Answer Addiction

Tag: interview

  • New Data Show Disturbing Racial Disparities in Combined Opioid-Cocaine Overdose Rates

    The problem is not just increased use of stimulants and opioids, it is also a lack of recovery resources, substance use disorder treatment, and a historical mistrust of healthcare providers.

    An exclusive interview with researcher Tarlise Townsend, Ph.D., reveals a definitive need for harm reduction policies plus investment in treatment in marginalized communities. In these communities, particularly lower-income African American and Latino neighborhoods, the opioid epidemic has combined with stimulant abuse to create a sharp spike in overdoses. These findings, from a study funded by the National Institutes of Health that examined death certificate data in the dozen years before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, were published last month in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

    Driven by the three-headed dragon of fentanyl, prescription painkillers, and heroin, drug overdoses kill over a hundred thousand people every year in the United States. However, from 2007 to 2019, drug overdose deaths involving more than one substance increased dramatically across the board nationwide. Additionally, these multi-drug overdoses had a more noticeable spike in traditionally marginalized communities that lack substance disorder education, prevention efforts, and treatment opportunities.

    The Fix is honored to interview Dr. Tarlise Townsend about the implications of her study.

    The Fix: Why is the combination of stimulant abuse like cocaine or methamphetamines and opioid use disorder like heroin or prescription painkiller misuse hitting marginalized racial and ethnic communities so hard? As opposed to one or the other, what do you think is the reason for the two-headed dragon?

    Dr. Tarlise Townsend: The overarching response to that question, unfortunately, is that we don’t have an answer. Although we have diagnosed and identified the problem, we still desperately need to understand what’s driving it: Why are marginalized communities, particularly Black Americans, being hit proportionately hard by these combined overdose deaths? At the same time, the reality is that structural racism shapes everything, including access to resources. There is a lack of harm reduction options in this community, a historical lack of trust in healthcare providers, and a profound lack of access to treatment for substance use disorder.

    Also, criminalization is a really big factor when it comes to the increased risk of overdose. It is so much less likely that authorities will be contacted in time to administer overdose antagonists like Naloxone. After all, Black Americans, particularly men, are so much more likely to be criminalized for just being in possession of these drugs.

    As a result, there are many factors contributing to these racial disparities. Also, these disparities may not be specific to just these two types of drugs; stimulants and opioids. It may be a more systemic problem that right now is just manifesting as increased overdose due to the combination of stimulants and opioids. When you put this issue into the context of fundamental cause theory, you realize that the fundamental causes of health issues like socioeconomic status or racism affect health outcomes in almost every context in these communities. These overarching causes fundamentally affect people in so many ways because they basically bleed into everything.

    Even if you try to address other causes of these health disparities, socioeconomic status and racism will find another way to generate other challenges. Indeed, socioeconomic status and racism have been and continue to be fundamental causes of adverse health outcomes in these marginalized communities. The problem is not just the increased use of stimulants and opioids leading to more overdoses. It also is a lack of recovery resources, educational opportunities, and substance use disorder treatment in these communities.

    What drug is playing the driving role in this overdose crisis? Is heroin or cocaine proving to be more destructive in these communities?

    Our study did not look specifically at the type of opioids contributing to these overdose deaths. However, other recent research looking at the problem of opioid-stimulant deaths has found that fentanyl is playing the driving role. The story of this rise in overdoses is due primarily to a surge in fentanyl exposure. There is a contamination of these street drugs that the person who is using does not realize. Despite the increase in combined opioid-stimulant use, the inclusion of fentanyl in that picture is the driving force. 

    In developing countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, methamphetamine use has been connected with working long hours. Is that happening in the U.S. as well?

    I don’t feel like I can answer that question with any expertise or confidence, but it does bring up another perspective. There is evidence of people who use opioids in homeless populations on the street intentionally using stimulants to stay alert. First, these people are more readily targeted and criminalized for using. Second, they cannot afford to be oblivious when living in such extreme conditions. It could be that the stimulants counteract the opioids, allowing these people to avoid what we would describe as loitering and remain aware of external threats.

    Thus, the co-use of these two drugs by homeless populations could be described as an effort to cope with really trying conditions. However, despite such hypotheses about what is going on, there is not a lot of proven research. Thus, we know very little about those specific dynamics. Still, the idea of homeless people addicted to opioids using stimulants as a survival mechanism is a notion that deserves greater investigation.

    Specifically, what kind of harm reduction and evidence-based SUD treatment services are needed in Black and Latino neighborhoods? For example, if you had a billion dollars in funding to fight this crisis, how would you spend it?

    We need to look at both the money is no object question, and money is an object, so what do we do question. For the first, we need all the things. There is no specific policy solution or harm reduction solution that is going to address everything. There is no quick and easy fix to eliminate rising disparities in opioid and stimulant overdose deaths. We would think that when we implement a societal health intervention, the population in our society that needs the most help will receive the most benefit from such an intervention. However, this is not the case because health disparities will often widen unless you specifically target the communities with the greatest needs. If you want to help those communities, you have to target the barriers preventing them from accessing the help they need, like resource barriers, stigma issues, socioeconomic gaps, and racial and ethnic challenges. Often, the people who benefit the most from societal health interventions are the people with the most resources. The lack of resources in marginalized communities results in such health interventions often proving ineffective.

    In general, when we are thinking about policies and programs designed to target disparities in substance use and overdose, we need to be intentional about tailoring those interventions to the communities that need them most. We need culturally informed and competent efforts tailored to address the needs of these specific communities that are being hit the hardest by opioid and stimulant overdose deaths. Highlighting such tailoring, we need education and outreach materials translated into the languages primarily spoken in these communities. Awareness of substance use disorder treatment and harm reduction programs need to be raised in contexts that people in these communities trust. A great example is the role that Black churches are playing in Black communities. Since that setting implies a greater trust, it leads to a greater uptake of these recovery options. There is a lot of distrust in these communities when it comes to traditional healthcare settings.

    Beyond these efforts, I also think we need to be thinking bigger. For example, the safe consumption sites that just opened in New York are encouraging, and initial evaluations are already underway. Researchers are looking at how effectively they reduce opioid mortality and increase the uptake of treatment for substance use disorder and other health intervention efforts. I’m also eager to see what effects decriminalization like we are seeing now in Oregon will have on overdose mortality trends. When it comes to spending money to combat these problems, whether it is the limited funds that are now accessible or an imaginary unlimited amount, researchers need in-depth cost-effectiveness analyses. No matter how much money is being spent, many health interventions that people thought would lead to major results did not give us the greatest bang for our buck. In reality, resources are limited and scarce. Thus, the money spent needs to be used in the best way possible. We need to study which of these programs and policies will prove cost-effective. 

    An example of such a cost-effective study is seen today in the use of Naloxone, the opioid antagonist that can reverse an overdose in an emergency. Distributing Naloxone to people who most likely will experience overdose is highly cost-effective and saves lives. It has proven to be one of the most cost-effective medications on the market. Our experience with Naloxone so far is a good model for figuring out how we can best use limited resources to address this crisis and reduce the health disparities in these marginalized communities.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The First Drink Was Russian Roulette: An Interview with Leigh Steinberg

    Life will knock us all back, but the question is can we stay in the present moment? Can we summon up the strength and energy to perform with excellence in those trying moments?

    If you’ve ever seen Tom Cruise as a driven sports agent in the award-winning film Jerry Maguire (1996), then you know more about super-agent Leigh Steinberg than you realize. Based on his life experiences, the film’s storyline ended before Leigh Steinberg experienced the worst travails of his life. During his career, Steinberg has represented over 300 professional athletes in football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and Olympic sports, including the number one overall pick in the NFL draft a record eight times.

    Despite his success, Steinberg met his match when it came to alcohol. In 2015, he described his challenging journey into sobriety in his memoir. Today, Steinberg reveals his inspirational journey in an interview with The Fix.

    The Fix: As a young man, your first client Steve Bartkowski became the No. 1 overall pick in the 1975 NFL draft, catapulting you into the upper echelons. When you look back on the sudden rise of those early days, do you ever feel like it all happened way too fast? Was it challenging to deal with the mighty rush of early success?

    Leigh Steinberg: I had had the wonderful experience of being student body president at Cal (University of California, Berkeley) in the tumultuous days of the Sixties. At that point, Berkeley was the vortex of student life. From demonstrations and rock music to alternative lifestyles, the school was at the center of the national story. Such an experience really prepared me for the national profile that came with the Bartkowski signing. I never confused newspaper clippings, awards, or external praise for the substance of being a good person and being grounded.

    From Warren Moon to Oscar De La Hoya, you desired your top clients to be preeminent roles models in their sports. Do you perceive yourself as a role model? How did the process of recovery illuminate this perception?

    We are all role models to someone. Younger people look up to you, older people will mentor you, and you will find people who will be the models for your future behavior. I had a father who raised us with two core values: The first was to treasure relationships, especially family, and the second was to do your best to make a meaningful difference in the world. It is part of your responsibility to help people who cannot help themselves. The whole nexus of my practice was trying to stimulate the best in young men.

    When it comes to making a meaningful experience in the world, I learned a lot from my struggles with alcoholism. Being in my twelfth year of recovery, I feel like I have been given the opportunity to help people who are struggling with the same challenges that I faced. It is a real positive that comes out of the experience. If you are reading this right now and you feel hopeless and overwhelmed by your experiences with substance abuse and addictions, I want you to know that there is hope and a light at the end of the tunnel. I have been where you are now, and it does get better.

    What did you learn from the success of your clients? What did you learn from their failures?

    For me, the critical key has always been how someone responds to adversity. If we take a quarterback who has thrown a couple of interceptions so the game is getting out of hand and the crowd is starting to boo, what happens next? Can that person summon up the internal focus to tune out extraneous distractions and elevate their level of play in critical situations? Life will knock us all back, but the question is can we stay in the present moment? Can we summon up the strength and energy to perform with excellence in those trying moments? What I saw them do in success is stay grounded and stay hungry. As opposed to bragging about a past achievement or becoming self-absorbed, they were able to stay in process and do the things that created their success in the first place.

    An old Irish saying goes, “A man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man.” How would you say this saying applies to your life experience?

