Jenna Stapleton is nobody you’d call a drunk.

Sunny, deftly articulate and the head of a philanthropic trust, she was on the state’s political stage, a wave year away from being Colorado’s first lady.

The wife of Republican gubernatorial nominee Walker Stapleton, she had been the life of every party since she got buzzed on wine when she was 15, she told me over oatmeal and fruit at a trendy diner near her home in Greenwood Village.

Know this about Jenna Stapleton. From the outside, she thrives under the social spotlight. Her presence fills up a room. Her laugh is contagious. She was built for a role on the political stage, an important part of the family business.

Her husband’s family goes back generations in Denver politics. They name airports and neighborhoods after them. Walker’s father is a two-time ambassador, to France and the Czech Republic. Walker’s mother is a cousin to the presidential Bush family. Jenna and Walker Stapleton were married in Kennebunkport, Maine, near the Bush family compound.

The Stapletons met in a New York City bar. She did a decade on the wagon to have children and nurse them, but when she hit the bottle again, it still packed a punch, she discovered.

Two years sober now, she doesn’t think her drinking was really about getting drunk. She felt fear and anxiety and drank to get numb.

But at 42 years old, the mother of three young children watched her husband enter the race for the state’s highest office in an election year remarkably angry, largely because of who’s in the White House, not who was on the ticket in Colorado.

Unless you’ve been there, it would be hard to appreciate the toll rough-and-tumble politics takes and how powerless you are to control it. The view from inside must be something for a woman like Jenna Stapleton who is so passionately protective of her family.

She decided to take it face-on, completely sober.

Putting hangovers behind her helped her become more focused and even-keeled, she said. She felt more in the moments with her kids. The intoxication she thought was soothing her anxiety was feeding it instead, she learned. And when a close friend died of cancer, Stapleton went through it emotionally bare. She realized she hadn’t really cried in a decade. Instead, she would pour a drink, numb her feelings and play her part.

“I would bury my feelings,” Stapleton said.

Shame is a contagion in our society that kills people. She doesn’t want to add to anyone else’s pain, even if it means being honest about her own.

There are two constant truths: We all need help sometimes, and we’re all capable of giving it to others, because it usually just means listening.

Stapleton thinks an unseen hand was guiding her toward getting help. Whenever she’d thought about quitting drinking before, she thought, “Well, that’s silly.” She found herself randomly reading books about alcoholism, however.

She connected with a book by Ann Dowsett Johnston, “Drink, the Intimate Relationship between Women and Alcohol.”

“When I got into trouble in my 50s with alcohol, I thought, ‘I can’t possibly be an alcoholic.'” Johnston told NPR in 2014 when she was promoting her book. “It was the last thing I ever wanted to be.”

Stapleton thought about the example she might inadvertently be setting for her two daughters, Coco and Olivia. Women have a different, complicated relationship with alcohol, she said. And if there’s a way to help her daughters avoid what she’s felt, she’s committed to giving them that.

There was serendipity. Jenna Stapleton is the executive director of the Harmes C. Fishback Foundation. While she was finding her way sober, she was asked for a donation from a Denver-based nonprofit called Young People in Recovery. YPR, with more than 100 chapters around the country, was started by Justin Luke Riley, a native Coloradan who went through seven treatment programs by the time he was 19.

Her interest turned into a commitment. Stapleton now serves on its national board, and the foundation she manages is providing a $10,000 matching grant for National Recovery Month, which is September.

“The work that YPR is doing is to make sure that individuals, when they come out of rehab or when they’ve decided to get sober on their own, have support beyond their friends and family, that they have a supportive community, so that they’re more likely to succeed in their recovery,” she said.

From the start she refused to be ashamed. Shame keeps others from getting help sometimes, and she didn’t want to add to anyone else’s pain by hiding hers.

She wrote about her drinking and her hope to give it up on Instagram. She asked her friends for help. At parties, she asked them to keep an eye on her, to maintain the space between her and the bar. Once she took her kids’ babysitter to a Rockies’ game to make sure she didn’t give in to one little drink during the seventh-inning stretch.

She learned “new life skills” to cope instead of putting on the mask that a few drinks used to provide.

“Now I work out, meditate or giggle with my kids, or take care of my animals to relieve stress,” she said.

Most importantly, now she’s honest with her friends and her family about how she’s really feeling. And she lets herself cry. Such honesty is rare in our political universe, where people are more likely to play a part.