Holly Whitaker: Reimagining Recovery

 Holly Whitaker is the author of the New York Times bestselling Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. I had heard about Holly long before I met her, primarily because she was disrupting recovery culture and many people did not like this. But the more I learned about her, the more I spoke to her, the more I witnessed her impact on culture, the more I was completely taken by both her brilliance and her willingness to say the things. Be warned: If you read her book, you’ll never think about alcohol again. In its pages, she recontextualizes the way we’ve been trained to normalize booze—and also the way the current recovery scene is shaped for the consciousness, and egos, of men. She’s created companies in the vein of a feminine-centered recovery, and it feels like she’s just getting started in the way we talk about addictive substances—and addiction. Those who struggle will find a lot of relief in her words, and I understand why. Let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM HOLLY WHITAKER:

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

Holly’s Newsletter

Holly’s Website

Holly’s Podcast

Follow Holly on Instagram

Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:

ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”

TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”

BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Well, it's funny because it took me so long to read your book, but I thought I knew all about your book, and I thought that I knew all about you before I met you, which I'm sure doesn't surprise you as someone in the culture, I definitely heard about you from friends who are fiercely devoted to AA, and we will talk about that in time, we'll put that in a parking lot, but it's an interesting system, because it also feels like a system that bears no detractors, it's similar to other themes in our culture where to criticize it or ask questions about its efficacy. It's quite threatening.

HOLLY WHITAKER: Yeah.

ELISE: It's sacrilegious and it starts to feel like you, Holly, are going to cause people to die by deterring them from AA. So that is often how I had heard about you as a merchant of death just kidding, but not entirely, and we'll talk about that because I think it's really, really important.

HOLLY: That's like such an important distinction and point. Thank you for bringing it.

ELISE: And I do want to talk about it because we see it in other parts of culture, which is this move to shut down conversation, dialogue, debate around very understandably very sensitive topics and sensitive or at risk groups of people, and yet when we do that, when we grind it down to a stop, we can't make anything better or more inclusive. And I know you and I are both Ken Wilber fans, so we're going to talk about that. I'm going to put that in the parking lot and start more at the beginning, which was the evolution or the creation of your book which is just sits at the top of the charts in this category as a Bible Which I know you probably don't want to hear it described as a Bible either, but is a really eye opening excavation of Women, specifically alcohol, but you could talk about it I mean you do you use case studies from culture to talk about the ways in which behavior is The engineered consent of marketing, right?

HOLLY: Right. Of our choices, right? That we're not really making the choices that we make.

ELISE: So take us to the beginning and you don't have to recount your whole history, but unless you want to, but the recognition that there was something afoot or problematic happening in your life and then how you came to understand why and how.

HOLLY: Yeah, I'll probably give like the 30, 000 foot view on this. Just because I think you and I have such more interesting things to talk about. And this I've told this story so many times, but I think, The basic gist of this, I think anybody can appreciate this, is that you know, I had, been drinking since I was 14, maybe I had been introduced to it at a really young age, it had always been, alcohol had always been presented to me as this thing that you will inevitably do, that's a privilege to do, that's fun to do, and I started drinking at a really young age, you I don't think I ever had a quote unquote healthy relationship with it, and not in the way where the second I started drinking it, I was like, I'm an alcoholic, and... You know, like there's a lot of people that the second they had alcohol, their whole life was transformed. And I think for me, it was a gateway, it gave me things I couldn't find otherwise, but it wasn't like the all important thing. And that I had a very confused relationship with it for years. That would sometimes border on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder, like if I had known what that was and that other times it just was an inner object that was not important, it would wax and wane and then it didn't, right?

And I never liked it. Like I liked what it gave me and did for me and the benefits it provided. I never was like, mm, alcohol, it was the thing I felt that I had to learn how to manage and control. And I never felt like I could do that. That always eluded me. And in my drinking, it felt like I was always trying to win at it or just like reach this like really nice balance with it that I imagined everyone else had. And that what I had was really exceptional, which was like just a lack of self control and then in my early thirties, you know, it just really spun out of control, right? I had multiple things going on. I had, you know, decades old eating disorder. I was deeply in debt. I was workaholic. I was smoking pot all day, every day. I was addicted to cigarettes. I was in terrible relationships. And I just, you know, I hit this tipping point in my life where There was just not a lot mitigating me from using alcohol in a way that was like disastrous and my alcohol use increased at a really alarming rate, like, you know, I was young and I was very sick in many ways, like physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, all that.

