Drink_The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

by Ann Dowsett Johnston

  In his response, Jung said that Roland H.’s “craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” He writes: “You see, ‘alcohol’ in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula, therefore, is spiritus contra spiritum.”

  As Jungian Marion Woodman puts it, Jung “recognized the confusion between physical and spiritual thirst.”

  Walk into any beginners’ room of AA and you’ll bump into God talk. Step Two? “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Step Three: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” (And yes, it’s always a “him.”) There’s one “ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself.”

  As Wilson wrote in 1961, the phrase “God as we understand Him” is “perhaps the most important expression to be found in our whole AA vocabulary. Within the compass of these five significant words there can be included every kind and degree of faith, together with the positive assurance that each of us may choose his own.”

  What is my faith? Why does spirituality work? Try describing air or water. This is a difficult one.

  The best I can do is this: My faith sustains me. It feels like a poultice on my heart. I take the largest comfort in practicing Vipassana meditation, and I often pray to a creative force of goodness. I take solace in Woodman’s words when she writes: “We live in a predominately Christian culture which has lost its living connection to the symbolism of wafer and wine. Lacking spiritual sustenance there is a genuine hunger and thirst. The archetypal structure behind the wafer and wine is slowly giving way to a new configuration, but we are in chaos during the transition. That chaos breeds loneliness, fear and alienation.”

  Amen.

  And to battle that loneliness, fear, and alienation, so many of us are cobbling together our own microsystems of something that sustains us. If it’s true that we are all in transition—and I believe we are—my own faith is still under construction. In my search for a deeper understanding, I turn to a variety of writers for guidance: the Jungians Woodman and Robert Johnson and Marie-Louise von Franz; the Buddhists Pema Chödrön, Jack Kornfield, and Thich Nhat Hanh, among many others: Annie Dillard, the poets. It’s a wide-ranging search. As I said, it’s a work in progress.

  I cannot explain what happened to me on November 3, 2008, when I got down on my knees. But I know there was a huge internal shift. I was so broken by that point—emotionally and spiritually—that my soul just cried uncle. And for the next two years, my faith evolved—it’s still evolving.

  At first, I just prayed to stay sober, and to survive. I prayed for some answer to this simple question: why do I need relief from consciousness—or self-consciousness? Why was it a relief to be tipsy, or worse? Why did I always wake with a hangover untroubled, unknotted, and serene? Yes, it’s true. And that’s how it felt, almost each and every time, until midday. Then would come the slump of dismay. By six o’clock I could have a drink, and the process would begin again. By the time I quit, I was exhausted by the journey and all my prayers were about survival.

  When I was in rehab, there was a moment near the end when the director came to speak to us as a group, about our drinking and our return to real life. He addressed us as you would small children who had committed a minor misdemeanor—like the time my sister and I ate the backs off all the Easter cupcakes Mum had been hiding in the cupboard. That sort of mistake—not the “you-fucked-up-your-entire-life” sort. The director advised us to make our beds each day, to join a group and keep our calendars full. Faith was not part of the discussion.

  Actually, in rehab, I felt like one of those cupcakes: from the front, I looked whole; but from the back, I was gnawed apart. In our group, we would struggle to feign confidence. But alone? We were chastened, terrified souls, so uncertain of our futures that we wept like babies. All of us had made mistakes. All of us had suffered at the hands of others. Once in a while, someone would start to cry at mealtime and have to leave the table.

  In rehab, I needed only marginal faith: that I was doing the right thing, making a 180-degree turn; hanging in, in the holding tank. I woke each morning, pressed play, and listened to Bach’s “Sleepers, Awake.” Did I pray? I know I did—even if, at times, it felt like I was just playacting. (I didn’t, as Jake’s sister Babe once said, believe in “scaffolding”: a ladder up to heaven.) I meditated on a daily basis. And I sampled the full banquet of recovery group options: Rational Recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous—and Women for Sobriety, a group I led.

  Life was raw—but not half as raw as it would be once I returned home, where I felt like a freshly peeled carrot, exposed and glistening. Once home, I found my energy started to play hide-and-seek on me, and depression dug in. I struggled with getting down on my knees. I struggled with a God that would allow so much pain and grief.

  On those early dark days, one of my few comforts was reading. Wilfrid Sheed’s recovery memoir, In Love with Daylight, was a favorite. Sheed, who suffered from depression as well, wrote, “Giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls.” He also said, “Booze is like an exit door painted on the wall for which alcoholics and other optimists manage to fall every time.” That helped me stay sober. Like me, Sheed had a very tough early sobriety. For him, AA was little comfort—a place where “parrots” lectured to “sheep,” and people talked “in bumper stickers.”

  I also loved E. B. White’s writing, in which he speaks of the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.” Once in a while, I would catch a glimpse of those flashy tail feathers, and vow to keep going. White gave me hope, and so too did Anne Lamott. I devoured her fabulous essay “Thirst,” in which she gets sober and lets “a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. . . . It turned out that there were not going to be any loopholes. The people who seemed to find loopholes were showing signs of failure; for instance, they were shooting themselves in the head.”