    When it comes to alcohol, it snuck up slowly on me. I didn’t drink for most of my life and most of my career. However, when I started drinking, it suddenly stopped becoming a decision and a matter of volition of whether or not to drink. With what seems like little or no warning, it becomes a craving and compulsion. I did not realize until later in my life that I am allergic to alcohol. At this point, the first drink would be a disaster. Knowing the metamorphosis in my brain when I take the first drink gives me no other choice but to stay vigilant.

    You write in your book, “Consuming alcohol became a form of Russian roulette for me.” It’s truly a powerful image. Can you explain it further?

    The first drink was Russian Roulette. After I took the first drink, it wasn’t clear what would be the eventual outcome. It could be anything from a blackout where I did not remember what had happened to just falling asleep to something unexpected. It was unclear how an evening would end, and it wasn’t going to be positive (laughing). After taking the first drink, I was no longer in control of my own life. It wasn’t positive. Depending on how my body was metabolizing alcohol and how much I was drinking, it could lead to many self-destructive behaviors, including drunk driving, hurting other people’s feelings, and complete self-absorption. It could lead to a place where I was no longer aware of the choices I was making.

    Can you describe your “moment of clarity”? What realization led to the start of what is now your long-term recovery?

    It was a sense of proportionality. I was sitting in my father’s room at our family house after closing my office and home. I am at my parent’s house in West Los Angeles, and all I have is the next drink. At that moment of despair, there was an epiphany where I gained a sense of proportion. I realized I wasn’t a starving peasant in Sudan, I didn’t have the last name Steinberg in Nazi Germany, and I didn’t have cancer or anything fundamentally wrong with my body. Thus, what excuse did I have not to live up to my dad’s admonitions and be a good father? How could I not follow his guidance and try to be helpful to other people? It was a moment of clarity that I needed to overcome the denial that I had a problem. I realized I had to turn my life over to a process that would hopefully lead to a better tomorrow.

    You believe the success of rookie prospects in the NFL is helped by being drafted by the right teams where successful cultures of strategy and support allow them to grow into professional players. You use the experience of Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City as the ideal example. Do you think that a person’s success in recovery might be similar as well?

    The key to winning in sports is the quality of the organization: Enlightened and stable ownership, a front office that excels at drafting and roster composition, and the quality of a coach who knows how to communicate with his players. All of that is important. Likewise, when it comes to recovery, having the right sponsor, being in the right sober living house, and surrounding yourself with other people who are serious about their recoveries and working the 12 steps is critical. I know it has been critical for me. Going to the right meetings helps you find the people with long-term sobriety who can become your role models. Overall, the concept of being in a healthy environment leading to success is critical in both environments.

    Can you talk about the role of steroids in professional sports? As an agent who cared about his clients, you write that you gained insight into the danger of steroids early on. Do you think performance-enhancing drugs will always be a part of professional sports?

    I don’t think they have to be, and I hope they won’t be. Steroids themselves are a real health danger on both a physical and a mental level. People taking steroids experience such emotional extremes, going from ‘roid rage to breaking down in tears in an instant. Steroids play havoc with a person’s emotional stability.

    Today, there are many promising therapies and techniques for training the human body, like nutrition, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and stem cell therapies. There are so many breakthroughs about enhancing performance and stamina in a natural way. It really shouldn’t be necessary to use destructive substances to perform well. One of the major threats in professional sports has been opiates to deal with pain. In a football game, it’s like a traffic accident on every play. Since pain is ever-present, it’s essential to find alternatives to becoming dependent and ultimately addicted to opioids is critical.

    Any last words? Any message you want to leave us with today?

    I have found that the most important life skill is listening. If you can cut below the surface with another human being and listen carefully to their greatest anxieties and fears and their greatest hopes and dreams, you can help them. If you can put yourself in their shoes and connect with their hearts and minds, then it’s possible to navigate yourself through life with grace and integrity. Indeed, from the beginning, it was at the heart of my father’s message to me.

    Lastly, I believe one of the keys is to try to live in this moment without being lost in the past or fearful of the future. We don’t always have to answer the cell phone that’s ringing. You can put focus and energy into the present to derive maximum satisfaction and be a happy person.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Strung Out: An Interview with Erin Khar

    Strung Out: An Interview with Erin Khar

    When I was in a 12-step program, I had so much shame… Some people seemed pissed off when you relapsed. I get that it’s upsetting, but have a little compassion.

    Erin Khar is an award-winning writer known for her deeply personal essays on addiction, recovery, mental health, parenting and self-care. “Ask Erin,” her weekly Ravishly column, attracts more than 500K unique readers per month. Her work is published in SELF, Marie Claire, Redbook, and anthologies including Lilly Dancyger’s Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. Her first full-length memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (Park Row Books, February 25), will be released this month.

    Khar battled heroin for 15 years. Her intro to opioids came in pill form at age eight. It was the year her parents split up. In Strung Out she writes, “My Dad had moved out and my mother drifted from room to room in our old Spanish house with a weightlessness that I could tell threatened to take her away.”

    Khar suffered from overwhelming feelings that she didn’t understand. “A panic spread across my chest, filling my body with heat, trapping me. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. As I reminded myself to breathe, some instinct led me to the medicine cabinet.”

    With anxiety pounding, the third grader fumbled past Band-Aids and Tylenol and found her grandmother’s bottle of Darvocet, which warned: “May Cause Drowsiness and Dizziness.” She wanted so badly to stop hurting she popped two big red pills into her mouth, then gulped from the faucet to wash them down. The burning heat of anxiety soon gave way to a “lightness of little bubbles.” Erin felt like she might float out of her body; this was the escape she’d yearned for.

    Strung Out depicts one person’s journey against the backdrop of America’s opioid crisis. The book is written in gorgeous, accessible prose. Candor and vulnerability come through in a natural, believable voice, conveying what many trauma survivors know intimately: pain, anxiety, rage, depression.

    Khar snorted heroin for the first time at age 13. At first, she’d said no to the boyfriend urging her to try it; her stolen pills felt like enough. But her guy persisted, describing it as a much better high. It was also the quickest route to forgetting. When Khar was four, a teen boy began molesting her. The abuse continued for years. Like many survivors, Khar told no one and desperately tried to block it from her mind. 

    “I needed to be somewhere else, someone else,” Khar told The Fix. 

    Strung Out is a page-turner that follows the progression of addiction: Narcotics seem like a magical solution until the relief morphs into a monster roaring for more. Opioids are now responsible for 47,000 deaths per year—that’s nearly two-thirds of all drug-related deaths in the U.S. 

    Reading Khar’s book felt like listening to a confidante, a kindred spirit who “got me.” We sat down in a New York City garden to talk about the hell of addiction and colossal relief of long-term recovery.

    What idea sparked this book?

    I wrote Strung Out because it was the book I wish I’d had when I was younger. I want to open up the conversation. Why do people take drugs? And why can’t they stop? The more we talk about it the more we can get rid of the stigma and shame surrounding it. Many people still don’t seem to understand addiction. I want to encourage empathy and compassion and give people hope.

    I love that your then 12-year-old son asked if you ever did drugs. Can you tell me about that?

    At first, I pretended I didn’t hear him. [Laughs] I tried not to cringe at my deflection.

    I stalled by saying, “That’s a complicated question.” I didn’t know what to say. I did use drugs. A lot of them. Heroin was on and off from 13 to 28. That’s when I got pregnant with him. But how much should I tell him? I’d smoked crack, done acid, taken Ecstasy.

    You describe childhood guilt and shame vividly. Looking back, do you think that was rage turned inward?

    Oh yeah. It definitely had to do with early trauma. All I knew then was a nagging feeling. It wasn’t until I was 19 that I came to terms with everything. Before that, I minimized what happened to me, trying to shove [memories] aside. It took a long time for me to see that my therapist was right: my anger had sublimated into guilt.

    Do you look back now and understand your feelings of shame?

    Yes. I took responsibility for things because it gave me the feeling that I was in control. Can anyone process that kind of childhood trauma all in one go? I don’t know. Maybe it takes a lifetime to process? Maybe I’m still processing it.

    Do you get triggered due to PTSD?

    Yes. Even though I’ve done a lot of work on myself, I still have hypervigilance. My body reacts strongly to some situations, like if I’m startled by something, and especially if I’m asleep.

    Can you describe things that helped? Especially for anyone who is trying but can’t stop using.

    The first thing was accepting that I wasn’t going to be fixed overnight. Then it was forgiving myself for relapsing constantly. For me, whatever I’m dealing with, if I break it down into small, digestible increments, it’s a lot easier to handle. Focusing on the big picture is not helpful. That’s why they say a day at a time.

    How did you stop relapsing?

    By being honest about relapses. When I was in a 12-step program, I had so much shame. It was detrimental to worry about being judged at meetings. [Some] people in AA seemed pissed off when you relapsed. I get that it’s upsetting but have a little fucking compassion. [So] I hid relapses, which made it a lot easier to do it again. Finally, I was honest about [chronically] relapsing and that helped me stop. You do not have to relapse. It’s not a requirement of recovery but I don’t think that we unlearn things in 30 days or 60 days or 90 days or a year. I don’t think it happens that quickly. For anyone who struggles with addiction, we want immediate relief. 

    Like pushing a button?

    Yes. I wanted to be numb. Stop thinking. In recovery, my biggest life lessons were learning to have patience, be honest, and work on accepting things I have no control over.

    Did you find things easier when you began opening up?

    First, I had to get through my fear that people were always judging me. It took work. I wouldn’t say it was easy but yes, I did get better. 

    How do you feel about your upbringing now?

    I definitely don’t blame my parents for any of the choices I made. Even the choices when I was really young. I hid the sexual abuse and my depression from them. I hid my suicidal feelings. If my parents had stayed together and everything had been perfect, I may still have hid things. It may be a function of my personality.

    Today I have a really good relationship with both of my parents and they have a really good friendship with each other. I will forever be grateful that no matter what happened, through everything I did, they never turned their backs on me. I have a very different idea about tough love than I used to. When I was first trying to get sober, the general idea of interventions and dealing with somebody who was addicted was this hard line of tough love. 

    I used to deal with people that way. But now, I really don’t think it works. That doesn’t mean that you should enable people. But, for me, I was lucky. Despite everything I had done to my parents—years of lying and stealing—our family connection remained. That door was still open when I finally asked for help.