And I also just didn't know if I was an alcoholic or not. And so, you know, the impetus for this book is really, or for my work from there was just like part of it was just that for years, I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me. And for me, it was just like, This realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career and like, why are we not asking the question? We're just like, we're drinking, it's compulsory in our society. It's exceptional if you don't drink. And then it's also this very addictive drug that's marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to like make rational choices around it. It's like the most socially accepted drug that you can use and like, we just don't have meaningful conversations or informed consent or any, you know, so for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013, it was this realization of Intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.

ELISE: Yeah, I mean, your book does provide, for me at least, and I drink very, very occasionally, socially only, and it was a paradigm shift for me in just being able to look at it, and I think it was easy for me to look at, in part because I've really cut back on my own drinking in the last, Few years similar to COVID, I think, being a turning point. And I know that that coincided with the timing of your book, or at least the paperback, but this watching in myself how this could become a progressive disorder. And because as you write about, there's this cultural myth that there are people who can drink and people who can't and the people who can't, there's something wrong with them genetically.

HOLLY: They have a disease.

ELISE: Yeah, likelihood for disease. And then you throw in this trigger and they're sort of ruining it for the rest of us. But most of us are built to be able to enjoy and benefit from alcohol. And so I thought you did an exceptional job of just actually projecting that onto a screen so we could look at it and say, how much of this is manufactured? And it's old, as you also say, I mean, people will, you know, Jesus drank. It's part of our cultural symbolism.

HOLLY: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's like one of the oldest drugs, right? Like it's a naturally occurring drug. I'm sure.

ELISE: Yeah.

HOLLY: used even before documented use.

ELISE: And potentially psychedelic originally, or like part of the rites of Ulysses.

HOLLY: and it's also something that also is extremely Westernized. It's a very white drug, right? It's a very, now it is, right? It's been stripped of all cultural meaning. It's in a part of a huge, huge industrial complex. It's a commodity that kills people and just like tobacco, just like they need to consistently replace their best customers, you know, most of the alcohol that's sold is sold to people that don't drink within the whatever recommended guidelines are based on what country you live in, but like don't drink as the industry would say responsibly, most alcohol is consumed by people that are consuming it in amounts That are causing, I'm sure, adverse effects and would qualify them for being on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder. So they're selling this product to people that are drinking it in quantities that are way beyond the suggested use. And they know this and they have to replace those customers. And so the way it's marketed is just as we know about tobacco. We understand how underhanded all the tactics were of the tobacco industry that caused people to die for years. And that is exactly what alcohol is. It's the same exact setup, like same exact like playbook and yet because we love alcohol, because like we have still a cultural fascination and just like a love for it, we don't have that objective... you said that you were able to read my book because you changed your relationship with alcohol. So that means that if you hadn't changed your relationship with alcohol and you had like maybe like an iffy relationship that was causing some kind of discomfort, it would have been uncomfortable and you might not have reached for that book. And that says a lot because a lot of people have an uncomfortable relationship with alcohol and they don't and they would and then they leap to if I look at it, It means I'm an addict or I'm alcoholic and that my life is gonna have to change drastically in a really unsatisfactory way, And so I'm not gonna look at it.

ELISE: well, it's so, so interesting when you write about the way public relations was born out of cigarettes and the way it was sold to Hollywood as a prop, a mechanism for an actor to use their hands, right? And use motions or telegraph language without needing to say anything about how they were upset or disgruntled or bored or cool. And certainly alcohol is part of our social fabric or the way that we signal. And it's interesting, I mean, I don't know how you feel about this, but just thinking about the sacrament, thinking about, I don't know if you've read the Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku about...

HOLLY: It's on my nightstand. It's in my up next.

ELISE: It's in your up next. So it's about, you mentioned tobacco. I know you've written in your sub sack about psychedelics, and then you think about alcohol and its early origins and the fact that it was potentially psychedelic and used in these rites, Dionysian rites, and then you think about how these ideas or these concepts which were part of ritual...

HOLLY: mm hmm ceremony Yeah.

ELISE: Symbolically loaded, have been scrubbed. Psychedelics not, although psychedelics, yes, it's happening, right?

