Ego
The profound stature of
This hill I would die on
Disarms me;
Enveloping me with insidious
Melanalcoholic acceptance.
Sleepless nights become
Displaced, impassive sedation.
Monotony shrieks, bellows.
I bear the years behind me.
Ignore the lies I tell–
I feel them all.
Success robs me of peace;
Failure bats at my brain.
Beat it smooth so that
I may bask in the ambience
Of blissful oblivion.
I got the rarest of opportunities. Something of a fly on the wall in the most delicate of environments. As a kind of underling of a therapy team, an intern in a rehab is a unique kind of nothing; a cipher of experience, neither staff nor patient. Witness to anything with hardly any agency at all. “Inmate or Guard?”I was once asked by someone easing into their long-term stay. In truth, I wasn’t either. I’d find myself continually second-guessing the sense of service in my role.
One of the organic joys was watching communities form. Total strangers with their poison taken from them, being asked to come together. There is absolutely nothing more harmful to a recovery than isolation. The two pillars upholding any active addiction are isolation and shame. One tends to feed the other in a vicious cycle. Getting to witness people historically riddled with these but now seen and heard, finding a sense of togetherness. was a genuine privilege. Being a trusted presence, fostering a sense of safety where this could happen, was hugely validating.
Yet there was always push and pull. Wanting the best for people and to see their growth could be a difficult thing to regulate. Being the guardrails and not anything more could be a difficult post. So much could be on the line for those giving their stay at the rehab the most long-lasting value. People, who over time and conversations, would come to reveal all that was glowing and admirable in them. Witnessing exactly how communities would form and bond could also be uneasy. What was camaraderie and what was corrosive? What was the place of gallows humor and a visible sense of mischief in an environment designed to bring people to reality?
Nevertheless, reality would arrive to puncture any floating above it all or skirting round the edges.
Between process groups, therapy sessions and psycho-educational workshops, reality was coming after them day after day. In most cases I would witness, seldom would anybody leave without a sense that they had a problem of greater scale than they’d previously wanted to believe. Those staying had very real circumstances, phone calls could be worth the world, residents had families hanging in the balance.
Bruised and wounded
One of the several psychological interventions offered in the program was a “collateral letter”. The letter was to be read to a person staying at the rehab during a process group and it was to be written by their closest ones back home. Designed to be a confrontation with reality, not a lambasting or shaming. More a form of inventory of how much harm has been caused to those who mean the most.
One Monday, to a vibrant community of incredible lived stories and contagious characters, a collateral letter opened their week. It was thunderously powerful. The words written and read were searingly heartfelt. They were words laden with love, but a bruised and wounded one. The message was clear as day. The person the letter was written for was dearly loved, with children, a wife, a family to hold on to. This individual meant everything, but if they couldn’t leave alcohol behind, the mother of their children would have no choice but to protect the family and leave them behind.
The therapist sitting next to me was clearly moved. Breaths so deep I could’ve credited them to Tony Soprano. I was far from immune, sitting on a bubbling well of emotion that I needed to keep buttoned down for propriety. The person reading the letter was moved to tears and rightly so, she would lead the feedback as well. What she was reading mirrored her own circumstances, she’d spent the last couple of weeks clinging to phone calls on the present danger she could lose her own family. She would be seconded in the feedback. Another individual in the exact same present danger; grasp recovery or risk losing your closest. Soulful and robust, they underscored the gravity of matters to him: get a hold of yourself, get on with your recovery, words aren’t words alone, this is reality.
It was as if just for that 20-minute spell, somebody stopped the clocks. Time paused, reality was here and nothing else mattered. An individual was being handed truth in a form they’d never have again. A phosphorous, molten truth of priceless value. Where else could something with such honesty be handled with such care?
On that Monday, I felt an immense sense of service. To be sure, I was just a small cog in a much greater machine, but that Monday I walked out feeling a part of something profoundly valuable.
Monday and Friday
The main thing that the therapy team hammered into interns and Healthcare Assistants was boundaries and just how important they are. Maybe I didn’t get that down, maybe I had a degree of personal investment in outcomes I could have handled better. There is always a danger in emotional resonance with matters one can’t control. When I came back that Friday, there was a different feeling around the place. The air was thick and stilted, something was off. Just four days on, from one of their several random drug tests, someone in the community tested positive for cocaine.
