Yay Lucy 
I wish I felt more coherent... some great thoughts/conversation happening on the thread at the moment and I wish I was contributing more.
Matron a big turning point for me was exactly as you describe: the realisation that there was a huge number of people I could identify with who were in the same boat as me. The drifting and gradual shift from thinking that the kind of person who stopped drinking completely was somebody alien to me and my circumstances to accepting that I was precisely the kind of person who needed to do this, could do this, and in fact stood to be vastly happier if I did indeed stop drinking.
I like that Lucy - life without the escape hatch. As you know, I was in court on Tuesday and had yet another horrific day trying to deal with the rantings of my (mentally ill) STBXH. This time from nowhere he seemed to be trying to suggest I have committed a very serious criminal offence. We now have to (yet again) try to deal with this false allegation and hope that the final hearing which is due to take place in a month can take place, and that the divorce can just END already.
Afterwards I went for a drink with my legal team into the bar next door - heaving with solicitors and barristers fresh from court and the wine/champagne glasses clinking away loudly. It's is about the third time that we've been to this place afterwards, each time so fcking stressed from our day. Each time I am full of adrenaline, and exhaustion, so much so that my hands are shaking from it all. But at nearly 20 months in, I just KNOW (as Lucy* says) that alcohol isn't the answer. When my barrister asked why I had stopped drinking I told her that if I had a glass of wine with her, I would want four. "I'm so stressed, that's just the way I am..." I said. Both her and my solicitor had two glasses each and seemed perfectly content with that (leaving some in the glass! 
) before we said our goodbyes.
I on the other hand would have been knocking back the first two really quickly, and then that little manipulative voice would have started up trying to wheedle them into staying longer etc etc. That kind of bar would be a nightmare for me - full of people decompressing from work and no doubt full of some messy people come 9 o'clock. I grimace slightly to think what I would have been like in the past - if the lawyers had insisted on leaving I would probably have phoned around friends and got someone to come and meet me there, talking about the fact it was full of lawyers ho ho ho wink wink 
and would then have had a couple of bottles with friends (and the rest), behaving embarrassingly with people at the bar and saying god knows what thinking I was oh so hilair before fuzzily getting a cab home and being an embarrassing wreck in front of my mum who'd been looking after the DC for me all day. And all of it would have been written off by the "if YOU'D had the day I'VE just had!!!" justification, and yes, everyone would have felt sorry for me and told me it was okay, because I'd been in court and wasn't it awful and poor me, etc etc etc.
Instead, I just came home, saw my kids before they went to bed, and went to bed early myself for a good night's sleep to recover from the day. Proper recovery from stress. I too love the "sobriety delivers everything alcohol promised" saying.