The End of My Addiction

I was bingeing once more.
    I had been through the rehab-relapse cycle four times now and I saw the pattern. The break from normal stresses in rehab induced calm and encouraged hope that the worst was over. But rehab was not the real world. Once I was back in a normal environment, the lack of a cure for alcoholism and an effective medication for my preexisting anxiety tripped me up sooner or later, usually sooner.
    Celebrities who go on television after rehab with shining eyes and talk about their spiritual awakenings and newfound commitment to sobriety are not speaking falsely. They are simply describing the genuine experience they had in rehab. They have indeed found inner peace, as I had in each of my rehab stays. But it is a fragile peace, and strong emotion, positive or negative, can trigger the unrest of a chronic dysphoria, and all one craves is relief from it.
    As I’ve said, the average celebrity can simply afford more rehab than the average noncelebrity. Even at High Watch Farm rather than Clear Spring rates, my money would not last long if I kept going into rehab. At the same time, if I could not periodically dry out thoroughly in rehab, my body would not last long, either.
    According to my physicians, I had a robust constitution. It had taken four men to hold me down when I was admitted to New York Hospital with seizures. Several times in emergency rooms and hospital detox wards, doctors or nurses told me that my blood alcohol level was so high when I was admitted that it was a miracle I was still alive. Sooner or later, though, my luck was bound to run out.
    At one hospital, I ran into a nurse I secretly knew from AA. When it was time to go home, she gave me a lift. She offered to take me to a meeting, but I told her I wanted to go home. She knew why.
    “Olivier,” she said, “with your luck, you won’t die easily.”
    “What?!”
    “You’re going to be much more miserable. You’ll be homeless. You’ll break god knows what.”
    I said, “If you want to scare me, you’ve succeeded. But I can’t go to a meeting now. I’m not ready.”
    As I took stock of my situation after my first post–High Watch Farm binge, the thought nagged at me that what I was hearing from my physicians and in rehab must be medically incomplete. Recovery from addiction could not solely be a question of spiritual awareness, moral virtue, and willpower. There had to be a biological component that could be treated medically. That left me exactly where I was when my alcoholism developed. All I could do was hold on and hope for a cure.

4. Doing Great and Feeling Awful
    WITH HIGH WATCH FARM behind me, I settled into a routine of debilitating binges punctuated by grueling abstinence. In the morning, except in the midst of a binge, I attended the outpatient alcoholism program at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital. The program was a by now familiar mix of classes in coping skills, group therapy, and AA meetings. When the program finished at noon, I went for lunch to a coffee shop where I could watch the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal play itself out on CNN. In the afternoon and evening, I went to the gym and to AA meetings, called my sponsor, AA contacts, and friends, and fought the craving for alcohol that increased as the hours passed.
    During this time I had two sorts of conversations with the counselors in the outpatient program at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt and my own physicians. If I drank, they asked, “Why do you think you relapsed this time?” I never had an answer that satisfied them or me. In hindsight there was no satisfactory answer. The question only makes sense if alcoholism is not a biological disease in any way but strictly a spiritual problem. It is like asking the cancer patient, “Why did your cancer come back? Did you adopt a negative attitude?”
    At the time, however, the question shamed me and deepened my self-loathing for my inability to stop drinking. If I suggested that my fundamental problem was anxiety, both physicians and counselors said, “If you stop drinking, your anxiety will disappear.”
    On the other hand, if I had achieved a few days or a week or two of sobriety, the physicians and counselors said, “You’re doing great.”
    And I said, “But I feel awful.”
    The truth was that despite its toxicity, nothing made me feel as well as alcohol. It calmed my anxiety and gave me a sense of self-esteem that I could not otherwise achieve. My interactions with other alcoholics in AA and