Her Best-Kept Secret by Gabrielle Glaser

Author:Gabrielle Glaser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

7 Twenty-First-Century Treatment

Joanna made two big decisions when she turned fifty. The first was that she was going to quit drinking. The second was that she was going to find an evidence-based treatment approach to help her do it.

The director of information technology at a large multistate hospital system, Joanna has an MBA, travels extensively, and is an accomplished mezzo-soprano who learns operas the way others might memorize pop lyrics. For decades, alcohol was an effective tool for squashing anxiety and numbing grief. But over the years, her little issue with chardonnay developed into a big one.

At the end of her drinking career, she was downing almost two liters daily. Her tall, athletic body showed no obvious physical effects, although one time during a gallstone attack, a sonogram revealed a slightly enlarged liver. Terrified, Joanna confessed to her doctor that she drank “a lot of wine” most nights. When her liver enzyme test came back normal, he dismissed her concerns. “You don’t have a drinking problem. Your liver’s fine! Don’t be hard on yourself!” Joanna tolerated her liquor well, rarely appearing inebriated. Then again, she took great pains to conceal it: She threw away most of her big golden bottles, wrapping them first in newspaper and plastic before burying them in the trash can.

Her husband was not so reassuring. One well-oiled evening, Joanna got too loud at a party. “She’s a drunk,” he said, by way of apologizing to other guests. Joanna’s drinking was a frequent source of tension in her marriage, but public humiliation was a blow.

Occasionally, she could stop—during several attempts at in-vitro fertilization, she went cold turkey for weeks, imagining herself as a mother during the shots, blood tests, and ultrasounds. Every time she got the call with the news that the embryos hadn’t implanted, her disappointment was somehow tempered by the thought that at least she could drink that night.

When Joanna was in her early forties, her Polish grandmother died, leaving her distraught with grief. She saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed depression and alcohol dependence, and directed her to A.A. Joanna told the doctor that she was disinclined to find an answer to her problems in the twelve steps. Her soft-spoken Canadian mother had tried it several times without success, even staying once for a month in a punitive rehab facility that left her more depressed than ever. To Joanna, the forced attendance at A.A. for all women abusing alcohol was akin to breast cancer before lumpectomies, a limited understanding of the disease prompted the medical community to recommend double mastectomies for every woman with the diagnosis.

Her psychiatrist was unequivocal. Recovery would elude Joanna if she didn’t find a sponsor and do the program. “It’s the only way,” she insisted. So Joanna tried several meetings. She felt most uncomfortable at all-female meetings, where many women imbued their sponsors with a kind of superhuman importance. If the women had good sponsors, they seemed to achieve the status of some sort of omnipotent Boss Mother. If the relationship

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