HOLLY: yeah, a thousand percent and I think it'll be worse than alcohol because of like where we are at in late capitalism. But yeah, anyway but yeah, it's totally scrubbed of their meaning. Yeah, this is just like anything else that gets fed into the machine. And I know I sound like a crazy anticapitalist, but it's just like a fact that anytime something becomes a commodity, like that basically like free market societies, like take sacrament, take ceremony, take all things that are meaningful, rob us of it, and then package it to us and sell it back to us and like far more toxic and like less meaningful, you know, it's just part of the extractive model and so you do have that and I mean I could go on and on but like alcohol, of course, there's ritual in their ceremony and there's plenty of documentation of it being used and you know in that way and it still is in certain cultures but for the most part, it's just become this thing that's also like we like alongside the war on drugs, right, which has like told us which is which drugs are good and which drugs are bad and truly dominated the world in terms of, like the world is influenced by Americans policy on drugs, their war on drugs. And the way that alcohol is basically, like, all drugs are stripped out and replaced by this one drug, right, it's phenomenal, right? It truly is.

ELISE: Yeah. And it's so rich. I mean, it's so captivating. It's even in the name, too, this idea of spirits, right? And you know, you can think about that in all ways, like a dual system somehow access point to some higher force or a takeover, like a spiritual hacking and yeah, these things are powerful and yet we're taught to use them wantonly and or, you know, obviously to numb to, I think everyone participates in that. It's to take the edge off. It's to dissociate.

HOLLY: Totally and I'm really clear on that. I don't think it's bad to want to do these things. I think, like, we have to really balance this conversation with, you know, being careful around prohibition, right? Because I do think people have the right to do whatever they want to do to their bodies. But at the same time, there's just not informed consent around alcohol. We don't have the right information. We don't go into it with eyes open. We don't turn 21 and have like the lead up to it. Like we're just kind of thrown to the world and told this is a great thing that we should be consuming but also you should be doing it responsibly, right? Like that constant message of drink responsibly is enforced on us. And with a substance that kind of basically dismantles the parts of you that are responsible, like it, it literally dismantles the parts of your brain that account for your ability to be a responsible human being.

ELISE: Right. Well, as you write, I think really eloquently in that phrase and in the way that alcohol is presented culturally as something that you can handle or you can't if you're sort of diseased.

HOLLY: of these sick people that can't.

ELISE: Yeah, like if you're not capable of being responsible, then the onus is on you, and it's such a fine line. I mean, these are really nuanced conversations because I also agree with you people Mostly should be able to do within...

HOLLY: They should. Within reason to not, I'm a total libertarian in this sense, and not in the general sense, but in this way, and like, drug taking, or killing yourself, or in any of the things that we police, or being whatever weight you want, we police people's bodies, right? And I think that, for me, when I'm having these conversations, that is really at the base of it, which is like, I do fundamentally believe, as long as you're not harming anyone else, that you are allowed to put whatever you want to in your body. We don't really enjoy that, right.

ELISE: You should be able to take what you don't want out of your body.

HOLLY: Yes. All of that. Yes. It's my body, my choice, or whatever. Yeah. Great. As long as there's no harm to others.

ELISE: yeah, and so you write about you write the words alcoholic and alcoholism Need to burn. Can you explain what you mean by that?

HOLLY: Yeah, I mean, like, God. So, first of all, again, disclaimers. Again, all this stuff requires a great deal of nuance. It's not that I don't think people are allowed to call themselves whatever they want. So I want to be really clear. It's very helpful to many people to call themselves an alcoholic and to talk about their alcoholism. But I I think the word alcoholic, probably like the most basic argument. There's multiple arguments for it in the book, and I'm not going to go through all of them, but the basic argument around this is that this, like, this idea of an alcoholic was truly born at the convergence of the development of AA, a group, a wonderful group, like mutual aid that has existed since the thirties that has helped a lot of people get sober and we'll talk about that, you know, down the line, but the convergence of that development along with post-prohibition the, basically like the dry movement kind of turning into like the anti liquor movement needing somewhere to go. And all of a sudden alcohol's not bad, but humans are bad, right? So this like, develop this development like post-prohibition where it wasn't that drinking was bad, just people that couldn't handle it were the problem. And so that thinking happened right around the same time that people like basically as part of belonging to Alcoholics Anonymous admitted they were the problem.

And so this idea of the human as the issue, right? This idea that there are some people that are different and like fundamentally different. They have an allergy to alcohol. There's so many different ways that this has been said. They have a disease, a chronic relapsing disease, or they have an allergy or they're a defect, whatever it is, like this idea was born that there is like a certain kind of person that cannot drink alcohol. It's only like a certain percentage of the population. You won't know it until you turn 21 or until you like start imbibing. It's a secret disease that like only magically appears upon like, you know, you drinking this one thing. And you know, you can't test for it and it puts all of the onus on the individual, and it totally wipes clean any sort of social responsibility for the alcohol industry.

