. You were protecting your family and here you are 13 years on.”