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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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Today is a special episode, the first of a four-part series on addiction.
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And I m joined by Holly Whitaker, the author of Quit Like a Woman.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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For years, I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me.
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And for me, it was just like this realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career.
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And like, why are we not asking the question?
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We re just like, we re drinking, it s compulsory.
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in our society.
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It s exceptional if you don t drink.
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And then it s also this very addictive drug that s marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to make rational choices around it.
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It s the most socially accepted drug that you can use.
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And we just don t have meaningful conversations or informed consent.
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So for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013, it was this realization of,
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Intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question, which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.
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So says Holly Whitaker, author of the New York Times bestselling Quit Like a Woman, the radical choice to not drink in a culture obsessed with alcohol.
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I had heard about Holly long before I met her, primarily because she was disrupting recovery culture, and many people did not like this.
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But the more I learned about her, the more I spoke to her, the more I saw her impact and culture,
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The more I became completely taken by both her brilliance and her willingness to say the things.
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Be warned, if you read her book you ll never think about alcohol again.
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In its pages, she recontextualizes the way we ve been trained to normalize booze
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and also the way the current recovery scene is shaped for the consciousness and egos of men.
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She s created companies in the vein of a feminine-centered recovery, and it feels like she s just getting started in the way we talk about addictive substances and addiction itself.
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Those who struggle will find a lot of relief in her words, and I understand why.
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All right, let s get to our conversation.
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you
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Well, it s funny because it took me so long to read your book, but I thought I knew all about your book and I thought that I knew all about you before I met you, which I m sure doesn t surprise you as someone in the culture.
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I definitely heard about you from friends who are fiercely devoted to AA and we will talk about that in time.
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We ll put that in a parking lot, but it s an interesting system because
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it also feels like a system that bears no detractors.
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It s similar to other themes in our culture where to criticize it or ask questions about its efficacy is quite threatening.
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It s sacrilegious, yeah.
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It s sacrilegious and it starts to feel like you, Holly, you are going to cause people to die by deterring them from
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AA.
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So that is often how I had heard about you as a merchant of death.
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Just kidding, but not entirely.
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And we ll talk about that because I think it s really, really important.
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That s like such an important distinction on point.
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Thank you for bringing it.
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I do want to talk about it because we see it in other parts of culture, which is this move to shut down conversation, dialogue, debate around very understandably very sensitive topics and
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sensitive or at-risk groups of people.
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And yet when we do that, when we grind it down to a stop, we can t make anything better or more inclusive.
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And I know you and I are both Ken Wilber fans.
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So we re going to talk about that.
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I m going to put that in the parking lot and start more at the beginning.
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which was the evolution or the creation of your book, which is just sits at the top of the charts in this category as a Bible, which I know you probably don t want to hear it described as a Bible either, but is a really eye-opening excavation of
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women, specifically alcohol, but you could talk about it.
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I mean, you do, you use case studies from culture to talk about the ways in which behavior is the engineered consent of marketing, right?
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Sure, right, of our choices, right, that we re not really making choices that we make.
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So take us to the beginning, and you don t have to recount your whole history, but, unless you want to, but the recognition that there was something
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afoot or problematic happening in your life and then how you came to understand why and how.
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Yeah, I ll probably give like the 30,000 foot view on this just because I think you and I have such more interesting things to talk about.
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The basic gist of this, I think anybody can appreciate this is that, you know, I had been drinking since I was 14.
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Maybe I had been introduced to it at a really young age.
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It had always been alcohol had always been presented to me as this thing that you will inevitably do.
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That s a privilege to do.
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That s fun to do.
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And I started drinking at a really young age.
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I don t think I ever had a quote unquote healthy relationship with it.
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And not in the way where the second I started drinking it, I was like, I m an alcoholic.
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And, you know, like there s a lot of people that the second they had alcohol, their whole life was transformed.
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And I think for me, it was a gateway.
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It gave me things I couldn t find otherwise, but it wasn t like the all important thing.
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And that I had a very confused relationship with it for years that would sometimes border on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder.
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Like if I had known what that was and that other times it just was an inner object that was not.
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important.
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It would wax and wane.
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And then it didn t, right?
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And I never liked it.
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Like I liked what it gave me and did for me and the benefits it provided.
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I never was like alcohol.
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It was a thing I felt that I had to learn how to manage and control.
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And I never felt like I could do that.
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That always eluded me.
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And in my drinking, it felt like I was always trying to win at it or just like reach this like really nice balance with it that I imagined everyone else had.
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And that what I had was really exceptional, which was like just a lack of self-control.
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And then in my early thirties, you know, it just.
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really spun out of control, right?
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I had multiple things going on.
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I had, you know, decades old eating disorder.
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I was deeply in debt.
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I was a workaholic.
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I was smoking pot all day, every day.
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I was addicted to cigarettes.
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I was in terrible relationships.
