Yesterday, HealthNewsDigest.com announced that the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health will fund a new five-year study focusing on addictive behaviors in women involving tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs and overeating.

The $2.5 million faculty-training grant awarded to Yale University researchers in the Department of Psychiatry will involve training scholars to conduct interdisciplinary research on addictive behaviors in women, as well as explore potentially new gender-specific prevention and treatment strategies.

“The stark reality is that addictive behaviors in women currently rank among our most prevalent health concerns; disorders involving these behaviors are linked to some of the top causes of mortality and preventable disease,” said Carolyn M. Mazure, the study’s principal investigator, a professor of psychiatry and psychology and director of Women’s Health Research at Yale. “Our unique training program fills a great need for new researchers who can bridge many areas to fully understand addictive behaviors in women.”

The ultimate goal, says Mazure, is to enable scientists to continue making contributions to the prevention and treatment of addiction, concluding in direct benefit for women and their families. Amen to that.

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“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays we will be running monthly. We are excited to have writer and mom Patty Nasey share her fresh perspective as she embarks on the road to sobriety.

STEP THREE

by Patty Nasey

In the spring of 1996, I converted to Judaism. A week before I officially joined the tribe, I wrote in my journal: “My conversion marks the beginning of a spiritual journey – not the end.”

Fourteen years later, my journey derailed. I hadn’t completely skidded off the track, but I was certainly heading in the wrong direction – away from humility and toward self-centeredness. My feet were no longer firmly planted on the ground; they were teetering four inches above it in $1,200 Alaia platforms.

Since I’d converted to Judaism, I had maintained a solid marriage, given birth to two beautiful daughters, bought a big apartment in the city, and, after several years as a stay-at-home mom, landed a full-time position at a fashion magazine. I became too busy to light Shabbat candles on Friday night; I felt too tired to go to services during the High Holidays; I didn’t have to teach the girls about religion – they went to Hebrew School.

I was slowly and subtly disconnecting from God. Instead of being grateful for my blessings, I was cocky. I believed that all this good fortune was the result of my hard work, my smart choices, my drive, my determination. And I deserved to be rewarded — with luxurious cosmetics, designer clothing, expensive haircuts and, of course, alcohol– the good stuff – Veuve Cliquot champagne, Patron margaritas, Ketel One Cosmopolitans, imported dinner wines and Grand Marnier with dessert. I didn’t need a Higher Power – I had the power and I was going to use it.  And, ultimately, abuse it.

The boozing got me into A.A.  And A.A., specifically the Third Step – the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God– got me back on a spiritual path. Down in the church basement, I stripped away my protective coating: the clothes, the make-up, the lies, and the alcohol. Over the years, I had piled on these layers to make sure nobody saw the pain I was wearing underneath all that armor. But to get – and stay – sober, I had to expose myself and let others see me emotionally naked, powerless and vulnerable.

The process reminded me of when I converted to Judaism. I had gone to the Mikvah, the ritual immersion bath, where I literally shed my clothes – and my past – and humbly asked for guidance in my new life as a Jew. Now I was again in need of spiritual cleansing and decided to revisit the Mikvah as the Third Step in my recovery.

I was nervous when I arrived at West Side Mikvah, but a friendly older woman in a uniform greeted me warmly and showed me to my private waiting area – a full bathroom with clean white tiles, a plush robe, slippers, a  large shower and a medicine cabinet filled with toiletries. I carefully followed the Mikvah preparation checklist that was posted on the mirror – shower, shave legs, wash hair, clean ears, remove nail polish, clean navel, remove all make up, take out contact lenses and remove wedding band, earrings and other jewelry. I put on my glasses, robe and disposable slippers and pushed the call button on the wall labeled “Ready for Tevilah (immersion).”

After several minutes, the Mikvah Lady – a fashionably dressed redhead in her mid-30s – knocked on the door. She asked me to follow her down the long, narrow brightly-lit hallway to a small, windowless room at the end. She gently inspected my hands and feet and noticed a speck of red polish on the inside edge of my big toe.

“Here, I’ll get it,” she said, kneeling down with a cotton ball and polish remover to wipe the last of the lacquer off my nail.

Finally, I was ready for immersion. The Mikvah Lady helped me step into the square pool. I dunked under the lukewarm water, came up and recited aloud the blessing for immersion in Hebrew. I dunked again and when I resurfaced, I stayed still for a moment, truly grateful that I had returned to this spiritual place as I humbly asked my Higher Power for guidance in my new life of sobriety.

I went home, refreshed and renewed, eager to continue on my journey. But there was one more thing I had to do to keep my feet on the ground. I logged on to eBay and put my sky-high Alaia shoes up for sale.

Patty Nasey is a 20-year veteran of the magazine industry. She has worked at Time Out New York, Jane, Lucky, Teen Vogue, Mademoiselle and SPY, and written for a variety of publications, including Time Out New York Kids, New York Magazine and
 PAPER.  She lives in New York City with her husband, two daughters and a dog. Read Patty’s first post and second post of this series.

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What’s the best way to tell someone that you suspect they have a drinking problem? What if you’re not sure they have a problem? Maybe you just have a gut feeling—a feeling that they might be hiding the extent of their drinking from you. Is that enough to go on?

I’ve been in the frustrating situation where I’ve confronted someone about their drinking, been shot down, and dropped the whole thing. Then I get that “if only” sinking feeling that I’m not doing enough to help that person—if only I could find the right words, if only I could give them that ah-ha moment. If only–

Here’s a re-creation of a conversation I’ve had:

“I’m worried about your drinking.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s genetic, and your mother’s an alcoholic, for one.  Every time I’m with you, everything revolves around getting that next drink.”

