Her grandmother had been an alcoholic, and years of watching the toll it took on her extended family convinced Barbara that "it wasn't a lifestyle I wanted to bring along for my kids." She didn't keep those family secrets from her own children but openly talked about the dangers of addiction, with them and her brothers.

Some of her self-therapy came through talking. After she married young, she set up a beauty shop in the basement of her home and her clients became her way of dealing with the world. A caring nature and lack of self-confidence meant she found herself "trying to take care of everybody but me," and eventually, she believes, the lack of self-care caught up to her. She became sick and had three major surgeries within a 10-month period.

Hospitalized and sure she would die, Barbara had a spiritual experience through a blessing from Latter-day Saint neighbors that changed the way she dealt with life. She was told it wasn't her time to die and that she had work to do — much of it in figuring out her own needs and incorporating God back into her life.

She credits God and her reactivation in the LDS Church for the courage to stay away from prescription medication when life got tough and she felt manipulated and alone. Now with her children grown and gone, Barbara says she never had her own goals and dreams until she became healthy about four years ago. God gives humanity instructions in the scriptures for a reason, she says.

"I think obedience (to God's law) is a key. It's not about being perfect," but about working to put yourself in harmony with God's will. While she can't predict that the future holds, Barbara believes she has broken her family's cycle of addiction.

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LeAnn grew up on a Sioux Indian reservation surrounded by addiction. "My mother was an alcoholic and my father died from alcoholism. I started drinking in the fourth grade," she remembers. "Alcohol didn't miss anyone in my family at all." She and all her siblings drank; one sister was killed in an alcohol-related accident.

The addiction has been in her family for "two or three generations," she says, tying it back to the repeal of Prohibition on the reservation and the wracking poverty that was endemic there. By the time she became an adult, she vowed to beat it, the first time at age 22 when she found herself aimlessly wandering the streets. She started a 12-step program and got sober for a year, then relapsed until 1988, when she repeated the process and stayed sober for seven years.

In June 2002, she made her latest stand against it. "This time I'm more serious about the spirituality the 12-step programs teach," she said, adding that she's come to understand religious buildings and "trappings" aren't what bring her close to God. "It's inside of me — the native spirituality that's personal."