I’m now blogging for the Huffington Post.  Most of my entries can be found in the Women’s Section or on the HuffPo Sex & Love page.

Say nice things about them so Arianna will invite me back :-)

You’re expecting me to say that love addiction killed Whitney Houston, aren’t you?  When all you have is a hammer, after all, every problem looks like a nail.  My hammer is the addictive model of romantic fantasy.  I’m the one who said Amy Winehouse died of love addiction, that drug and alcohol dependence were her coping mechanism for an underlying problem.  I said that Etta James — who wrote “I’d rather go blind/ Than see you with another girl” — was the vocal standard-bearer for the love addict.

And now there’s Whitney Houston, simultaneously a transcendent world-class talent… and a hope-to-die drug addict.  She first gained fame thanks to an Eliza Doolittle/Professor Higgins relationship with record executive Clive Davis, who famously locked a roomful of music critics in a studio and made them listen to her debut album from start to finish.  Later, her insane marriage to Bobby Brown played out in the tabloids and on reality TV.  Still, her most destructive love affair was with the pipe.

Scratch an alcoholic and you’ll usually find a codependent, which is the nicer way of saying love junkie.  And crack addiction is alcoholism… well, on crack.  An addict in recovery will tell you that drugs and alcohol were a solution before they became a problem, a way to soothe an existential dis-ease that permeates the very marrow of our bones.  A neuroscientist will tell you that cocaine activates the same chemical “reward cascade” in the brain as being in love. 

When Kenny Rogers sang about “love or something like it,” he probably didn’t realize that “something like it” sells by the $20 rock.  But, chemically, it does.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to Dolly Parton, who wrote Whitney’s signature hit “I Will Always Love You.”  It sounds like just the sort of pop song I decry, a desperate declaration of undying enmeshment.  Pop music has always specialized in the longing and the loss; anything between “I want you so bad” and “I miss you so much” is generally overlooked by the Top 40.  Not so “I Will Always Love You.”

“I hope life treats you kind/ And I hope you have all you’ve dreamed of/ And I wish to you, joy and happiness/ But above all this, I wish you love.”  A sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous may recognize this sentiment as the template for a Resentment Prayer.  When we simmer with anger towards another — and who isn’t angry at their ex? — we’re supposed to pray for them to have all the gifts we would wish for ourselves.

Personally, I usually preface the prayer with “Okay, God, you and I both know I really want him to eat glass and die.  But….”

“I wish you joy and happiness… I wish you love” is not the wounded cry of the love junkie.  That’s the prayer of a healthy person who can separate and remain whole.  It was written by a woman who’s been in a “monogamish” relationship with the same man since 1964.

So, yes, I think Whitney Houston was addicted to love and I think it contributed to her early and tragic death.  But she leaves us with a transcendent soundtrack of recovery.  It is possible to let someone go with love, instead of leaving claw marks all over them.

(Photo by Jim Steinfeldt c1987)

            Here’s an old AA story for you: A man falls in a well (I told you it was old; who gets water from a well any more?). He’s trapped down there in the cold and dark.  He calls out for help.  A priest passes by, hears his cries, leans over into the well and asks, “What’s the matter, son?”  Imagine a dramatic boomy echo on the dialog. “I’m stuck in this damn well!” yells the man.  “That’s no call for bad language,” says the priest, “but I’ll pray for you.”  And off he goes. The guy is getting steamed.

            Next, a social worker passes by.  “What’s the matter, friend?” “What does it look like?  I’m at the bottom of this well.”  “Aha!  I’ve got just what you need,” says the social worker.  She tosses a blanket and a length of rope down the well, and walks off with a smile.  The guy is really pissed off now.

            Along comes a doctor.  “Do you have a problem, sir?”  “Fucking A I have a problem!  I’m stuck in a well.”  “Are you anxious? Worried? Can’t relax?”  ”Whadda you think?”  “This should fix you up,” says the doc, and tosses a prescription for tranquilizers into the hole.

            It’s getting darker.  It’s getting colder.  The man considers hanging himself with the stupid rope, but there’s nothing to attach it to.  Finally, a new face appears at the rim of the well.  It’s a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous.  “Looks like you’re stuck in a well,”  he calls down to the man.  “Brilliant deduction,” says the trapped man, now thoroughly disillusioned and angry at the world.  Unexpectedly, the AA member jumps down into the well.

            “Are you insane?  Now we’re both at the bottom of a goddam well!” shouts the man.  “Maybe so,” says the sober alcoholic.  “But I’ve been down this well before.  And I know the way out.”

            The point of the story — and I’m sure you’re a step ahead of me on this — is that no one can help you the way someone can who’s been where you’ve been.  Professionalism and expertise are great, but there’s nothing that compares to the deep identification you feel with someone’s who’s struggled your struggle.  It’s so easy not to take advice from someone, even good advice, when you can get up in their grill yelling “You don’t know what it’s like!”… and be correct.  

