While Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step offspring still dominate the addiction field,
there is a growing clamor for more alternatives. We may well be seeing an
addictive-treatment Reformation, and if you’ll join me inside that metaphor
for a moment, ask yourself how long it’s been since you could say, “I’d
like to worship Christ, please. What’s the routine?” Sit yourself down,
Jack. It ain’t that simple anymore.
It was simple for me, to my everlasting relief. I quit drinking almost 15
years ago. No 12 steps; I took one, right off a cliff, and found I could fly.
It was the final chapter in a drinking history that began in Grade 8
when my friend Bodo and I sat in my parents’ basement during Christmas
break, chugging from a $1.05 bottle of Calona Double Jack. (It went equally
well with meat or fish.) One moment I was sitting on the floor guzzling,
the next I had somehow ended up flat on my back, knocking over a set of
chess pieces, laughing like a hyena. A pivotal moment, like a future pope
trying on his first toque, or Curly getting his first finger-in-the-eye
from Moe.
What followed over the next 11 years was, at times, a lot of fun — for me, if
not for my parents. (We’re only young and thoughtless once.) I traced that
familiar curve from party animal admired for his tremendous capacity, to
party animal inspiring a growing level of concern among friends, to guy
drinking himself out of a job or two, to guy living alone in a strange city
and hauling home 42 beers in a backpack, enough for two solitary trips to
Blottotown.
That lonely drinking phase is not what you could call fun, but it is oddly
comforting, in a way that probably only a lush can recognize. Other people
may be confused about their lives and their goals, but not you. You, the
addict, have a clear plan, and the very straightforward means to put it
into action.
Every drunk has stories. Actor John Larroquette tells of emerging from a
blackout to find he was on an airplane, and trying to figure out through
casual small talk just where it was he was going. I’m not really the best
source for some of my own ugly tales; you’d have to ask a participant whose
personal think tank was not flooded at the time.
One little story, while not the worst by any means, stands out for its neat
combination of so many of dipsomania’s drawbacks: danger to self and
others, pain and anxiety for loved ones, loss of dignity, amazing lack of judgment and elementary common sense. It involved a bicycle ride home from an all-night party. I remember only little snapshots from it, but they are enough to confirm that I made the entire cross-town trip while looking straight down at the ground. Stop signs ambled by the corner of my eye as I trundled on blindly, spared from death or injury by dumb luck and the fact that I lived in a city small enough for the streets to be deserted very early on a Sunday morning.
A witness supplied the end of the story; I wasn’t really there. The sun was
already up and kids were playing on the street when my mother saw me pedal into the driveway and stop. Not stop and dismount, but simply stop
pedaling, pausing upright for a wondrous moment before toppling over, bike
and all, like a tipped cow. With a crowd of kids pointing and laughing, Mom
had to walk out to the driveway and drag me into the house. She noted that,
in fitting punctuation to a perfect experience of pain for her and
humiliation for me, I had pissed myself.
I still had many miles to ride before I would decide to look up and start
watching the road. But when I did quit, at the age of 24, it was on my own.
It’s been a lovely decade and a half, minus a few dentist appointments and
a Vanilla Ice weekend on MTV. There’s just one problem. AA’s philosophy
suggests that I am living a lie.
I went to my first and, until recently, last AA meeting a week after taking
my final inebriated swallow. It was a thoroughly depressing experience.
Speaker after speaker pounded home the idea that I, the hopeless drunkard,
was weak. I needed to take step one: Admit I was powerless over alcohol.
Then steps two and three: Believe that a Higher Power could help me, and
decide to turn my will and my life over to God, as I understood Him. I
don’t, of course. Never have.
My own experience notwithstanding, Alcoholics Anonymous is still the best-established, most often copied and arguably most successful alcohol-addiction treatment program ever created. Founded in the 1930s by William
Wilson, a.k.a. Bill W., AA is a nonprofit, nonprofessional group that
seeks to unite problem drinkers in support groups based on mutual
acceptance of the 12 steps that, AA believes, can lead to recovery from
addiction. In addition to inspiring the creation of many other unrelated 12-step organizations such as Gamblers, Smokers, Overeaters, Sexaholics and
Twizzlers Anonymous (I’m starting that last one myself), AA has become an
integral part of government- and industry-sponsored recovery programs.
For some, the biggest stumbling block to AA membership is the spiritual
aspect, the insistence that recovery depends upon surrender to a Higher
Power. AA members recognize this, and usually soft-pedal the spiritual
side. But as anyone who reads the Alcoholics Anonymous text (referred to as
the “Big Book”) can see, there’s no getting around it. In fact, in a 1996
case, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that a prison inmate was not
required to participate in mandatory 12-step meetings, as this violated his
right to religious freedom.
On a clear, cold January night, I visited an AA meeting for the first time
in 15 years. Attendance at the central Vancouver Lutheran church basement
was about 30. Some speakers were shaky, afraid — others witty, well-spoken, calm. Strikingly pretty, Germaine stood at the podium and shook her head. “Fuck! Some of the things I go through,” she laughed. One of those things is a separation. “I know one person in the relationship. He knows two.”
One woman said that she was grateful that week simply for the feeling of
being sick; that is, sick in an ordinary way, instead of the sickness she
used to feel after drinking, with all the attendant guilt and self-hatred.
It struck a chord. There’s no telling what you’ll end up feeling grateful
for after you sober up.
My luckiest break may have been losing control of my bladder. After
drinking myself senseless, I would often wake up soaked in my own urine. It wasn’t pleasant. My penchant was to view myself as a complex,
self-destructive philosopher/romantic. The romantic part was hard to
maintain when I was busy wetting myself like an untrained mongrel.