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And I just, you know, I hit this tipping point in my life where
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There was just not a lot mitigating me from using alcohol in a way that was disastrous.
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And my alcohol use increased at a really alarming rate.
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I was young and I was very sick.
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in many ways, like physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, all that.
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And I also just didn t know if I was an alcoholic or not.
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And so the impetus for this book is really or for my work from there was just like part of it was just that for years I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me.
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And for me, it was just like this realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career.
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And like, why are we not asking the question?
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We re just like, we re drinking.
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It s compulsory in our society.
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It s exceptional if you don t drink.
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And then it s also this very addictive drug that s marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to make rational choices around it.
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It s the most socially accepted drug that you can use.
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And we just don t have meaningful conversations or informed consent.
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So for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013,
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It was this realization of.
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intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question, which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.
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Yeah.
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I mean, your book does provide, for me at least, and I drink very, very occasionally, socially only.
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And it was a paradigm shift for me in just being able to look at it.
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And I think it was easy for me to look at in part because I ve really cut back on my own drinking in the last
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Few years, similar to COVID, I think, being a turning point.
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And I know that that coincided with the timing of your book, or at least the paperback.
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But this watching in myself how this could become a progressive disorder.
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Because as you write about, there s this cultural myth that there are people who can drink and people who can t.
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And the people who can t, there s something wrong with them genetically.
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They have a disease.
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Yeah.
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Likelihood for disease.
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And then you throw in this trigger and they re sort of ruining it for the rest of us.
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But most of us are built to be able to enjoy and benefit from alcohol.
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And so I thought you did an exceptional job of just actually projecting that onto a screen so we could look at it and say, how much of this is manufactured?
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And it s old, as you also say, I mean, people will, you know, Jesus drank, it s part of our cultural symbolism.
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Yes, it s like one of the oldest drugs, right?
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Like, it s a naturally occurring drug.
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I m sure.
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You know, it s been used even before documented use.
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And potentially psychedelic originally, or like part of the rites of Ulysses.
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And it s also something that also is extremely westernized.
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It s a very white drug.
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Right.
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It s a very now it is right.
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It s been stripped of all cultural meaning.
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It s in a part of a huge, huge industrial complex.
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It s a commodity that kills people.
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And just like tobacco, just like they need to consistently replace their best customers.
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You know, most of the alcohol that s sold is sold to people that don t drink.
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within the whatever recommended guidelines are based on what country you live in.
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But don t drink, as the industry would say, responsibly.
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Most alcohol is consumed by people that are consuming it in amounts that are causing, I m sure, adverse effects and would qualify them for being on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder.
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So they re selling this product to people that are drinking it in quantities that are way beyond the suggested use.
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And they know this and they have to replace those customers.
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And so the way it s marketed is just as we know about tobacco, we understand how underhanded all the tactics were of the tobacco industry that caused people to die for years.
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And that is exactly what alcohol is, is the same exact setup, like same exact like playbook.
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And yet because we love alcohol, because like
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we have still a cultural fascination and just like a love for it.
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We don t have that objective.
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You said that you were able to read my book because you changed your relationship with alcohol.
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So that means that if you hadn t changed your relationship with alcohol and you had like maybe like an iffy relationship that was causing some kind of discomfort, it would have been uncomfortable and you might not have reached for that book.
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And that says a lot because a lot of people have
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an uncomfortable relationship with alcohol and they don t.
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And they would and then they lead to if I look at it, it means I m an addict or I m alcoholic and that my life is going to have to change drastically in a really unsatisfactory way.
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And so I m not going to.
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Yeah, well, it s so, so interesting when you write about
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the way public relations was born out of cigarettes and the way it was sold to Hollywood as a prop, a mechanism for an actor to use their hands right and use motions or telegraph language without needing to say anything about how they were upset or disgruntled or bored or cool and
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Certainly alcohol is part of our social fabric or the way that we signal and it s interesting I mean, I don t know how you feel about this, but just thinking about The sacrament thinking about I don t know if you ve read the immortality key by Brian mirror rescue about it s on my nightstand It s on my up next
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It s about, you mentioned tobacco, I know you ve written in your sub-sack about psychedelics, and then you think about alcohol and its early origins and the fact that it was potentially psychedelic and used in these rites, Dionysian rites.
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And then you think about how these ideas or these concepts, which were part of ritual,
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Mm hmm.
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Ceremony medicinal.
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Yeah.
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Symbolically loaded have been scrubbed psychedelics, not although psychedelics.
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Yes, it s happening, right?
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Oh, yeah.
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A thousand percent.
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And I think it ll be worse than alcohol because of like where we are at in late capitalism.
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But yeah.
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Anyway.
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Yeah.
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It s totally that trajectory.
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Yeah.
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Yes.
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This is just like anything else that gets fed into the machine.
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And I know I sound like a crazy anti-capitalist, but it s just like a fact that any time something becomes a commodity that basically like free market societies like take.