“Every time you see me, I’m on vacation. Everyone drinks on vacation.”

Good point. Good point. “But you always seem to have a headache the next day, and you’re down for the count, but you still do the same thing, the next time.”

“You and your husband drink.”

“True, but we can take it or leave it.”

“I can stop drinking if I want. I just don’t want to.”

“I was worried because you were drinking during lunch. You had two glasses of wine. I don’t do that.”

Exasperated: “I was on vacation. You’re just paranoid because you’re the daughter of an alcoholic.”

“Okay, maybe I am, but I just have a weird feeling about your drinking. Remember the time you hit your head?”

“You have a weird feeling about everyone’s drinking, and I was upset about something.”

And so on and so on. These conversations can go on forever, circling around and around until you’re sorry you brought it up in the first place.

Then there’s the fear: fear of alienating someone altogether, and then what help will you be? You don’t want to drive the person underground, so they feel they have to hide things from you even more than they already do.

Maybe you have to wait until someone hits rock bottom for an intervention. Or perhaps it’s better to round up a group of that person’s friends and family, and do the intervention in person. But only when you know for sure. Maybe the person is just a heavy drinker. It’s a gray area, because no one wears a sign on their forehead saying, “I’m an alcoholic.”

And what about the Al-Anon credo to “Let go and let God?” There’s the school of thought that says people have to learn from their mistakes, and they have to want to change.

So what’s a person to do? Have you ever been in that situation? If so, how did you handle it, and did your approach work?

Problem or heavy drinkers can possibly stop drinking by behavior modification. Alcoholics, on the other hand, are different. Here are some points, culled from Rebos, at Allexperts.com. These points apply to someone who is actually an alcoholic, and not just a problem drinker.

1)    Stopping drinking is not a matter of willpower. Alcoholism is a disease. Drinking alcoholically is but a symptom of a deeper underlying problem that must be faced up to in order for an alcoholic to recover. For the alcoholic there is no such thing as cutting down, drinking only on weekends, changing what they drink, smoking pot or taking other mind altering drugs or even switching to “near beer” with 0.5% alcohol. For the alcoholic nothing will work short of total and complete abstinence from any thing that contains alcohol or other mind-altering substances (drugs).

2)    Unfortunately, all alcoholics must hit their own bottom before they do anything about stopping (if they ever do). I am sorry to say that hitting a bottom for some many may mean going as low as a person can go…plus six feet! Don’t let her take you there with her. Let her go if you must and get on with your life.

3)    Until she “admits and accepts” that alcohol is causing her problems there is little you can do for her. Even those poor unfortunates who are in shelters “admit” that they are having a problem with drinking, but their “acceptance” to the point of doing something positive about it is what counts. No one can scare an alcoholic into stopping drinking. Cajoling, hand-wringing, threatening, begging and even putting them away against their will, will not get them to stop doing what they have not made up their own mind to do.

4)    An active alcoholic’s choices become limited to: attending a recovery program like AA, or entering an in-patient detoxification clinic that has an after care outpatient program. I personally have never seen an alcoholic stop drinking on willpower alone. The disease (addiction) is too powerful.

The bottom line is—someone has got to want to stop drinking in order for anything to work.

According to new research published online in the journal Addiction, children with a family history of alcoholism prefer intense sweets. In the study, 300 children between the ages of 5 and 12 tasted five levels of sugar in water to determine how much sweetness they liked.

Nearly half (49 percent) of the children studied had a family history of alcoholism. The researchers paid close attention to the sweet preferences of the children with a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, because sweet taste and alcohol activate many of the same reward circuits in the brain.

Children who had both a family history of alcoholism and who reported depressive symptoms liked intense sweetness the most (the equivalent of 14 teaspoons of sugar in a cup of water, and more than twice the level of sweetness in a typical cola).  This was one third more intense than the sweetness level preferred by the other children.

The study’s lead author, Julie A. Mennella, PhD, noted that the findings do not necessarily mean that there is a relationship between early sweet preferences and alcoholism later in life. “At this point, we don’t know whether this higher ‘bliss point’ for sweets is a marker for later alcohol use,” she said.

It would be interesting to combine this study with research on alcoholics and hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Dr. Douglas M. Baird, director of the Hypoglycemia Support Foundation, says: “I have never, ever seen an alcoholic who wasn’t hypoglycemic. It just doesn’t occur, it’s the same problem.” The question is: Which came first, the alcoholism or the craving for sweets?

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List some words that describe you…

Artist, grandmother, ultra-liberal, health-conscious vegetarian, lover of nature, immigrant.

How old were you when you had your first drink?

I was in my early twenties, I was working as a children’s nurse at a hospital in the city. People smoked and drank. I did it, too.

What was your favorite drink?

I was never really hot for drinking. The only time I liked to drink was when I was on vacation with my girlfriends–we drank a lot of wine and other stuff in Greece and Spain, and I got a taste for it.

Did your parents or siblings drink?

My older brother drank (I am the youngest of 5). My other brother drank only on special occasions. Not my sisters or my mother. In those days (Europe in the 1940s and 50s) it wasn’t fashionable for women to drink. Men and boys drank, but mostly on special occasions, and at dances. I don’t know if my father drank. [He left the family when she was one.]

Was there alcoholism in your family?

According to a family tree that my oldest brother researched and made, one guy a long, long time ago was put in jail for drunken behavior. I have a picture of my father, in a Teetotaler’s Club.

When did your drinking cross a line? Were you aware that you had crossed a line?

In my early 40s. I had been socially drinking before then. I bought a gallon of wine and I drank all day long. I always had liquor in the house, mostly wine–Ernest & Julio Gallo was my favorite–because it was cheaper, and I thought wine wasn’t so bad.