The message from the therapy team was clear: when there’s using, there’s no growing. The healing back to square one, the value lost, the formidable message of Monday nowhere to be found. “The Community is Unwell”. I was gut-punched. The intervention couldn’t have been any more potent, the stakes any higher, yet mere days later we were staring down the barrel of families left in tatters. Addiction blindly bulldozing reality.
It would be the longest day I’d spend interning at that rehab. It didn’t belong to me. It really wasn’t my hurt but I couldn’t deny the sting of it. I was left with a painful doubt — what use did this work have to these people? What was my service?
I was a twentysomething, twentysomething. Lost and wayward, yet somehow granted the occasional tentpoles of good people to guide me along the way. I was nudged by one of those people at the time to go work for a rehabilitation center. I was raised in an alcoholic home and, like many who come from such beginnings, memory is a blur to me. A roof beam here, an adult’s face there, maybe a friend’s house. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I can see how things were.
The adults aren’t my parents, the roof beam doesn’t belong to a place I recognize, and the friend’s house isn’t really a friend’s. I was shifted around a lot. I was the youngest of my family and because of this, I was kept away from the disaster zone. Like many, I’m sure, I was left with a lot of questions.
I knew the “how” and I knew the “why,” but not the “what” exactly. What is the profile of a person? What is in the architecture of a person who loses their motherhood for the bottle? It’s a fall from grace that many don’t want to know exists. Women, I know, have described motherhood as something “sacred.” What exactly is the making of a supposed transgression?
While it originally brought some amusement to tell people that I was interning at a rehab, it would turn out to be an incredibly rich, spiritually nourishing experience. Moreover, this voluntary engagement would soon turn into employment. At the start, my placement was once a week and each day was illuminating. Shadowing the therapy team, I was sitting in on group therapy sessions, handovers, and supporting clients during their stay.
There’s a prevalent cultural misconception about what a rehab is and what exactly it does. These places don’t and can’t fix people, neither do they heal or get rid of addiction. In clinical terms, twenty-eight days is hardly a pocket of time at all. What a rehab can do and what I’ve witnessed it do, is bust denial. It can give appropriate interventions in the correct environment to assure that there are no illusions about the scale of the problem. A rehab can give a person abstinence and the tools to uphold it. It can show the way for a lasting sobriety. It is entirely up to the individual if they want to take it beyond their stay; the choice can only be made by them.
Across the months, there would be clients passing through for twenty-eight-day stays, or longer. Treated as a collective, they would be known as the “community” by the therapy team. Within a month it became clear I was in the right place. Each community passing through included at least one woman in her forties who had become alcoholic. More curiously, father, brother, lover, son… they all had a significant “Oliver” in their lives. So who were they?
They were clearly people giving their all. Perhaps too much, they were all remarkably hard on themselves. They were all either the only girl in the family, or the youngest, having a profound sense of being the runt of the litter. They were all from homes where doing one’s best was required and yet having one’s feelings acknowledged was seldom. They were all from formative environments where anxiety could be felt in the air. They were all able to speak of a mother or father, sometimes both, that they just couldn’t reach.
From school rebellion, to university freedom, to home life and domesticity, each was profoundly affected by their actions letting down others. Each understood their drinking habits but hadn’t realized the extent of this pervasive spiritual anesthetic. Each one of these women felt unseen or unheard as perennial perfectionists with sewer-bound self-worth. Something had to give.
Yet I look at these themes and can’t help but figure… it’s no cosmic curse. It’s not a smiting from the Almighty. To be sure: some had a genetic predisposition, a family disease, but some didn’t. The women in question were remarkably warm, provincial, and familiar figures. You can picture them loading up their shopping in a supermarket car park. Or waiting and chatting with fellow parents at the school gates. Maybe catching a coffee with friends, prams and/or little monsters in tow. Perhaps finding an oh-so-rare moment to themselves at a nearby salon. These women aren’t anomalies; they’re all around us everyday.
Transgression or falling? I’m not so sure. Addiction has an eerie ability to breed denial and minimization. From what I’ve seen, it’s a playing-out of matters we can’t control, a hard turn of misfortune, a flicker of fate away.
