What were the defining moments that got Karin to stop? One night her teenage daughter called home around 1 a.m., asking for a ride. “She was stuck at a party she didn’t want to be at,” says Karin. “Neither of us heard the phone. I thought she was in her bed because I was drunk.” Soon after, her daughter got drunk at a Christmas party and was sent to the emergency room. Karin was too inebriated to drive to the hospital. A neighbor pitched in, ferrying Karin to the ER. “I didn’t know how to talk to my daughter about this,” says Karin. “I was so full of shame and remorse.”
Finally, her son confronted her about her drinking. Arriving home with a gang of his friends, he found her slurring. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Next time, try to be sober when I bring friends home.” Says Karin, now six years sober, “That was it. I was done.
“For a while, I was very depressed. I thought I would take my life—I could take as much vodka as I could carry, and some pills, and crash my car.” Instead she joined AA, quit her corporate job, and began a consulting company of her own. “At first there was a lot of relief. I was freed from the obsession of drinking. Then there was a lot of growth: I battled my depression, saw a therapist, and began to find my sea legs in sobriety. Today, I am grateful to feel.”
Occasionally she will take a moment to have a look at the piece of paper she keeps in her top drawer: the one where she made herself write out one hundred times, “I will only have two glasses of wine tonight.” There was a time when she thought that would keep her safe. It never did.
Most of all, she is sober enough to tackle the key issue of sexual abuse, and how it derailed her, and still derails her. “What sobriety has meant is that I am able to look at the past, confront it, and try to make my peace with it. Sobriety paves the way for healing.”
Beata Klimek’s history has no sexual abuse, but there is trauma just the same—and a history of using alcohol to numb. “You want to know about my drinking?” says the clear-eyed Klimek. “I lost my friends, my children, my mind. I did not want to be.”
To me, this forty-six-year-old is remarkable: a woman willing to tell her story with unflinching candor, name included. A mother of two, comfortable sharing the details of her serious alcohol abuse, her recovery, and her life in the aftermath. This, I discover in my years of research, is exceptionally rare.
Born in Warsaw to an unwed female lawyer, Klimek is very clear on how her mother felt about her from birth: “I was a mistake.” When she was very young, she was sent two hundred miles away to live with her grandparents. In six years, her mother came to visit three times—visits Klimek cannot remember. It was a happy time for her, living in a small village with a grandmother who loved her.
When Klimek was six, her mother came to fetch her. It was an unhappy turn of events: “My mother was a prosecutor, at home and at work. She was very critical, bitter, and judgmental. She never connected with me. There was a lot of emotional abuse.”
New to Warsaw, Klimek pretended she was sick “all the time” to avoid going to school, where she was bullied and teased for being “fatherless.” Her mother sent her to a sanatorium for six months. Klimek shakes her head, incredulous. “What kind of mother sends a young child away like that?”
In high school she played volleyball and was popular. But in her late teens she tried to commit suicide twice, ending up in the hospital. “It was really a cry for help—I didn’t want to die.” Her mother responded by taking away her phone privileges, forbidding her to see friends.
Throughout her childhood, Klimek saw her father rarely, but she loved him. He lived with his mother, with whom he had escaped the concentration camps. “He was an amazing, loving man,” says Klimek. “He nursed his own mother for ten years when she had Alzheimer’s.”
As soon as she could, Klimek left home, heading off to university to study psychology for three years. When her studies were finished, she emigrated to Canada to marry, and she was soon pregnant. But by the time her son, Jacob, was eight months old, Klimek found herself on her own, a single mother working two jobs and taking English classes. Over five years she managed to put a life together. “I don’t know how I did it,” she says, “but I was the happiest I had ever been. I had my own car, my own apartment, a leather sofa, and my son. I was independent and I was at the top of the world.”
Eventually she met a widower with a young daughter; he was a doctor. “I wasn’t attracted at first,” she says, “but he grew on me. He was very intelligent. I got pregnant with my daughter, Caroline, but I wasn’t ready for it. That’s when ten years of hell began.”
At thirty-seven, she began to drink heavily. “It started with a glass of red wine just to relax,” says Klimek. “I was a doctor’s wife, and I was more lonely than I’ve ever been. We had club memberships, children in private school, everything I had ever dreamed of, but I was very unhappy. I felt trapped. My husband was critical and emotionally abusive like my mother—not loving. I married my mum. That’s life: we look for something we recognize.”
Klimek started to drink wine in the afternoon. “The wine helped me to unwind,” she says. “And then it progressed—two glasses turned into three. I tried cocaine, but alcohol was the best because it killed my feelings.”
Still, she was unprepared when her husband left her for his secretary. When their ten-year marriage fell apart, she fell apart as well. Now there were bills she could not pay. She went to Poland to say good-bye to her grandmother, who was ill, and her father, who had stomach cancer. Both died within six months of each other. She returned to Canada “broken.” Says Klimek: “I had the shakes in the morning. Instead of coffee, I’d have a shot of vodka. I was still fooling some people, but not the family. I was a complete mess. My daughter was eleven and decided to move in with her father.