Did anyone notice you were drinking too much?

My husband was nice, but he said things. Some of my friends noticed. Once, on vacation,  [the husband of a friend] said, “You don’t have to drink everything there is.” I guess I drank all the beer in the house. He bawled me out, and it was traumatic.

How was it raising two kids while drinking?

Miraculously, I could function–I don’t remember who made breakfast, or who made the lunches, but I always had dinner on the table.

What was the low point?

We went to Mexico City with our two children and stayed with a friend who had a huge property, like the Garden of Eden, surrounded by a high wall. I got so upset because there was a flood, and I felt like the Garden of Eden was being lost, so I drank myself into oblivion, and ended up in bed. In Mexico, I drank from beginning to end. When we came home, my husband said, “You have to do something about your drinking.” I got scared when he got serious. It’s hard even to think straight when you’re drunk all the time.

How did you get sober?

I was detoxed in a hospital. A lot of people do it themselves. I was in the care of a doctor, and I was in the hospital for at least a week, and then I went to a group for a long time, a therapy group run by this doctor, who was also a psychiatrist and a [recovered] alcoholic. He was the right guy for me. I also went to AA at least twice a week. I made all my friends there. I went to AA for many, many years–20 to 25 years.

Do you have any advice to someone trying to stay sober?

In my case, I had to think about something that could replace the drinking. I was still smoking. Stopping smoking [some years later] was extremely hard.

What helped you the most?

My husband was supportive. He stopped drinking. We had no liquor in the house. If we’d had liquor in the house, I know for sure I couldn’t have made it.

What’s the best part about being sober?

Everything. I was amazed at how I felt in my head. Before, my head felt heavy, like I had cottonballs in it. After I stopped drinking, I got so light; it felt great.

Did you ever have a relapse?

No.

Is there anything you miss about drinking?

Nothing. Sometimes, when I see people drink a little wine for dinner, I wish I could have that, but I put it far away from me. I know it’s untouchable. If I were to start drinking today, I would go back immediately to my dependence.

What’s your view of AA?

It’s great. It saved my life. If I were ever tempted, I’d go back.

Do you have a favorite quote or book or inspiration that has helped you through the years?

When I was in AA, somebody gave me a poem called “Desiderata.” When you drink, you have a lot of self doubt and guilt. It’s a three-fold illness: spiritual, emotional and physical. The poem helped because it says you shouldn’t compare yourself with others, and everybody has a right to be here on earth. Everybody who is born has a right. “The Big Book” from AA and the Twelve Steps helped very much, too. “The Big Book” helps, because it has drinking stories in it.

Recently, there has been a spate of novels, short stories, memoirs and non-fiction books published that touch on the topic of women and alcohol–Here is just a sampling:

MOMMY DOESN’T DRINK HERE ANYMORE by Rachel Brownell (memoir)

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (personal essays written before the popular blogger/memoirist announced she was quitting drinking)

BLAME by Michelle Huneven (novel)

LIT by Mary Karr (memoir, see excerpt in Drinking Diaries)

“Intervention” a short story in Jill McCorkle’s collection GOING AWAY SHOES

TROUBLE by Kate Christensen (novel w/ lots of unapologetic drinking)

ONCE WAS LOST by Sara Zarr (young adult novel with alcoholic mother)

And for those of you interested in poetry, there’s FLAWED LIGHT: American Women Poets and Alcohol, a non-fiction book about women poets and alcohol.

Some of my personal, perennial favorites:

SMASHED by Koren Zailckas (memoir)

ROSIE by Anne Lamott (novel, featuring a woman struggling with her relationship to alcohol)

AT HOME IN THE WORLD by Joyce Maynard (memoir, & she’s the daughter of an alcoholic)

What are your favorite books that touch on the subject of women and alcohol? Favorite movies? Poems? Please share!

Alcoholics Anonymous used to be the great equalizer: Rich or poor, famous or unknown, everyone was an addict, and everyone sat on the same hard chairs, in the same church basement, drinking the same bad coffee. My mom used to tell me about all the politicians and other muckety-mucks in her Washington-area AA meetings (never naming names, of course, but just mentioning that this or that famous person was there, as if to prove she was in good company). And that was a good thing, especially for celebrities and other narcissists, who needed the humbling.

Then along came fancy rehab centers (yes, there’s always been Betty Ford, but usually after rehab, those people went straight to AA), Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew, and now–sober coaches–a sort of first-class airplane ticket to sobriety.

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I learned about sober coaches for the first time, recently, when I happened to be reading about Brooke Mueller & Charlie Sheen’s early-morning knife fight (yes, I admit, I was kind of fascinated). Since both celebs apparently have a history of alcoholism and addiction, they had their Sober coaches on hand that morning. So what is a sober coach? Basically, it’s a person you pay to help you stay sober, after you leave rehab. Apparently, if you don’t feel like going to AA and hanging around those icky basements, the one-person AA meeting will come to you. How’s that working for you, Charlie Sheen?

For $40-$100 per hour, companies like Sober Champion will appoint someone to be your “sober escort” (to take you from point A to point B, such as on an airplane) or your “sober coach” (your companion for a finite number of hours). If you’re willing to shell out up to $1800 a day, you too can have a “sober companion,” who will go through all your stuff to make sure you’re not hiding booze or drugs, and basically follow you around, coaching you, praying with you, and helping you find ingenious alternatives to boozing (i.e. meditating, taking a bath, exercising). Sorry, but sober coaches are not generally covered by insurance, so you’ll have to shell out all the dough yourself. The maximum suggested time for the 24/7 sober coach is 90 days. Celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Owen Wilson, Robert Downey, Jr., Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen have used sober coaches.