    Erin Khar talks hope, shame, and recovery:

     

    Order Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Life After “Blackout”: An Interview with Sarah Hepola

    Life After “Blackout”: An Interview with Sarah Hepola

    I was far more scared to fail — to have written a lousy book that people ignored — than I was embarrassed about people knowing that, say, I had sex with some random guy in Paris.

    Sarah Hepola’s book, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget was released four years ago, in the summer of 2015. It quickly became one of the best-known and most well-received memoirs about addiction. 

    In Blackout, Hepola recounts her long-term love affair with drinking and the lifestyle that comes with it, and then describes how her relationship with booze transformed into something complicated and dark. Literally dark, as in frequent blackouts where she didn’t remember what she did the night before, or sometimes who the person in bed next to her was. This behavior had disastrous results: “I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care,” she writes, “but I woke up a person who cared enormously.”

    The Fix recently caught up with Sarah to discuss life, recovery, and what it’s like to share your most intimate moments with the world. 

    While I am sure that you were thrilled to have a book deal for Blackout, did you have any trepidation before the book was released about having all of your dark secrets out in the open? Was there ever a feeling of ”Oh my God, what have I done?”

    I crashed my car twice in the months before the book came out. Once I was pulling out of a tricky underground garage, and the second time I was in a middle lane I mistook for a turning lane, and I just smashed into an SUV. I really shouldn’t have been driving. 

    The anxiety is weird. On one hand, maybe no one will read the book. Great! But wait, then nobody reads your book. Your surest route to comfort is your surest route to failure. I was far more scared to fail — to have written a lousy book, that people ignored — than I was embarrassed about people knowing that, say, I had sex with some random guy in Paris. My dark secrets were an exposure I could control, in the sense that I got to say what was included in that book. But to expose your secrets and discover no one cares? That is sad, like someone yawning in the middle of your striptease. 

    I was also deeply worried the book would have a negative effect on family and friends. That my parents would be judged harshly, or one of my friends would feel mistreated. I volunteered for that kind of scrutiny, I cashed the check, but those people never asked for a spotlight. They only made the mistake of loving me. I think in nearly every case, those relationships were made stronger for the experience, but I worried myself sick over it, which probably tells you something about me, or my deficiencies as a writer, or my overdeveloped sense of responsibility for other people’s happiness. But the short answer to your question is that I didn’t sleep well for months.

    What was it like for you when your book first hit and became hugely successful and your whole scene was out there for all to see? 

    I think it was about 4 p.m. on a Wednesday when my editor called and told me the book was on the New York Times bestseller list. Some part of me had been waiting for that call since I was a little girl, and afterward I walked around in a daze, like: I’m going to be a New York Times bestseller for the rest of my life. No matter what crap I put out after this, no matter how I fail, they can’t take that away from me. The next day, I was like: But why is it in LAST place on the list? Can we nudge that up a bit? So I’d say I felt astonished, and still hungry.

    As for how it felt to have my “whole scene” out there, I don’t know. I’d been writing candid first-person essays for a while, so disclosure was a comfortable position for me, but the book took it to another level. On one hand, I was deeply gratified to hear people connect with the material. On the other hand, it can be a cold and drafty feeling when strangers behave as though they already know you, or you know them. It’s made dating weird. I use the dating apps, and I try not to let potential romantic interests know my last name before we meet, but it doesn’t always work out. To this day, I’m never sure what the person across the table knows about me when I sit down. Usually it’s nothing, though, because it turns out most people don’t read books, or care much about them. 

    Your book has been inspirational to a lot of folks. Do you have a lot of people who are in recovery or considering recovery contact you and talk about how you’ve inspired them?

    Yes, and it’s one of the coolest parts. The emails are often quite personal about their drinking problems, or blackouts, or the struggles they’re having, and you’d think I’d get tired of those emails, but I devour each one. I read them in line at airports and in grocery lines and sitting in my driveway at home, because I’m so riveted by the story I can’t be bothered to turn off the engine and walk inside. I just sit in my parked car with my seat belt fastened, scrolling and scrolling like wow, huh, you don’t say, that’s wild. 

    I’ve always loved people’s stories, especially their darkest ones, and I think the emails have been an antidote to the lonely disconnect I felt when someone knew about me, but I didn’t know them. Every once in a while someone asks if I can call, or help them get sober, and I decided before the book came out I wouldn’t do that. In fact, I knew I wouldn’t respond to most emails. I didn’t have time. But most people just want to just say their piece, and move along. I do occasionally get late-night emails that will say things like, “I’ve never told anyone this, and please don’t write me back.” A couple have said, “I need to tell someone this before I die.” It’s a very strange perch to sit on, to be the recipient of these little confessionals. Mostly secret drinking problems, some affairs, risky sex, that kind of thing. I do have to wonder how many people are drunk when they write me. But many — the majority, by far — are sober people who want to say, “hey this was cool” or “hey, this meant something to me.” I never get tired of it. I’ve heard from a fair number of people who stopped drinking after they read the book, and a few send me updates on their birthday. “I have one year.” “I have two years.” That’s incredibly special. 

    Where are you at with your recovery now? 

    I was five years sober when Blackout came out, and my recovery felt so strong. I mean, jeez, why wouldn’t it? I gave up drinking, and I got the life I always wanted — I’d written a book, the book did well, I was traveling the country, people were cheering, cash and prizes, what’s not to love? I wondered how my recovery would hold up after the excitement went away and life threw me challenges, and — well, recovery got harder. I’ve had some tough years.

    I don’t struggle with a craving for alcohol, because whatever was wired in me got disconnected. I’m better without booze, and I know it. But I struggle with a craving … for what, exactly? For more. For a love relationship that I have never managed to maintain, for a family I never put together in all the years of slipping off bar stools, for a connection I found in alcohol — temporarily and ultimately at a cost that was too steep — but that can be hard to make when you are a quiet writer who works from home and lives with a rotating cast of over-loved tabbies. Twelve-steppers would tell you I need a stronger connection to my higher power, and who knows? Twelve-steppers have often been right, in my experience.

    The book I’m working on now, which has taken a long, long time, is an attempt to make sense of the frustration I’ve felt over the last few years as I edged into my forties as a single woman. Those can be confusing years for a woman who hasn’t had kids yet, if she wanted them—which I always did—because the window is closing on your fertility, and it’s like: Should I give up, or never give up? I also think that’s a challenging stretch in your sobriety. I’ve heard years six to ten referred to as “the desert years.” I just got nine years last May, so maybe I’m almost out of my little Sahara. 

    I’ve never regretted my decision to quit drinking. What I regret is not quitting sooner. But you know what they say: It takes what it takes. For me it took until the age of thirty-five. 

    Since you started your recovery in 2010, what changes have you noticed in the drinking scene, and in the social scene in general?

    Well, I’m pretty checked out on “the drinking scene,” though everyone seemed jazzed about the Aperol spritz for a while. What took me by surprise was the growth of the non-drinking scene. Sober bars and sober parties and the “sober curious.” I’m curious to see where the recovery movement goes in the 21st century, because it’s becoming less tied to the spiritual solution of 12-step programs and more tied with health and wellness and lifestyle brands. Is that good? Bad? I have my suspicions, but we’ll see. 

    I’m certainly glad to see sobriety losing its stigma. I’m thrilled to be living in the golden age of seltzers. My refrigerator is filled with La Croix and Bubbly and Waterloo and my current favorite, Spindrift. I like that bartenders who used to be dicks about making a virgin cocktail treat it more like a challenge now. Do you like ginger? Do you like pineapple? That’s nice. Not long ago I went to this amazing restaurant in Oklahoma City called Nonesuch that had non-alcoholic pairings with their dinner that were arguably more interesting than the alcoholic ones. Incredible. I commend the creativity that went into that, but I’m also glad business owners are realizing the money they’ve been leaving on the table. Suckers like me will pay a LOT for pretty drinks with no booze in them. 

    A big change is that young people are drinking less. Fashions change. I suspect we’ll reach a place where the kind of drinking that defined my era — drink-till-you-puke binge drinking — will seem old-fashioned. We’re in an era of pot and pills and whatever behavioral addiction we are all currently acquiring through our phones. I did an event with Chelsea Handler not long ago, the famously vodka-swilling Chelsea Handler, and she’s a pot evangelist. She’s starting her own line, and she’s working on a strain that doesn’t give you the munchies. I’m not into marijuana, but whoa. That sounds like a growth industry. I’m watching mom friends put away the Chardonnay and pick up the one-hitters. 

    What projects are you working on now?

    The new book is another memoir. It pivots around questions I started asking as I edged into my forties, which also happens to be the years since Blackout came out: Why did I never get married? Why did I never have kids? Is singlehood something that happened to me, or did I choose it? Is my solitude a curse, or a gift? Something I should change, or accept? In a way it’s me working through what was underneath my drinking all along, which was loneliness.

    The book dips back into my past choices, and examines deep relationships — with men, with my family, with my writing, with my own body — to try to understand how my story has unfolded, at the same time it’s tracking a larger cultural story about women’s rising place in the world, along with shifting attitudes toward marriage, love and sex, parenthood, etc. I sold the book last summer to Whitney Frick at the Dial Press, which is part of Random House, and she’s been so insightful and patient with me because it’s shifted a bit as I’ve been working on it, as books often do. My hope is that we can push it into world in 2020, but that depends on me making my fast-approaching deadline (yikes), and whatever the fates have in store for the news cycle and the general mood with regard to the presidential election. Let me say this: I was stuck for a long time. But I’m writing as fast as I can.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Heidi Fleiss Talks Sex, Drugs, and Saving Macaws

    Heidi Fleiss Talks Sex, Drugs, and Saving Macaws

    I’ll get high to hide my pain and as an excuse. It’s stupid, just plain stupid. I’ve never known drugs to help anyone. It’s so crazy to hate it so much but to do it still. I don’t understand that insanity.

    The “Hollywood Madam” lives today with scores of noisy exotic birds in the small town of Pahrump, Nevada. Remembering her prison days, she now dedicates herself to freeing macaws from their cages.

    When Fleiss was arrested in 1993 for charges including attempted pandering, her escort service employed 500 beautiful girls-next-door who were like porn stars in the bedroom. They charged clients what today would be almost $3,000 a night, and Fleiss grew rich by keeping 40 percent of those earnings. Partying hard and living in the fast lane led to struggles with addiction.