Like, to name one thing in this, right, because if there are alcoholics that are just sick naturally, And that, like, shouldn't use this substance because they have an allergy to it, like, like a peanut fucking allergy, right, then you're not responsible, like the peanut industry is responsible for peanut allergies, right, and then, you have this, you know, trillion dollar industry, and there's, I don't know what the latest figure is, it's like 3. 3 million when I wrote my book people a year across the world are dying. It's like one of the leading causes of death. From this, we have no responsibility because it's not the fault of the substance, it's the fault of the people that use it that are naturally unable to do it based on this pathological issue that they have called alcoholism.

And so, I'm very clear about it's not helpful to say it's just me. Let everyone else have fun. I think it's very important for us, like there has to be personal accountability and responsibility, that's not what this is about, but there's also the sense of like, there has to be this ownership around the fact that it's just an addictive drug, just like there's no cigarette aholics, right? There weren't just like some people that were naturally already cigarette aholics and they didn't know it until they started smoking and then they became... you know, it's the same thing. And when we call people alcoholics, we're basically othering ourselves from them, right? We're cutting ourselves off and saying, Oh, I'm fine with alcohol.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, I think it's a really interesting point, like cigarette holics or, I mean, obviously culturally we understand opioid addiction as a progressive disease that often begins when people have pain in a medical setting and develop a chronic use of opioids and suddenly they're fully addicted. And yeah, I think stating alcohol is addictive, a varying potentially, heightened in some people more than in others, but if you continue to escalate your use over time, it's a progressive disorder. I mean, I've observed that in myself, and...

HOLLY: You can become addicted to it if they try hard enough, you know? I mean, that's just the bottom line.

ELISE: yeah, where you start with one glass and then suddenly, you know, six months into COVID, you're having almost a bottle or a bottle every night by yourself. I could see that in my own boredom and at homeness and that's why I needed to see that I could not drink and stop before I couldn't stop. And this was fascinating where you, in 2010, you write about how the former UK drugs are dave and Nut, this is in the UK, but they assess 20 licit and illicit drugs harm to users and harm to others. And alcohol had a score of 72, the most dangerous drug in the UK, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Cocaine came in at 27, just above tobacco.

HOLLY: Yeah.

ELISE: which is wild.

HOLLY: Totally. Yeah. It has, per that study been declared the most dangerous drug that exists and it's because of, it's also because of the things we've been talking about. It's just like not inherently because of alcohol like I'm sure if like we were promoted to use cocaine from birth that cocaine would be at the top of that list, right if it was a legal substance with all the protections that it has all the lobbying that it has, like if it was just this thing you did and you know like you it was part of every single cultural custom that you had like cocaine would probably top that list but alcohol, we know, it's just like One of the most dangerous drugs, not just because of what it does to a human body, which is terrible, horrible stuff, like terrible and horrible stuff, it's a very harmful drug to ingest, but the other piece of it is just like what happens in society when you have the relationship with alcohol that we do, which is associated with high rates of domestic violence, it's like sexual assault, drunk driving accidents, bad decision making, like there's So much stuff that comes from alcohol use as a result of our, you know, sexual assault isn't because of alcohol, it's because of, you know, rape culture and patriarchy, but still, alcohol is part of that. It's tied into it because of how we consume it and because of the effects that it has.

ELISE: Yeah. I think people don't quite understand how Depleting and dangerous alcohol, I have, someone close to me died in their late 20s, I think he was in his late 20s from alcohol use. Very healthy, theoretically, like very strong person, no other comorbidities, but I don't think anyone realized that he was drinking himself to literal death. It's ravaging. It's also why, you know, I wrote a small check to this it's an at home rehab called NorthCare. And part of the program is because so many people can't, in a way, can't step away to go to rehab, et cetera. So you can do it at home and part of it is like a nutritional reparation because of the depletion to vital stores in your body. It's very stripping there and not only increases cravings and I mean you write about this extensively, the health repair that you needed to do.

HOLLY: Yeah. Well, if you just think about what did we use in COVID? What was like the first thing we ran out of to fight off a deadly virus? Well, alcohol, right? Like, you couldn't get hand sanitizer. And because it kills things. I think it kills living things, right? It literally, it takes the life force out of things. So, I mean, it's just... You pour it on a wound in the, you know, like the civil war, it's just this thing that like actually shouldn't be in our digestive tracts and all the cancers that are associated with it. They're either hormonal or they're cancers from like your digestive tract, your throat, your esophagus, your colon, your, you know, your stomach. It just ruins, ruins everything it touches and the body has to work really hard to get rid of it.