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sacrament, take ceremony, take all things that are meaningful, rob us of it and then package it to us and sell it back to us and like far more toxic and like less meaningful.
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You know, it s just part of the extractive model.
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And so you do have that.
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And I mean, I could go on and on.
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But like alcohol, of course, there s ritual and there s ceremony.
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And there s plenty of documentation of it being used and, you know, in that way.
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And it still is in certain cultures.
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But
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For the most part, it s just become this thing that s also like we like alongside the the war on drugs.
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Right.
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Which has told us which which drugs are good and which drugs are bad and truly dominated the world in terms of like the world is influenced by Americans policy on drugs, their war on drugs and the way that alcohol is basically like all drugs are stripped out and replaced by this one drug.
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Right.
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It s phenomenal.
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Yeah, it truly is.
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Yeah, and it s so rich.
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I mean, it s so captivating.
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It s even in the name to this idea of spirits, right?
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And you know, you can think about that in all ways, like a dual system, somehow access point to some higher force or a takeover, like a spiritual hacking.
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And yeah, these things are powerful.
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And yet we re taught to
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use them wantonly and or, you know, obviously to numb to.
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I think everyone participates in that.
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It s to take the edge off.
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It s to dissociate.
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Totally.
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And thank you.
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And I m really clear on that.
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Like, I don t think it s bad to want to do these things.
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I think like we have to really balance this conversation with, you know, being careful around prohibition.
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Right.
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Because I do think people have the right to do whatever they want to do to their bodies.
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But at the same time, there s just not informed consent around alcohol.
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We don t have the right information.
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We don t go into it with eyes open.
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We don t turn 21 and have like the lead up to it.
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Like we re just kind of thrown into the world and told this is a great thing that we should be consuming.
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But also you should be doing it responsibly.
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Right.
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Like that constant message of drink responsibly is enforced on us.
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And with a substance that kind of basically
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dismantles the parts of you that are responsible.
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It literally dismantles the parts of your brain that account for your ability to be a responsible human being.
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Right.
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Well, as you write, I think really eloquently in that phrase and in the way that alcohol is presented to us culturally as something that you can handle or you can t if you re diseased.
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If you re one of these sick people that can t.
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Yeah, like if you re not capable of being responsible, then the onus is on you.
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And it s such a fine line.
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I mean, these are really nuanced conversations, because I also agree with you.
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People mostly should be able to do what they should.
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What s the reason to not?
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I m a total libertarian in the sense and not in the general sense, but in this way and like drug taking or killing yourself or in any of the things that we police are being whatever weight you want.
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We police people s bodies.
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Right.
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And I think that
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For me, when I m having these conversations, that is really at the base of it, which is like, I do fundamentally believe, as long as you re not harming anyone else, that you are allowed to put whatever you want to in your body.
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And we don t really enjoy that.
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Right.
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You should be able to take what you don t want out of your body.
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Yes.
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All of that.
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Yes.
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It s my body, my choice or whatever.
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Yeah.
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Great.
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As long as there s no harm to others.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wild Card, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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It s part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.
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Join me on Wildcard, wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR.
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And so you write about, you write the words alcoholic and alcoholism need to burn.
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Can you explain what you mean by that?
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Yeah, I mean, like, God, so first of all, again, a disclaimer is again, all this stuff
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requires a great deal of nuance.
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It s not that I don t think people are allowed to call themselves whatever they want.
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And so I wanna be really clear that it s very helpful to many people to call themselves an alcoholic and to talk about their alcoholism.
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But I think the word alcoholic, probably like the most basic argument, there s multiple arguments for it in the book, and I m not gonna go through all of them, but the basic argument around this is that this idea of an alcoholic was truly born at the convergence of the development of AA,
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a wonderful group like mutual aid that has existed since the 30s that allowed like that has helped a lot of people get sober.
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And we ll talk about that, you know, down the line.
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But the convergence of that development, along with post-prohibition, the basically like the dry movement kind of turning into like the anti-liquor movement needing somewhere to go.
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And all of a sudden, alcohol is not bad, but humans are bad.
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Right.
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So this like developed this development like post-prohibition where
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It wasn t that drinking was bad, just people that couldn t handle it were the problem.
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And so that thinking happened right around the same time that people like basically as part of belonging to Alcoholics Anonymous admitted they were the problem.
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And so this idea of the human as the issue, right, this idea that there are some people that are different and like fundamentally different.
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They have an allergy to alcohol.
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There s so many different ways that this has been said.
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They have a disease, a chronic relapsing disease, or they have an allergy or they re a defect, whatever it is like this idea was born that there is like a certain kind of person that cannot drink alcohol.
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It s only like a certain percentage of the population.
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You won t know it until you turn 21 or until you like start imbibing.
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So it s a secret disease that like only magically appears upon like, you know, you drinking this one thing.
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and, you know, you can t test for it, like, it puts all of the onus on the individual and it totally wipes clean any sort of social responsibility for the alcohol industry.