Frankly, not that I’m his mother or anything, but what Charlie Sheen needs is a bad cup of coffee and a basement full of regular people calling him on his shit, not a suck-up sober handler who charges him $650-1800 day. Ditto Lindsay Lohan et al. The cure for narcissism is a dose of reality. One of the most helpful cures for addiction is to find a community of people who can bolster and support you, and who you in turn can bolster and support. Sober coaches offer a community of one–a one-sided arrangement.

I’m sure there are cases where sober coaches have saved peoples’ lives, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. They have testimonials out the wazoo from grateful celebs, I’m sure. But still…

What I don’t get is that AA has always offered sober coaches–for free! They’re called “sponsors,” and they are AA veterans with years of sobriety under their belts. If it’s hard for celebrities to attend public meetings, couldn’t they have celebrity AA meetings or something? And get this–one of the sober coaching companies is called “Hired Power.” A sellout G-d. How ironic.

Move over, men, there’s a new face in drunk driving: the sensible everywoman.

Remember “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk?” and how you couldn’t get that phrase out of your head? Well, the Ad Council, along with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), has come up with an equally unforgettable public service announcement: Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving.

At first glance, the video on You Tube, made to support the latest anti- drunk-driving campaign, looks like business as usual. The camera focuses in on a very drunk blonde, maniacally laughing, clutching her beer bottle.

Then things go all wrong, and she knocks her front teeth out with the beer bottle. Does she get upset? No. As she continues laughing, her missing front teeth prominently displayed, the camera pans over to her friend, who is way more sober, only politely laughing, and is putting on her jacket, ready to leave and, presumably, drive home.

And this is where the twist comes in: Instead of panning back to the smashed woman, the camera pans over to her friend, the sensible-looking brunette (natch), as if to say, Not So Fast! The camera then freezes on the sensible brunette and a voiceover says: Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving. Sobering? I think so. We can laugh at the overly drunk woman, but the buzzed woman–well, the buzzed woman could be anyone you know. It could be you.

If the slogan, “Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving,” sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it is. The PSA, first released in 2005, was originally targeted at men, ages 21-34. So why the re-release? And why the focus on women, not men? According to the NHTSA, the number of women DUIs rose 30% in the 10 years between 1998 and 2007, while DUIs by men went down.

Television spots are set to air just in time for the winter holidays, but the Ad Council is also betting on social media sites, like Facebook, to spread the message. A visit to the site’s fan page, Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving, turned up 574 fans. The Twitter page has 552 and counting. So far, the You Tube video (described above) has had over 10,000 hits. And there are other videos on You Tube as well.

by Leah Odze Epstein

The problem with Al-Anon meetings is they’re not fun. In fact, they’re so depressing, they could drive a person to drink. Okay, so maybe I’ve only ever been to two meetings in my life, and I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but still…

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I sometimes need to vent, and it’s better to vent to people who’ve been in the same position. But couldn’t we  lighten up the mood a little bit? Couldn’t we change up the location so we’re not sitting in the basement of a fluorescent-lit church, on a hard chair, drinking bad coffee?

Were the two Al-Anon meetings I went to eye-opening? Yes. Paradigm-shifting? Yes. But they kind of left me spooked.

One day when I was in my late twenties and living on the Upper West Side of  Manhattan and very few things in my life worked, I felt compelled to drag myself to my first Al-Anon meeting. I was used to fixing things by myself, but the nightly bottle or two of red wine I shared with my best friend just wasn’t working anymore. I was waking up flushed and hung over.

On my way to the meeting, I was riddled with the fear that I’d run into somebody I knew, or worse—that they would ask, “Where are you going?”

Irrational? Well, this is the kind of secrecy and shame I learned as the daughter of an alcoholic. My lifelong code: Don’t let them see you crack. It may have been hard at home, but no one had to know. That would only make them criticize my mother, and by extension, me.

That code made it kind of hard to want to go to a Meeting. In public. But I suppose that’s part of the battle: getting to the meeting to break that feeling of public shame.

As a teenager and young adult, I wore the façade of an untroubled free spirit, so when I walked into the Al-Anon meeting on that crisp Fall evening, it jarred me to look around at my fellow attendees. Like me, most people at the meeting were in their twenties. Unlike me, most of these people exposed their trauma right there for all to see. They were like live wires, with their unlit cigarettes and shaking hands clutching coffee cups. The room buzzed with energy.

I cringed as the guy beside me told of his alcoholic parents locking him in the basement–torturing him. I heard about incest. Evil stepmothers. Runaways. I was nothing like these people. What I’d suffered was long ago. Minimal, compared.

My memories of my mother’s drinking were as fuzzy as a drunk’s vision. I was nine when she stopped drinking. The stories I remembered seemed minor. And yet I carried them around inside of me, like my driver’s license in my wallet with its unflattering photo, slightly out of focus.

The people at the Al-Anon meeting told their stories willingly. I remember thinking they must be so messed up they had no choice but to tell. Then a girl—a beautiful folksinger with long, wavy blonde hair and faded jeans—stood up and spoke. She was an artist, a true free spirit; the girl I was pretending to be. I sat there, listening, my body trembling, as I tried not to cry. Not one single outward detail of her life story resembled mine, yet the emotions rang true.

There, in that room, I finally found people who got it–who felt like me, alone and alienated most of the time, except there, in that room, when they told their stories. I felt those people could help me, if I let them. But I couldn’t bring myself to go back to that depressing room.

Nearly a decade later, plagued by some of the same issues that seem to haunt adult children of alcoholics (control issues? Check. Accept nothing less than perfection? Check. Alienated? Yup), I went to another Al-Anon meeting in the suburbs. Again with the dimly lit room. Again with the hard chairs. Again with the basement. Were we trying to re-create our childhood suffering through the setting? I didn’t get it.

