Life and Death Resolutions : Fostering real change in one’s life is never easy. For some, willpower might serve as a jump-start, but courage is what pulls these people through.
The will to change. It’s behind every New Year’s resolution, even for those who have found resolutions impossible to keep.
Clearly, willpower doesn’t always do the trick. Sometimes, real change requires something larger, something that comes from down deep when one’s life has become threatened by alcohol, food, drugs.
It’s called courage. Not to simply stop drinking, not to stop eating. But to look at oneself and ask: Why do I drink too much? Why do I binge on food? Why do I do these things?
Not everyone can face up to it. But a few do. Where willpower might act to jump-start change, courage is what pulls these people through long term and allows them to face challenges presented by change.
Those with the courage are this New Year’s true heroes.
Garland Bradley is 56 and still fights the battle with booze, not by locking the liquor cabinet but by looking within herself. She knows. Vodka’s cost to her over the years has been great.
“I lost both of my children through drinking,” she says, referring to her 1966 divorce and the fact that her husband got the kids. “I was not able at that time to care for them. Then I had 22 years of sobriety and relapsed. That was 2 1/2 years ago. Most people don’t make it back after that.”
Bradley is a registered nurse by training. But her job now is at Primary Purpose, the alcohol- and drug-addiction counseling center in Oxnard, where she serves as program director.
“What triggered my relapse was that I’d gone through three years of losses-- death in the family, death of friends, job loss and declining physical health. I had to address those issues. Depression can be dangerous for me, so I have learned not to be alone if I feel depressed.
“You must worry about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and the quality of your life. Because it’s not really about alcohol. Drinking is only a small, small part of recovering. It’s not enough not to drink.”
Indeed, Garland Bradley knows that courage first exerts itself--if it does at all--after the booze stops flowing and amid the bewilderment of sudden sobriety.
“You know, if you’ve been drinking a long time, you may not have the skills to live another way. Being willing to try a new way of life is very scary and confusing. It takes a lot of courage to change yourself when (your addiction) is the only thing you know.”
Cynthia Eddings of Thousand Oaks had to find another way to live when it became clear that her disorder-- compulsive overeating--was taking over her life. Eddings had grown up in a house where physical beauty was emphasized. She had great success in school as a ballerina. But when puberty set in and Eddings started becoming a woman, she gained weight--too much, in the eyes of her parents.
“My mother freaked out,” she says. “At dinner, everyone at the table would get a baked potato but me. Everyone got an ice cream cone but me. If I protested, the words were, ‘You’re gonna get fat.’ ”
At the time, Eddings, who is a relatively tall 5-foot-7, weighed between 110 and 115 pounds, trim by any standard.
Still, her physician father shared her mother’s value on magazine-like beauty, having pasted inside the china cabinet door a glossy photo of a model. It would serve as icon of “what you should look like,” her father would say.
Eddings bought into it, pasting her own cutouts of model Cheryl Tiegs on her bedroom walls. She would, of course, fail. Cheryl Tiegs is Cheryl Tiegs.
Rebellion was around the corner. Food was the ammo. Uncontrolled bingeing on snacks was the assault. In high school, Cynthia Eddings and her girlfriend would sneak out, stop at the convenience store and drive around wolfing chips, M & Ms, ice cream. She would reach--after 1 1/2 years of college and further loss of control around food--a whopping 180 pounds.
She would try diets--some bringing dramatic success with 40 shed pounds only to be eclipsed by the return, within weeks, of all the lost weight and more still. But diets, though they are often effective for the non-addicted, are merely the workings of conventional will, or willpower. Once change was achieved, the courage wasn’t there to face it.
Cynthia Eddings would come to decide, much later, that her problem didn’t lie with her parents, implicated though they are. It had to do instead with “who I am,” Eddings says.
Courage spoke.
“As a result,” Eddings says, “I don’t feel I ever really hit bottom but instead found my way into a process that is concerned with who I am, why I do what I do and finding support to help me through.”
Eddings found her support and a working guide for herself in the Eating Disorder Track at Charter Hospital in Thousand Oaks, where she now counsels others who have overeating problems. (While anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are the better-known and clinically recognized eating disorders, compulsive overeating is increasingly recognized as a treatable disorder. Guidelines and definitions for the disorder will appear in forthcoming editions of the American Psychological Assn.’s reference on clinical diagnosis.)
Eddings’ “who I am” work would eventually lead her to the conclusion that conceptions of appropriate body weight and beauty came from within her, not from people around her.
While she reversed her course--her last binge was five years ago--Eddings is quite modest but profound on the subject of courage.
“I’m recovered, past tense,” she says. “It was really a growth process. In fact, I never thought of it as recovery. It’s simply what I needed to do to live, to save myself.”
