Actress Valerie Bertinelli is in a good place in her life right now, and she doesn’t want anything to get in the way of that — including alcohol.
“I don’t need anything to amplify my happiness right now,” the “One Day At A Time” icon told People.
“I feel high just on life,” said the actress, author, and devoted mother to Wolfgang, the son she shares with her late husband, the great Eddie Van Halen. “I recently went out to dinner with a friend, and I had ginger ale in a wine glass. And it felt like I was celebrating.”
Bertinelli has just released a new cookbook, “Indulge.” Though she said she hasn’t had a drink in recent months, she admits she hasn’t sworn off alcohol completely.
“If I really, really want to have a drink, I will,” she said.
It was while she was penning her memoir, “Enough Already,” that Bertinelli began thinking about “taking alcohol out of my life.”
“I was still going through a lot of crap, and I knew that I wanted to be on the road of intentionally finding my core happiness,” she told People.
Van Halen died in 2020, and, in 2022, Bertinelli divorced her second husband, Tom Vitale. Food and alcohol, she said, were in her “toolkit for soothing and ignoring s— that I shouldn’t be soothing and ignoring.”
Alcohol, she found, only amplified her grief.
“I would go out and have a fun time, drink, and the next day, I’d be so sad,” she said. “Because there was so much sadness in my life, and alcohol amplified it.”
Numbing emotions, she learned, is not a good thing.
“I think it’s important to really not numb emotional pain,” she said. “Emotions are information. When I decided to really question why I was having a certain emotion, I was able to — most of the time — walk through it and get to the other side.”
She was surprised to learn living with emotional awareness is easier than she thought it would be.
“I’m actually shocked at how hard it’s not,” she said. “Because for a long time, I leaned on it. Right now, I love how I feel more than how the alcohol makes me feel.”
“I found that I do naturally hum at happy,” she explained.
And she does have a lot to be happy about. In a separate article, People reports, “Valerie Bertinelli Is in Love!”
(Video: YouTube)
“I’m in love,” the 63-year-old announced. “It’s a seesaw of emotions because I was adamant I was never falling in love again.”
“I was supposed to die with my six cats and my dog, and very happily live the rest of my years alone,” she said. “I’m good alone.”
While she was not ready to name her new beau, she did say, “My belly is flip-flopping.”
“This was not supposed to happen,” Bertinelli said.
Writing “Indulge,” she said, was therapeutic for her.
“The cookbook was an offshoot of the emotional and mental healing I‘ve been doing,” she said. “First came the work. Why I thought I didn’t deserve to be loved. Why I was using food to numb my feelings. All the drama and trauma I hadn’t dealt with — with Ed and my last marriage.
“I know we’re talking about a cookbook but this cookbook got me through all of it.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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