    Although she never served time for her work in the sex industry, a federal tax evasion case led to 20 months in prison in Dublin, California. While incarcerated, she longed for her freedom; this longing served as the genesis of her efforts with macaw rescue.

    We recently got the inside scoop from Heidi on prison, reality TV, addiction, and her mission to free birds.

    The Fix: Today, your passion is providing freedom to dozens of macaws, beautiful parrot-like exotic birds that you live with on the outskirts of Pahrump, Nevada. You describe how seeing a caged bird reminded you of your experience in prison. Is being of service to these birds who once were forced to live in boxes a reflection of personal redemption?

    Heidi Fleiss: You pretty much got it. After prison, I did see the world differently. I saw a beautiful macaw in a cage, and it really bothered me. I asked the owner when was the last time it was out of its cage. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe 20 or 30 years.” The bird actually had dust on it. I realized I could not go on with my life, knowing that bird was still in that cage. It seemed so awful to have wings and be stuck in a cage, of all things. Imagine 45 years in a basement with another 45 years to go.

    It has never been properly addressed. We are a civilized society. How can we do this? The subjugation of this species is selfish and self-absorbed. It’s a tortuous, bleak existence. It’s so painful for them because their bodies aren’t meant for sedentary lives. They struggle with this lonely, painful existence. Do you really think these animals with wings are on this earth to say bad words and to dance for us? It’s disgusting, and everybody should find it offensive. Are we really that selfish?

    Before prison, I never paid attention to or cared about a bird in a cage. I lived with this one rich boyfriend, and we had lots of birds in cages. I’d walk by them every day, and I looked at them like I looked at pictures on the wall. It didn’t matter. Now that I’m aware, I can’t ignore it. I have to be proactive. I rescue them from parrot prison and give them a life outside of a cage. (In the background, macaws screech loudly.) They need to have some other option beyond living and dying in a cage. Today, I am that option. I did not want to do this with my life. I still do not want to do this, but somebody has to do it.

    In terms of your attempts to maintain your sobriety, you say, “I struggle. I struggle with my addiction. And it’s tough because I’ll be doing so well. And I don’t know what will make me flip.” When you have fallen off the proverbial wagon in the past, what triggered you? What tools do you use today to avoid such triggers?

    I am just coming off of a slip right now. I’m barely off of one. Obviously, there are some personal demons that I can’t confront. Sometimes I cannot accept the mistakes that I’ve made. Dealing with a relapse seems easier than continuing to deal with the pain. I’ll get high to hide my pain and as an excuse. It’s stupid, just plain stupid. I’ve never known drugs to help anyone. It’s so crazy to hate it so much but to do it still. I don’t understand that insanity.

    Was the business a pure money-making venture for you? How many of the women involved in the sex business view it purely as a money-making business, and how many of the women struggle with substance use or behavioral disorders like love addiction and sex addiction? Do you think a madam is to a sex addict what a dealer is to a drug addict?

    Absolutely not. In any professional field, whether it’s the medical industry or the legal industry or education or the sex industry, you’re going to find the same amount of problems: sex addiction, drug addiction, hang-ups from being molested, or this and that. You’re going to find just about the same ratio that I went through in the sex industry with just about any of these other professions. You really will.

    As for the sex addiction question, that’s the man’s point of view. They think the women do it because they love it. They don’t do it because they love it. They do it for money. And they are introduced to a world they would never have experienced otherwise. Who else gets to spend a summer yachting on the French Riviera? The people that worked for me traveled the world, and many had incredible, unique experiences. It’s very hard for people to understand the world that I was in. When you are dealing with the wealthiest people in the world, what happens is rare and beyond expectation. A million dollars is nothing to a billionaire. It’s hard to fathom that kind of life when it’s combined with having a good time.

    You don’t have to have a golden pussy to get a hundred thousand dollars. It has nothing to do with that. Rather, it’s about the circles you travel in, and I was able to access the people with that kind of money. That’s what it’s all about, and it’s really hard to understand the way money works at that level. All that stuff was a long time ago, it was a lot of fun, but it seems silly now to me, particularly in light of what I do today.

    Speaking to Vice, you said that the public humiliation you experienced on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew was actually therapeutic. Can you help us understand how it was therapeutic to have dirty laundry aired on national television? 

    When I was asked to do that show, I was like no way. I’m not going to be humiliated on television. You have to be a real idiot to do that show. There’s no way on earth. I turned it down, and then they contacted me again. I changed my mind. I don’t know why I decided to do it, but it was probably the five hundred thousand dollars. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life, and I wish they would start doing that show again.

    Really?

    Yes.

    Why?

    I think it’s really helpful to people both on and off the show. Yes, you’re watching someone else’s train wreck, but that’s what we always do. I don’t think it’s any more exploitive than anything else. You learn when you watch other people that you’re not alone whatever you’re going through and that there might be a way out.

    Dr. Drew is a genuine person and a great guy. He truly cares, and I found him to be one hundred percent sincere. He’s the real deal. He’s not a fraud or a phony. Ever since I first met him when I was 27 and sent to my first rehab, he’s been a consistently wonderful guy.

    You are famously quoted as saying, “I was too lazy in bed to be a prostitute.” Did this laziness change when crystal meth entered the picture? Was your sexual relationship with Tom Sizemore as charged and powerful as Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew made it out to be?

    I hate crystal meth. It still plagues me. I don’t see it as a sex drug. I think if you connect with someone, you connect with someone. I did crystal meth before and after I was with Tom, and I didn’t have these freakily intense sexual relationships. If you do not want to sleep with someone, drugs certainly do help. They really help.

    Personally, when it comes to sex, I don’t want to see anyone disrobe in front of me again. When it comes to sex, I’m done. I don’t want to have sex ever again. And this is from someone who’s slept with everything and everyone. I slept with a guy who rode on the Queen Mary when it was a ship, and I’ve only known it to be a tourist attraction. I’m not saying that I’m a new virgin or anything, but I don’t even want to have sex ever again. It doesn’t matter to me at all.

    Do you think people can be addicted to sex? What about addicted to love? Do you believe that you have suffered from sex addiction or love addiction?

    I definitely have never had a sex addiction. I’ve had a sex drive, and I’ve had lots of sex, it’s never dominated my life. I’ve felt that I’ve got to get laid or I got to have sex or my life will fall apart. That’s not me. Mind you, I’ve had mornings where I’ve woken up and looked over to find someone in my bed, and I have to ask myself, “Is that a boy or a girl?” Never ever has sex been the driving force in my life. I think the word “addiction” can mean a lot of things. People always talk about moderation, but I don’t believe in any of that. If you want to ruin your life, just do drugs.

    Love addiction can be co-dependency. I know women who do not feel complete unless they have a man in their life. I also know girls who go out at night with one purpose in mind. If they don’t get laid, then no matter what happens, it’s not a good night. It’s only good if they get laid. Father complexes and mother complexes drive those behaviors. They feed off of abandonment issues and get even complex.

    Also, my girls were not sex addicts or love addicts. They were prostitutes, and they were professionals. I went for the best. I wanted the cover of Seventeen magazine. None of them were underage, but I wanted the girls that looked like cheerleaders. I wanted the girls that knew how to fuck like a porn star but looked like the girl next door. (The squawking of the macaws intensifies.)

    You once lived a life that most people cannot even imagine. You told Vice about the parties at your house in the Hollywood Hills, saying, “They didn’t have sex for money at my house, but they would come to hang out. It was social… You’ve got people like Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger partying at your house… I remember coming home, and Prince was dancing in my living room.” Do you miss those days?

    I remember walking out of my bedroom to see Prince dancing in my living room. I thought it was way cool, and I couldn’t even stick around to enjoy it. I had to go to a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow to check in so I could manage my business. It was too loud at my house to get anything done. There were a lot of good times, but I also worked hard.

    Do I miss it? (There is a pause as a macaw screeches in the background.) Look, when you’re young and a girl in Los Angeles, it’s hard to do any better than I did. For a long time, I had the best of everything: food, sex, drugs, people, clubs, hotels, and more. I was having a good time, and it seemed like the party never ends.

    As a woman gets older, it’s harder and different. When those things don’t work anymore, it changes you. The only thing I miss about Los Angeles today is there’s a lot of opportunity there. I don’t miss that life even when these birds are driving me crazy. I’ve had a great life and good times, but saving these birds right now is the only thing that matters to me.

    (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Addiction and Poverty, Dignity and Friendship: An Interview with Chris Arnade

    Addiction and Poverty, Dignity and Friendship: An Interview with Chris Arnade

    Even in harsh situations people can find dignity, and create these beautiful things. Even in the crack houses, even in the drug spots there is beauty. It’s not just all down and out.

    In 2011, Chris Arnade was a successful bond trader, working on Wall Street and experiencing a level of success most Americans only dream of. He seemed to have it all – a degree from a prestigious university, a nice home, and family. And yet just a year later, he began a project that would eventually morph from distraction to obsession: photographing and documenting the lives of the drug addicts who were then denizens of Hunts Point, thought at the time to be one of the roughest neighborhoods in New York’s South Bronx. 

    Arnade had become disillusioned with the financial industry during the mid-2000s financial crisis, and he left Wall Street for good in 2012. In 2013, he published a series of photographs titled “Faces of Addiction” on the image hosting site Flickr.

    In 2014, Arnade began taking long road trips across America, documenting “the back row” – his term for the people who had fallen through the cracks of the Great American Success Story, those who are routinely ignored, marginalized, and demonized. At oases of calm, like local McDonald’s restaurants which often serve as places of refuge for the down-and-out, Arnade found unexpected resilience, dignity, and even humor in the lives of America’s forgotten.

    Photographs, interviews, and observations from these journeys comprise Arnade’s latest book, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. I once again had the opportunity to talk with Arnade about how he went from being a cog in the finance industry machine to the lens that strives to expose the worth in people so many think of as worthless.

    The Fix: You’re a scientist, you worked on Wall Street, where you had a very successful career. What made you decide to make the transition from Wall Street to becoming a documentarian? Actually, you’re more than a documentarian. As I recall, you were very much involved in the lives of the people that you met in Hunts Point. What was the catalyst for that transition?