Alcohol abuse runs in my family.
It seems like a curse passed down the generations.
That said, I also struggled with substance abuse in my early adult life.
It has been a battle not to run to the bottle when I am feeling lonely or unsuccessful. I do not want my generational curse to overpower and ruin me. Hence, I fight for a better future every day.
A summer to remember
One summer, I was feeling extremely lonely and defeated. I was failing community college. I was having relationship drama. My mom was in Pennsylvania with my dad and my friends were nowhere in sight, so I turned to wine.
I was also on medication for my mental health. Mixing those with wine was a huge risk. There wasn’t a single day that summer when I was sober. As a result, I got a speeding ticket, three points on my license, and had to join a driving school.
For the first time, I felt completely alone, as if I did not have anyone to turn to. And I think that is why a lot of people drink. They drink not to feel or to numb their feelings of hurt and despair. Or, as in my grandma’s case, to forget, for a while, the mental trauma of the past.
My familial alcoholic traits
My dad’s family is all alcoholics. They drink in secret and judge people for drinking at a bar. It’s kind of a double standard mindset- like the saying, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” My dad is not as alcoholic as his mom and siblings, but he has some narcissistic traits.
My grandfather died of an overdose at the age of forty. He was a heavy drinker and physically abusive. My grandparents were divorced by then, so my grandma raised five kids by herself. My grandma and dad found my grandfather’s dead body in his apartment, surrounded by empty beer cans and pill bottles.
My aunt’s husband walked in the same footsteps as my grandfather. He was only in his thirties when he died of an overdose. He was found in his car at his workplace. Fortunately, he was not driving so the only life lost was his.
My way of ending the toxicity
Some people drink to celebrate a good time but mostly, I think, people drink to numb the pain and avoid feeling certain emotions.
I know because I did the same. I drank to numb my childhood pain, to numb my feelings of loneliness and despair, and to forget about life for just a little while.
I stopped after that summer. The reason was, firstly, my mother had returned, and I was no longer alone. Secondly, being fully aware of the effects of addiction, I never gave in completely to the high, having learned from my grandfather and uncle.
I lived in the present moment, so I could change the outcome of my life. I wanted a better future for my kids, so I chose therapy instead of the bottle.
This is how I broke the generational curses that haunted my family.
After-work drinks, generous customers, access to stock, brewery days, meetings in pubs, beer festivals, wine and spirit product tasting, line-cleaning sessions, and being surrounded by alcohol all day. Working in a pub not only facilitates regular drinking, it is actively encouraged. For some, this sounds like a dream.
Enthusiastic about drinking back in the early 2000s, I was drawn to working in the industry. But with an already developed alcohol problem stemming from my teens, I found that working in a pub fueled this at an extreme rate. Today, the sober-curious movement has introduced a wide array of alcohol-free alternatives in pubs for the customer.
But there is still very little being done by pub companies and breweries to safeguard their staff. In a 2021 study by BMC Public Health, 353 UK jobs were analyzed. The study found the most significant ratio of heavy drinkers were publicans and managers of licensed premises. Certainly, an industry that would benefit most from prevention programs.
Early exposure
I grew up in Yatton, a village halfway between Bristol and Weston-super-Mare in the south west of England. It was a fairly idyllic 1980s childhood with kickabouts in our cul-de-sac and cricket in the fields surrounding our streets. But I often had a pang of sadness in me. I was quiet as a child and never shared how I felt, which led to feelings of disconnect and loneliness.
I started experimenting with alcohol at 12 and instantly fell in love with how it made me feel. It was a kind of liberation. It released me from the feeling of being trapped within myself. My teenage years were then all about where the next party was and how we were getting our booze. I couldn’t get enough and quickly gained a hedonistic reputation.
But on each occasion, I got carried away and passed out, being told what I did or what was done to me the next day. By the time I was 15, I was depressed. But no one spoke about mental health in the nineties and I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. Alcohol allowed me to escape the depression. At least, initially.
But by 17, I was drinking alone and at crisis point. Struggling secretly, I planned my first suicide attempt. But I fought my way through and completed my A-Levels, never telling anyone what I was going through. I just knew that qualifications were my opportunity to escape.