My method of dealing with it may provide a perverse glimpse into the
problem-solving techniques of an addict. Consider my options: A) Quit
drinking, or B) Prepare for each solitary drinking bout by stripping to my
undies and then covering the entire apartment floor with newspapers, since
there was no telling where I might eventually fall senseless and stain the
hardwood. I could have sold tickets and made it into a lottery, like
cow-patty bingo. Ah, missed opportunities. (And no, I had never heard of
Depends. Kids have it easier these days.) I’m not sure that I ever would
have gotten sober had it not been for that repeated humiliation. Certainly,
it hastened the day. So, in retrospect, a lucky break.
But was my do-it-yourself experience so unusual? Jack Trimpey thinks not.
In 1982, Trimpey and his wife, Lois, founded an organization called Rational
Recovery. Trimpey had been a heavy drinker who wanted to quit but found AA totally unsatisfying. Reading AA’s “Big Book,” Trimpey says he was “insulted by its sophomoric fundamentalism.” They rejected the so-called disease model of addiction, which says that dependency is an illness, and addicts are sick and powerless. This, they believe, sets the stage for failure, as does the “one day at a time” approach, which allows the addict to hang onto the possibility of a future drink or fix. Rational Recovery suggests that the addict must learn to recognize the “addictive voice,” which originates from the primitive part of the brain called the limbic system. Recognize that voice and you can first isolate, and then defeat it.
While AA is based on a profoundly pessimistic view of human nature — or at least human drinking nature — Rational Recovery takes an optimistic position. So optimistic, in fact, that RR is not a support group. You come to a few meetings, read the literature, learn the method and you’re on your own. So long, have a great sober life.
Much of the RR model fits my own quitting experience perfectly. Trimpey’s
ideas, laid out in the book “Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance
Addiction,” also include vehement opposition to any kind of forced
treatment. Aside from pointing out that it doesn’t work, he also believes
that addicts have the absolute right to drink themselves spongy if they
choose.
Constructive though the program is, Rational Recovery literature has a
disturbing tendency to spit venom at Alcoholics Anonymous. A parody of the
12 steps is sometimes handed out at RR meetings: We “admitted that we
were complete failures and decided to blame it all on alcohol … Made a
list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to annoy them with our guilt and remorse … Visited each of those people and proved to them that
we had now become spiritually superior to them.”
Like Trimpey says, Rational Recovery is not a support group.
As in almost any sectarian clash, the hostilities are really about control.
Opponents of the AA model resent the perceived 12-step stranglehold on
mandatory treatment programs — what Trimpey calls the “addiction treatment gulag.”
I met George at the Rational Recovery meeting. An inmate in a rehab clinic,
George was there on the sly. He claims his innkeepers wouldn’t approve,
since in their eyes, “AA is the way. Any upstarts are viewed as negative.
I’m reading Rational Recovery to get better, but I have to go through the
motions at AA just to keep them happy. I don’t show anybody my Rational
Recovery literature.”
Stanton Peele, author of “The Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out
of Control” (Lexington Books), agrees that AA has helped many problem
drinkers beat the habit. But Peele believes that AA’s refusal to accept the
validity of other treatment methods means “their role in alcoholism
treatment is repressive and totalitarian.” Peele also decries American
courts that force people into 12-stepping.
Trimpey sometimes portrays AA as a cult full of brainwashed 12-step
zombies. But on my return visit I found many people who simply want what I had wanted 15 years ago — to join a sober community of former drinkers.
Germaine came to AA out of a detox program, a young woman who had
completely alienated her family, despite the usual attempts to keep things
under wraps. “I used to drink vodka and mouthwash. It took away the smell. Problem solving!” she says brightly. “That’s a transferable skill!”
She landed in the hospital with a dangerously enlarged liver after coming to
one night, slouched over the wheel of her idling car. A passerby informed
her where she was. “Vancouver?” she asked incredulously. She had started the day in the town of Quesnel, B.C., hundreds of miles away. Now she’s in AA. But Germaine does not much care about the 12 steps. “The Big Book,” she believes, is outdated and written from a resolutely male point of view. For her, AA is people: “I need that support.”
I had to find it on my own. At midnight on Apr. 3, 1983, I was parked in
my favorite armchair in a basement suite, drinking tequila. Although an
incorrigible heathen, as a minister’s son I can’t help but appreciate the
fact that in 1983, Apr. 3 happened to be Easter Sunday: resurrection day.
My mind wandered around to a familiar theme: the possibility of quitting. I
had never made a serious attempt, afraid that in failure I might come to
resemble those buffoons who sit in the bar every afternoon, loudly
proclaiming that they are currently consuming their final beer.
Sobriety looked to me like a green pasture on the far side of an
electrified prison fence. Still, I had long imagined that, one day, a
magical state of readiness would arrive, and I would free myself. That
morning, I held that belief up to scrutiny and saw it for the piece of
horseshit it was. The day of readiness was in fact like the horizon, which
recedes as you approach. I had become one of those donkeys with a stick
protruding from its halter, from which a carrot dangles — the donkey goes
forward, but that clever carrot always escapes.
So I asked myself: Are you ready to quit? The answer: No. And will you ever
be ready? Again: No. But that realization had a flip side. It told me I
would never be more ready than I was on that day. I decided to quit drinking.
Drunks have a reflex, developed after countless embarrassments, that causes
a wave of revulsion to strike immediately at the point of regaining
consciousness. “Oh my God,” says the sodden brain, “what did I do last
night?” It’s as regular as the chimes of Big Ben, even on those occasions
when it turns out you actually stayed home and watched Godzilla flicks
until you keeled over.
That Easter day, I woke up and reflexively repudiated the nonsense of the
night before. But, standing in the shower, I wondered: Suppose I really
meant it? The idea began to take hold. A sense of joy grew along with it. I
experienced a few shaky days, but the momentum was irresistible. It was
over. I was free.