    Chris Arnade: A combination of curiosity and frustration. Frustration with Wall Street and how, especially after the financial crisis, how the industry was, and how much damage it had done, and how closed-minded people on Wall Street were to the fact that they had done damage. So, I kind of, in some way, blew off my job and just starting walking around the town, and that’s kind of what led me to Hunts Point. Not just Hunts Point, but other neighborhoods like Hunts Point where people tell you not to go to.

    Then it became somewhat political, where I was seeing things that are very different to what people had said I would see. Neighborhoods [where] there’s a lot more sense of community. It wasn’t as dangerous as people said it was, it was far more inviting, friendly, than people said it would be. But also people were screwed over, and so the neighborhood had been kind of unfairly stigmatized. And it made me kind of frustrated that people here weren’t necessarily any different that the people on the Upper East Side, but they were treated a lot different.

    It was an area that people judged quite harshly, but you saw another level, you saw the community, you saw other pieces.

    Right. And also…it was the first time I was really spending a large amount of time around hard-core addicts, and so the stereotypes for addicts were all wrong. They were no less intelligent, no less hard working, no less decent than any other people. Here they were, being in this awful situation, and being treated like shit. So, some of that was going on, just being kind of like, “Oh my God, this is so wrong.”

    Did your experience in Hunts Point change your thoughts about and viewpoints of addiction?

    Yeah, I became a lot more sympathetic. I certainly understood a lot better how stigmatized the community is. This is, I guess, seven years ago now. A lot has changed in the seven years, for the better. I think seven years ago, you’d regularly hear people saying, “Addicts deserve this.” I don’t think you hear many people say that anymore, thankfully…The biggest change I saw was, if you had asked me before, I would’ve thought it would’ve been pretty easy to get clean, to get sober. Life sucks for them and this is unfair, but why don’t they just get clean? When I was in Hunts Point, I realized just how hard that is, it’s impossible sometimes.

    Did you have a sense of addiction from the medical model?

    Yeah. From that perspective, I’m in the minority I think. I don’t want to get people angry and say it’s not a medical condition, [but] I don’t see it that way. I see it as more of a cultural issue, in the sense that you’re surrounded by it. You grew up in these neighborhoods. I see it as a response to basically being either traumatized, or stigmatized. The sense of being cast aside, and feeling like you don’t really fit in anywhere, and that life is kind of meaningless. 

    So, one of the things I write about in the book is: I talk about how— and people don’t want to admit it— there’s a strong community in the drug houses. You walk into a crack house or drug trap, or you crawl underneath a bridge and hang out with people shooting up, it’s a real community. Friends, there’s people, it’s a place where you fit in. And, I think there’s a lot of people who don’t feel like they fit in, or are not accepted in other clubs. Nobody wants to let them in their club, so why not go to the club underneath the bridge?

    McDonald’s became almost a symbol while you were in Hunts Point. Why McDonald’s?

    I think there’s two reasons. One is, well, it’s been the place addicts go. It’s often the only place that is opened to all people, when you’re really pushed to the margins. That’s where the addicts were, that’s where my friends were. People who would spend all day there. They’d go pick up a newspaper out of the garbage can and maybe a soda cup, and refill the soda, sit in the corner, and maybe shoot up in the bathroom, clean up, and just otherwise get lost alone for maybe four or five hours, and no one bothering them. No one telling them “move,” nobody telling them to get out; do this, do that. As I say, a place to regain a sense of dignity, where people don’t stare at you. 

    And the second one, it’s one of the few places that worked. I think Hunts Point’s doing better now. I don’t know, haven’t been there in a while, but I think back then [McDonald’s] was one of the few places that actually was functional, that you could just go to. It was open, and had a bathroom.

    And McDonald’s remained a touchpoint for you in your travels across the country.

    I didn’t really want it to necessarily, but it was for the same reasons as I found myself at McDonald’s in Hunts Point. I found myself in McDonald’s in Portsmouth, I found myself in McDonald’s in other places, because that’s the place where, if your goal was to write about people who were living in the margins, you go to McDonald’s. That’s where they were. I also wanted to be there because I could charge my phone, charge my computer, and I could use the bathroom, and I could clean up. And also, I like the coffee there. You had free WiFi, all those things that people want.

    You also visited many community churches across the country, how did that affect your experience with faith?

    I’m not an atheist anymore, but I’m certainly not religious. I write a lot in my book about how I grappled with thinking about the role of faith, and what I believed before that. I’m a lot more open minded about people. I certainly have a lot more respect for religion, for faith, than I did before.

    It’s interesting, because very often science seems to be at odds with religion and you are a scientist. 

    I’m not doubting that the science community is extraordinarily well-intentioned and does great things, and wants to help the people, the homeless, and they want to help the addicts. Certainly, doctors do and certainly, people do. The average scientist doesn’t understand how, on the street it doesn’t feel like you’re being helped by science. Even a lot of readers won’t understand this. Detoxes, certainly ones that serve the poorest of people, are not necessarily accepting places. They can be sterile cold places, not very welcoming. Hospitals are the same way.

    The places you would think would be the least judgmental, very often are the most.

    The thing is, it’s just a matter of legwork too. If you’re in the worst neighborhood, worst stigmatized, worst drugs, worst crime…the groups that go in there and talk to them on their level and don’t treat them like things they don’t understand are churches. They really go into these communities and do outreach. Some people might be upset with that outreach, but I think the reality is they’re there, they’re boots on the ground.

    And I noticed, in the book, it wasn’t like you visited homeless shelters or spent much time in treatment programs.

    No. I think McDonald’s are the homeless shelters during the day, the day shelter. When people can’t be in the shelter, they walk over to the McDonald’s and hang out there. There are certain McDonald’s that were open 24 hours, especially ones in the inner states. That’s where they hang out. They try to hang out all night there.

    Was your experience of this kind of journey different than what you expected it was going to be? Did you have a sense of what you were going to see or what you might encounter? 

    I didn’t think I would see as much pain as or as much frustration as I saw. Every town has a neighborhood, or multiple neighborhoods that are like – this isn’t a blue-state, red-state or urban thing, it’s everywhere. You go into any town, and there’s going to be a problem, a place where there’re drugs, and where there’s frustration, and where there’s poverty. I guess, what I found, what kind of shocked me or disappointed me in some ways, is just how easy it is to find. You don’t have to go searching for it. And how out of touch politicians are, with what’s going on in their own country. 

    So, the magnitude was greater than you expected yet, it seems like you have hope. In your book, that sense of hope comes across, despite the fact that as you said, the problem was greater, the magnitude larger, but there’s hope, still.

    People are resilient. So, even faced with these awful structural problems that are kind of put on them, they do their best. It’s like in Hunts Point. 

    The things I worried about that didn’t get a lot of attention are like the pigeon keepers, right? People who take pigeons and make beauty out it. A lot of people think it’s nothing, they’re just rats with wings, but if you go up on a roof and watch the pigeons fly, they’re gorgeous. The same with the guys who fix up Schwinn bicycles, which are literally being tossed out by wealthy people, or ignored, they turn them into these really cool things. 

    So, I think what I appreciated is the resilience. Even in harsh situations people can find dignity, and create these beautiful things. Even in the crack houses, even in the drug spots there is beauty. Where there’s people putting together small works of art, and there’s humor. It’s not just all down and out. There are funny moments, people have fun. It’s not just all evil.

    The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that “we don’t and never will have this under control.” It is far easier to see religion not just as useful but true.

    From Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • I Can’t Wait to Hug My Brother: A Conversation with White Boy Rick’s Sister Dawn Wershe

    I Can’t Wait to Hug My Brother: A Conversation with White Boy Rick’s Sister Dawn Wershe

    Whenever they needed something, our police and government, the FBI, they made all these big promises: You do this and we’re going to give you this. But when it came down to it, nobody was there for Rick.

    When Rick Wershe was 14 years old, his older sister Dawn didn’t live at home. She was shacked up with her boyfriend smoking crack. She remembers the day her dad came over to tell her that Rick had been shot. They rushed to the hospital where Rick was in a bed, hooked up to all these wires and monitors. Dawn just lost her mind. She was hysterical and the nurses had to give her a Valium to calm her down.

    The .357 bullet entered Rick’s stomach and came out his back, just barely missing his main artery and blowing his large intestine in half. After Rick was discharged, Dawn moved back home to take care of him. His recovery was long and slow, and Dawn didn’t understand why he was so paranoid. Later she found out that Rick had been informing on local drug crews to the FBI, DPD and Prosecutor’s Office.

    You’ve probably heard of White Boy Rick. His odyssey has been covered in magazine, newspaper, and internet articles, a feature documentary, and a major motion picture with Matthew McConaughey. But while the injustices of his case have been widely profiled, the collateral damage to Rick’s family has received less attention.

    As Rick remained in the public eye, Dawn faced her own problems, including battling a 30-year addiction to crack cocaine. The Fix sat down with Dawn to discuss her drug use, how she’s dealt with her brother’s continued incarceration, how it felt to be portrayed on the big screen, and what it will be like to finally have him home.

    The Fix: When did you get involved with using drugs and do you recall the first time you experimented with drugs?

    Dawn Wershe: The first time I’d ever smoked crack cocaine was actually at my father’s house when he was in California. It was my girlfriend and these two guys. They’re like, “Hey, we’re going to go get this stuff. We want you to try it.” I think I was 15 years old. After that I smoked it now and then. When I was 17, I had a boyfriend who used to go rob people. Then we would go smoke. It was crack, but back in the 80s they called it freebase.

    When we were freebasing in the 80s, it was pure cocaine. It was an unbelievable high. I became addicted. My boyfriend ended up going to jail when I was 18 and I struggled with my addiction for probably a good year until my family said it’s either rehab or we don’t know what to do with you, so I checked myself into rehab. It was over on Michigan Avenue. I met a lot of strange characters there. I got clean and had my daughter. I stayed clean for a long time. I had a relapse when she was two.

    You battled addiction off and on for close to thirty years, what was that like?

    I got clean and had my second daughter. Another relapse, got clean, and had my third child, my son. Another relapse, got clean, and had my fourth child. It was a vicious cycle. Sometimes I’d only relapse for a

    day or two. After I had my fourth child, another son, I just said enough is enough and I was clean for over ten years. But after he turned ten, I relapsed again. My relapses were like daytime trips: going places I

    shouldn’t have been. Soon my relapses started becoming more frequent, and some longer than day trips. They became two-day trips, three-day trips, depending on how much money I had to spend. Always crack cocaine, that was my drug of choice.