ELISE: Yeah. So let's talk about AA and..

HOLLY: And I'm just telling, I don't answer any questions about AA anymore because it's like, no, I'm going to talk to you about it though. Like I want us to talk about it, but I stopped answering questions about it like two years ago, I was on a podcast and I was like, I'm never, I'm done. I'm so tired of answering the question of being anti AA.

ELISE: About why, because it's very beautiful. And again, I came into it being like, what does she have against AA? It's like free and available to everyone. And obviously it can be, you know, people can join very powerful groups. I participated in some Al Anon and, It varies widely. And, but it's anonymous. It's untested it, and it's kind of the only thing that's available to people. But what I think that you write about that's so, significant in terms of why it's important specifically for women, and I'm sure for some men very much relate to what you say, is that the construct of AA is inherently not built for women. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it was like, oh right, oh my god, wow, I just didn't, I did not see this at all.

HOLLY: there. Yeah. Well, I mean, like everything else, right? I want to be really clear. I'm not against AA. I'm not against AA. AA was founded in the thirties when there existed no kind of treatment at all for people that were suffering with alcohol use disorder. And it was a radical, a totally radical and novel idea. Bill Wilson was the founder of AA, was way ahead of his time, extremely progressive, deeply compassionate, and today it remains an organization that is meant to be deeply compassionate. Again, it's decentralized, it's not always the experience people have. My arguments around it are about the impact that it's had on culture and how we view addiction, because it does inform how we view addiction. It owns the recovery industry. It owns the idea of addiction and recovery. It is the default way that we conceptualize how addiction works. And it is not for everybody. And it is also not rehabilitation. It is mutual aid. It is never, it was never meant to be the end all and be all of how people recover. It's a community, right? It is not a full recovery. It's not a full rehabilitation and often has to be supplemented by so many other things. So, it's just, like, my arguments around it are how we think about it. Not that I want to burn it down. I'm not an AA basher. And I can, you know, hold both.

So, for me, the thing that, the question you asked, it just goes back to, it was created in the 1930s by two like upper middle class white men cis gendered, heterosexual. And it was truly based on their own experiences that led them to drinking. Which again, like 1930s America, white, upper class men, right. Like too much power, too much power, too much ego. Basically like just toxic masculinity, right. That needs to be broken down. And a lot of the tenants of it, like a lot of the cure, right, or a lot of the prescription is in breaking down the ego is in shutting up, you know, listening, serving, like following the rules. Which are basically like, what it's like to be a good woman, you know, like all of the prescription for men alcoholics, you know, in like the early days of AA was, the prescription was to basically be a woman, right? To serve, to be quiet and shut up, to like get over yourself, to not conflate yourself with being God, you know, and like, these are just not things that women suffer with still today, right? Like women are still at a deficit. They do not think they're God. They do not think they own the world. They, you know, and I'm not saying this across all, I'm sure there are plenty of women that have a overinflated ego, but for the most part, women are coming into it sick from the things that prescribe sick from serving sick from silencing sick from lack of agency sick from, you know, like from lack of power.

And so when you prescribe shutting up listening service, you know, I have like so many men that I've had conversations with over the years that they have are post AA of left AA, but they always say is but you have to admit, like, it's so important to learn how to serve. That has stayed with me. And I always have to remind them. I didn't have to learn how to serve. I didn't need to go to that training. But like to them, it's radical, right? And I think it is radical when you're talking about somebody that exists in the world at the top of the power structure. Those are radical things, truly. And we wish all men that experience, but it doesn't apply to people at intersections of identities that don't sit at the top of the power structure. Right. And it's not just women. It's really like any intersection of identity that's not white cis male.

ELISE: It's really beautiful, I think just to think about the how deep it is in our culture and write, "The funny thing is that when I didn't force on myself the need to be less, when I allowed myself the freedom to be self centered, flawed, and self willed, I still ended up on my knees in the ever so impressed upon alcoholic state of surrender to what was, to what I didn't have control over, to what I did have control over. And while my first prayers might have echoed some of what Step 7 begs, please make me good. The prayers quickly became about something far more than me. Help me do good. Put me in service." I thought that was really beautiful. And I have friends sort of in and out of AA and one of the things similar to what you're talking about, I'm thinking of a man and he talks about too as an introvert, how, I don't want to say unsafe, but that it's a culture to where he particularly in men's groups where he feels sort of overpowered by the group dynamic and some of the hero stories and he just doesn't feel like he belongs but in our culture where it's the only or perceived as the only option and when the reaction from those who are in a to those who are choosing not to be is like you'll never do it any other way and I understand that and I understand it's a life saving intervention, but it also feels like it creates a certain fragility around this, again, this like polarized, I am this thing which I think you, I want you to talk about sort of these tenets, like practicing sobriety and an evolving recovery, and rather than staying in this, you know, we talk, you and I talk a lot about fixed binaries, but where you're not in an intractable position where it's you against your disease, or you as your disease is the problem, but how you move into something That moves as we move. Can you talk about some of those healing tenants?