There were only eight of us sitting in a circle, and I was the youngest. No one smoked or drank coffee. The energy in the room was flat. I couldn’t breathe. But I sat there and listened to the forty-something woman with the twisted hands talk about her crippling rheumatoid arthritis and her nightmare mother. I listened to the nearly 300 pound man talk about his bad mother, too. And the woman whose lips barely moved when she, too, spoke of her evil mother.

I never went back to Al-Anon after that. I’m not saying it’s not a lifesaver for many people. I’m sure it is. Still…

Sometimes, I fantasize about the kind of meeting I might like to attend. First off, I wouldn’t call it a meeting. Maybe a Girl’s Night Out. There would be women my age, maybe a bit younger, some a bit older. The women would be smart and funny. Some would have battle scars, but they’d talk about them with humor. Maybe we’d laugh until we cried, sharing our stories, and how we turned out after all that craziness. I picture sitting in a warm cozy place, maybe on a red velvet couch–My fantasy Al-Anon meeting takes place in a restaurant, or a bar.

I shake my head to wake up from my dream–we’re supposed to be scarred by alcohol, bruised. But in my opinion, we’re the lucky ones, the ones who escaped, the ones who didn’t qualify for AA. That calls for celebration: bright lights, a nice glass of wine and a comfortable chair. Or at the very least, a latte.

Leah Odze Epstein is co-editor of Drinking Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @Leaheps and you can become a fan of drinking diaries on facebook.

Just in time for the holiday season, so full of liquid temptations: a new drug called naltrexone was approved by the FDA for use in the treatment of alcoholism. If taken daily, naltrexone can curb the urge to drink. The drug works by blocking the effect of drugs, known as opioids, on the brain. While it is not meant to take the place of AA, psychotherapy and other treatments for alcoholism, naltrexone–which is generally used for a 3 month period–can lessen cravings for alcohol. In clinical trials, patients using naltrexone to curb cravings were twice as successful as patients taking a placebo.

Time Magazine named Naltrexone as one of the health highlights of 2009. And given the statistics on alcoholism–in the U.S. alone, 14 million residents are battling an alcohol addiction–naltrexone will most likely be welcomed as a powerful weapon in the battle against this tough disease.

By Sari Botton

Al-Anon sucked. If I hadn’t been too broke for therapy, I’d never have taken a friend’s advice to attend those awful meetings.

They were worse than the AA meetings I’d been to in support of my string of alcoholic boyfriends over the years – three, if you’re keeping count.  The AA people, when they finally hit bottom, were brave, copped to shit, took responsibility for all the nasty things they’d done when they were trashed. The Al-Anonics were victimy and whiny.  Everything was someone else’s fault.

They were addict-addicts, people who NEEDed people in the worst possible way, and yet would counter-intuitively go for only the most unavailable, most uninterested, meanest people around. I, of course, did not see myself that way – she who was addicted to alcohol not by mouth, but on the breath of a difficult man.

Eric, my friend in AA, suggested I try his meetings instead.

“I’m not an alcoholic,” I protested.

“Here’s what you do,” he said. “Go lock yourself in a room with a case of Jack Daniels and don’t come out until it’s all gone. Then, go directly to AA. Do not pass Go.”

I thought about it. While I was at it, I might try writing, too. I’d always wanted to try writing drunk. I imagined it would free me from my crippling good-girl inhibitions.

I couldn’t though. I’d sworn off drinking nearly four years before, initially for Steve. I kept my vow of sobriety as I moved on to Bill, and then to Evan. How, oh how, pray tell, would these poor, poor men stay on the wagon without the support of little ole me? That right there is what kept me hooked. Look at how all-important I was to another human’s well being. What power I could have. All while appearing saintly. Trade that in for the occasional glass of wine? No way. This was much more intoxicating.

Except that the buzz never lasted long. In a matter of time, each boyfriend would return to drinking, and I’d feel like the ultimate failure. The relationship would bust apart, maybe for a while, maybe for good.

Evan and I went back and forth a few times. He had the hardest time of all staying sober, and I had the hardest time walking away from him. A hot, long-haired musician always surrounded by women, he also had difficulty keeping it in his pants. He reminded me of my grandfather, the original drunk in my life, alternately affectionate and icy, and unfaithful to my grandmother.

Pappa could put away a fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label a day.  I knew because I worked for him at his Seventh Avenue garmento firm. When my cousins heard I’d started working there, they joked, “What do you do, pour scotch all day?” Well, that was one of my jobs. It started at 10:30 a.m. He’d ask me to wash a glass, grab some ice, and pour some Johhny. I did that over and over until it was time to catch the train home. I knew that smooth, perfumey, malty smell so well. I had been breathing it in since I first sat on Pappa’s lap as a little girl. It simultaneously tantalized and lulled me, from the first.

Evan’s breath was infused with Vodka rather than Scotch, but it worked. My last go-round with him could have been avoided. I thought I had finally learned my lesson, and was ready to move on, not just from him, but from the Land of the Twelve Steppers. But he begged.

“I need to do this – I need to get sober for you,” he pleaded.

“But they say it never works when you get sober for someone,” I reasoned. I also instinctively knew he wasn’t ready, and doubted whether he ever would be. There were too many other women around him who were eager to do whatever he wanted in exchange for him making them feel important and powerful, too.

“Please.” He was serious. “You just have to promise you won’t leave me if I fall off the wagon. You have to stick around and help me back on.” It was the opposite of the frequently advised tough love, but I signed on anyway.