    My addiction started spiraling again, I was using more frequently. I would disappear for a day or two back then. Maybe I went a month without crack, maybe I went a week. It depended on the situation, but it all was bad looking back. I can’t think of one time that I was happy and smoking crack or freebasing. Most of the time I was paranoid and worried my family was going to know; it was like how am I going to deal with this? I have to get back home. The streets are ugly. I saw and heard things that nobody wants to see or hear.

    How do you think your addiction hurt and affected you and your family?

    My addiction crushed my family. It was horrible. Now that I look back and see things I did, and what the outcome of them was, it mortifies me that I’ve put them through that. Especially my kids when they were younger. It’s something I would never want to put anyone through again. The biggest regret I have is putting my family through that. Something [would] happen in my life, let’s say my husband cheated on me and I found out. I’d be off to the races. Bam, I’m gone. Because I’m going to show him, I’m going to pay him back. But in actuality I was hurting myself and I was killing my family.

    It didn’t hurt him, he didn’t care. I would leave and then I would feel so guilty. The guilt consumed me. As soon as you take that first hit, it’s like, “Oh my God. They’re going to know I’m high. They’re going to be so disappointed.” That was the worst thing I could’ve done. I never robbed anyone, I never stole anything, I never sold my body. I never did any of that. I would just leave and lie to everyone. I’d say, “I’m going to the gas station” and just not come back. It breaks my heart. I just thank God that my children have unconditional love for me.

    When was your last relapse and how long have you been clean now?

    I relapsed in March of 2017. Right after the documentary about my brother premiered in Detroit. I was clean 11 months prior to that. Right now I’ve been clean a little over two years. I don’t think I’ll ever relapse again at this point, because I hit the bottom of the barrel and that last time I had an epiphany. It wasn’t a good epiphany, it was me dying. And my children having to deal with that: having to deal with the way I died, where I died, how I died. And it devastated them. Nothing anyone says or does to me at this point in my life could make me want to use drugs. Not a boyfriend, not a man, not my kids, not a stranger. Not anyone could say or do anything to me that would make me say, “Well, I’m going to go get high. I’ll show them.” That Dawn is gone.

    What’s it been like watching your brother go through his ordeal with the criminal justice system and the insane amount of time he’s been forced to remain incarcerated?

    When Rick started selling drugs on his own, I was there with him. I told him it was going to be bad. He ended up going to jail not too long later. He was only selling for a year on his own after he wasn’t an informant. And when they sentenced him, I was mortified. I mean, I had just lost my little brother. Then the very next day they took my dad. They arrested my dad for threatening a federal officer at Rick’s trial. They ended up dropping that and charged him with components to make silencers. He got convicted on that.

    In two days I lost the only family I had. The only one I had left was my grandmother, my dad’s mother who helped raise us. And she wasn’t good, she was in and out of the hospital and living in a nursing home. I wish back then we had home healthcare where I could’ve let her live with me, because she raised Rick and I with my dad. It was very devastating to lose my dad and my brother, and then nine months later, I lost my grandmother.

    Every week I went to the prisons to see my dad and my brother. I would gather up my kids, sometimes go get Rick’s kids, sometimes pick up my mom and go visit them at the prison, which is an all-day thing. It killed me because I didn’t have my family. That was my whole support system — my brother, my dad, you know? It was the Three Musketeers, and now we’re no longer. I feel that they used Rick as a child. They took away his childhood from him.

    People talk about them doing it in China and foreign countries, but our police and government, the FBI, they did it here. They did it to Rick. Whenever they needed something, they made all these big promises. You do this and we’re going to give you this. But when it came down to it, nobody was there for him. Nobody came to bat for Rick at his trial. Nobody came to bat for Rick at his parole hearings until 2003 and then more recently.

    What was it like to see yourself portrayed on screen in a big Hollywood movie and be a part of the Shawn Rech documentary?

    I was in the documentary, which I’m quite certain helped gain my brother his parole in 2017. And that was put together and orchestrated in the best way possible. It gives the solid answers and the truth. In the documentary we don’t talk about my drug addiction.

    When the Hollywood movie came out, I saw it for the first time in public and cried the first 30 or 45 minutes. They had me on screen looking like I was a dope fiend. They had my dad — Matthew McConaughey — with greasy hair; the clothes he was wearing and the car he was driving were never anything that my father wore or had. I told everybody before it happened it wasn’t going to be real, it wasn’t going to be right. That movie just caused me so much grief, aggravation, and pain that it’s a wonder I didn’t relapse.

    Rick got paroled from Michigan and now he actually has a date, what’s it going to be like having him finally come home?

    He had to go to Florida to do a five-year sentence for something that happened while he was in prison involving a car theft ring. He was turned down for clemency in March 2019. But next year in 2020 he’ll come home. I can’t wait to stand there and watch him walk through that gate, because it’s going to be so surreal. I probably will pass out because I won’t believe it.

    I can’t wait to be able to hug my brother. To have him home. To show him how different life is out here now from the life that he left. To be with us as a family. To be around his grandkids, my grandkids, and to just spend time together. It’s just going to be one good time after another. It will be dinners, barbecues, trips, just family time. It’s going to be family time for a long time with us when he comes home.

    (Images of Dawn and Rick Wershe via author)

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Sex Addiction, Porn, and Online Dating: An Interview with Dr. Stefanie Carnes

    Sex Addiction, Porn, and Online Dating: An Interview with Dr. Stefanie Carnes

    More and more women are getting involved with porn, cybersex, hook-up apps and sexting. Given the technological advances, it’s not surprising that these behavioral addictions have blown up.

    Dr. Stefanie Carnes, Ph.D., CSAT-S is the President of the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP) and a senior fellow for Meadows Behavioral Healthcare, where she works with people struggling with sex, love, and intimacy disorders and their families. As the daughter of Dr. Patrick Carnes, the nationally recognized expert credited with popularizing the term “sex addiction” in the early 90s, she grew up in the midst of the theoretical underpinnings of modern behavioral disorders like sex addiction, porn addiction, and love addiction.

    The Fix is honored to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Stefanie Carnes about the rise of sex and porn addiction and how it’s tied to the increased availability of online pornography and hook-up apps, the necessity for a different paradigm in treating family members, and how stigma is causing harm to a growing and largely unrecognized population of sex addicts: women.

    The Fix: Can you explain why compulsive sexuality is similar to substance use disorders?

    Dr. Carnes: Although the treatment can be very different, the latest neuroscience research reveals very similar patterns in the reward center of the brain. In the latest edition of the journal World Psychiatry, the WHO recently released an article that said they are moving the behavioral addictions into a new category under the umbrella of addictive disorders. Thus, gaming, gambling, and substance use disorders are all going to be included in a single category. My hope is that they will move compulsive sexual behavior from the impulse control disorder category to this much broader addictive disorders category. It’s the same path that gambling took, and I hope we will follow that classification path as well. Although the WHO remains somewhat conservative by keeping compulsive sexual behavior as an impulse control disorder, it is possible that it will be moved over once more research is examined and evidence accumulated.

    The definition by the WHO in the World Psychiatry article is as follows:

    Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder is characterized by a persistent pattern of failure to control intense repetitive sexual impulses or urges, resulting in repetitive sexual behaviour over an extended period (e.g., six months or more) that causes marked distress or impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.

    The focus is on behaviors that are out of control, thus there are a lot of similarities with gambling and substance use disorder.

    Dr. Patrick Carnes believes that at least 40 percent of female Internet users engage in problematic cybersex. Do you agree with this statistic? If so, what percentage of those women are potentially sex addicts? What steps could be taken to help this massive population gain awareness and receive potential help?

    I’m not sure what specific study was being cited in that article, but I can tell you that we are seeing huge increases for women in terms of such behaviors online. It’s very underestimated how both sex addiction and porn addiction are impacting women. A big part of that gap is that the stigma is greater for women. It’s harder for them to come forward and ask for help. If you look at a recent study done by Dickenson and colleagues, the results proved surprising:

    In a nationally representative sample that asked how many people in the United States were struggling with some form of out of control sexual behavior, the percentage of the overall female population came back at about seven percent. It was much higher than what people in the field had anticipated. There are over 150 million adult women living in the United States, and 7% means that over 11 million women are struggling with this issue to one degree or another. Even if we cut that number in half, it’s still an enormous number of people.

    We are seeing that a lot with women struggling with pornography, for example. For example, Porn Hub designated 2017 as the “year of porn for women” because rates of women using porn almost doubled during that period according to their statistics. We are seeing more and more women getting involved with porn, cybersex, hook-up apps and sexting. We see really high rates in the college student population where porn is normalized. In that group, the use of porn has become normative behavior. Any time you have greater availability and accessibility of an addictive substance or behavior, you are going to have higher rates of addiction. There is a reason why there are more gambling addicts in Las Vegas than in any other part of the country.

    The higher rates for women mean the battle against destigmatization has become even more important. The stigma prevents women from accessing help and professional support. In terms of porn addiction for men, you have a lot of well-known men ranging from political leaders and athletes to movie stars and other public figures that have come out and said they were struggling with this problem and were getting help with it. In contrast, there still have been very few women that have done the same. Like with alcoholism, we need the Betty Ford moment where women stand up and say that we, too, are struggling with this. Such a moment had a tremendous impact on the process of the destigmatization of alcoholism and substance use disorder. We have seen a lot of men coming forward, but we haven’t seen that as much with women. This is a women’s problem too, and we need to open and expand that national discussion.

    How has the rise of the internet and online dating affected sex addiction?

    Availability and accessibility almost always is a key part of the development of any form of addiction. Given the technological advances, it’s not surprising that these behavioral addictions have blown up. Today, we have hook-up apps with location features on every smartphone and any kind of porn at the tip of your fingertips at any point in time. Thus, we are having much higher rates and much higher instances of sex and love addiction than we’ve ever had in the past.

    Can you help illuminate the relationship between sex addiction and porn addiction, particularly online porn addiction? Is there a widespread direct relationship or is it contextualized case by case?