The drinker’s double life
In 2000, age 18, I moved to London to attend the Metropolitan University’s communications and audio visual production course. I didn’t get into halls but found a house-share with six others in a large property in Stratford, East London. But after a few months of drinking and hangovers, I stopped attending university. Instead, I found a bar job, which I loved. I made friends, worked hard, partied hard, and felt like I belonged somewhere.
But it didn’t take long for this to get out of control. I found myself in the cycle of drinking every evening and passing out anywhere from a corner in a pub, on the tube, or on the street. Regularly, I woke up somewhere I had no idea where I was and had to take myself home for a quick shower and then back to work amid a mighty hangover fog.
I’d make it through the day, but after pouring beer all day. And, in an attempt to hide from my problems, I’d finish with “a few” pints after work again. Being surrounded by alcohol normalized daily drinking. I thought it’s what everyone did, especially at my age. The lifestyle came with its dangers, though. Over ten years, I was raped multiple times and found myself in countless situations where I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was doing it with. I felt utterly trapped in a cycle of self-hatred and attempts to alleviate the shame with more drink every day.
But throughout this period in my life, I was actually very high-functioning. Known as the “drinker’s double life,” functioning alcoholics often have steady careers, disposable incomes and positive relationships while they hide the seriousness of their alcoholism from those close to them.
Management and misuse
I ran my first pub when I was 25. Working for a large London brewery, I climbed from bar server to general manager through extensive management progression training. I learned about profit and loss, licensing and legislation, stock control, recruitment, training and disciplinaries, kitchen hygiene, and cellar work. But I never learned about responsible drinking, managing stress and mental health, or interventions or prevention programmes for staff who may develop drinking problems.
The pub was trading well and I was making good bonuses. So after paying rent and bills, I still had a significant disposable income to spend on more booze. Friends and family could always rely on me to be up for a drink and a good time. Often, they witnessed me having too much, perhaps passing out somewhere or falling over, but that was all in the spirit of the lifestyle. Life was all about enjoyment and I thought alcohol was the only way to achieve this. But, hidden to many, I was struggling with severe depression and drinking daily to deal with it.
I often woke up without remembering the end of the night. Sometimes on the floor. Sometimes in a bus terminal. Sometimes in a stranger’s house. The shame was too painful to acknowledge; I would do my best to push the feelings down and put on a smile. Alcohol made this easier. However, this progressively detached me from any emotions at all, and my true self sank away. Soon, all I knew was the shiny exhibited version – the side my customers saw. I had no idea who I was or what I liked.
Over time, the murky underbelly of my life grew bigger, infiltrating me like a poisonous gas. I was suffocating. Backed into the last remaining corner, it became too hard to hide from the shame and it became impossible to keep the smile on. Consequently, I became suicidal again as I was desperate to escape the exhausting cycle of pretence and remorse.
Attempting to get a grip on my drinking, I often told myself in the morning that I wouldn’t drink that day. But after spending hours pouring pints, I would have a few “in the till” from customers by the end of my shift or I would know which beer currently had a large stock surplus and I’d pour myself one. Propped up at the end of the bar and chatting with my staff and customers, who were all of a similar age and who I considered my friends, it felt completely normal to spend my evenings off this way.
Of course, as an alcoholic, I wasn’t able to stop at one or two and this led to several drinks before stumbling home. Friday nights were line-cleaning nights. After we closed and cleaned up, three pints from each lager and cider tap were poured into jugs for us to drink before the line-cleaning chemicals came through. It was quite a skill to stop it just in time. This was very often the start of drinking until dawn.
Monthly area meetings were always in one of our pubs, with drinks on a company credit card afterwards. Then, a few months into my role, I was given the additional title of Ale Champion, as the only manager in the area enthusiastic about cask ale. This role allowed me one day each month out of my pub to taste and learn about beer at beer festivals or at the brewery. I was literally being paid to drink. The next few years saw a few mental health crises and leaving jobs to escape my increasingly intolerable headspace, twice leaving the UK to escape. I kept running until I was 35. Eventually, though, I gave up pub work and finally gave up drinking. I’m now six years sober.