  And so I too let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. In doing so, I had to dig a lot deeper when it came to faith. I had to excavate the very foundation of my belief system, and rebuild it anew. On and off, the first eighteen months of sobriety were strenuous and difficult: my depression and anxiety just got worse. And then things turned hellish in the extreme: Jake broke up with me on the phone, one Monday morning, and I was stripped to my naked core. I was heartbroken with life, and solace was nowhere to be found.

  From that day on, I had no choice but to rebuild. Within three weeks, I did another “hair-shirt holiday”: I went into the woods and did a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat. One breath at a time, I began to reconstruct my life, one that looks totally unlike the one that came before. Day by day, month by month, I began to shape a life where I have a writing voice, where I am depression-free and happy and sober. Missing Jake still, daily. But fervently, deeply alive and thriving.

  I did not do all of this alone. I had the help of several key friends—a group I call “the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—and a superb doctor. Add to this months of effort and trust and, yes, faith. Faith that there would be better chapters ahead, faith in the goodness of people, faith in the goodness of my own bruised heart. Like Carol Shields, I believe that goodness is the biggest part of our human conversation.

  And I have faith in a God of my understanding. I pray for a soft heart. My prayers seemed to be answered: what began as a supplicant process, down on my knees, has evolved into a dialogue.

  I know that I have recovered my true self. That’s the greatest gift of sobriety: the journey inward—endlessly challenging, rewarding, and profound. More often than not, I feel at peace in my own skin.

  A major part of
my evolution has taken place in reading and in conversation with others—an extended inquiry into what sustains them. For this book, I set out on a small quest: to speak to four people who had helped shape my own belief system. One of the sober alcoholics who helped me stay sober is Claire, a corporate lawyer in her early forties. I want to know, how did she wrestle with the God thing? She invites me to her colorful midtown Toronto apartment on a Friday night, a place where we can be private. Sitting in her living room, I see an easel with a half-finished canvas in the adjoining dining room, paints lined up across the table. Everywhere there are books and photographs, evidence of a life fully lived. In the past year Claire has hiked in Bali; in the past week, she has traveled to Mexico. But tonight, her full concentration is on the question at hand.

  She settles back into the couch, collects herself, preparing her case. When she speaks, she speaks in paragraphs—perfectly formed. “When I got to the point where I was ready to ask for help, I was broken on many levels. Physically, I was sick from alcohol. Mentally, I was paranoid and my perspective was dramatically off. Emotionally? I lived in constant fear and anxiety and was deeply sad—it was like a soul sickness. My spirit was broken. I had lost my desire to live. I had no self-respect. At the end, I was trying to kill myself—that’s what the drinking was: a slow death. I tried to commit suicide once, but I wasn’t successful. But I could do it slowly.

  “In terms of healing, the physical was the easiest part: I slept well, ate better, it just took time. The mental and emotional and spiritual are intertwined, and I’m still working on my recovery in those areas. I don’t feel alone. I have a concept of a creative force—much bigger than me, that some people call God. That has given me great comfort because there are places that we go emotionally that no one else can come with us. In those moments, when I am afraid or my confidence is low, that’s what I lean on. In the past, I leaned on alcohol. Therefore, when I hear Carl Jung’s letter to Bill Wilson, that’s what I think of: the concept of a loving creator has replaced alcohol as a solution.

  “And it’s not just the concept of God, but living life according to spiritual principles. I have a sense of purpose and a sense that I belong. Those feelings of not belonging still return—it’s not like I got sober, found God, and all of a sudden had a full sense of purpose. I still have times when I am discouraged. In early recovery, I was full of anxiety every day. I had panic attacks. Now, things aren’t so overwhelming.”

  And God? “I was raised a Catholic, and I had a very strong sense of a Christian God—which at no time did I reject. I just simply forgot: I lived my life.” She smiles, and when she does, she looks like the French movie star Juliette Binoche. “As I started to drink more, I simply didn’t develop that relationship. I didn’t believe that God would come down and fix me, so I didn’t look up.” She grins at her own foolishness. “The fellowship was my higher power—all the other people who had recovered. It gave me hope, and that was enough to move forward. Within time, I started to thaw, and things got clearer. I started to see something at work in the rooms of recovery that I could not explain—and it was the start of a belief in a higher power.

  “I don’t know when I started believing in God. I just started praying down on my knees.” She smiles and leans back. “It happened so quietly. Faith is fundamental to my recovery.” She has argued her case, and I am won over.

  One of the great advantages of being a writer is the ability to phone someone you deeply admire—a stranger—and ask if you can meet. In early sobriety, I found A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps deeply liberating. Stephanie Covington’s generous, flexible attitude and open heart won me over. So I asked if I could visit her at her home just outside San Diego, to talk about spirituality and her own voyage of recovery.

