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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
When the founder of the "alcohol in moderation" movement pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide last week, it was a sobering reminder that there's no alternative to quitting cold turkey.
Jul 14, 2000 | Every evening, in thousands of church basements in hundreds of cities, clusters of us sit in rows of metal folding chairs and listen to a fellow alcoholic tell his or her story. The details always vary: Some of us are rich, some poor; some were at the peak of our careers when we first came to Alcoholics Anonymous, some homeless and unemployable; some of us looked shiny and bright on the outside, some were in tatters.
But for all the external differences, the central narrative in these stories is the same, identical threads of desperation and grace woven through each. Perhaps you woke up in a hospital, unable to remember the final moments before your car careened off the road. Perhaps you lost your job, or your spouse, or your kids. Perhaps (and this is just as common) nothing at all earth-shattering occurred -- there was no tangible turning point, no financial ruin, no injury or loss of life -- but you woke up one morning and could no longer bear your own life, the corroded sense of self and dignity and hope that had come to define it.
In the common parlance, these moments are known as "hitting bottom," and they are exquisitely agonizing affairs, portraits in anguish: The jig is up, all systems failed, it's over. You peer into the future and realize that your relationship with alcohol -- which feels like your lifeblood, as vital as air, your primary drive and need and love -- has got to end.
With rare exceptions, these are also intensely private affairs, personal reckonings that take place in the darkest corners of the heart and soul. AA members may understand them intimately -- we know how scary it is to lose control over drinking and how unfathomable the prospect of living without it can be -- but even we tend to see only the tail end of the process: the drinker who's just surrendered, who's shown up at a meeting for the first time, who's trembling through the first week or day or hour of abstinence. The moments prior to that, the days or weeks or years that lead to the end, are generally solitary and dark and internal, a private hell that's largely invisible to the wider world.
Last week, when Audrey Kishline pled guilty to two counts of vehicular homicide, she gave that brand of hell a public face; an alcoholic's hidden agony was rendered extraordinarily and grotesquely visible. I first heard word about Kishline, who has made a career out of teaching drinkers to curb their consumption, an hour or so after coming home from an AA meeting. I froze in my kitchen: The news had such an eerie and familiar ring, such an "it could have been me" feel, and it made me cringe. This is a classic alcoholic crash landing, the kind of story that makes you realize how lethal alcoholism is and how precarious sobriety can be.
The irony here, of course, is 150-proof. Kishline, now 43, is the very outspoken founder of Moderation Management, a self-help treatment program that purports to help "problem drinkers" drink responsibly. Challenging most of the central tenets of alcohol treatment in the U.S., her view offered a tantalizing set of possibilities: Alcohol abusers, she suggested, could be taught to cut down on their drinking without resorting to total abstinence. Recovering alcoholics might be able to return to drinking at moderate (and therefore safe) levels, and budding alcoholics might be able to control their consumption before it got out of hand. Kishline, who clearly knew her own way around a liquor store, founded her program in 1993 and published a book -- "Moderate Drinking: The New Option for Problem Drinkers" -- a year later. An advertisement for the book said: "Based on her own unsatisfactory experience with total abstinence-based programs, Kishline offers inspiration and a step-by-step program to help individuals avoid the kind of drinking that detrimentally affects their lives."