    There is a widespread relationship. One study done recently showed that about 80% of people that identify as sex addicts also said that they had some form of problematic pornography use. Having made that point, there’s a difference in terms of treatment for people that just have porn addiction versus people that have both sex and porn addiction. The people who only identify as porn addicts, and it’s a large group, their behavior has not transitioned to being problematic in real life and offline. Although porn addiction affects their life, it tends to be very isolating and lacks interaction with other people. Thus, treatment looks very different for them. As a population in general, they look very different from sex addicts and have very different needs in terms of a recovery program.

    For example, a recent paper made a very interesting distinction between contemporary porn addicts and classic sex addicts. Most of the classic sex addicts have multiple addictions, high rates of trauma, attachment problems, and mood disorders. They are using sex and porn to self-medicate, and that’s the typical classic presentation. In contrast, the contemporary presentation of porn addicts tends to be young people that got exposed to pornography online at a very young age. They tend to have less trauma, fewer attachment problems, and fewer co-occurring disorders. Instead, they simply got hooked on internet porn at a very young age and it deeply affected their sexual interactions as they grew older. With someone like that, it’s a very different treatment process than with somebody that has the attachment wounding, the trauma history, and serious co-occurring substance use disorder.

    With porn addicts, we focus on healthy device management, content filters, social support, and managing triggers and cues. Those kind of treatment methods are very important when it comes to treating porn addiction. The goal is to foster a healthy way of living moving forward.

    On November 14, 2017, IITAP released a position statement about Harvey Weinstein and the sexual assault and abuse scandals that led to the #MeToo movement, which reads in part: “It is critical to understand that sex addiction and sex offending behavior are not the same things. A sex offense occurs when there is a non-consensual sexual behavior that has a victim…. most studies show that only about 10%-30% of sex addicts have behaviors that constitute sexual offenses. The majority of sex addicts struggle with issues like pornography addiction, prostitution, anonymous sexual behaviors, and sexual promiscuity and boundary failure.”

    How severe is the damage done by these misconceptions to the sex addiction treatment industry? How can the industry rehabilitate itself, shifting public opinion?

    The media and the public have a hard time making the distinction between a sex addict and a sex offender. Since they classify sex offenders like the Craigslist Killer as sex addicts, suddenly everyone with a problem with compulsive sexual behaviors becomes a sex offender. This is not right, and it prevents many people from admitting their problem and reaching out for treatment.

    For example, let’s take Bill Cosby and his crimes. Bill Cosby is a sex offender who was committing crimes, yet the media would refer to him as only a sex addict. His actions were coercive, exploitative, and criminal. The Craigslist Killer had anti-social personality disorder so it doesn’t make sense to define him as a sex addict. He was sociopathic and psychopathic. By defining him as a sex addict, you are making the implication that sex addicts are sociopathic and psychopathic, and this implication is grossly unfair. From a clinical standpoint, we understand the distinctions. However, the media conveys a wrong message to the general public by looking at extreme sex offenders and saying, “Oh, this person is just a sex addict.”

    We have to be better about teaching people the appropriate language. We have to help them understand the distinctions. Indeed, we need to educate them so they understand that sexual harassment, rape, and other criminal behavior are sex offenses. Sex offenses and sex addiction are two very different things, and people need to understand the difference.

    In the position statement, you also write, “There are many misconceptions about sex addiction treatment. The first is that it is a retreat or a way to escape problematic behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Can you describe how sex addiction treatment works at your facilities?

    A lot of people have the mistaken perception that sex addiction is an excuse for bad behavior. They believe that sex addicts go to treatment only to escape the consequences of their actions. In my firsthand experience treating clients, such a perspective is just not the reality of what treatment is like. By the time you are going into inpatient treatment for sex addiction, you have done damage to yourself, and you truly need help. Many have destroyed their lives. Thus, there is no escape without doing the work.

    At our treatment center, we have both a men’s unit and a women’s unit. Gentle Path is our men’s unit and Willow House is our women’s unit. When both men and women enter treatment, we have very high rates of suicidality. To ensure their safety, many clients are put on one-to-one suicide watch at the beginning of their stay until the threat passes. In terms of the work being done, the clients are in group sessions for almost forty hours a week. Then, they have individual therapy sessions on top of it. They also have homework to complete as well as 12-step meetings at night. If you want a vacation to avoid consequences, the Meadows is not the right choice to make. Our program is about attaining sobriety from addiction and working a program that leads to long-term recovery.

    One of the aspects about my father’s treatment philosophy that I have always admired because it really works is the idea that you have to grab onto a client’s frontal lobes and hold on. What he means is that to enact positive change in a person’s core personality takes focus and determination. Thus, it’s a very intensive treatment program because the addictions we are treating are life-threatening. The stakes are high, and people come to us really needing to be helped and supported.

    From morning meditations and journal entries to a whole protocol of exercises and nutritional support, everything is designed to foster this process. Then, it’s also extremely emotional on account of the trauma work which pulls up the root causes behind the behaviors and all of the original pain points. The very deep experiential work around the root trauma is not easy for anyone.

    Beyond their own work, the process builds up to family week where they have to face the devastation caused by their addictions within their own families. Revealing the truth and facing your family for an entire week is heart-wrenching. As I mentioned, the men’s unit is called the Gentle Path, and that is also the name of the program. Our clients jokingly refer to it as the Brutal Path because the process is so difficult. They are grateful for the results of the work because they know by the end that they have done the work. It’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination. As you can see, there is a huge discrepancy between the public perception of sex addiction treatment and the reality of sex addiction treatment. The blatant falsehood of sex addiction treatment being an easy escape is an unfortunate perception because it puts treatment in a negative light. One of our goals is to change this perception.

    In contrast to your father’s focus on treating sex addicts, you also have become laser-focused on supporting their partners and loved ones. How does your work help the loved ones of people with sex addiction?

    Coming from a family with sex addiction and having been impacted by it as a family member, I feel it has often been overlooked. When I first entered the field, many therapists denied the existence of sex addiction. If you asked for help, you were sent along your merry way. Thus, many people looking for help were turned away, and many families were negatively impacted.

    Back in the 1980s and 90s, since the only therapists treating sex addiction in the beginning were addiction therapists, the same treatment principles used for substance use disorder were applied to sex addiction. However, when it comes to families, there are some big differences between chemical dependency and sex addiction. When I entered the field, there was so much that was misunderstood, and there simply were not a lot of resources for partners and family members. It seemed that what happened after treatment in the context of the family was more of an afterthought. The treatment of the sex addict was put first during treatment and helping the family was nothing more than an adjunct to the addict’s treatment.

    Another problem was that the codependency model was being applied to the majority of these families when most of them did not actually know that the addiction was going on. The families felt they were being pathologized by such an approach. I’ve tried to use a lot of my efforts in outreach and training to educate therapists about the traumatic nature of these kind of addictive behaviors for family members. Beyond being very difficult to even learn, it often becomes downright devastating for them. They really need a kind of help and support that is not the same as with families dealing with chemical dependency. For example, disclosure is a huge issue. How does a sex addict share information about the sexual betrayals with their partner without traumatizing the heck out of them?

    Moreover, think about the challenge of the children. What are you going to tell the children about this? It becomes very complex and very age specific as well. In our Certified Sex Addiction Training for therapists, I teach our second module which is all about how to work with the couples, how to handle the betrayal trauma, and how to talk to the kids about what is happening. It’s an incredibly important aspect of treatment. If it’s not handled well, it can really derail the addict’s recovery. When it comes to compulsive sexual behavior, you have to look at the family from a relational paradigm. You have to examine and address the whole system or treatment doesn’t work.

    Dr. Stefanie Carnes is the author of numerous publications including Mending a Shattered Heart: A Guide for Partners of Sex Addicts, Facing Heartbreak: Steps to Recovery for Partners of Sex Addicts, and Facing Addiction: Starting Recovery from Alcohol and Drugs.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Lisa Marie Presley Writes About Painkiller Addiction, Opioid Crisis

    Lisa Marie Presley Writes About Painkiller Addiction, Opioid Crisis

    The daughter of music legend Elvis Presley opened up about her struggles with opioids.

    Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley, wrote about going public with her struggles with painkiller abuse in a foreword for the new book, The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain by Harry Nelson.

    In the foreword, Presley tells the story of the first time she spoke publicly about her experiences with addiction.

    Last August, Presley was on Today to promote Where No One Stands Alone, a gospel compilation album featuring archival recordings of Elvis’ vocals with new instrumentals and mixing. When the interview took a turn towards the topic of addiction, Presley did not shy away.

    “I’m not perfect. My father wasn’t perfect, no one’s perfect. It’s what you do with it after you learn and then you try to help others with it,” said Presley, referring to her father’s famous substance abuse problems.

    On the show, she also revealed what life was like prior to finding recovery.

    “I was not happy,” she said. “And by the way, the struggle and addiction for me started when I was 45 years old. It wasn’t like it was happening all my life. I have a therapist and she was like, ‘You’re a miracle. I don’t know how you’re still alive.’”

    Presley chose to open up in hopes of helping others, she revealed in her foreword.

    “I had never openly spoken in public about my own addiction to opioids and painkillers,” she revealed. “I wasn’t sure that I was ready to share on such a personal topic.”

    Her own problems with painkillers began in 2008 when she was prescribed opioids while recovering from having her twin daughters, Vivienne and Finley. Her substance abuse problems began earlier than that, and she credits Scientology for getting her clean after a big, final bender.

    “I was on a 72-hour bender,” she said. “Cocaine, sedatives, pot and drinking—all at the same time. I never got my hands on heroin, but it’s not like I wouldn’t have taken it. I just couldn’t be sober. I don’t know how I lived through it.”

    She eventually found recovery and hopes that stigma will be abolished.

    “It is time for us to say goodbye to shame about addiction… Across America and the world, people are dying in mind-boggling numbers because of opioid and other drug overdoses,” wrote Presley in the foreword. “Many more people are suffering silently, addicted to opioids and other substances. I am writing this in the hope that I can play a small part in focusing attention on this terrible crisis.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How It Feels to Be the Reality Show Villain: An Interview with Kari Ann Peniche

    How It Feels to Be the Reality Show Villain: An Interview with Kari Ann Peniche

    Those shows continue to haunt me and do me damage in my personal life. I was portrayed as this crazy person, and that portrayal is something I find myself having to fight against on a regular basis.