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Like, to name one thing in this, right, because if there are alcoholics that are just sick naturally and that, like, shouldn t use this substance because they have an allergy to it, like,
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like a peanut fucking allergy, right?
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Then you re not responsible.
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Like the peanut industry is responsible for peanut allergies, right?
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And then you have this, you know, trillion dollar industry and there s, I don t know what the latest figure is.
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It s like 3.3 million when I wrote my book.
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People a year across the world are dying.
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It s like one of the leading causes of death.
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from this.
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We have no responsibility because it s not the fault of the substance.
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It s the fault of the people that use it that are naturally unable to do it based on this pathological issue that they have called alcoholism.
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And so I m very clear about it s not helpful to say it s just me.
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Let everyone else have fun.
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I think it s very important for us.
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Like there has to be personal accountability and responsibility.
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That s not what this is about.
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But there s also
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the sense of like there has to be this ownership around the fact that it s just an addictive drug.
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Just like there s no cigarette-aholics, right?
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There weren t just like some people that were naturally already cigarette-aholics and they didn t know it until they started smoking and then they became, you know, it s the same thing.
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And when we call people alcoholics, we re like basically othering ourselves from them, right?
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We re cutting ourselves off and saying,
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Oh, I m fine with alcohol.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think it s a really interesting point.
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Like, cigarette-holics or, I mean, obviously, culturally, we understand opioid addiction as a progressive disease that often begins when people have pain in a medical setting and develop a chronic use of opioids.
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And suddenly, they re fully addicted.
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And yeah, I think stating alcohol is addictive
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a varying, potentially heightened in some people more than in others.
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But if you continue to escalate your use over time, it s a progressive disorder.
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I mean, I ve observed that in myself.
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And you can become addicted to it if they try hard enough, you know, I mean, that s just the bottom line.
2
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Yeah, where you start with one glass and then suddenly, you know, six months into COVID you re having almost a bottle or a bottle every night by yourself.
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I could see that in my own boredom and at-homeness and that s why I needed to see that I could not drink and stop before I couldn t stop.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this was fascinating, where you, this is in 2010, you write about how the former UK drugs are, Dave and Nut, this is in the UK, but they assessed 20 illicit and illicit drugs, harmed users and harmed to others.
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And alcohol had a score of 72, the most dangerous drug in the UK, followed by heroin and crack cocaine.
2
SPEAKER_00
Cocaine came in at 27, just above tobacco, which is wild.
2
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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It has, per that study, been declared the most dangerous drug that exists.
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And it s also because of the things we ve been talking about.
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It s just not inherently because of alcohol.
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I m sure if we were promoted to use
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cocaine from birth, that cocaine would be at the top of that list.
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Right.
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If it was a legal substance with all the protections that it has, all the lobbying that it has, like if it was just this thing you did and you know, like it was part of every single cultural custom that you had, like cocaine would probably top that list.
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But alcohol, you know, it s just like one of the most dangerous drugs, not just because of what it does to a human body, which is terrible, horrible stuff, like terrible and horrible stuff.
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It s a very harmful drug.
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to ingest.
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But the other piece of it is just like what happens in society when you have the relationship with alcohol that we do, which is it s associated with high rates of domestic violence.
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It s like sexual assault, drunk driving accidents.
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bad decision making, like there s so much stuff that comes from alcohol use as a result of our sexual assault isn t because of alcohol.
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It s because of, you know, rape culture and patriarchy.
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SPEAKER_01
But still, alcohol is part of that.
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SPEAKER_01
It s tied into it because of how we consume it and because of the effects that it has.
2
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Yeah.
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I think people don t quite understand how depleting and dangerous alcohol.
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Someone close to me died in their late 20s.
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I think he was in his late 20s from alcohol use.
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Very healthy, theoretically, like very strong person, no other comorbidities.
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But I don t think anyone realized that he was drinking himself to literal death.
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It s ravaging.
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It s also why, you know, I wrote a small check to this, it s an at-home rehab called NorthCare.
2
SPEAKER_00
And part of the program is because so many people can t, in a way can t step away to go to rehab, et cetera.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you can do it at home.
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SPEAKER_00
And part of it is like a nutritional reparation because of the depletion to vital stores in your body.
2
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It s very stripping and not only increases
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cravings, and I mean, you write about this extensively, the health repair that you needed to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, if you just think about what did we use in COVID, what was like the first thing we ran out of to fight off a deadly virus?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, alcohol, right?
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Like, you couldn t get hand sanitizer.
2
SPEAKER_01
And because it kills things, I think it kills living things, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It literally, it takes the life force out of things.
2
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So, I mean, it s just you poured on a wound in the you know, like the Civil War, like it s just this thing that like actually shouldn t be in our digestive tracts and all the cancers that are associated with it.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re either hormonal or they re cancers from like your digestive tract, your throat, your esophagus, your colon, your stomach.