“I had a nervous breakdown. My way of dealing with it was to drink. I had alcohol hidden everywhere in the house. It was a medicine for me: to knock myself out. I wanted to disappear, to not feel, not think. I tried to drink myself to death. If I had to scream out all the things that make me sad, I would be screaming for days. So? I’d have another drink. I was looking for numbing, to knock myself out.”
Ultimately, Klimek found her way to Toronto’s Jean Tweed Centre, where she completed three weeks of an outpatient program. That experience convinced her to enter a treatment center, where she spent three months in an intensive program. Today she is reconciled with her children: her grown son sees her regularly and her teenage daughter lives with her. Still, her daughter gets antsy if Klimek has to go to the liquor store to buy something for an event. “This is a whole-family disease,” she says. “Everyone suffers—especially if it is the mother.”
Klimek has been sober for more than five years. Of the seven women she met in treatment, only she can make that claim. One who was a successful real estate agent is now a prostitute. Two are dead—including one who had a corporate job. Says Klimek: “You have to remember: this can be fatal.”
8.
Self-Medication
MOOD DISORDERS AND ALCOHOL: A SEDUCTIVE COMBINATION
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
—RUMI
Winter of 2002
I have decided to work on this riddle of depression by writing about it. I have sold my editors a story on depression and suicide. I have interviewed every expert I can find: endless questions, of which I never tire. I am learning a lot. I have found two willing families, both who have sons who suffered and took their own lives. The story is scheduled as a cover story at the magazine. But every time I go to write it, I freeze. My own depression deepens. I am stalled. First for voice, second for delivery. My drinking increases.
Spring of
2005
My depression has become debilitating. I am having lunch with my wise friend Gillian. Mid-meal, I can feel the elevator plummet down. “What just happened?” she asks. “The elevator just hit the basement floor,” I say. “It happens all the time.” “You need to see a doctor.” With her help, I see a psychiatrist within two days. My first experience with an antidepressant: Effexor.
The Houseboat, Summer of 2005
Four weeks into taking my first antidepressants, and I am losing weight at a remarkable rate. This pleases me. This pleases Jake, who is snapping my portrait daily. On a hot summer day, chopping down trees on the land he has purchased, we are surrounded by so-called sword-flies—nasty little demons that attack every available spot of bare skin. I can feel them through my thin blue jeans. “Baby, jump in the water—they won’t get us there!” says Jake. We strip fast, and I hear: snap—Jake has caught my naked back as I prepare to dive into the cool Winnipeg River.
I am revving. I need very little sleep. My sister says: “I’ve never seen you like this.” She looks concerned as I head out with an axe, armed to clear a path in the north woods. My psychiatrist says: “If you get any healthier, I fear for the forests of Canada.”
I like this new energy. I begin to drink more: these pills make me rev. I can feel it in my brain. At night, I pour myself a second scotch when Jake is nursing his first. “Go easy, baby,” says Jake. “I never want us to get to the point where you can’t have a couple of drinks with me.” My heart does a little lurch, but I choose to ignore it. I settle down beside him in the darkened night, and take a sip.
Christmas of 2005
I have hit my stride. I am finally depression-free. The suicide story has been published. The annual university cover story has been written. I have done 120 media interviews. I have been named a new vice principal of McGill University and am planning a move to Montreal in the new year. All things are possible. Only my doctor disapproves: “It is too early for you to move away from me. You have been in a very deep depression. Something is not right.”
I like him a lot, but I think he is being sentimental. I ignore his words.
All of a sudden, when I least expect it, I find myself having too much to drink. An aid has become a habit.
Long before I decided to fill a prescription for antidepressants, I drank to alleviate the pain of depression. And once I did fill that prescription, I drank to tamp down an incurable, endless revving, and sleeplessness that wouldn’t quit. Antidepressants did this to me, at least in the early months. Or maybe it was menopause: they coincided. I would pace the halls at night, finally falling asleep past 3 a.m. Once in a while, I’d be awake when the paper was delivered—a nasty way to enter a workday.
Today, my condition can be managed with no trouble whatsoever. It’s a huge relief. But my years of self-medicating haunt me. I often wonder: What would have happened, had I filled that first prescription back in the mid-1990s? Would I have sidestepped addiction? I am wistful when I think about this: so much trouble could have been averted.
In many women’s lives, we miss the biggest part of the story if we don’t link drinking to the issue of self-medication. It’s an all-too-common reality in modern society: using alcohol for what ails us. As one beloved doctor said to me, when I used alcohol to tamp down what I call revving: “You were smart. Alcohol’s a depressant, and you were using it to slow down.”
It didn’t feel smart at the time—but it did feel urgent and necessary. And before we get a diagnosis, or locate the correct medication and treatment, alcohol is an easy go-to substance to cure what ails us.
Women are 70 percent more likely to experience depression than men, and twice as likely to experience anxiety. And while women and men are equally likely to have bipolar I, a larger number of women have bipolar II—which typically translates to an increased number of depressive episodes in the female population, more hypermania in males.