            This is one reason 12-steps programs have no leaders, no facilitators, no administrators, and millions of success stories.  It’s why Weight Watchers counselors have lost a lot of weight, and why the best treatment centers are started by former addicts and alcoholics, even if they do have lousy credit. 

            Which brings me to Broken Heart RX, from whom I recently received a press release.  According to the publicist, “Broken Heart RX is the first ever break-up, love addiction and emotional trauma support system that includes a proprietary blend nutraceutical supplement, a 30-day email support program and a referral network of experts created to help guide people to recovery. No one wants to feel crippled by a broken heart and now they don’t have to.”

            Indeed, in shades of the Schick-Schadel weekend recovery program for alcoholics, Broken Heart RX will, for the low low price of $34.95, provide you with a 30-day supply of their vitamin supplement, a month of “inspirational emails,” a 10-mninute phone consultation and a referral to a local therapist “if desired.”

            Ten minutes?  Have you ever talked anyone out of their fetal position on the floor in ten minutes?

            To be fair, 35 bucks isn’t going to break anyone’s piggy-bank and the nutritional supplement — full of St. John’s Wort, magnesium and amino acids — won’t hurt you and might even help stabilize your mood.  But the only way a 10-minute phone call is going to anything towards curing love addiction is using the time to recommend my book, Susan Peabody’s Addiction to Love bulletin board, and few years in 12-step meetings.

            I say this as someone who has tried every prayer, every prescription, every rope and blanket.  There’s no shortcut out of the well.

Craving is a hunger so deep no amount of ANYTHING will truly fill it.  But we love addicts keep trying, and trying, and trying…

The main criteria for labeling something an addiction are the phenomena of Craving, Tolerance and Withdrawal. Some find it hard to get their heads around the concept of tolerance in sex and love addiction. I don’t.

Some symptoms of sex and love addiction aren’t so bad - mainly, the sex and the love.  Some symptoms, however, suck suck suck.  This is the worst: Withdrawal. 

I used to made a living writing record and concert reviews and bios for rock bands.  It wasn’t much of a living, which is why I stopped doing it.  But when the Hollywood Reporter asked me to review Etta James at the House of Blues in 2001, I couldn’t say no.  I’d been watching Etta incinerate the Sunset Strip HOB since the place opened.  And when RCA Records asked me to write her bio for the 2002 live album of that very performance… hell, I would have paid them.  (Don’t tell them I said that.)  A chance to talk to Jamesetta Hawkins, the love addict’s official spokeswoman?  Yes, please!

This is a woman who never knew her father, and whose teenaged mother was used and abused by men as a profession.  Her drunken choir director used to beat her to make her sing for his friends.  She became B.B. “Blues Boy” King’s girlfriend when she was 16 and he was 30.  Her husband, Artis Mills, went to prison for heroin possession; they were still married when she died.

How do you not become a sex and love addict with a pedigree like that? 

Etta James was the alpha and the omega of affection deficit disorder.  Her first single (“Roll With Me, Henry”) was so overtly sexual in its day that disc jockeys couldn’t say the title out loud.  When I last saw her onstage, she was 62 years old and so fat she could barely stand up.  She was still sexy.  “With that big voice and that little smirk, James manages to sell sexuality with nothing more than gesture,” read the review.  “When she sings ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You,’ you believe her.”

But the flip side of the cool, sexy Etta (“I used to ride a motorcycle to work on the Harbor Freeway, nothing but a kerchief on my head,” she told me proudly.  “I was born to be wild.”) was the “I Would Rather Go Blind” Etta.  She wrote that song, although for a long time she wasn’t able to take legal credit — or get legal royalties — for it.  Sing it with me now: “Something told me it was over/When I saw you and her talking… I would rather, I would rather go blind/than see you walk away from me.”  

The clutch-his-ankle Etta, though, never sucked the joy out of the hopeless romantic Etta.  The Etta who could sing “At last/My love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song” with such conviction that it has watched over the first dance of half the newly marrieds in North America.

“Everybody who gets married wants that song,” she sighed.  “First dance, ‘At Last.’  Cutting the cake, ‘At Last.’  Last dance….”  When we spoke, the tune was all over the television as the soundtrack of a car commercial.  “I thought I was finally going to get me a Jaguar!  I didn’t get no Jaguar.  But I tell you something, my manager turned up in a bad green convertible Jag!”

That’s Etta all over.  She pours her heart into a microphone, and some man drives off in a bad green convertible.  I  wanted to hug her.

Etta James tacked a picture of me up on her bulletin board back in 2002.  She was impressed that I had learned to scuba dive, and wanted a snapshot of me underwater to use as inspiration for her new fitness program; her doctor told her she had to lose weight or lose a leg to diabetes.  She was quite thin when she died, but that was just the leukemia.