Things were great for a few weeks. Evan was so eager to try, and he’d replaced his fixation on alcohol with a fixation on me. He wrote songs about me, wrote me love letters, thanked me for having the courage to insist he go to meetings. I was higher than a kite, strung out on his complete adoration. It was so perfect.

But right on schedule, he fell. Hard. He’d never made it longer than a month, and we were rounding three weeks. Just in time, his last girlfriend, Melissa, sent him a Christmas card. He met her for a “friendly” dinner. He called me that night, and tried to hide his slurring, unsuccessfully.

“I can’t talk to you like this,” I said. “I have to get off.”

“But you promised you wouldn’t leave me if I fell. You’d stay and help me get up.”

And so I did. I went to Al-Anon, bristling as people whined. Evan was supposed to go to AA. When he stopped doing that, I started dragging him there myself, sitting with him through meetings. Then he’d sneak off. He always had to be somewhere. I knew where, although I didn’t want to know. He’d call from payphones, and the names of the bars they were situated in would come up on my caller I.D.

The drinking got worse. Now I was the enemy.

“At least Melissa will drink with me,” he argued on the phone one evening. “You’re. No. Fun.” He had this way of punctuating his word when he was sloshed, in what seemed like an effort not to seem sloshed. “If you’d just come with me to the bar…” He fell asleep mid-sentence.

Okay. I’d go with him to the bar. Maybe sitting there, sober, across from him, I could somehow appeal to him. And get him to go back to AA. And change his ways. And save his life! And save our love! Because I am just that awesome and powerful.

For a guy who clung to the mid-90s grunge look, Evan had weird taste in bars. He liked these shiny mid-town tourist traps on the ground floors of hotels that especially appealed to high-class hookers and their business-men-in-from-out-of-town clientele. One well-dressed flight attendant type came back with three different men in the course of an evening as I sat there and watched Evan down six pints of draught beer, each one followed by a shot of chilled Stoli.

I stared as he pounded, wondering what it felt like inside his brain. I was fascinated with the idea of being blissfully anesthetized, but not quite tempted to go there myself. I found myself torn between wanting to be fun like Melissa, and wanting to get serious and save him. One minute I was laughing at his stupid jokes, positioning myself just so to receive his sloppy, fragrant, Vodka-flavored kisses, and the next, I was crying, pleading, “When will you be ready to get sober again?”

“This is just a bender, babe,” he said holding me tight, alcohol fumes wafting out his mouth and off his skin, enveloping me, caressing me. “I just have to go all the way through it to get to the other side. Stay with me. We’ll get there.”

More drinking. More dragging him to meetings, after which he’d run off. Then came the confession.

He’d cheated.

I punched him in the stomach. I stopped taking his calls.

“What about me?!” He shouted into my answering machine.“I want to jump out the window and kill myself, and you won’t even pick up the phone. Would you even cry if I died?” Imagine that. With just one phone call, I could save his life. I was getting tired of being so important and powerful.

That didn’t stop me from going back and forth with him a few more times. The night he chose to stay at Melissa’s and drink instead of coming to see me, sober, it was over for me. Well, almost. First, I needed to see what all the fuss was about. I needed to know what he and Melissa felt when they were knocking back shots. It never looked fun from the outside, but if he kept wanting to do it so badly, there had to be something to it.

I went to Detour, the jazz bar across the street from my East Village tenement. I hadn’t had a vodka drink since my 18^th birthday, when a single screwdriver had yielded bed spins and a terrible hangover. But now I wanted vodka. I knew the smell. Now I wanted to know the taste. And, hey, this might be my chance to write drunk.

There was a woman singing old standards accompanied by a guitar and bass. I ordered a vodka martini. After four years of not a drop of alcohol, I sat at the bar and sipped it slowly. It went right to my head. I felt like there was a bubble on it. The edges on the sounds got softer. People seemed to be moving more slowly.

A man at the other end of the bar sent over another one for me. I smiled at him, not feeling the least bit flirtatious or amorous. This made people want each other? Sip. Sip. Sip. I felt…out of it. Removed. Numb. The appeal was lost on me.

I stumbled back across the street to my apartment. As I lay down on the couch, exhausted, I noticed my journal on the coffee table. This was my chance. Inhibitions be damned!

The next morning I woke with a crushing headache. The notebook was on the floor. I picked it up. There were only two lines:

“I drank vodka tonight,” I wrote. “I can’t feel my face.”

Sari Botton’s articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, The Village Voice, MORE, Marie Claire, Self, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and many other publications, as well as on WAMC radio and NPR. Her website is http://www.saribotton.com/and she blogs at www.rosendaleramblings.com

By Erin St. John Kelly

Late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday, my mother arrived at my house for dinner holding on hard to my stepfather’s arm, sporting a fresh, scabby shiner. She’d managed to fall up the stairs, slamming into the baluster of her staircase the night before. I nudged her towards a chair in my little kitchen as efficiently and subtly as I could, hoping to minimize her mobility and the possibility of another accident.

My mother sat at the head of the table, having a slur of a rant to no one in particular. Among my assembled friends and family, one of my sisters and her daughter sat quietly leaking tears at their places. My eldest daughter left the table after a short while and the rest of the children followed her. Their grandmother was scaring them during the appetizer and they opted for crackers and cheese in the next room instead. She was impenetrable, only vaguely resembling the person they’d known as their grandmother.

My brother James had died earlier that year. It was sudden, out of the blue, and far, far away from my mother’s bucolic college town. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye. She hadn’t seen his body. After he died she lamented that she never should have let him go. As if he’d asked, and as if he would have obeyed. She couldn’t relate to the distant place he’d died except through the story of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” because they too had died in Tupiza, Bolivia. James wasn’t robbing banks and he didn’t die in a shoot-out. He and his wife were backpacking around the world, doing good works, before they would settle down to raise a family. He died of altitude sickness in an Andean emergency room that had no oxygen mask. He came home as a box of ashes.