2
SPEAKER_01
It just ruins ruins everything it touches.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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The body has to work really hard to get rid of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So let s talk about A.A.
2
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and I m just telling I don t answer any questions about A.A.
2
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anymore because it s like, no, I m going to talk to you about it, though, like I want us to talk about it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I stopped answering questions about it like two years ago.
2
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I was on a podcast.
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I was like, I m never I m done.
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I m so tired of answering the question of being anti A.A.
2
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About why?
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Because it s very beautiful.
2
SPEAKER_00
And again, I came into it being like, what does she have against AA?
2
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It s like free and available to everyone.
2
SPEAKER_00
And obviously it can be, you know, people can join very powerful groups.
2
SPEAKER_00
I participated in some Al-Anon and it varies widely.
2
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And it s anonymous, it s untested.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s kind of the only thing that s available to people.
2
SPEAKER_00
But what I think that you write about that s so significant in terms of
2
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why it s important specifically for women, and I m sure for some men very much relate to what you say, is that the construct of AA is inherently not built for women.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you talk a little bit about that?
2
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Because it was like, oh, right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, my God.
2
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_00
I just didn t, I did not see this at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
Fair.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, like everything else, right?
2
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I want to be
3
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really clear.
3
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I m not against AA.
3
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I m not against AA.
3
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AA was founded in the 30s when there existed no kind of treatment at all for people that were suffering with alcohol use disorder.
3
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And it was a radical, a totally radical and novel idea.
3
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Bill Wilson was the founder of AA, was way ahead of his time, extremely progressive, deeply compassionate, and
3
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Today, it remains an organization that is meant to be deeply compassionate.
3
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Again, it s decentralized.
3
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It s not always the experience people have.
3
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My arguments around it are about the impact that it s had on culture and how we view addiction, because it does inform how we view addiction.
3
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It owns the recovery industry.
3
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It owns the idea of addiction and recovery.
3
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It is the default way that we
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conceptualize how addiction works.
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And it is not for everybody.
3
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And it is also not rehabilitation.
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It is mutual aid.
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It was never meant to be the end all and be all of how people recover.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a community, right?
3
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It is not a full recovery.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not a full rehabilitation and often has to be supplemented by so many other things.
3
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So it s just like my arguments around it are how we think about it.
3
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Not that I wanna burn it down.
3
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I m not an AA basher and I can hold both.
3
SPEAKER_01
So for me, the thing that the question you asked, I mean, it just goes back to it was created in the 1930s by two like upper middle class white men, cisgendered, heterosexual.
3
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And it was truly based on their own experiences that led them to drinking.
3
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which again, like 1930s America, white, upper class men, right?
3
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Like too much power, too much power, too much ego, basically like just toxic masculinity, right?
3
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That needs to be broken down.
3
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And, and a lot of the tenants of it, like a lot of the cure, right.
3
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Or a lot of the prescription is in breaking down the ego is in shutting up
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you know, listening, serving, like following the rules, which are basically like what it s like to be a good woman, you know, like all of the prescription for alcoholics, you know, in like the early days.
3
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of AA was the prescription was to basically be a woman, right?
3
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To serve, to be quiet and shut up, to get over yourself, to not conflate yourself with being God, you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
And these are just not things that women suffer with still today, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Women
3
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are still at a deficit.
3
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They do not think they re God.
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They do not think they own the world.
3
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I m not saying this across all.
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I m sure there are plenty of women that have an overinflated ego, but for the most part, women are coming into it sick from the things that prescribe, sick from serving, sick from silencing, sick from lack of agency, sick from
3
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you know, like from lack of power.
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And so when you prescribe shutting up listening service, you know, I have so many men that I ve had conversations with over the years that they have are post AA of left AA.
3
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But they always say is that you have to admit.
3
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Like it s so important to learn how to serve.
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That has stayed with me.
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And I always have to remind them I didn t have to learn how to serve.
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I didn t need to go to that training.
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But like to them, it s radical.
3
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Right.
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And I think it is radical when you re talking about somebody that exists in the world at the top of the power structure.
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Those are radical things.
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Truly.
3
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And we wish all men had that experience, but it doesn t apply to people at intersections of identities that don t sit at the top of the power structure, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not just women.
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It s really like any intersection of identity that s not white, cis, male.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s really beautiful, I think, just to think about how deep it is in our culture.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you write
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The funny thing is that when I didn t force on myself the need to be less, when I allowed myself the freedom to be self-centered, flawed, and self-willed, I still ended up on my knees in the ever-so-impressed-upon alcoholic state of surrender to what was, to what I didn t have control over, to what I did have control over.
3
SPEAKER_00
And while my first prayers might have echoed some of what Step 7 begs, please make me good, the prayers quickly became about something far more than me.
3
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Help me do good.
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Put me in service.