    Kari Ann Peniche was thrust into more scandals before the age of 30 than most fictional Hollywood starlets. She was crowned Miss Teen USA 2002 before her 17th birthday, then in 2004 the title was taken from her after she appeared nude in a celebrity pictorial for Playboy magazine. Then, from 2009 to 2010, Kari Ann appeared in succession on the reality shows Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, and Sober House. Set up as the troubled bad girl by the producers, Kari Ann received little help and lots of negative press. She was also the subject of tabloid celebrity stories covering her volatile engagement to Aaron Carter in 2006, a nasty public quarrel with the late singer Mindy McCready in 2009, and the leak of a controversial nude home video that included married actors Eric “McSteamy” Dane and Rebecca Gayheart in 2009.

    With hard work, Kari Ann moved on from that chapter and today she is happily married with two children. She found her true calling as an interior designer and creative director, and in 2017 she launched DAF House, a “luxury design, fashion and art firm.” 

    The Fix recently had the pleasure of speaking with Kari Ann about her journey. 

    After appearing nude in the November 2004 issue of Playboy magazine, you were stripped of your crown. Why did you decide to appear in Playboy? Since Hugh Hefner was still alive at this point, I imagine you spent time at the Playboy mansion.

    When Playboy was introduced to me, I didn’t really know how I felt about the idea. All I knew was that it was a nude magazine that my Dad had kept hidden in a drawer when I was growing up. I thought it was weird to even consider the idea at first. Then, the agent went on to tell me about all these iconic women who had posed for the magazine in the past: Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett, Sharon Stone, Shannen Doherty, Drew Barrymore, and many more. I thought, “If they posed for the magazine, then I definitely want to pose for the magazine and do a celebrity pictorial because I will be in such good company.”

    So, I agreed to do it, and I did spend time at the mansion. I lived there for a couple of months, and Hef was always very nice. He taught me how to play backgammon, and he let me stay in the guest house. I don’t think it was too much for me, but it definitely opened my eyes to a world that I hadn’t been exposed to before.

    In an interview with Steppin’ Out magazine, you revealed that you had been raped twice before you turned 18, first by a neighbor when you were 13 and later by a U.S. military officer when you were modeling in South Korea. You also had a series of abusive boyfriends that took advantage of you and introduced you to hard drugs. How difficult was it to be in the national spotlight while dealing with such extreme trauma?

    I know now that being busy with modeling and Playboy and all the attention that I was getting at that time really helped to distract me from that trauma. At the same time, I never really dealt with what happened. I just pushed everything aside because I was too busy to stop and really think about it. I would tell myself that I was fine, I’m not a victim, and those things aren’t about me. The ones that did those things to me, they’re the ones that need help and they’re the sick ones. They should deal with it, and I don’t need to deal with it because I’m just fine. That was my attitude about all that back then.

    When I did the Steppin’ Out interview, I was starting to kind of crumble, and I was reaching out for help. Everything had slowed down, and suddenly I had a lot of time to myself. Finally, being with myself allowed me to reflect on what had happened. I realize now that I shared stuff that they didn’t even really ask me questions about. The interview really captured where I was emotionally and mentally. I was breaking down, and it felt like everything was falling apart. It happened to be the same time that I got the calls to do the reality shows. I knew I needed something so I thought it made sense: I would help my career and help myself at the same time, but that’s not what ended up happening.

    You went on Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew because your manager thought it was a good idea. Today, you say that you were never a sex addict. Instead, would you describe yourself back then as a love addict or a relationship addict?

    I like to say that I had more of a shopping problem, I mean, I didn’t even know what sex addiction was and I didn’t know why I was going on that show. I was the first person cast for that show, and I had only been intimate with a handful of people. Never had I ever had a one-night stand or hooked up with people I didn’t know. I was never promiscuous in that way, but I knew how to play that part in a weird sense.

    I do know that I used sex as a kind of protection. I would use sex as a way to ward off guys that I thought were trying to make moves on me. I thought that being graphic or explicit would intimidate my guy friends and keep them in line. I always had people over at my apartments and my houses. I would buy sex toys and bondage stuff that I would have in my bedroom and on my bed, but I had never even used these things before. It was all like some kind of strange decoration, and it was my way of protecting myself. I don’t know if that makes sense, and I know it sounds kind of confusing, but it actually worked really well. Rather than use sex toys and bondage equipment, I really just shopped for them and displayed them, and that’s why I like to refer to it as more of a shopping problem. My goal was to make guys think, “I’m not even going to try to hit on her because I am inadequate. I won’t be able to keep up with a girl like her.” In truth, it was all one big illusion. I had been through so many bad things in the past, and I needed to have a way to protect myself.

    When you were on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew and Sober House, it seemed like the producers cast you as “the villainess.” Did you feel unfairly portrayed on these shows?

    When I did those shows, I had really bad management, and I was coached to be a certain way by the producers. I was told that VH1 was looking for a new starlet to come out of these reality shows, and the cast was going to include Tom Sizemore and Dennis Rodman. We had big names on the show, so I thought it made sense to be a part of that group; I thought it would help my career.

    I do feel unfairly portrayed because the producers did a lot of things to provoke negative behaviors. I could have behaved differently, but so much of what happened wasn’t shown. You saw the reactions but never the provocations. We’re being filmed 24 hours a day for 21 days, and all that’s aired is 47 minutes once a week for ten weeks. Obviously, a lot of the story is edited out. They never showed the full story of what led to my outbursts on the show.

    I also felt like they were digging things up and putting words into my mouth that weren’t true about my drug use and past trauma. At first, I would just say whatever they wanted me to say. I didn’t really know the answers to the questions they were asking.

    As time passed, I knew I wasn’t being true to myself. It really started to bother me, and I started regretting a lot of the things we had filmed earlier. I didn’t want to be there anymore, and I knew that doing the show wasn’t right for me. At the same time, I also knew that I needed some kind of intervention because I was going down a bad path in my life. I really wanted to be helped, and it was a struggle to try to get something positive out of the experience when I also felt manipulated and not properly cared for.

    At the end of the day, we were just a cast, and our pain didn’t matter. All that mattered was them getting the material that they wanted. They were creating characters, and I hated the character that they created for me. Rather than help me get well, it felt like it was designed to do just the opposite.

    If you could sit down and talk to the producers of those reality shows today, what would you say? Should behavioral addictions like love addiction, relationship addiction, and sex addiction be used as fuel for the engine of the entertainment machine?

    I would first thank them for the experience because I did learn a lot. However, I don’t think they were fair or considerate. Rather than manipulate those experiences, they should have let things unfold naturally. If they had done it naturally, I believe they would have had great content anyways. There already are enough things that unfold in rehab anyhow. I don’t understand why their focus wasn’t helping the patients as opposed to doing things to provoke the drama.

    The producers and people on the show used our addictions and our traumas in these therapy sessions as entertainment, but they didn’t provide any follow-up care. It was a bad idea, and it caused a lot of hurt for my family and for me because they opened wounds without trying to heal them. It was like pulling off psychic scabs, and they would be blaming my mom or my dad for what had happened to me when I wasn’t even blaming them. I have never blamed them for anything. I was an adult, and I made those choices on my own. I knew better, and I knew I shouldn’t have put myself in those situations or done those things. Rather than help, they made me more confused.

    After those shows, I left each one of them feeling worse than I had before I went on them. They had ripped off those scabs, and I left filming with all these open wounds and no one to help heal them. Even today, those shows continue to haunt me and do me damage in my personal life. I was portrayed as this crazy person, and that portrayal is something I find myself having to fight against on a regular basis.

    I don’t think those settings should be televised. Everyone comes off poorly, and it’s not a good message. It does more harm than good.

    On the DAF House team page, you are quoted as saying, “Change is possible no matter who you are, what you’ve done or where you’ve been. It starts with creativity.” How did your creativity help you overcome the trauma you experienced as a girl and young woman? When did you realize that it was time to change and how did you change?

    I believe we are all artists in our own way, and we are all here to create, whether we are creating art or music, writing or designing, building or financing, marketing or selling. It all depends on our identity, but everything can be done creatively. For me, the quote on the DAF House website refers to that chapter in my life. There has been so much said about me that’s honestly not true, and I had spent four or five years honestly embarrassed about who I was or even who I am. I was afraid of anyone Googling me and finding out about what had happened because the reality had been so twisted. I was scared about what was going to happen.

    I recently went through a tough time in my marriage where my husband and I spent almost two years divorcing. It was really ugly and crazy in retrospect because we never got divorced, and we are still together. During that time, everything from my past before I was even married and before I was ever a mom was being brought up in court. I was being portrayed as a bad mother because I was an addict, and I had been on those celebrity rehab shows. It was all in the past and completely irrelevant to my being a mother or being married at that point in time. It was so in the past, but still, the judge ordered me to do random drug testing where they go in the bathroom with you and watch you pee three times a week. It was awful, and during that period, I did over 80 drug tests in a six-month period, and every one of them came back negative.

    Look, I was happy to do those drug tests because I knew I had nothing to hide, but never did any of that get publicized. Only the negative headlines are focused on by the eyes of the world. My husband’s lawyer brought forth a torrent of allegations against me, all this bad stuff that had happened long before we were married and all this bad stuff that was untrue. What was so disturbing is that the false picture that lawyer tried to paint of me kept coming out in the press and being published as truth. I cannot tell you how hard it was to go through something so awful.

    My husband and I did manage to reconcile, and we have done our best to repair our marriage. He was going through his own crisis mentally at the time, and the divorce had little to do with me and our relationship. However, given my celebrity and the scandals in my past, I became the punching bag of that process. He was influenced by a lot of outside people, and he let those people dominate his perspective. For a long time, all I could do was love him from far away and do my best to let him know that I wasn’t playing games. I wouldn’t say anything mean about him because I knew it was all going to be public record. I didn’t say anything about him being a bad father because it wasn’t true. He’s always been a good father, and I would never say such things about the man I love.

    We have been married for nine years, and we have put that behind us. For me, that quote is about focusing on the present and the future, leaving the past behind. I am trying to create a new picture of who I am for the public so I can be seen for who I really am.

    This interview was edited for length and clarity.

    View the original article at thefix.com