I wish I had sent her a copy of LOVE ADDICT; she would have related.  But then, she had already summed up the whole book in the first couplet of her first composition:  “Hey baby, what do I have to do/To make you love me too.”

Men have been known to inseminate inflatables.  They seduce sheep.  They will, if push comes to shove, poke a posthole if has been sanded smooth.  This is not a knock on men; my dog humps my leg, and I don’t love him any less for it.  I just don’t mistake it for a marriage proposal. 

The publicity department of HCI Books read my manuscript for LOVE ADDICT: SEX, ROMANCE AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS — 288 pages on the history, science and treatment of sex and (mostly) love addiction — and this is what they came away with: “Ethlie has her first sexual experience at 18 and by age 22, had slept with 75 men.”  I don’t know if the writer of press releases was shocked, titillated or appalled at the number.  I thought it more noteworthy that I did this while maintaining a 3:7 grade point average.

The main thing they missed, though, is that not once did I think of myself as promiscuous.  I was convinced that each of these young men was the Love of My Life.  My problem wasn’t sexual profligacy; it was unmitigated optimism.  There was the Red Headed Artist, and the Catholic School Virgin, the Roommate’s Boyfriend (I’m sorry…) and the Married Record Promoter (sorry again….)  There was a guitarist, a drummer, a keyboard player and a vocalist - no, not from the same band.  Some of these have names I can associate with their faces.  Most do not.

See, I went to college after the Pill, before AIDS, and when a hook-up was the trailer hitch on the back bumper of your dad’s car.  Sex was the adult version of holding hands, a demonstration of romantic togetherness.  For a love addict-in-training like me, sex was a secret shortcut to intimacy.  My reasoning was that since I was sleeping with you because I fancied myself in a relationship with you, surely you were sleeping with me for the same reason.

This made me, among other things, a cheap date.  I was in more of a rush to the bedroom that he was, usually, because I mistook sweating on each other for bonding.  Hurry up and commit your naked body to me; if I get to know you, I may lose interest.  Addiction, we have come to learn, is largely fueled by the brain’s need for dopamine and dopamine is stimulated by novelty.  Between my ears, excitement passes for happiness and I misread desire as affection.

I plead youth and naïveté.  Also quantities of Gallo jug wines and Mexican marijuana.   I have come to understand that (pay attention; this is important) just because a man wants you, does not mean he loves you.  

Men, God love ‘em, will fuck sheep.

A new study at the University of California at San Francisco uses PET scan technology to prove what pretty much everyone has known forever: Drinking feels better to heavy drinkers than to casual drinkers.  Since the study was done at the I-kid-you-not Ernest Gallo Clinic, no mention was made of alcoholism, just “heavy drinking.”  In a clinic funded by a winery, the a-word is spoken in hushed tones, if at all. 

According to the report here, the researchers used positron emission tomography to observe the immediate effects of alcohol in the brains of 13 heavy drinkers and 12 control subjects who were not heavy drinkers. In all of the subjects, alcohol intake led to a release of opiate-like endorphins. And, in all of the subjects, the more endorphins released in the nucleus accumbens, the greater the feelings of pleasure reported by each drinker.

In addition, the more endorphins released in the orbitofrontal cortex, the greater the feelings of intoxication in the heavy drinkers, but not in the control subjects.

“This indicates that the brains of heavy or problem drinkers are changed in a way that makes them more likely to find alcohol pleasant, and may be a clue to how problem drinking develops in the first place,” said lead researcher Dr. Jennifer Mitchell. “That greater feeling of reward might cause them to drink too much.”

The alcoholic community responds with a resounding “Duh.”  But here’s the greater problem brewing in the labs of the Center for the Study of the Blindingly Obvious: The researchers are excited about these finding because they pinpoint specific endorphin receptors active in the heavy drinkers.  This mean they can now develop drugs to block those receptors, the way suboxone and other opiate blockers are supposed to reduce heroin dependence by making heroin not work so well.  “If it doesn’t feel good, why do it?” is the theory.

The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t go far enough.  The actual addict continues “…I’ll just do something else.”  The basic need, after all, is to feel okay.  If the alcohol doesn’t make me feel good any more, I’ll find something that does.  What fills basic needs?  Food (overeating, self-starvation), money (gambling, shopping, hoarding), love (sex, relationship, romance, fantasy.)

Now, I am pleased as punch — rum punch, if you’re asking, but not today — that the American Society of Addiction Medicine has officially declared that addiction is “a chronic brain disorder.”  It’s less judgmental than “lack of willpower,” “moral failing” or “demonic possession.”  But you can’t cure addiction by attacking the substance; any more than you can heal a wounded soldier by treating the bayonet that stabbed him.

That, too, was once considered good medicine

.