My mother was raised on an apple farm in Southern Quebec, the middle child of seven girls. She was the first ever in her family to go to college. She survived a bout with breast cancer, a stint in women’s prison for civil disobedience, and Woodstock in the rain, but it was her despair from James’ death that triggered her descent into raging alcoholism.

My mother was so drunk she smelled. She wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt day in and day out. She had once loved a martini – we called them garbage-tinis because she’d pretend it was good for her by adorning it with limp, brown vegetables culled from the drawers of the fridge, creating a stinky salad in a fancy glass. Now she was pared right down to gin, in a coffee mug, while lying in bed.

My mother has read all of Proust.  She has probably spent more time immersed in the matters of Congress, albeit via C-SPAN, than have most actual Members. As a matter of course, three televisions and at least one radio were on at all times, and two or three daily newspapers were ingested. When we were growing up she took us to rock concerts, peace rallies and hitchhiking through the Yukon.

Then, a cacophonous slide into nothing. The televisions were all on but she didn’t care about what was happening on them. She didn’t know what time of day it was– it was irrelevant. She was either in a rage, or on the verge of one.  She complained that she didn’t hear from us, her children, enough. We did call, but she didn’t remember having spoken to us. One winter my eight-year-old daughter realized that my mother was surprised to see her every time she walked past.  She said to me, “Mom, I am worried about Granny’s memory.”  Mom had provided me a tremendous opportunity to explain the nexus of martinis, mourning and memory.

My five remaining siblings and I felt helpless for more than a year to address her drinking, except among each other.  His death brought the revelation that the family had depended on James, the middle child, to be our emotional and cultural center. Now we had lost him, and it. He was so steadfast, earnest and good. He signed off all his emails from abroad with this Mark Twain quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

James was also a worry-wort. Be it concern for the global state of humanity or trying to eat healthier, he was on it. No one hated my mother’s drinking like James had.

I hadn’t planned to confront Mom for everyone’s Easter dinner.  I had planned to serve a specially ordered ham instead. I had been rolling around the need to deal with her in my mind, but hadn’t been able to form a real plan of how and when to do it. Turns out, there’s no good time for an intervention with your mother.

It started by accident. I sat next to her and suggested she eat something every now and again, maybe even drink a glass of water. I offered to get her one. She mumbled that she couldn’t, that I just didn’t understand how it felt to be her. She dropped the sickening bomb I knew she had, but didn’t think I had it in me to withstand. She didn’t save it up. It came out fast. “You haven’t lost a child,” she moaned. And everything froze.  All the chopping, washing, table-setting and chat ceased.

My voice shook and I paused. Then I continued, motivated by the eternal regret and sorrow that I’d experience if I let her die without trying to make her stop, just once.

“You haven’t lost a child.” It was what I feared she would say. I felt almost guilty for not having a dead child myself. That without one, I had no understanding and therefore no grounds to complain. “No, I haven’t,” I said. Then it came to me why I could confront her. “But I have lost a brother. And now I am losing my mother. And my children are losing their grandmother.” There was more that just tumbled out, but I can no longer remember what else I said. My mother sat quietly waiting for me to finish. “Well, dear, Mommy loves you very much, but now she has to go,” she said, as she put her hand on my shoulder to raise herself up from the table.

I know that it is completely irrational to feel like James’ death was a personal failure of mine, but there it is. I did. As the oldest child I had always felt a conflicted mix of power and responsibility. I fixed things. I adjudicated. I felt I had failed everyone by not bringing him back from Bolivia alive. At the funeral home in La Paz, I saw him for the last time through the glass window of a little blue coffin.  His shoulders were cramped against the wooden walls of a box built for a small Andean native – the biggest coffin his wife was able to find. I am haunted by his face with his lips pursed in the way they looked before he was going to say something that mattered to him. I couldn’t be so weak as to fail him and the family again, by letting Mom die a drunk.

At my desk on Monday, I wrote my mother an email to restate in print what I’d said at Easter dinner – I was afraid that my spoken words wouldn’t stick. I didn’t know how else to try to get through. I hoped that she would be able to process it, staring at the screen in her own time. In my email I begged her to stop, to take some pity on us – the survivors – her children and her grandchildren. Must we watch her kill herself? And then I typed what I had been unable to say: was the death of one of us worth more than the other five of us alive?

I sent a copy of my email to my siblings right after sending it to my mother. I wanted them to be aware of what I’d done, the possible horrors I’d unleashed. I waited with a panicky, shiny sense of dread for reaction – from them and from her.

Two days later, I was sitting at my desk when an email gently floated across my computer screen that simply said, “You’re right. I quit.” Oh my God, it’s a suicide note I thought, and I dialed the phone, to see if I could stop her or if it was too late. There she was on the other end of the phone. I was at work so I couldn’t say much except, “Really? What can I do to help?”

I thought rehab. “Let me try it my way,” my mother said. “If that doesn’t work then I promise to do it your way,” she said. She and my stepfather joined AA.

It’s been more than a year. She showers. She drinks seltzer and fruit juice spritzers in wine glasses. She goes to weekly AA meetings. A former reporter, she listens intently to other people’s tales of horror and redemption. And she thanks me all the time for writing the note. “I want to be sober until the day that I die,” she announced last summer. I believe her. My mother is nothing if not a zealous participator, a whole-hearted committer to things. She’s recommenced being her old quirky self, protesting for peace in front of the post office, glutting herself on news and stuffing her grandchildren full of snacks.