  Enter Covington’s private perch above the ocean in Del Mar and you are transported into an elegant, rarefied world, with a profoundly Eastern influence. There is folk art, Buddhist art, and artifacts from around the world. More than one figure of the goddess of compassion—Quan Yin—welcomes you.

  And of course, there is Covington. She greets me with a warm embrace, and there is deep connection in those piercing blue eyes. It is not the first time we have met. I spent some time with her at an addiction conference two summers ago when she gave an excellent presentation on trauma. But there is something essential about entering a person’s private haven. I am unprepared for the beauty, the care with which each room has been shaped. This is a home that has been loved into being, and it radiates peace.

  This is a treat: I know that three hours in Covington’s company will be enlightening. She has an enormous perspective on all things related to women and addiction. When I arrive, the kettle is on the boil. Within ten minutes we are nestled on her couch, drinking delicate Thai blue tea, something she discovered in Paris with her daughter. When I ask her about the relationship between spirituality and recovery, her eyes are knowing, her voice soft and certain. “Addiction attempts to fill a spiritual void—and of course, it doesn’t work. Finding spirituality is important for sustained recovery. At the core of recovery is the spiritual piece.”

  Covington, who has been sober for thirty-four years, is concerned that our culture is fostering an addicted society. “We are being taught to want more: our society supports compulsive behavior—overeating, overshopping. We had the Age of Repression, the Age of Anxiety, and now the Age of Compulsivity, where some is not enough and more isn’t better. The spiritual part is necessary for balance, and balance can be a lifelong struggle.”

  What prompted her own search for balance, more than three decades ago? “The overwhelming majority of women in recovery are trauma survivors—but I am not one of them.” When Covington faced her own alcohol issue, she was wearing another skin: wife of a Wall Street investment banker, working in the antiques and design business, playing tennis and bridge, the mother of a young son and daughter. Before she had graduated from college, she told two people she might be an alcoholic—“I could drink a lot, but I always got sick.” In her early years as a parent, her drinking progressed. One night she had a fall and a blackout. “I got up the next morning and I had a gash across my face—and I didn’t know how I got it.” She called AA. She says: “Part of it was my eleven-year-old son’s demonstration of what I had looked like, and it was humiliating; I was clutching at chairs as I tried to stay standing. But when I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, I didn’t go to stop—I thought there was going to be a better way to drink—I went there to learn how to drink less!”

  One month into her recovery, she “felt free. I felt lighter. Euphoria would be too strong, but the monkey was off my back. And I thought: how can I give this sense of possibility to one other woman?”

  In recovery, Covington began a total shift in her life. Alcoholics Anonymous advises that you make no changes for the first year. “I remember saying: ‘If I stay sober, I can look after my children and leave within a year.’” Leave she did: someone came back into her life and she returned to her home state of California. Ready to work in the addiction field, she didn’t have enough sobriety to do so. What she did have was a master’s in social work from Columbia University, so she focused on getting a Ph.D. in addiction and the psychology of women. Covington has been working in addictions ever since, becoming a leading specialist in trauma and women’s recovery. “The way I am today is not who I was,” she says, with distinct modesty. “I believe every powerful life experience stays with us—good and bad—and that’s why we say ‘recovering,’ not ‘recovered.’ My addiction was the best gift of my life: it’s the thing that shook me and made me wake up—it got me conscious. I am very grateful. I think if I hadn’t got into recovery, I’d be dead. I’d periodically think about suicide—but I had children.”

  One of her major achievements has been her contribution to the understanding of the role of trauma in women’s addiction. Another major contribution is A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps, which has sold more than four hundred thousand copies worl
dwide and has been translated into several languages. “At the end of the eighties, things were written, saying the Twelve Steps weren’t good for women because of the first step and its reference to powerlessness: ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—and that our lives had become unmanageable.’ One young woman told me that the Big Book must be about two hundred years old. A lot of professionals thought AA was crap, a cult. What motivated me was working with clients who were having trouble going to meetings because of the language—and my own irritation with sexist and reductionist language.”

  She turned to thirteen women, including “four radical feminists who had used the Twelve Steps in a way that was not in conflict with their values.” One was a professor emerita, a specialist in feminist ethics, who said: “The power of this program is in the spirit beneath the words.” Their voices are woven throughout the book, along with Covington’s very reassuring interpretation of recovery: “This is what it’s about: integrating inner and outer, and thereby creating integrity.”

  The book has several references to Covington’s “mother guilt.” “I was a distant stranger to my kids because I was lost in an alcoholic fog,” she writes, bravely. “When I became sober, it was painful to see how alienated we were from each other. I hadn’t been available to them, and I hardly knew them. Children need attunement and a sense of attachment—and I didn’t have the capacity. First, it’s sad: but what are you going to do about it? This is where living amends come in. This means learning to be more present. I am a better mother today than I was when they were young. I have learned to focus on them and become attuned.”

  How do we heal? “We’re all born with innate qualities and characteristics, and then things happen to undermine or cloud them. Addiction overshadows and impacts everything about the inner self—our thoughts, our beliefs, our values.