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SPEAKER_00
I thought that was really beautiful and I have friends sort of in and out of AA and one of the things similar to what you re talking about I m thinking of a man and he talks about too as an introvert how I don t want to say unsafe but that it s a culture too where he particularly in men s groups where he feels sort of overpowered by the group dynamic and some of the hero stories and he just doesn t feel like he belongs
3
SPEAKER_00
but in our culture where it s the only or perceived as the only option and when the reaction from those who are in AA to those who are choosing not to be is like, you ll never do it any other way.
3
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And I understand that and I understand it s a lifesaving intervention, but it also feels like it creates a certain fragility.
3
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around this, again, this like polarized, I am this thing, which I think you, I want you to talk about sort of these tenants, like practicing sobriety, and an evolving recovery.
3
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And rather than staying in this, you know, we talk, you and I talk a lot about fixed binaries, but where you re not in an intractable position where it s you against
3
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your disease or you as your disease is the problem, but how you move into something that moves as we move.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you talk about some of those healing tenets?
3
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It s very static.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s doing the same thing, right?
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It s the same intervention on day one as it is on day 20,000, whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
The model stays the same.
3
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You continue to work the steps.
3
SPEAKER_01
That doesn t mean a human can t evolve if they re going to AA for 30 or 40 years.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think you can or can t.
3
SPEAKER_01
It just depends on who you are.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think the idea that you wouldn t, the idea that these things would be as impactful, as meaningful on day one as they are on day 20,000 or 10,000,
3
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You know, whatever.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t even know what the math is, but just that as you move along and you evolve, the whole point of addiction is extremely regressive, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like in developmental speed, meaning.
3
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you regress to behaviors that are expressed at earlier ages of development, right?
3
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So self-centeredness, narcissism, lying, lack of empathy.
3
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And I m not saying this pathologically, I m just saying this in my own experience, like it s a stunting thing.
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Addiction is stunting and regressive, the experience of it, because it basically just dismantles the things that actually give you the structure to be a fully formed, complex, mature adult.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so when you think about this, when you move into recovery from addiction, you re moving from probably like a regressed behavioral development stage, or at least some pathologies in that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you re going through like probably one of the biggest boot camps of transformation that exists in the entire world.
3
SPEAKER_01
People that go through recovery because addiction touches every single area of your life, your relationships,
3
SPEAKER_01
relationship to your work, your job, how you socialize, how you date, how you have sex, your family dynamics, your sleep habit.
3
SPEAKER_01
It touches every corner of your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so to create holistic and effective recovery, people that are really engaged in their recovery are oftentimes just going to naturally lift up all these areas of their life like they re going to evolve.
3
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That s what recovery requires.
3
SPEAKER_01
Self-awareness, compassion, empathy, like all these things that are like their higher ideals.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that we do have this conception that, and then you just stay there, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then all the things that you learn in early sobriety that make your sobriety so worthwhile are going to be the exact same principles that carry you through for the rest of your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you just go through this one
3
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revolution of development and then you stop because this is the end all and be all.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I think that, you know, in what I proposed and what you re talking about, the tenants, you re talking about like what actually creates, you know, what I call feminine centric recovery.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this is one of the biggest ones, which is evolution.
3
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Like you, your recovery and your process, including what you believe and the frameworks that hold you together.
3
SPEAKER_01
They will, they should evolve.
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They will likely evolve.
3
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It s a good thing when they evolve.
3
SPEAKER_00
those tenants, I don t know if they ve evolved, I think there are six, work with our core beliefs, weaken and break the cycle of addiction, add healthy coping mechanisms, get at the root causes, practice sobriety, create a recovery that evolves as you do.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I actually love that idea of practicing sobriety because, and you write about this a fair amount throughout the book, both in your own, the early days of your recovery, but also in an ongoing way, which right now,
3
SPEAKER_00
art culture is still very, again, in a quite a binary and I understand it because it s when we re talking about certainly some drugs, abstinence, and for some people
4
SPEAKER_01
abstinence is really the only avenue towards safety, and yet so many people relapse, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
This is just the reality.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then in our current model, when you relapse, you fail, you start over.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s not a lot of grace in it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I understand that it s hard to say, get grace when it feels like people s lives are on the line, but relapse rates are incredibly high.
4
SPEAKER_01
People do need grace.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
I just started researching this.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like 5% of people that go through recovery will not have a lapse or relapse.
4
SPEAKER_00
So 95% do.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you say we need grace, I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m just thinking about, well, everyone I know that s in recovery provides grace for people that need it in those situations.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s more of an exterior cultural edict.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And this doesn t just apply to alcohol.
4
SPEAKER_00
This applies to anybody struggling with addiction.
4
SPEAKER_00
One of my friends was like she when George Floyd s murderers went on trial, she called me or she texted me and was like, oh, they just played the addiction card.
4
SPEAKER_00
Meaning that she s black.
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SPEAKER_00
There s protections for the fact that he s black.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s no protections for the fact that he was addicted.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like when you play the addiction part, what she meant was you are free to dehumanize somebody that is in active addiction.