Working in pubs did not make me an alcoholic, and my experiences are extreme. It did, however, facilitate and enable my alcoholism.
Industry silence and call for change
In April 2023, I contacted 11 of the biggest UK pub companies to inquire whether there were any policies in place for safeguarding staff and whether they had any interventions for when it had gotten too far. Only two replied.
Nicholson’s sent me an alcohol responsibility policy, but this was for guests and the sale of alcohol, not for staff. Marstons told me their policies were internal and not for the general public. Their silence is staggering. Since 2001, when I started my first bar job, there has been no improvement.
I recently met with Dru from Club Soda, a small organization committed to helping people drink more mindfully and live better by promoting low and alcohol-free drinks, providing courses, and setting up alcohol-free events.
Dru told me he is “continually disappointed” by the big pub companies, who he says are difficult to engage with. He says many of them offer yoga days, vegan days, and promote well-being with their staff, but they go silent when the dangers of alcohol are mentioned.
Obviously, it’s not good business sense to tell the world that your core product is harmful, but shouting about the good work you’re doing to safeguard your staff could be excellent PR. The good news, though, is that there is some movement among smaller companies.
Club Soda works with The Drinks Trust, a charity dedicated to the drinks and hospitality workforce. They offer a service for businesses that can’t provide an employee assistance program due to the size of their company, and it is the smaller businesses that are most receptive to safeguarding their staff.
Alessandra from The Drinks Trust told me their free service for hospitality professionals was set up to benefit staff wellbeing. She added that their work with Club Soda has already helped thousands of people change their relationship with alcohol. Although with only 120 people per year signing up for Club Soda’s courses, there is still a long way to go.
The team at Bristol Beer Factory are also doing great things. I contacted Tom Clermont, head of sales for BBF. He reported that BBF invests more time and money into promoting Clear Head, their 0.5 percent alcohol IPA, than any other product. The beer was brewed with their primary charity partner, Talk Club, a Bristol-based mental fitness charity for men. Five percent of every bottle or pint sold goes directly to keeping Talk Club sustainable through regular cash donations to keep building a community of positivity and mental fitness.
Tom also told me BBF invests in their managers by enrolling them in mental health training. He also says BBF is on its way to achieving B-Corp status, a certification of proven excellence across staff happiness and policies, environmental impact, charitable giving, and community engagement.
Unfortunately, the wine industry is still a little sniffy about alcohol-free alternatives, instead adopting the mantra, “drink less, drink better.” A cynical mind could view this as an upselling technique. However, Liberty Wines, a wine wholesaler and importer based in London, has been working with Club Soda on an in-house workshop, Discover Mindful Drinking, to promote a mindful drinking culture within their company.
On a larger, global scale, Healthy Hospo supports drink brands to promote health and wellbeing, which, they claim, is tackling the problem at its source. I met with Jason Knüsel, co-owner and director of the non-profit organization. We discussed why so many are attracted to the job, such as the buzz you get from being around lots of people in a fast-paced environment and the passion for food and drink.
He told me that workers are still trained in many food and drink tastings but not about the dangers of excess, which he believes is due to the large-scale benefit of tax to governments worldwide. Healthy Hospo offers courses raising awareness, and educates staff about drinking habits and the science of neuroplasticity, the way the brain rewires itself through new routines.
But Jason tells me that hospitality is a mess. Since the pandemic, the industry has been losing a third of its workforce every year on an international level, citing mental health, cost of living, and life reevaluations in lockdown as a few of the causes. Industry sustainability is diminishing fast.
I don’t blame the pub industry for my alcoholism. This was well-developed on my own. But it’s been on reflection that perhaps pub companies need to take some responsibility for their employees. People who are attracted to working in pubs are often enthusiastic drinkers, making them susceptible to the progressive nature of regular heavy drinking. This is entwined in the culture.
Companies and organizations like Club Soda, The Drinks Trust, Healthy Hospo and Bristol Beer Factory are paving the way for culture change. Others need to follow.
The next steps are to implement company policies for prevention and processes for alcohol responsibility and awareness among staff. Interventions should also be planned for when an employee’s alcohol intake tips from social to dependent drinking. Hopefully one day, the big pub companies will follow the smaller organizations and breweries to take some responsibility as well.