And now, even her sense of humor is reviving. On Mother’s Day this year she took me and two of my sisters out for dinner. She explained it was to make up for whatever she’d done wrong during our entire lives. She was practicing an AA step, and we had about an hour. We sipped delicious, unembellished tap water and I asked her what the secret element to her resolve was. “Maternal instinct,” she said. “I don’t want to worry the children. It’s not the way it’s supposed be.”

Erin St. John Kelly is the eldest of the eight children from her parents’ many marriages. She and her husband have two daughters. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York for almost 20 years. The writing she is most proud of has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Brain Child Magazine and on WBFO, the Buffalo NPR station. This essay originally appeared in “Knowing Pains,” an anthology that is a fundraiser for a breast cancer non-profit (http://www.knowingpains.com/about.html“)

By Becky Sherrick Harks

I am an adult child of two alcoholics, and although there are nifty acronyms used to refer to us, I prefer my real name: Becky. The Internet knows me as Aunt Becky and I blog over at a seemingly incongruently named site: “Mommy Wants Vodka.” Perhaps you have heard of me, mixed into articles about Diane Schuler, the lady who killed her kids, bashing me for being a Cocktail Mom.

My blog was named as a tongue-in-cheek joke, which is easily lost in the negativity swirling about the tragedy. Perhaps on paper (or computer screen) this is how I sound: like a lousy drunk who is unfortunately a mother. When, you know, I can sober up enough to actually, you know, parent my children. I hate to shatter expectations to those looking for a quick target to let their anger at alcoholics out on, but I am not a drunk. Humor–tasteless to you, perhaps–is the way that I cope.

In reading up on the other issues facing my cohorts, my fellow children of alcoholics–who also, presumably, have names–I think that in spite of the flack that I get, humor is the far healthier way to handle it. I’ve somehow, by the grace of God, perhaps, been able to avoid many of the nastier lasting effects of my childhood. I am not shy, I do not suffer from low self esteem, and I don’t obsessively hoard china cat figurines.

I do have anxiety and guilt, and I frequently blame myself for things that never had anything to do with me. I cannot trust even my husband with certain things, not because he wouldn’t be unfailingly kind, but because it is ingrained in me to not trust other people.

For all of the controversy surrounding me on The Internet, on the sites that bash me, nothing–NOTHING–can compare to what swirls within me. Every day, every single day that I wake up, I wonder if today will be the day that it hits. We adult children of alcoholics are four times more likely than the general population to develop issues with substance abuse. FOUR TIMES.

For someone like me, who has not one, but two alcoholic parents, this number must be infinitesimally higher. So I wait. Somewhat impatiently, I wait for the day when I will feel the need to become staggeringly drunk and fall down the stairs. Or take to my bed, weeping at what has become of me.

It’s exhausting, this waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But I don’t think that drinking is Of The Devil, no matter how much I hate the smell of scotch and the scent memories that live on, well beyond their lifespan. While I do not recall the last time I had a drink, I have had one and I will continue to have them now and again. The liquor cabinet is well-stocked at my house, and always has been. I’ve not felt the urge to drink myself to obliteration in at least five years and I don’t longingly wait for a cocktail at the end of a long day. Frankly, for as uncool as I will no doubt paint myself now, forever banned from the tattoo-biker moms, I’d be horrified to drink at a playdate.

So I sit and I wait, and while I do this, I build a life for myself: I’m a mother, a writer, a wife and a friend. A daughter. A sister. A niece and a cousin.

My name is Becky, and I am not an alcoholic.

Becky Sherrick Harks is an overachieving nurse who retired from the profession after an admirable 3 months. She stays home now, writing, raising kids and making mischief. She blogs at Mommy Wants Vodka (http://www.mommywantsvodka.com) pretty much every day that ends in “day.”

I’m Leah Odze Epstein, and I am a blogger. Actually, I’m co-editor of Drinking Diaries, and this is my first official off-the-cuff blog post, spurred on by a reader who threw down the gauntlet and said, “Why don’t these bloggers just BLOG?” Hmmm. Good question.

Last night, when I couldn’t sleep (probably because of an overloaded back-to-school schedule, as the mother of three kids), I was thinking about how my mom, a recovered alcoholic who has been sober for over 30 years, explained to me that alcoholism was a disease, and alcohol was not the only cause. It is a disease of the emotions as well as a chemical disease (involving blood sugar issues, the body’s ability to metabolize alcoholic, etc.). She always said to me, “You don’t have the personality for it,” which somehow made me feel better.

Over the years, I’ve debated many people on the disease front–people who don’t believe alcoholism is as much a disease, but a failure of will or a lifestyle choice. It’s confusing, because so-called high functioning alcoholics throw a wrench in the works–can’t everyone just cut down? Isn’t it just a question of moderation and self-control?

For alcoholics, it’s not that easy. My mother had to go through detox–and after that, she was told she should never drink again because she is allergic to alcohol, and she hasn’t.

I would argue that my mother’s definition is true: an alcoholic is someone who is allergic to alcohol, and should never drink again. Just as my husband and daughter have celiac disease, and their bodies cannot tolerate wheat or gluten-containing products, some people have an allergy to alcohol. I think a distinction needs to be made between alcoholics and heavy drinkers, and that the label high-functioning alcoholic can be misleading. Most alcoholics eventually hit rock bottom. Many people can benefit from moderation management, I am sure, but they are probably not alcoholics.

I’m not saying that alcoholics should not make amends to the people they hurt, using their “disease” as an excuse. I’m just arguing for  increased understanding of the distinction between heavy drinking, a drinking problem and the disease of alcoholism.

What do you think, readers? What is your definition of an alcoholic?