Affected by Addiction? How Reading Other People’s Stories Can Help

In early February, I finished reading Elizabeth Vargas’s book: Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. Like so many other good books I have read, approaching the last pages, I wonder how in the world of words can the writer conclude their story in so few pages? Then, POW!

Because all books have to stop on a page, (even though life stories continue to unfold), Elizabeth’s wrap-up punched a hole in this reader’s armor. Bodily reaction to the pain she so poignantly described included tightness in my chest, shallow breathing, leaking eyes, and an audible gasp as this book made me think about my mom.

My mom was a raven-haired beauty in her youth. People said she looked like Jean Peters, the actress at one time married to Howard Hughes. But then, life and loss, and alcohol, changed the trajectory of my mom’s story.

Reading, I could not stop thinking about my mom. About the disease of addiction, the isolation, the pain, the torment of soul that takes its toll on the mind and the body.

Elizabeth Vargas reminds readers, “Beneath all the appalling behavior, there was a human being.”

I admire the courage of Elizabeth Vargas to write a memoir. She’s a seasoned, world-class reporter, co-anchor for ABC’s 20/20. She makes her living telling other people’s stories. Yet telling other people’s stories relies on distance and perspective that protects reporters from the actual suffering felt by the afflicted.

That barrier collapsed when Elizabeth herself became afflicted. Addicted to alcohol.

The life she got back after she got sober bears the scars of loss.

Is Alcoholism a Disease?

Way back in 1966, Elizabeth writes, the American Medical Association classified alcoholism as a disease. But even today, she says that the Surgeon General (cir. 2016) reports “only one in ten people who need help actually get it––10%.”

“Despite our acknowledgement that addiction is a disease, there is still an enormous stigma surrounding addiction that paralyzes its victims. People are literally dying of this disease because they are afraid . . . [Afraid if they seek help, she says, they will ] “lose everything––their jobs, their families, and their reputation.”

Sadly, judging alcoholism as a moral failure or weak will or sinful behavior fails to consider the underlying conditions or circumstances that lead people to believe that alcohol helps them cope.

“Magic, Medicine, Misery”

My daughter Erin heard Elizabeth speak at Texas Tech University, purchased her book, and then passed the book on to me.

In the talk Elizabeth gave to students, she said that alcohol was “at first magic, then medicine, then misery.”

This statement struck me as the most precise description for what alcohol or drug addiction does to users. First comes this false sense of power, enticing people to rely on alcohol to numb the causes of their pain. Like the potion offered by an evil magician or a sorcerer or an unseen force that taunts and tempts people to come to the dark side, alcohol makes promises it cannot keep.

“I can tell you that nearly every addict I know drank or took drugs because there was something else bigger that felt wrong, that hurt so much, it was unbearable. Numbing that ‘something else’ became the only way to survive. We were, many of us, tormented souls who needed to find our way, however possible, to a place of grace.”

Elizabeth explained how reading other people’s books about their battles with drinking had helped her; she then summoned the courage [and honesty and vulnerability] to write hers.

“I spent my whole life looking at other people and thinking their lives were perfect and easy and wonderful, while mine was not. Perhaps, my story will show them everyone has something they struggle with, something difficult and painful.”

“Now the narrative is mine,” she said.

“I am responsible for my own sobriety, and my own happiness. I cannot expect other people to fix my problems, or blame them when things go wrong. Learning that lesson has helped me take ownership of my own life again.”

“Every day I make the choice not to drink, the choice to be present in every moment, even the difficult ones. And every night I thank God for another day of sobriety. I do not take it for granted. Not now, when I have seen how quickly everything good about my life can dissolve in a glass of wine, never to be recovered.”

The promise of relief at the bottom of an empty glass or empty beer cans or pills or syringes turns to misery for the one addicted while trying to numb pain. Addiction is a dead end.

Her husband divorced her. She almost lost her job. And Elizabeth’s deepest regrets surround what she lost with her two sons and how she hurt them.

Hurting people hurt people.

And so this book pointed me back to my childhood, where and when there was no way to know, feel, or understand the pain and trauma my mother had endured.

In my own memoir manuscript, I’ve written about a breakthrough day––a specific day when a shaft of light penetrated my own dark thoughts supported by pride and resentment toward my mom.

Suddenly, the effects of my mom’s drinking on me was beside the point. Not even in the same room. Not even the same conversation. Like, in the next county.

I got to pivot. That day marked the first time I actually hurt with her and for her, pulling down years of brick-building self-righteousness, years of focusing on how my mom’s drinking had hurt me.

On the day I finished reading Between Breaths, I wrote out all the quotes used in this blog. I revisited those journal pages this week. Hence, these thoughts spill onto this page.

What I gained from reading Elizabeth Vargas’s story underscores that each of us has to “take ownership“ of our own life story. With all its confusion, mysteries, disappointments, and illusions, the key is not to happiness, not to airtight answers, not to a painless existence, but to a “state of grace” where gratitude for whatever is true and good and honest adds up to Grace.