4
SPEAKER_00
They are a threat to society, to themselves.
4
SPEAKER_00
They need help.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like there is only one path for that person.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is absolutely unacceptable that a person struggles with addiction.
4
SPEAKER_00
They need to be rehabbed.
4
SPEAKER_00
immediately and until then, they re the worst.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s no root because when people recover, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Recovery may be part of your identity, but active addict or like I am an active addiction, like you are in no place to advocate for yourself or for all people that are addicted.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there s very few people outside of that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like when you re moving through recovery, you move through recovery, you continue on.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s just people that are in active addiction.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think of some of the most vulnerable people that exist within our society because they are absolutely according to us, just like not human.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that this is
4
SPEAKER_00
for so many reasons, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
This is not an AA thing, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like there s so many reasons that this exists.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when you re saying like there isn t a lot of grace, you re right.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s no, there is none.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like unacceptable for people to have addiction.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no compassion.
4
SPEAKER_00
But you re also seen as a person that s doing it to yourself, making a choice that it s a purposeful, instead of an effect of like the way that we structured our society.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we believe in this fantasy of self-sufficiency, individualism, and also meritocracy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And like, so we think of like, when we think of addiction and we conceptualize it, we think of a people that are choosing to not actually engage in the appropriate mechanisms that they need to.
4
SPEAKER_00
And this is not like just right wing blowhard.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is not just like, it s not, this is how we as a population and as Americans generally consider people that are struggling with addiction.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s gross.
4
SPEAKER_00
Addiction is gross.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s so much about it that is so like unacceptable to us.
4
SPEAKER_00
And therefore people that struggle with addiction, they re just like a totally unprotected group of individuals that are kind of left under resourced, underfunded, under understood.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, it s heartbreaking.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you think about sort of your own acts of service, and who you are in the culture, and what you stand for, where do you feel most drawn in terms of
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting to be that this is your life s work at this point.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I know it s still consuming for you.
4
SPEAKER_01
I understand why, because it is so in some ways spiritual, essential, complex.
4
SPEAKER_01
What are you after in the sense of finding these threads?
4
SPEAKER_01
Where do you imagine it will take you?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s so funny because for the last couple of years, I ve really wanted to step out of this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like I had such a bad experience.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve had a bad experience, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like as a human being.
4
SPEAKER_00
You ve had a ride.
4
SPEAKER_00
I have just been so over it, you know, but it is my life s work, unfortunately.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that
4
SPEAKER_00
It just reminds me of like this, I can t remember which book it was in.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s in a Pema Chodron book where she talks about like, there s some guy that does some kind of outreach.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think on the one hand, I did not ever expect my book to make, to have the impact that it had.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there is an argument that can be said that I am a very fortunate person who has lived to be part of something, you know, because I m not the only one and there s a lot of people that do this work and have really pushed the message forward around alcohol and addiction and harm reduction.
4
SPEAKER_00
So many people, I have an out, like I have in many ways an unfair spotlight on me.
4
SPEAKER_00
It should be shared with so many people.
4
SPEAKER_00
But in this one way, I have had a significant impact through luck, timing, all number of things, intelligence, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like passion, all of it, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I think that s on one hand, just enough.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s enough.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think I want to state that because that s such a belief of mine that like,
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve done work and it s good.
4
SPEAKER_00
And God, I m lucky for that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I think, on the other hand, there used to be, I think, when I was starting out, this very grand idea of what change could be affected.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t have those ideas anymore.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I feel that I will have done good work if I just do the work that s in front of me.
4
SPEAKER_00
that feels aligned and ethical and compassionate and whatever.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t think that there s like, oh, if you know, if we have this happen, or if we decrim and legalize all drugs, or if we actually have parity, you know, for treatment, more than a handful of people can actually access treatment or any of those things.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s so much work to be done in this space.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I think for me, I really enjoy thinking about and talking about this.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think we re all impacted by this in ways that are so much far greater than our ability to comprehend.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think all of us are
4
SPEAKER_00
deeply impacted by addiction personally in our own lives and the way that we function, especially today, and that there s so much to be gained from understanding the one population of people that struggle from the unacceptable addictions to chemical substances.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like we could stand to look to that population to learn a lot about ourselves.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s beautiful and I think that people who are in addiction in a lot of ways hold our cultural shadow.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s what we don t want to look at.
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I think we all feel susceptible or we all recognize in some level that this could be us.
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And it is us.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And so there s a deep need to disown it.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I mean, like we are at peak addiction.
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We are at peak addiction.
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There s a great book called Globalization of Addiction by Bruce Alexander.
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It s like one of my favorite books of all times.
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But it just talks about a free market systems capitalism naturally
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are addictive societies.
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It just is a byproduct of it.
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And the rates of addiction that exist today.
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Carl Fisher wrote a great book called The Urge that traces the history of addiction.
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Like we ve had epidemics before throughout history.
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But we are, I think, living in a society that it s calling card is addiction.
