600 Women Gather in Irvine to Talk About Their Recovery From Crippling Addictions : Sharing Lives of Struggle, Triumph

Addiction used to be thought of as a male phenomenon. No one talked about, or even saw, the women who hid in their houses drinking gallons of vodka, popping handfuls of Valium and stuffing themselves with cakes.

But today, tens of thousands of Southern California women are coming out of the closet, attending grass-roots 12-step recovery meetings and openly discussing their problems.

Almost 600 of them gathered Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre to discuss addictions to alcohol, drugs, destructive relationships and food.

There was a Yucca Valley housewife, a Ventura social worker, a San Diego nurse, an Irvine office manager. There were workers from local treatment centers, authors of addiction-recovery books and even celebrity Ali MacGraw, a recovering alcoholic and destructive relationship addict.

MacGraw was keynote speaker for the seven-hour “Recovery Day for Women,” the third such event taken on the road in two years by the Betty Ford Center. The others were in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“This is a day of celebration of women’s recovery,” said Stephanie Covington, a La Jolla clinical psychologist and recovering alcoholic who is also consultant for the Ford Center’s Women’s Program. “It’s important to have days like this to celebrate and recognize the profound changes we have to make.”

Covington, author of “Awakening Your Sexuality: A Guide for Recovering Women” (Harper Collins, $22.75), defined addiction as “a downward spiral of constriction, the chronic neglect of self in favor of someone or something else.”

She told the group that recovery, the “upward spiral of expansion,” is one of the most dramatic choices a woman can make, a journey that alters the entire course of her life.

“The strength of women’s lives is to be present and conscious,” said Covington, adding that only in the past 20 years has there been recognition that women could even be addicted, a fact that makes today’s women in recovery “pioneers.”

But such recognition is only the first step, she said, because recovery for each woman involves hard work on “sense of self,” relationships, sexuality and spirituality, all of which are damaged in addiction.

And a significant part of that work involves sharing the secrets that in large part drive addictive behavior, she said.

“We all need to appreciate what a day like this means and how incredibly privileged we are,” said Covington. “In our mother’s generation, there were not days like this where women could gather and share. We no longer need to be silent.”

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During a conference break, MacGraw, 54, sat at a small cafeteria table, drinking decaffeinated coffee and talking about recovery--the hardest thing she’s ever done, she said.

“I’m not a new story, and I don’t want to rehash the past,” she said. “The point of my being here is simply to show people that think, ‘Oh, if I had the car, the Armani suit and the movie star lifestyle and perks, then I wouldn’t feel this hollow in my heart.’ But the reality is that those blessings finally have nothing to do with bandaging the essence of addiction.”

MacGraw said she grew up with her artist parents and brother in the middle of a New England wildlife preserve. She described her parents as educated, cultured and poor.

“Although they were very loving, mother was a perfectionist and my father was given to unpredictable and violent mood swings,” she recalled. “He was erratic because, like me, he was an alcoholic.”

MacGraw said she early on became a perfectionist.

“I guess I thought if I’m perfect, the apparent insanity in this house is going to stop,” she said. “If I do my chores, if I get A’s and have good manners and get scholarships, then my home will be like a Norman Rockwell painting. We didn’t know then that alcoholism was a disease.”

MacGraw received full scholarships to attend a private girl’s school and Wellesley College. It was during college that she started social drinking, drinking that increased in quantity and secretiveness as time went on.

A lot of alcohol, three divorces and several unhappy relationships later, she went to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage--not because she thought she had a drinking problem, but because of a “broken heart.”

“I was just asked in a basic monotone voice how much do you drink and how often,” she said. “I did the math and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a bottle (of wine) a night when nobody was looking. . .constituted behavior dependent upon something other than my own energy.”

It was at Betty Ford in 1986 that MacGraw was able to admit she was an alcoholic. She also began examining her entire life including relationships with men. “Being in love was my real drug of choice,” she said.

Today, MacGraw, a Malibu resident, regularly attends 12-step meetings, in addition to practicing yoga, eating well and exercising and enjoys healthy relationships.

“I’m still a working actress just like I always was,” she said. “But I’m also a recovering alcoholic, so I feel it’s somewhat of a responsibility to be honest. It’s not breast-beating tragedy, it’s just one of many facts of my life.”

According to figures from the New York-based National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, more than 17 million Americans have significant problems with alcohol. About 35 percent of the Alcoholics Anonymous membership is estimated to be female.

Women alcoholics are more often addicted to an additional, illegal drug, and 1 million women are addicted to prescription drugs, the figures say. And millions more have eating disorders including anorexia and bulimia and suffer severe problems with relationships and sex.

In Orange County alone, there are 1,300 AA meetings a week plus hundreds more for other addictions. Many are for women only.

It was listening and talking to others at such meetings that enabled Becky Counterman to break decades of denial about her alcohol, drug and relationship patterns.

“That’s what saved my life,” she said. “Knowing I wasn’t alone, that there were other people out there and there was hope. I felt accepted for the first time in my life.”

Counterman, 39, a Long Beach resident, said her grandfather, father and uncle are alcoholics. When Counterman was 15 years old, she started drinking on weekends and using amphetamines to lose weight. At 25, she added cocaine to her private drugstore.

By the age of 31, the then-divorced manicurist with two children was drinking and using cocaine daily with her fiance, the owner of an aerospace firm.

“At first I would have a glass of wine with my last customer, then it got to be lunch, then liquor in my coffee in the morning,” she said. “I couldn’t think straight, I’d get lost going to work, my children were out of control.

“I basically kept it a secret,” said Counterman. “I had all this guilt and shame and wasn’t at all in touch with my feelings.”

In June, 1990, she was flying with her fiance--also a pilot--when the plane malfunctioned and crashed into the ocean off Long Beach. Because of his blood alcohol content and other violations, her fiance’s pilot’s license was revoked and, soon after that, the couple parted, said Counterman.

Believing that her problem was her “alcoholic boyfriend” and previous males in her life, she began attending Al-Anon--a 12-step program for those involved with alcoholics--and there discovered that “I was the alcoholic, I was the drug addict.”

Counterman then went to AA, where after four months of slipping (“it’s real hard for a woman to admit she’s alcoholic”), she has finally stayed sober for 2 1/2 years.

Now Counterman is again engaged to her former fiance, who is also clean and sober.

“I was raised to cover a lot of secrets and a lot of lies that everything was fine in the family,” she said. “It is my hope that I can now break the dysfunction in this family so that the generation of my granddaughter will know how to live.”

Pamela Reed, 47, a recovering alcoholic from Tustin, has been sober for 4 1/2 years.

“I came here because it’s important to talk to other people,” she said. “That’s how I live my life.”

It wasn’t always that way.

“When I was drinking, I was very secretive,” she said. “I did not go out to bars. I was the bottle of wine a day. I don’t know when I crossed the line (into alcoholism) but I was way past having fun and scared to death.”

Luckily, nothing “tragic” happened, said the former office worker. “I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I just decided to put the wheels in motion.”

Reed went to treatment at Hoag Chemical Dependency Unit in Newport Beach and then spent seven months in a sober living house in Santa Ana. After that, she got married, quit her job and lived in Paris for two years. She said “everything is different now.”

“I’m 1,000% better. Everything is clear and everything’s in focus. I have vision, I’m happy and everything is falling into place as it should.”