My story is similar to those told by Rational Recovery. But having been to
a few meetings in that Lutheran church basement, I believe Trimpey’s
anti-AA venom is misplaced. I didn’t see people possessed by a smug sense
of moral superiority, or people wallowing in their troubled past. I saw
people standing up and helping others stand with them; people who’ve had a
lot of the piss and arrogance knocked out of them. That hard-won modesty,
some say, is what the “Higher Power” aspect of AA is all about — acquiring
not religion, but humility.
Hey — whatever works.
Dear Cary,
I am a grown-up, well-educated, privileged American. I had several hellish years. Like, hellish pain. Dead children, miscarriage pain. The pain of all the losses was overwhelming. My soon-to-be-ex-husband and I both drank to dull the pain. I managed to escape and rebuild a life, thanks to my money and education. Now I can’t quit drinking.
My soon-to-be-ex-husband and I struggled to have children — he was the infertile one. His masculine pride really made the whole ordeal much, much more agonizing than it needed to be.
We were together from teenagers, and went to college together, same degrees, same professors. Learned all the same languages. Read all the same books. Watched all the same movies.
We achieved real academic success that led to financial success. We lived in a lovely, lovely Midwestern town, and enjoyed a very, very high status of living.
But the children we had dreamed of — it is such a long and painful story. He had cancer as a youth. His father threw his sperm away. True story. I do not want to revisit it in any more detail. I have re-told it once in the last year and I cannot again. Anyway, the children we dreamed of for so many years will never exist.
We did get one child from our 22-year union — after much agony and expense.
I am now 41. Still desperate for more children. My pain at our infertility was so extreme that it led to the end of my marriage — my ex hated me for wanting things he could not give me.
I was desperate to hang onto my great love for this man whom I had loved since a teenager and my dreams of my children.
I am a walking Buddhist parable: in trying to hold two things, I lost them both. My husband is gone. I will likely never have more children. The pain of this kept me sobbing on the floor for nearly a year, wondering how I could prevent my own suicide. All my most cherished dreams — dreams of over two-decades — snatched from me.
So, I fled. I fled to a European capital with my 6-year-old son. He is in school here and now perfectly bilingual. I should mention that my child is extraordinarily bright — he started talking at 3 months — no lie — and reading English at 2 years. His math skills are breathtaking. I do credit this to my parenting — I have been a stay-at-home mom. He now reads in two languages. He can draw up the schematic for an arduino of his own design and explain it in two languages. Yep, just turned 6.
My divorce will soon be final.
Just two months ago, living in my posh furnished apartment in a glittering European capital, I was in so much agony, I wondered how I would get my son back to the USA safely if I killed myself.
And then. Love shined its face. I met someone. It was like being renewed, reborn. Like every cliché in the world. Ecstasy. Walking on sunshine.
So, my problem? I can’t quit drinking.
My new lover does not drink. He is not contemptuous but deeply worried. And he has no experience — he is not American or European — his culture has no narrative or experience with addiction.
We discuss making a life together — on another continent, actually, and it is exciting and I have two doctorates and I know exactly how I could make the whole thing work. And it would be a vindication, actually, this adventurous new life, which all my past education seems to point me toward. We are actively trying to make a baby.
But, I can’t quit drinking. Where I am living, it is normal to drink with lunch and dinner and all the time.
And I cannot “just go to a meeting.” The school my son is in is only for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, four days a week. This is the normal schedule for his age group. My language skills here are not good enough for me to go to anything but an English-language meeting, which are only at night — I have no caregiver for him here.
Also, I am still at the phase where “I like drinking.” I know this is a lie — that drinking does not make me more fun or creative — but I am still at that place where it feels true. Let me be clear, also, I am no casual drinker. Three bottles of wine over the course of the day seems normal. I am never falling-down drunk, but I am never sober, either.
In the early stages of my new love affair, after my lover asked me, I abstained and was happy, etc.
But you know how it is — one glass of wine at dinner leads to a glass of wine at lunch the next day and then the whole thing is a wreck again.
How do I find the will to quit, when, as I said, where I am living it is so normal?
OK, so what I am asking is help in quitting drinking. My life was an utter disaster and I had lost all. The loss of the children — I cannot even describe the pain. I numbed the pain drinking.
I escaped, I have remade a life. New vistas are open.
But the drinking remains.
How do I quit drinking and take advantage of all the shimmering opportunities for happiness in front of me? In a foreign capital when I have 24/7 responsibility for a child and baby sitters are not an option?
Desperate
Dear Desperate,
I recently had occasion to re-read the “Doctor’s Opinion” in the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
What struck me afresh in these words published over 70 years ago — and I am always struck freshly by something — was Dr. William D. Silkworth’s clear, measured but inescapable conclusions about alcoholism, reached after years of clinical observation and treatment of alcoholics in a hospital setting.
On page xxviii, he spends two paragraphs roughly classifying several types of alcoholics he has observed.
“Then,” he says, “there are types entirely normal in every respect except in the effect alcohol has upon them. They are often able, intelligent, friendly people. All these, and many others,” he says, “have one symptom in common: they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving. This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.”
And there you have it. What he observed in the 1930s continues to be observed today: Some people just can’t drink. It goes across all social classes and body types and personalities. Some people are just this way. As you have noted, you can stop for a time, but then you have one little drink and one thing leads to another and there you go. It seems as if this would be a noncontroversial matter, but still people go on television and write books and write to me suggesting that abstinence is nonsense and unnecessary and that anyone can learn to drink in moderation. As Dr. Silkworth noted, the suggestion of complete abstinence “immediately precipitates us into a seething caldron of debate. Much has been written pro and con, but among physicians, the general opinion seems to be that most chronic alcoholics are doomed.”
Boom. Does that not strike you with some force? It does me.