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You know, and I think that when we get distant from it, you know,
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if we have offspring, if there s a war.
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Anyway, like I think when we look back, if we have the ability to look back on this period of time, that s that will be the thing that, you know, so few of us have because we ve uttered it and buried it and swept it under the rug and hidden it in the shadows and put it in the jail system, like because of the way that we ve treated it, we ve lost this opportunity to truly examine our own selves.
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Yeah.
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And that s why I love it so much.
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I know.
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you read potentially like faster and more compulsively than I do.
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And there s a substantial Venn diagram, I think, in our interests.
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And I think I recognize in you, someone like me, I wanna understand.
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I just wanna see the closet that we re all like sort of all the hangers inside of, I wanna understand this larger system.
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And I do think looking at those who are
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I have like the positive varieties, varietals of addiction, you could say.
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Yeah.
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The socially rewarded, right.
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The socially rewarded, virtuous behaviors.
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And I love that you talk about the way that you built your feminine-centered model.
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Was it on Ken Wilber?
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Was it on… or was Spiral Dynamics or something metaphysical and…
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Ken Wilber and Guy Deplisse, they were all really foundational.
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And like when I was really trying to piece together the Aqua Map by Ken Wilber, which I found through John Deplisse work, was a game changer for me because John Deplisse, by the way, wrote Integral Recovery.
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And Guy Deplisse, P-L-E-S-S-I-S, also wrote a book that I think is also called Integral Recovery.
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But it s such a simple thing and it s such an obvious thing.
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You have to raise all the boats of your life.
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You have to look every single corner.
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And the way that you construct a holistic and likely to succeed sobriety, or recovery, let s say, not sobriety, is by creating, using
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Pinwall-Brizoc is using a holistic map and is addressing basically all of you.
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Whereas traditional systems, AA, is great at addressing belonging and shared meaning, community, and also just structure.
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It s a very clear path of spiritual development.
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and an ethical development.
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And but it s not going to help you with your serotonin and your dopamine.
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It s not going to help you with your checking account.
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It s not going to help you with, you know, like your abusive father or your lack of child care or whatever it is.
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It s not going to help you with like
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the things that deeply impact us.
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And so it s not a whole solution.
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And so when you re building a recovery, you need to have essentially like this, you know, like multi-pronged approach.
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And the feminists, those are just pennants.
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These are like ideas that fit into this.
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The map is like, it s the map.
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It s the actual, like, how do I fix this part?
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Yeah.
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Well, thank you for your work.
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Thank you for helping me shape this special series.
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I m going to ask you also if you re willing to do a short recommended reading list because you don t have to write captions, but I just want some titles.
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I ll include the words you mentioned today because you re full of wisdom and curiosity.
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I think that s what s so needed, too, is the fact that you
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are a sponge for other people s ideas and or like are capable of integrating, distilling, synthesizing really complex systems is so needed because without that wider context, we re all just left feeling broken rather than parts of a much more significant whole.
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And whole parts, I would say, of a more significant.
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Holes and parts.
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Yeah.
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It s not holes, it s not parts, it s holes and parts.
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Sorry, that s like a Ken Wilber joke.
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Holarchies, not hierarchies.
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Yeah.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Just been delightful.
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And I love talking to you about this stuff.
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So as mentioned, Holly Whitaker s book Quit Like a Woman has had a tremendous amount of success in the space.
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not only because people really need astute guides to this landscape, but she s also a brilliant writer and thinker who is touching a wound and touching something that deeply affects all of us, whether it s head-on or not.
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And the way that she grounds research, science, and lived experience in this larger psycho-spiritual context is fascinating.
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Because, for me at least, and again, I think it was easy for me to read this book, not only because I love Holly, but because I ve rehabilitated my own relationship with alcohol.
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And really, I drink.
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Maybe I have a glass of wine a week, every two weeks.
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But I had to really walk it back.
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And fortunately, I was in a position where I could do that without suffering for it.
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And now I will say, when I do drink, I do actually suffer for it.
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Because the migraine disorder, I just can t metabolize it.
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I feel it acutely in a way that I think many people do.
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It is, as she says, ethanol.
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I wanted to go back to this idea about the words alcoholic and alcoholism to read what she wrote, which is, the words alcoholic and alcoholism need to burn.
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To be clear, I believe that alcohol is addictive, that alcohol addiction is progressive, that some people are wired a bit differently and are more vulnerable to alcohol addiction.
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In fact, I don t just believe these things, science tells me these things.
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I m not refuting that alcohol addiction is an actual thing because it is an actual thing, a thing I had.
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What I am saying is alcohol is addictive to everyone.
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Yet we ve created a separate disease called alcoholism and forced it upon the minority of the population who are willing to admit they can t control their drinking.
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And because of that, we focus on what s wrong with those few humans rather than on what s wrong with our alcohol centric culture or the substance itself.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren LaGrasso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Kden s 13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Deval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.