In the United States, a woman is almost 50 percent more likely to walk out of a doctor’s office with a prescription for a controlled drug than is a man. But what if she is reluctant to use pills, as I was? Or uses alcohol in concert with those drugs? Given the closing gender gap on risky alcohol use, the issue of self-medication needs to be raised. I was not alone in using alcohol to soothe troublesome feelings.
Substance use muddies the water: it makes diagnosis difficult. Says psychiatrist Pamela Stewart of Toronto’s CAMH: “The art—and difficulty—of this field is to untangle what is caused by the substance and what by the underlying mood disorder.”
The majority of female clients whom Cheryl Knepper sees have alcoholism with other complications: of a recent sample of 279, 80 percent had co-occurring disorders, and 85 percent had sedative dependence. Knepper, vice president of continuum services at Caron Treatment Centers, says many women are adding Valium, Xanax, or Ambien to their drinking. “Life starts to hit them and prescription drugs become their best friends, along with the alcohol. They don’t share with their primary physician that they are using alcohol to self-soothe. Couple pills with alcohol, and it’s a slippery slope. Women have a tendency to want to project an image of holding it all together—but they will know internally, long before others, that they have a problem. Eventually they will be outed: a DUI, showing up late for work too often, external issues. And by the time they come to treatment, the majority are here because their family asked them to.”
Self-medication: of all the women I met while researching this book, Alex was one who used alcohol to treat full-blown bipolar I. Hers was also one of the most compelling life stories: certainly the one with the most dramatic end-of-drinking tales.
Sitting on a plush couch in her penthouse suite, Alex confesses that to this day, she is not sure what really happened on that plane to Las Vegas. Did she really take her top off in first class, as the rumor goes? Did she actually punch the male flight attendant in the groin? Who knows. All she’s really sure of is that she boarded a flight in Chicago, drunk, en route to a major sales conference.
Owner of several successful businesses, and president of her industry’s North American association, she was well recognized on the flight. She has a vague memory of lying on the floor at the luggage carousel. When she came to, out of her blackout, she was unpacking her clothes in her hotel suite. Minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and a colleague arrived with a large jug of Kentucky bourbon. The next morning it was breakfast.
This was Alex’s last hurrah—and a very public one at that. On the conference floor, an old friend confronted her: “What did you do on that plane yesterday? Everyone is talking.” Turns out, airport security had escorted her to the luggage carousel, where she had passed out. Those who recognized her persuaded security to release her. Says Alex: “In a blackout, I got myself from the airport to the hotel room. By that point, I was a functioning blackout drinker. I ended up drinking for the next four days.”
Impeccably fit, confident, and articulate, Alex sold her three companies ten years ago in a series of multimillion-dollar deals. The Las Vegas incident is now twenty-two years in the past, and she is generous with the details concerning what led up to that fateful trip.
The pivotal incident in her childhood was the death of her younger brother: hitchhiking at the age of thirteen, he was killed by a drunk driver. Alex was fifteen, and “all hell broke loose in our family.” Her mother was sedated; her father’s drinking escalated. “There was no grieving or consoling as we know of it today, no hugging. It was very brutal. It certainly changed things in my family.” Most of all, Alex felt incredible guilt: she had noticed that night that her brother wasn’t in his bed, and decided not to tell her parents. She felt “quietly responsible” for his death.
Within months, she had her first drink, and experienced her “first of hundreds of blackouts.” Downing two-thirds of a bottle of rye within a half hour, she threw up everywhere and ended up with a huge bruise on her face. The next morning, uncertain of what had happened, she put on her tennis clothe
s and headed to school. The incident was all over the school. “It was complete humiliation,” she says. “I was honor athlete of the year, Miss Goody Two-shoes, and it turns out two guys had had to hold me over the toilet for most of the night. I didn’t drink again until university.”
At twenty-three, she launched herself in the family business, working for a company based in Dallas, a division of a multinational. There she did a one-week boot camp in sales, and then stayed on the road for the following year. Seven days a week, she stayed in hotels and motels, some so sketchy she slept with the lights on. Within six months, she had increased sales by 400 percent. “I loved the product, I loved the work, I loved my customers. I was in heaven.”
She was also drinking daily. “I would drink on planes, drink in hotels. I drank to blackout all through my twenties, and it would not be unusual for me to take someone home—and not know them in the morning. I was doing all sorts of inappropriate things with inappropriate people.”
While Alex built a very successful company, it was fueled by undiagnosed bipolar disorder. “My creativity, ability to negotiate, and reserves of energy were when I was really manic. I was very speedy.” She negotiated deals until 3:30 a.m., chartering planes in the middle of the night, all stocked with full bars. “I was hugely manic. I would get to that agitated state and I could do eight more things than I am usually able to do.”
At thirty-four, she met Ian, a very successful older man, who said: “How can I help you make your business grow?” He helped her arrange the financing to buy two companies, and the two fell in love. Their honeymoon was spent on the road, working. Most of all, they drank together—a huge amount. “Two martinis before dinner, two bottles of wine with our meal, and then something else afterwards.”
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