The remaining pages of the book Alcoholics Anonymous go on to explain how one can stop, and how one then goes about living while abstaining from alcohol. It turns out to be a fairly simple process, requiring only a willingness to try what is suggested.
I understand your difficulty in getting out to a meeting. So why don’t you do this: Why don’t you get a copy of the book and just read it. You don’t have to go anywhere. You need not make your case to anyone in person. Just read the book.
I predict it will strike you with sufficient force that you will find the next steps easy to take. And if not, no harm done. You will at least have examined the primary source material and will have had a chance to make up your own mind.
Dear Cary,
I am writing to you because from prior letters I know you know about alcoholism. My ex-husband is calling me, for the third time, asking me to take him back. I have left him twice before. The second time was 10 years ago. Our issue was always his alcoholism. He would try to stop, but eventually fail and then his drinking would become progressively worse. He was a mean drunk. Not physically, but still scary mean.
When he first called, he was in a sober living house, following a jail stint after three DUIs in three months. We talked for hours on the telephone every night for months. He talked about the past in a truthful manner for the first time. He took responsibility for his actions. His remorse was genuine. We spent two great weekends together and then he relapsed, calling me from jail after being drunk in public and resisting arrest. You see, the people in his sober living house are mostly not sober. They go out and drink during the day and as long as they make curfew there are no penalties. The place is in a very bad area and drugs and drunks abound on the streets. My son (our son, actually) went to visit him there. He said it’s a wasteland of abandoned buildings and gang/drug activity.
So now he is in jail. Of course I will not be bailing him out. But eventually he will get out. He receives Social Security disability for a back injury and will likely return to the same sober living house or one similar. My question is, How can I help him? I live alone in a beautiful suburban area. Would taking him in be a big mistake? Can he ever get better in the place he is in? Can he ever get better anywhere? He is 53 now and he has been like this his whole life. He, of course, claims he will not drink ever again if only I would take him back. I, of course, have heard that song before. Yet, I believe it would be hard for anyone to spend their days living in such a terrible environment. I’m afraid that I will be the one consumed with guilt if I let him return there and something worse happens.
I do love him with all my heart. I believe he loves me too and wants a better life. But wanting a better life and actually achieving it are two different things. I guess I want to know what to do and what not to do, what helps and what hinders someone from stopping drinking. Any advice you can give me would be much appreciated. I feel …
Lost and Sad
Dear Lost and Sad,
Moving in with you will not help him. Continued help from experts and people with direct experience in alcoholism may help him. There are no guarantees but certain things are clear: Resuming old romantic relationships has not been shown to cure alcoholism.
There are many wise people to consult on this, and many groups, most notably Al-Anon, where you can get advice and inspiration. You will hear many things when you begin your search for answers; you will hear about codependence and so forth. Some of what you hear may sound unscientific, and you may meet people who strike you as zealots and cranks drunk with their own doctrine. You may also meet people of lifesaving grace, honesty and caring. Alcoholics and their families and friends constitute a universe all its own. My advice to you is to begin your own journey, which is to understand your place in the alcoholic’s life. Alcoholics have certain generally shared traits. Those who become involved with them do too, generally speaking. Understanding yourself in relation to him is your task. It may turn out that you can help him in some limited way. But first must come your own journey of understanding.
I have answered this question many times in different ways. Each time I try to take a different approach to essentially the same answer.
This time I suggest an exercise of the imagination that may allow you to understand the situation emotionally.
Imagine that your husband is in another country, across a vast ocean you cannot cross, on the other side of an impenetrable wall. Imagine that you cannot reach him and only receive reports every few months, possibly unreliable reports, delivered by people who claim to have seen him. The reports contradict each other. One month you will hear that he has met a wealthy backer who is helping him mount an expeditionary force of men who will help him scale the wall and come back to you. Another month a disreputable-looking man walks up your walk and tells you the most terrible tales of degradation, how your husband was found in an alleyway, thrown out by hookers, left to bleed in the gutter. The man then asks for money and promises to take it to your husband, to help him.
You don’t know whom to believe. You hear that he was kidnapped, that he has a job in a port city, that he is waiting for a ship to bring him home, that he has died, that he is ill and needs you to send money.
You cannot call him and your letters do not reach him. One month you hear that he has a rare disease that prevents him from remembering where he came from or formulating a plan to escape and return. Another month you hear that he has met a woman and is marrying her. When your son comes of age he sets out to find his father and you wait long months for word. He returns and says only that he found him but that it was not a happy encounter. You ask your son, Isn’t there something you can do? What did he say? How did he look? He turns away. Then he becomes angry with you, claiming that you did this to his father, that you drove him away, that if only you would send him money he would be healed.
People tell you to forget him and move on. You wonder how they can be so callous.
I ask you to imagine this because it is something like what is happening. Your husband is beyond your reach. He may return. He may not. He is in a land where he may find help. Help is certainly available to him. If the people around him are drinking in a sober living house, then in all probability it is a mixed bag. There are some who are exploiting the system and some who are trying to get sober. It would be better if he were in a place where everyone was sober. But a person who wants to get sober can find a way. A person who truly wants to get sober is like a person trying to survive a shipwreck; he will grab at anything; he will be resourceful; he will hang on.
But not only is that eventual goal of sobriety in essence a gift: Even the desire is a gift! Even that fierce, desperate clutching at any chance of survival and sobriety, which you would think every suffering alcoholic would have: Even that is a gift! Some suffer and occasionally lament it but never have that searing moment when they feel themselves drowning and thrash about in the dark sea for anything, anything that will keep them from sinking into oblivion. Some just quietly sink.
I don’t know why that is. I don’t know much. That is why I suggest you imagine him in another land, beyond communication, lost to you for now. It is a way to understand, through metaphor, what has happened.