She smiles.
“It gets very practical and basic after a while,” she says. “Do I want this piece of cheesecake and to feel tired and bloated and gross and miserable for the rest of the day? Probably not. But you know, sometimes I will eat that piece of cheesecake because it’s more important at that particular moment. The difference now is that I know why I’m having it, if I do.”
Eddings’ counselor and guru at Charter is the program’s director, Carolyn Costin, herself a former anorexic who once taught high school in Simi Valley.
Costin is blunt on the subject of food disorders. While she is careful to differentiate them from alcohol addictions, she does say that overeating and alcohol abuse share the common denominator of “sedation against feeling, a way to bury one’s feelings.”
And just as Garland Bradley diminishes alcohol’s power in the disease of alcoholism, Costin says, “Compulsive overeating has nothing to do with calories and weight, but rather underlying emotional needs that are not met.” (Of bulimics, for that matter, Costin says, “they can’t manage feelings and (so they) plug themselves with food.”)
Making the difference in Bradley’s return to sobriety and Eddings’ journey to control was in finding the right help. Only rarely do people do it all alone (see accompanying profile of recovering alcoholic Steve Brodie).
Treatment philosophies vary as widely as the disorders themselves.
While eating disorders share food as common ground, they are viewed by specialists as distinct problems requiring distinct sets of treatments.
Anorexics starve themselves and, untreated, according to some estimates, face a mortality rate as high as 13%. Bulimics binge and purge, sometimes taking on but not digesting as much as 50,000 calories daily and in the process bleed, facing death. Overeaters compulsively eat, taking on dangerous amounts of weight and living in constant subordination to appetites that have nothing to do with physical, metabolic needs.
Each disorder, Costin says, shows clusters of distinct sets of causes--child abuse and molestation is seen frequently in the backgrounds of bulimics, for instance, while overeaters often come from families that place unrealistic expectation on physical beauty and performance.
But the simplicity stops there. Unrealistic expectations about beauty and performance are often issues for weight-obsessed anorexics; Costin notes her own adolescent competition with the young model that her father “took up with”--just as sexual abuse is sometimes seen in all disorders, not to mention the addictive personalities of alcoholics. Still, alcoholism is viewed as yet another distinct problem, with its own myriad causes, symptoms and treatments.
The individual’s disorder and history determines the treatment method and recovery rate. For instance, Kathleen Gates, a clinical psychologist practicing in Ventura, says: “The rule of thumb is that if someone has been bulimic for five years or more, they’re going to be dealing with it the rest of their life.” On the other hand, Gates says she has counseled some overeaters and anorexics whom she considers to be completely recovered.
Therefore, “global” approaches that depend on group ritual more than personal investigation, such as those seen in the profusion of 12-step programs, are in some cases seen as having limited value, even though such programs often do help people jump-start change in their lives.
Says Garland Bradley, who supports the efforts of Alcoholics Anonymous but winces at the thought of 12-step programs addressing the needs of people who feel, for instance, that they can’t control the physical clutter in their lives: “Personally, it frightens me. To have a 12-step program for every behavior that is self-destructive, and many are not life-threatening behaviors, distracts from the seriousness and the work we’ve done to show that drug and alcohol abuse are disease processes.”
Says Carolyn Costin: “Eating disorders have a physical, metabolic component and underlying emotional states. All of it must be dealt with; it’s not just another 12-step thing.”
Gates, whose Ph.D. work included research on bulimia, is the bluntest of all on the source of all disorders, whether from food or booze, and as a result says: “I’ve not seen (12-step programs) work on anyone.”
“These problems are about pain,” she says. “While a severe bulimic shows elements of addiction in that the eating and vomiting creates clear biochemical reactions from which there is withdrawal, the real work is in underlying (emotional) pain. And it’s necessary to untangle the things that cause the pain.”
Does this view further trivialize what we have come to know as willpower, that sure-fire impulse beneath so many well-intended New Year’s resolutions?
Gates sidesteps the question. For her, courage is the only thing that drives people to “find and let out the secrets” that make personal change possible. Willpower--often so much lip service, with temporary result--isn’t even in her lexicon.
“I don’t see people as having willpower, per se,” she says, straight-faced. “Pain is stronger than anybody’s willpower. These people are all real aware they’re killing themselves.”
And only a few will really do something about it: The few who have the courage to face the pain--whether in therapy, or in a highly regimented and calibrated treatment program at Charter Hospital, or in an alcohol counseling program at Primary Purpose.
While the rest of the world makes New Year’s resolutions, some individuals--Garland Bradley, Cynthia Eddings and Steve Brodie, among them--find the courage to look inward and face whatever demons necessary to create real and lasting change in their lives.