HOLLY: Yeah. It's a very static. It's doing the same thing, right? Like, it's the same intervention on day 1 as it is on day 20, 000, whatever. The model stays the same. You continue to work the steps. That doesn't mean a human can evolve if they're going to AA for 30 or 40 years. Like, yeah. I think you can or can't, right? Like, it just depends on who you are. But I think the idea that you wouldn't, right? The idea that these things would be as impactful, as meaningful on day one as they are on day 20, 000 or 10, 000 or, you know, whatever.

I don't even know what the math is. But, just that as you move along and you evolve, the whole point of addiction is extremely regressive, right? Like, in developmental speech. Meaning you regress to behaviors that are expressed at earlier ages of development, right? So, self centeredness, narcissism, lying, lack of empathy, and I'm not saying this pathologically. I'm just saying this in my own experience. Like, it's a stunting thing. Addiction is stunting and regressive, the experience of it because it basically just dismantles the things that actually give you the structure to be a fully formed, complex, mature adult. And so when you think about this, when you move into recovery from addiction, you're moving from probably like a regressed behavioral development stage, or at least some pathologies in that. And you're going through like probably one of the biggest boot camps of transformation that exists in the entire world. People that go through recovery, because addiction touches every single area of your life, your relationships, your relationship to your work, your job, how you socialize, how you date, how you have sex, your family dynamics, your sleep habits, it touches every corner of your life.

And so to create holistic and effective recovery, people that are really engaged in their recovery are oftentimes just going to naturally lift up all these areas of their life. Like they're going to evolve, that's what recovery requires: self awareness, compassion, empathy, serve, like all these things that are like their higher ideals. And I think that we do have this conception that and then you just stay there, right? And then all the things that you learn. In early sobriety that make your sobriety so worthwhile are going to be the exact same principles that carry you through for the rest of your life and you just go through this one revolution of development and then you stop because this is the end all and be all. And so I think that, you know, in what I proposed and what you're talking about, the tenants you're talking about, like, what actually creates, you know, what I call feminine centric recovery. And this is one of the biggest ones, which is evolution, like you, your recovery and your process, including what you believe and the frameworks that hold you together they will, they should evolve. They will likely evolve. It's a good thing when they evolve.

ELISE: Those tenants, I don't know if they've Evolved I think there's six: Work with our core beliefs, weaken and break the cycle of addiction, add healthy coping mechanisms, get at the root causes, practice sobriety, create a recovery that evolves as you do. And I actually love that idea of practicing sobriety because, and you write about this a fair amount throughout the book, both in your own, the early days of your recovery, but also in an ongoing way, which right now, art culture is still very, Again, in a quite a binary and I understand it because when we're talking about certainly some drugs, abstinence, and for some people abstinence is really the only avenue towards safety. And yet so many people relapse, right? This is just the reality. But then in our current model, when you relapse, you fail, you start over. There's not a lot of grace in it. And I understand that it's hard to say, get grace when it feels like people's lives are on the line. But Relapse rates are incredibly high. People do need grace, right?

HOLLY: I just started researching this. It's like 5 percent of people that go through recovery will not have a lapse or relapse. So 95 percent do. When you say we need grace, I don't know, I'm just thinking about, well, everyone I know that's in recovery provides grace for people that need it in those situations.

ELISE: I think it's more of an exterior cultural edict.

HOLLY: Right, and this doesn't just apply to alcohol, this applies to anybody struggling with addiction. One of my friends was, like, she when George Floyd's murderers went on trial, she called me or she texted me and was like, oh, they just played the addiction card, meaning that, she's black, there's protections for the fact that he's black, there's no protections for the fact that he was addicted. Like, when you play the addiction part, what she meant was, you are free to dehumanize somebody that is in active addiction, they are a threat to society, to themselves, they need help, there is only one path for that person. It is absolutely unacceptable that a person struggles with addiction. They need to be rehabbed immediately, and until then, they're the worst. There's no root, because when people recover, right, recovery may be part of your identity, but active addict, like, I am an active addiction, like, You are in no place to advocate for yourself or for all people that are addicted.