The one thing that might work is a person like himself who is sober and has been where he is. This is the foundation of the Alcoholics Anonymous method: One desperate alcoholic who has found a way to recover finds another who is struggling and talks with him, sharing without reserve his own struggle and the solution he has found.
This has been seen to work. It is one way he might get sober. It might happen in the course of living at the sober house. That presumably is the idea of the place — that alcoholics would encounter each other and share their stories, and authentic experiences of recovery would result. But a certain element of chance attends there. If you were to introduce a bit of planning it might speed things along. I’m just saying, if there is any way to introduce a truly sober person into his midst, someone he trusts, perhaps someone he has known and drunk with, it wouldn’t hurt. It might work. If you could find among your circle of friends or at your local AA chapter someone to visit your husband and offer to help him get sober, that might work. You never know.
It’s possible that this scenario has already played out numerous times with the same result. However, sometimes it is like lighting a fire in damp wood, or hitchhiking. You just have to keep at it and eventually the fire lights, or you get a ride, or you get enough sobriety that it sticks.
It is sad. It is sad indeed. It is one of the saddest things on earth to see a man waste his life. On the other hand, people do come out of it. After enduring the most horrific trials, people do come back.
You must cling to that hope. He may come back. There are examples all around us of people who have come back from his state and worse.
Meanwhile, you can’t put your life on hold.
Do what you can. Let go of the results.
Dear Cary,
I’ve suffered from pretty serious depression — laced with a good dose of anxiety — for more than 15 years now. It’s never been incapacitating; I always get up out of bed and bathe and work, but the lows, and darn-close-to-suicidal thoughts, are getting lower and coming more frequently.
I’m on antidepressants — four. I also self-medicate with booze — I’ll make no bones about it, I’m an alcoholic. I know it’s a depressant, but it’s also the only thing that gives me any sort of respite.
For most of these 15 years, I’ve been in therapy. And I want to give it up forever, period.
I’ve had six therapists for stretches of time from a few months to three years. None of these stretches has ended well. One was good but I moved away; one put me on major drugs that wrecked me; two were pleasant enough, and talking to them helped sometimes, but they never brought any special insight to the table.
Two others have been ruinous. One insisted, through my worst depressive episode, on reminding me of all the reasons I had to be depressed (his favorites were the death of my father several months prior, and my mother’s long-term incapacitating illness), and pointing out what a long hard road back lay ahead for me, and how much work it would take. Every session was worse than the previous, and I would find myself sobbing uncontrollably as soon as I got home afterward. (My partner took to referring to this one as “Dr. Mengele.”)
My most recent therapist spent half of our last (and final) session exploring the fact that I often forget to write down the times of our appointments, and have to email him for confirmation. “Why did you forget to bring your calendar today? Well, why do you think you forget to write things down? Will you put this on your calendar for next week?” I’d had a terrible week, and was sitting on the couch in tears at the end of this.
Neither of these guys tried to comfort me, or make me feel better in the moment, or the week that lay ahead. The first guy made sure I knew that I could always check myself into a psych hospital, but never listened when I asked him to please stop saying things that made me feel worse, week after week. The second sat there in a room with me — another human being — looked at me with tears running down my face and said nothing to express any sort of compassion or concern. Nothing. Never went back to him, of course (that was a few weeks ago).
I’m sick and fucking tired of this. I go see these people, and pay them as professionals to provide a service: helping me feel better. Yes, I know that you have to go into painful areas in therapy. I’m willing to do that, and have. And I know their job isn’t to make me “happy.” But if it isn’t to help me feel better, and cope better with those painful feelings now rather than sometime in the distant future, then what the hell are they doing there?
I don’t get it and I don’t want to be involved in it anymore. Frankly, I think there’s something inhuman in this — who spends their day watching humans suffer terribly, while proffering little more than handkerchiefs and banal questions? I don’t want to work these things out alone, I want help. Instead, I find myself consistently talking to people who, to my mind, border on the sociopathic in their ability to disregard suffering. (I’m looking at you, Dr. Mengele.)
The day I “fired” my most recent therapist, I felt better than I had in months. I knew I didn’t have to go back there and ruminate yet again.
Unfortunately, in America, if you’re not happy and well-adjusted, everyone from you to Dear Prudence to Dear Abby to my sister proffers therapy as a necessary component of maintaining mental health. Well, I’ve done it, I hate it, it’s damaged me, and I never want to go back. I especially don’t want to go back into that hellish process of trying out new therapists and spending multiple hours laying out my troubles.
But, there’s still the nagging feeling that I might be wrong — obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing to you. What would you do if you were me?
Thanks for letting me ramble.
Jeff
PS: Don’t suggest cognitive-behavioral/mindfulness therapy; that last guy specialized in that and didn’t do jack shit.
Dear Jeff,
I feel for you. I wish you could find some relief for your pain. I don’t know what I would do if I were you. I guess if I were you I’d keep looking for some kind of solution. I’d keep looking for someplace I could go and just leave all my problems for a while. If not through therapy then some kind of group.
All I can say is I totally hear you when you say you want to quit therapy, and some of these therapists sound like real jerks. Maybe there are some sociopaths who are therapists. I hadn’t really thought about it before, because I’ve been very lucky with the therapists I’ve had.
I just went through the worst depression of my life, in the spring, summer and fall of 2011. That was awesomely bad. So what was I depressed about? Loss, I guess. I was grieving. But I was fighting it. I was fighting my own grief, and I was angry and heartbroken over things that happened in my family and in my own life. But I got a good therapist and I’m working through it and most days I’m pretty good. Of course, I haven’t been drinking for a long time, so that helps. I think when I was drinking I was depressed but didn’t even know it.
Where the hell are you living? It sounds like you’ve had some real cold therapists! Out here in San Francisco there are lots of really caring people. I mean super caring people. There are people out here full of love, and when you’re down really low you can feel it and they’ll pull you out of it. I’ve been pulled out of it by people with extraordinary gifts, extraordinary wellsprings of love. Where does that come from? Hell if I know. I came out here, though, because I sensed there was a lot of love out here, and love was what I needed. You know, like the song says, “If you are going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”
Seriously. I was a lonely, cold, frustrated kid down in Florida, and I needed people who could be warm, and luckily the therapists I found were that way. They didn’t just sit there and stare at me. They helped me.
You know, one thing I’d do, is contact that one therapist who was good, and see if you could do sessions by phone. Or at least just talk and see if he or she had any ideas about what to do.
It would probably feel good just to get in touch.
This thing about therapists not being kind is interesting. The idea, I think, is that by observing you in a neutral way the therapist lets you have your emotional experience and then hopefully guides you through some kind of process where the sadness ends up meaning something. It’s compassion for yourself that you need, but the therapist can model that for you by showing compassion for you. Now maybe this being within you who is deserving of your compassion has surfaced but the therapist hasn’t helped you successfully identify this being and connect with it. Or maybe, just maybe, you haven’t been able to process and integrate what you’re encountering in therapy because afterward you self-medicate with alcohol. If that were true, it would make perfect sense that therapy’s not working — because you’re not able to really solidify what you’re learning.
But if drinking’s the only thing that gives you any respite, well, that’s a tough one. Not to bring you down any more, but the alcohol and the antidepressants together sound like a dangerous combo. So at the very least, please get some solid medical advice about drug interactions. And find out how much alcohol it’s safe to drink with these medications. That’s really not something to fool around with.
Look, I’m just another drunk, and a depressed person to boot, but I’ve been able to quit drinking, and I’ve been helped by therapy. And I don’t know if therapy would have worked if I was drinking. I never would have gone to therapy when I was drinking, because I was afraid of therapists and also angry with anyone who tried to help me. I did think they were a bunch of jerks — but that was before I tried it.
So if therapy isn’t working here’s my suggestion: Try Alcoholics Anonymous. Just start going to meetings. At the very least, you’ll find some people who are compassionate. You’ll hear some stories of other people who are having a hard time.
That’s what I would do if I were in your shoes. See if you can quit drinking. That really might help.
This article is the first in a series of essays by current and former sex workers about
their favorite johns.
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes the fellowship as “people who normally would not mix.” That’s a good way of describing James and me. I was 27 years old, a grad student, bored and curious — just like my ad said. James was in his mid-30s, a little too old and far too normal. He was not the kind of guy who’d approach me in another situation, at least that’s what I thought when I saw him. Then again, James and I would never meet in any situation other than this.
I was a Craigslist call girl. James was my first. I had gotten the idea from a friend. “There are ads,” she said, “placed by men, looking for” — she raised an eyebrow — “company.”
That night I got online. It was just as she’d described: SWM seeks non pro, GFE, a little fun. FS. DATY. BBBJ. A lady that speaks GREEK, possibly, a road of possibilities, a chance encounter, no strings attached. For 200 roses, 300 reasons, a generous donation, a happy ending. You can start any day that you like.
On the now-shuttered adult services section of Craigslist — to the left and below where you’d rent an apartment or sell a couch — you could find ads, written in their own coded language, from men and women and everything in between, all of them after one thing: the simple exchange of money for sex.
It was just what I needed. Working full-time as a research assistant at a hospital, I struggled to make ends meet. I was single for the first time in adulthood. Besides my ex, who’d been my high school sweetheart, I’d only slept with a handful of people. I shocked us both by calling off the engagement. I was not ready to start a family. I didn’t want to grow up. In the weeks and months after our breakup, I slept with anyone who’d have me — most of my male classmates and some of the women — until I’d alienated many of the people who had once been my friends. I was guilt-ridden. I was alone.
It was a Tuesday night after class, and I’d had three or four drinks at the bar. It was one of those nights where no matter how much I drank, I couldn’t get drunk. No one would talk to me either; I went home alone, pitiful and unsafe in my own skin. But not 20 minutes later, I found myself in a yellow cab traveling south down the West Side Highway, on my way to meet a man who called himself James.
How I got to James is something of a blur. I remember answering James’ ad, getting directions, getting dressed, hailing a cab. I had his phone number and address written on a scrap of paper I held in my hand. I remember the cab stopping at an intersection, our green light, and two bright white lights — headlights — coming straight at me.
When the other car made impact, we spun. The taxi was facing the opposite direction when it finally stopped. I can still remember the quiet, the pause.
The paramedics said, don’t move. But I wasn’t hurt. I scanned my body as if it were someone else’s, but I felt nothing. Really, I told them, I’m not hurt. Not one bump or scratch. The driver lay slumped over the steering wheel.
“Do you have anyone to call?” the paramedic asked. I shook my head. “No family? No friends?”
I looked down at the scrap of paper still in my hand. I called James.
When James arrived, I saw that he was not bad-looking. Irish American, deep blue eyes. He was not my type, exactly — he had a beer gut and was wearing a Red Sox sweat shirt and a matching baseball hat — but he was a normal guy. As James helped me fill out the police report, I couldn’t stop laughing. I felt giddy. I had just survived a near fatal accident without so much as a scratch. This was so surreal.
“She’ll feel it,” one paramedic said to the other, “when the vodka wears off.”
Back at James’ place, I made myself comfortable. His home was nice in a Crate and Barrel sort of way. I sat down on his microsuede sectional and slipped off my heels. From the kitchen, he offered me wine. I asked him what he did for a living.
“I own a sports bar on the Upper East Side.” “You’re not having one?” I asked, as he reappeared with one glass.
“I don’t drink.”