And there's very few people outside of that, like when you're moving through recovery, you move through recovery, you continue on. So there's just people that are in active addiction, I think are some of the most vulnerable people that exist within our society. Because they are absolutely, according to us, it's just like not human, right? And I think that this is for so many reasons, right? This is not an AA thing, right? Like there's so many reasons that this exists. So when you're saying like, there isn't a lot of grace, you're right. There is none. It's like unacceptable for people to have addiction.

ELISE: There's no compassion.

HOLLY: But you're also seen as a person that's doing it to yourself, making a choice that it's a purposeful, instead of an effect of the way that we structured our society, and we believe in this fantasy of self sufficiency, individualism and also meritocracy and like so we think of when we think of addiction and we conceptualize that we think of a people that are choosing to not actually engage in the appropriate mechanisms that they need to and this is not like just right wing blowhard like this is not just like it's not this is how we as a population and as Americans generally, consider people that are struggling with addiction and it's gross. Addiction is gross. There's so much about it that is so like unacceptable to us. And therefore people that struggle with addiction, they're just like a totally unprotected group of individuals that are left under resourced, underfunded, under understood, you know.

ELISE: Yeah. It's heartbreaking. When you think about sort of your own acts of service and who you are in the culture and what you stand for, where do you feel most drawn in terms of, and it's interesting to be that this is your life's work at this point, I mean, I know it's still consuming for you, I understand why, because it is, in some ways, spiritual, essential complex, what are you after in the sense of finding these threads? Where do you imagine it will take you?

HOLLY: It's so funny because for the last couple of years, I've really wanted to step out of this, like I had such a bad experience, I've had a bad experience, right? Like as a human being.

ELISE: You've had a ride.

HOLLY: I have just been so over it, you know, but it is my life's work, unfortunately, right? And I think that it just reminds me of like this, I can't remember which book it was in, but it's in a Pema Chodron book where she talks about like, there's some guy that does some kind of outreach and I think on the one hand I did not ever expect my book to make, to have the impact that it has. And there is an argument that can be said. That I am a very fortunate person who has lived to be part of something, you know, I'm because I'm not the only one and there's a lot of people that do this work, and I've really pushed the message forward around alcohol and addiction and harm reduction. So many people, I have an out. Like I have, in many ways, an unfair spotlight on me it should be shared with so many people, but in this one way, I have had a significant impact through luck, timing, all number of things, intelligence, right? Like passion, all of it. Right. You know, and so I think that's on one hand, just enough, that's enough.

I think I want to state that because that's such a belief of mine that like, I've done work and it's good and God, I'm lucky for that. Right. And then I think on the other hand there used to be, I think when I was starting out, this very grand idea of what change could be affected and I don't have those ideas anymore. But I feel that I will have done good work if I just do the work that's in front of me that feels aligned and ethical and compassionate and whatever, I don't think that there's like, oh, if you know, if we have this happen, or you know, if we decrim and legalize all drugs, or if We actually have parity for treatment, you know, more than a handful of people can actually access treatment or any of those things. There's so much work to be done in this space, but I think for me, I really enjoy thinking about and talking about this. I think we're all impacted by this in ways that are so much far greater than our ability to comprehend. I think all of us are deeply impacted by addiction personally, in our own lives, in the way that we function, especially today and that there's so much to be gained from understanding the one population of people that struggle from the unacceptable addictions to chemical substances. Like, we could stand to look to that population to learn a lot about ourselves.

ELISE: It's beautiful. And I think that people who are in addiction in a lot of ways hold our cultural shadow. It's what we don't want to look at. I think we all feel susceptible or we all recognize in some level that this could be us.

HOLLY: And it is us.

ELISE: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a deep need to disown it.

HOLLY: Yeah. I mean, we are at peak addiction. We are at peak addiction. There's a great book called globalization of addiction by Bruce Alexander. It's like one of my favorite books of all times, but it just talks about a free market systems capitalism naturally are addictive societies. It just is a byproduct of it and the rates of addiction that exists today. Carl fisher wrote a great book called The Urge that traces the history of addiction, like we've had epidemics before throughout history, but we are, I think, living in a society that it's calling card is addiction, you know, and I think that when we get distant from it, you know, If we have offspring, if there's a world, I mean, anyway, like I think when we look back, if we have the ability to look back on this period of time, that's, that will be the thing that, you know, and so few of us have because we've othered it and like buried it and swept it under the rug and hidden it in the shadows and put it in the jail system, like, because of the way that we've treated it, we've lost this opportunity to truly examine our own selves.