“You own a bar and you don’t drink?”
“It’s complicated,” he said.
Whatever, I thought. Enough with the small talk. I drained the glass and returned it to its coaster. As soon as he sat next to me, I straddled his lap. This is fun, I told myself. This is no big deal.
Sex for money is not the same as casual sex. When you’re getting paid by someone, you become his employee. I didn’t understand this at the time. I set up two dates with another man and met James later that week. I sold the Girlfriend Experience, or GFE for short. GFE meant the encounter would feel like a “real” date. I’d show affection for the guy and act as if I were attracted to him. After a drink or two, we’d end up at my place or his. There’d be kissing, petting, cuddling, oral sex, sex.
Normal being what I wanted, normal was what I sold. I began attaching a picture to my email. The picture was taken by my mother a few Christmases back. I’m sitting at my computer, wearing a sweater, a knitted scarf wrapped around my neck. It looked like an author’s photo.
In the beginning, I scheduled dates for evenings when I didn’t have class. I made the arrangements days ahead of time, emailing back and forth multiple times before we’d actually meet. At the time, I might have told you I was screening my clients. The truth is that the emails were foreplay. It was part of the thrill. I liked meeting new people. I liked seeing new places. I liked being in apartments nicer than mine. I liked seeing the insides of fancy hotels. I liked getting dressed up. I liked making lots of money, fast. Most of all, I liked having sex. I was aroused by the fantasy of getting paid to do all this. Becoming someone else’s fantasy really turned me on.
In my eyes, I was a non-pro — not a professional, not a prostitute. I was different, I thought. I was educated. I was not drug addicted. I was no victim of trafficking. I didn’t have a pimp. I was doing it by choice. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t want to know. This wasn’t my career. I wasn’t a whore.
“You know,” James said one night when we were done, “you don’t have to do all that you do.” He meant, I understood, my giving a blow job without a condom. “Most girls don’t,” he said, and then hesitated. “Or they’ll charge more.”
I’d never given a blow job with a condom but, having been to the dentist, I knew that latex tasted gross. I said as much to James. ”Besides,” I went on, “it’s safe, right? I don’t let you come in my mouth and if you did, I’d just spit it out.”
James looked at me like I was nuts, like he felt sorry for me or like maybe he wanted to help. But he knew he had tried to help enough.
James told me all the time that what I was doing was wrong. He’d say, You’re a good girl, Melissa, and, Shit, Melissa, you gotta stop. A part of him meant it: the part of him that put potpourri in a little jar next to the sink in the bathroom. The part that had hung the plaque in the hall decorated with geese that read, “Bless this house.” Part of him felt guilty, ashamed: the part of him that would always offer me the ride home that I’d always refuse.
Then there was the other part of James, the part that contacted me like clockwork nearly every night an hour before he got off work, cryptic texts that would inevitably lead to my coming over, if I didn’t already have “plans.” This part of him was excited by the very things that brought him shame. I understood it well. It was the part of James I knew best, maybe the only part of him I ever really met. We can’t do this again, he’d say every time just as soon as we’d finished. He’d say, We gotta stop. And, You gotta stop, this isn’t right. He’d make me promise I wasn’t doing it with anybody else and so I would, even though we both knew it was a lie.
The fact that there was a “good” part of me — a part of myself that I was proud of, a self-esteem still salvageable — just as there was still a good part in him is what made me appealing to James, which made it all the worse. He was destroying that part of me, he understood, just as he destroyed that part in himself.
Refresh, refresh, refresh. After less than a month I’d started trawling for dates during the daytime at my desk at the hospital. The hospital where I worked had spyware; I didn’t care. After just one month of selling sex online, I had already accumulated a literal pile of money — tax free, in cash — that I kept it in a desk drawer at home. I’d take it out some nights and I’d count it just for fun.
I started squeezing more than one date in a night. I was meeting men before and after class. If the offer was sweet enough, I’d skip class altogether. I spent all my free time sitting at my computer, posting ads, responding to ads, emailing back and forth. I became less interested in getting to know them ahead of time and more interested in making it happen, as quickly as possible, so I could get on to the next. Every encounter, I got a little charge. Night after night in the same dress, the same ad, the same scenario — two and a half months into it, it was becoming harder and harder to bill myself as “non-pro.” I was crossing boundaries I hadn’t even known existed.
I once met a guy who said you can buy anything on Craigslist. He was talking about collectible antique furniture, but I thought it was so funny I wrote it down. You know, ironic. He said it as we took the back stairs up to the 14th floor of the granite building where he worked on Fifth Avenue, where in his corner office I gave him a blow job for 200 bucks, the city lit up behind him like a Broadway set. When he finished, he opened the top drawer of his desk and brought out an antiseptic towelette, as if he did this all the time, as if I were contagious. I didn’t write that part down, but I remember.
Every man I had sex with for money, all the strangers that I met — when it comes to memory, you have no choice what you remember and what you forget. I could tell you the good parts: the nice guys I met, like James, and the fancy restaurants. I could describe the interiors of every luxurious hotel. I could tell you all about the time I was flown to Paris with a man I’d met just the week before. We stayed at the Four Seasons and ate $800 meals. I could tell you the price of the meal, but I can’t tell you I enjoyed it. Hell is getting everything you want — everything you think you need and more than what you even asked for — and not enjoying any of it. Getting everything you think will make you happy and still feeling nothing at all.
The longer I sold sex, the less I was the person I wanted to be. After three months of prostitution, I felt raggedy, used up. I was anxious and afraid. Condoms broke. People stiffed me. The only way to deal with these things, I thought, was to pretend they didn’t happen. Trading sex for money, I changed.
James changed too. He began asking me to do things that I wouldn’t — anal sex, sex without a condom — wanting to take bigger and bigger risks. Alternately, he would email me on Thanksgiving, wishing me a happy holiday. He would ask me out on dates. He was a good person — we both were — but we did not know how to be good to each other. We were using each other to get high. I wanted real relationships. For me, prostitution had made that impossible. As much as I wanted to trust James, I could not. The first night we met, when the police asked, he said his name was Chris. But how could I trust anyone? I couldn’t trust myself.
No one forced me to have sex for money, and no one could have compelled me to stop. But when the pain became great enough, I became willing. Today, I don’t believe in accidents. I believe things happen for a reason. I haven’t seen James since I stopped selling sex, months before I stopped drinking and long before I became a teacher. But that is another story entirely.
Dear Cary,
I’ve read your column often, and I think you can help me since you yourself have dealt with the consequences of addiction.
I really don’t know who else to turn to with this particular problem since most self-help books don’t deal with people who don’t drink.
I am in my mid-20s. In a nutshell, I was raised as an only child in a single-parent home with an alcoholic mother, who self-medicated with wine to deal with depression.
I know she loved me more than anything, and she sacrificed a lot to try to give me a good life, but as a kid, I felt as if I was battling her alcoholism for her. I would constantly find single-serving wine bottles stuffed between couch cushions, and it was an almost nightly occurrence for her to drink herself to sleep, leaving the house a mess and me to throw away the empty bottles and rinse out the glasses she would leave next to the couch. After she would go to bed, it was usually a coin flip whether or not she would rise from her sleep to stalk around the house staring blindly at everything and shouting incoherently. More than once she, thoroughly drunk, thought I was a burglar and tried to attack me. The first time this happened I was 11, and in her mind she had gone back in time and thought I was going to steal her baby (me). She nearly strangled me.
What made my childhood much easier was the fact that I had grandparents nearby who did not seem to struggle with alcoholism or poverty or depression. They were good people who seemed to rise above all the stupidity we are capable of. In fact they helped my mother make ends meet on a few occasions, and they always seemed to come to the rescue when we were in a jam. I felt more often than not that my grandparents were like my real parents, and my mother was like some big crazy sister who loved me a lot but was still trying to figure things out.
And from a young age, the lesson they kept quietly teaching me was that alcoholism was a demon in our family. It ran in our blood, and had ruined cousins, uncles and sisters. And the best way to avoid this fate was not to start at all.
And for my part I promised myself that I would never drink, or smoke, or do drugs.
And I never did.
A lot of people may not believe me, but I have never so much as sipped a beer, or taken a drag from a cigarette. And there is my problem. Everyone who knows me knows that I don’t drink, and I feel like I’ve put myself in this box where I will never drink.
This was fine for my early 20s, and in some ways I felt superior for not having blown hundreds of dollars at the bars, or woken up with hangovers, or been so drunk I couldn’t remember what happened to me. I have always been in control of my life, and that is something I take pride in.
But I also feel like there is this whole side to life that I may be missing out on, and that maybe I should relax these rules I’ve created for myself. I feel that a lot of people can’t relate to the fact I don’t drink, and I also would sometimes really like to be able to have a beer with my friends and be their equal, and not this always-sober outsider. A few weeks ago at a champagne brunch with friendly strangers who didn’t know I don’t drink, the waiter poured me a glass of champagne, and when they toasted I held it up and looked at it for a long time before I realized my wife was staring at me.
What to do?
Dear What to Do,
Testing yourself for alcoholism is like testing yourself for flammability. You’re probably not. But what if you are?
“Given the fact that alcohol-dependence seems highly heritable,” why take the risk?
Why not instead ask what needs alcohol might satisfy, and then find other ways to satisfy those same needs? Why not seek safe, life-enhancing alternatives to drinking? Why not read Abraham Maslow and design your life around the quest for peak experiences?
We raise our glasses and drink ceremonially to sanctify some event or passage. We all drink from the same bottle. By imbibing the same drink, we are joined; it is a kind of sacrament. You can mime the gestures but something pulls you to fully engage. Of course it does. This is not just about getting a little champagne in your mouth. It is a powerful ritual.
My suggestion is to find even better ways, more direct, honest and compelling ways to have this same ritual bonding and expression of shared esteem and purpose. I suggest you make this a lifelong pursuit. Make it a way of undoing for good the perhaps multigenerational history of alcoholism in your family.
This way, if those who dispute the role of genes in alcoholism are correct, and behavioral factors are more important, then you will still be doing something to eradicate certain behaviors that were leading to case after case of alcoholism. You will be finding something that members of your family have a particular need for, and satisfying that need.
Look for something that seems cool but not too cool, something you’ve always wanted to do, something you’re drawn to, that’s maybe a little outside your normal range but not totally kooky and weird.
For instance, it may be possible to participate in the ecstatic communality of a sweat lodge. I don’t know. Maybe a sweat lodge would be too weird for you. I don’t know how much facial hair you have, or what your body mass index is. I’m just saying, identify the underlying principle and then find something that suits your social tastes.
That there are things wrong in the world, that there are things so awful in this world that knowledge of them drives us to want to blot them out of consciousness. Read today’s piece by Noam Chomsky, for instance, for a reminder of how thinly “normal American life” veils our history of brutal atrocities.
How are you supposed to think about these things and not feel as though you are going mad? How are you supposed to have a conscience and not feel trapped by history? How are you to take all this in, as a young person? How to reconcile knowledge of evil done in one’s name with the innocent desire to believe in one’s country, to identify with one’s countrymen, to feel strong and patriotic and confident about the future?
These, too, are legitimate questions. So, my friend, I urge you to take seriously the genetic and environmental risk factors for alcoholism, and actively seek ways to have ecstatic experiences in this insane world without killing yourself. Adopt adaptive behaviors that don’t make things worse.
(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon) 
More Cary Tennis.