ELISE: Yeah.

HOLLY: that's why I love it so much.

ELISE: I know. And you read potentially, like, faster and more compulsively than I do. And there's a substantial Venn diagram, I think, in our interests. And I think I recognize in you, someone like me, I want to understand. I just want to see the closet that we're all, like, sort of all the hangers inside of. I want to understand this larger system. And I do think looking at those who are, I have like the positive varieties, varietals of addiction, you could say. You know?

HOLLY: Rewarded. Right?

ELISE: socially rewarded, virtuous behaviors and I love that you talk about the way that you built your feminine centered model. Was it on Ken Wilber? Was it on, or was Spiral Dynamics or something metaphysical?

HOLLY: DePuis and Ken Wilber and Guy DePuis they were they were all really foundational. And like, when I was really trying to piece together the aqua map by Ken Wilber which I found through John DePuis work. Was a game changer for me because John DePuy, by the way, wrote Integral Recovery and Guy Deplessis, P L E S S I S, also wrote a book that I think is also called Integral Recovery but It's such a simple thing and it's such an obvious thing like you need to raise all the boats of like your life like you have to pull up every single corner and the way that you construct a holistic and you know and likely to succeed sobriety right or recovery let's say not sobriety is by Creating like using pin Wilbur's up like is using a holistic map and is addressing basically all of you, whereas like traditional systems. AA is like great at addressing belonging and shared meaning community and also just like a structure. It's a very clear path of like spiritual development on an ethical development. And, but it's not going to help you with your serotonin and your dopamine.

It's not going to help you with your checking account. It's not going to help you with, know, like your abusive father or your lack of childcare or whatever it is. It's not going to help you with like the things that deeply impact us. And so it's not a whole solution. And so when you're building a recovery, you need to have essentially like this you know, like, multi pronged approach. And the feminine centric, those are just penance. These are, like, ideas that fit into this, the the map is, like, it's the map. It's the roadmap. It's the actual, like, how do I fix this?

ELISE: Yeah. Well, thank you for your work. Thank you for helping me shape this special series. I'm going to ask you also if you're willing to do a short recommended reading list because you don't have to write captions, but I just want some titles. I'll include the ones that you mentioned today. Because you're full of wisdom and curiosity. I think that's what's so needed too is the fact that you are a sponge for other people's ideas and or like are capable of integrating, distilling, synthesizing really complex systems is so needed because without that wider context, We're all just left feeling broken, rather than parts of a much more significant whole. And whole parts, I would say, of a more significant...

HOLLY: and parts.

ELISE: Yeah!

HOLLY: It's not holes, it's not parts, it's holes and parts. Sorry, that's like a Ken Wilber joke.

ELISE: wholarchies, not hierarchies.

HOLLY: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Just been delightful and I love talking to you about this stuff.

ELISE: So as mentioned Holly Whitakers book, Quit Like A Woman, has had a tremendous amount of success in the space, not only because people really need astute guides to this landscape, but she is also a brilliant writer and thinker who is touching a wound, and touching something that deeply affects all of us whether its head on or not. And that way that she grounds research, science, and lived experience in this larger psycho-spiritual context is fascinating because, for me at least, and again I think it was easy for me to read this book not only because I love Holly but because I have rehabilitated my own relationship with alcohol and really, maybe I have one or two glasses of wine a week, but I had to walk it back and fortunately I was in a position I can do that without suffering and now I will say when I do drink I do actually suffer for it because of my migraine disorder, I just can’t metabolize it, I feel it acutely in a way that I think many people do, it is as she says, “ethanol.” I wanted to go back to this idea about the words alcoholic and alcoholism to read what she wrote, she wrote: “The words alcoholic and alcoholism need to burn. To be clear, I believe that alcohol is addictive, that alcohol addiction is progressive, that some people are wired a bit differently and are more vulnerable to alcohol addiction. In fact, I don’t just believe these things, science tells me these things. I’m not refuting that alcohol addiction is an actual thing, because it is an actual thing—a thing I had.What I am saying is, alcohol is addictive to everyone. Yet we’ve created a separate disease called alcoholism and forced it upon the minority of the population who are willing to admit they can’t control their drinking, and because of that, we’ve focused on what’s wrong with those few humans rather than on what’s wrong with our alcohol-centric culture or the substance itself.” I’ll see you guys next time. Thanks for listening.