Women’s History Month – Celebrating Women Leaders in the Addiction and Family Recovery Movements
Women’s History Month is celebrated annually during the month of March. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum celebrate Women’s History Month to recognize “the great contributions that women have made to our nation” and “join in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.”
As an author of four biographies on women leaders in the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights Movements and a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Women’s History Project, I am passionate about this annual celebration.
As an author who has written a great deal about addiction (aka substance use disorders) and family recovery, I wanted to use this post to honor and raise awareness about four women leaders in the addiction and family recovery movements. Of course there are many more, but these four are especially important to me. Their books, articles, lectures, organizations, courage, strength, and hope profoundly helped me during the early years of my own secondhand drinking recovery and in my wholehearted forgiveness of my loved ones whose alcohol use disorders had so deeply affected my life.
Women’s History Month – Celebrating Women Leaders in the Addiction and Family Recovery Movements
I lead with…
Mrs. Marty Mann – One of the First Women to Join AA and Founder of NCADD (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence)
Mrs. Marty Mann, one of the first women of AA and founder of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD)
I first heard of her in the early 2000’s when Sally Brown contacted me about the biography she and her husband, David R. Brown had written, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann: The First Lady of Alcoholics Anonymous (Hazelden, 2001). I met Sally at a local coffee shop and learned more about Marty Mann and then read their biography, which is well-researched and brings to life Marty’s gifts to the addiction recovery movement.
Another important source of information about Mrs. Marty Mann NCADD, the organization she founded.
According to NCADD, it was 1939 when Mrs. Marty Mann first entered the rooms of AA because her life had become unmanageable. “Hangovers began to assume monstrous proportions, and the morning drink became an urgent necessity. ‘Blanks’ became more frequent… With a creeping insidiousness, drink had become more important than anything else. It no longer gave me pleasure—it merely dulled the pain—but I had to have it,” wrote Mann. (Source: NCADD>Our Founder)
And then, just five years later, Marty Mann had a vision of “a plan to teach people the facts about alcoholism.” This plan became the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism in 1944, and later the National Council on Alcoholism (NCA) in 1950, and then the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD) in 1990. Marty’s plan is described on NCADD’s website > Our Founder as follows:
Tossing and turning in her bed one cold February night in 1944, Marty prayed for a way to help other alcoholics. Rising from her bed, a plan came to her, “a plan to teach people the facts about alcoholism. A plan to remove the stigma surrounding it, so people could face it unashamed and unafraid, armed with the weapons of knowledge and able to take constructive action.”
The idea needed scientific support, she felt, and so — accompanied by Bill W., the co-founder of AA who had become her sponsor — Marty approached E.M. Jellinek, one of America’s premier researchers into alcoholism, and Dr. Howard Haggard at the Yale Center for Alcohol Studies, who agreed to adopt Marty’s vision of educating Americans about alcoholism.
On October 2, 1944, the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism was founded in a modest office suite on the upper east side of Manhattan. With Mrs. Mann as spokesperson, the fledgling organization became quite successful in communicating the three tenets of its core message – a message that today encompasses drug dependence and addiction:
- Alcoholism is a disease, and the alcoholic is a sick person;
- The alcoholic can be helped, and is worth helping;
- Alcoholism is a public health problem, and therefore a public responsibility.
These ideas are so universally accepted today, that it can be difficult to imagine how revolutionary they were at the time. Yet through her vision and leadership, the attitude of America toward alcoholism and addiction began to change from the perception that it was a moral issue to recognition that it was truly a matter of public health.
I mean think of it – tackling the stigma, misinformation and shame that surrounded the disease of alcoholism back in 1944 – incredible! As Sally and David R. Brown wrote in their biography, “The fact that alcoholism is now legitimized and accepted as a treatable disease is due largely to Marty’s unrelenting efforts to bring the information to everyone she could” (Brown and Brown, p. 8).
For me – discovering NCADD back in 2003, when I began my own secondhand drinking recovery journey, was life changing. Finally! I’d found information from a reputable source that helped me understand the disease of alcoholism and what it takes to treat it and an organization that put words to the family’s experience and how deeply, deeply affected they are.
To learn more about her life and work, check out A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann: The First Lady of Alcoholics Anonymous (Hazelden, 2001) by Sally Brown and David R. Brown.
Stephanie Brown, Ph.D. – Clinician, Teacher, Researcher, Consultant and Author in the Field of Alcoholism
Stephanie Brown, Ph.D., internationally recognized expert on the treatment of alcoholics, adult children of alcoholics and all addicts and their families and founder of The Addictions Institute.
I was so fortunate to have begun my secondhand drinking recovery journey in the same city where Stephanie Brown, Ph.D., has her office, The Addictions Institute. It was 2003, and one of my loved ones had entered a residential treatment program for alcoholism. As I describe in my book If You Loved Me, You’d Stop!,
“By the time Alex admitted himself into the residential treatment program, I was so angry I could hardly see straight. I looked forward to our weekly family group meetings at the center because those meetings were the first time I got to ‘tell’ Alex what life had been like with him when he’d been drinking. I was able to say what I had to say without his being able to interrupt me, or even more frustrating, to flip the exchange so it was somehow ‘my fault.’ Giving a voice to the family members of the alcoholics (and addicts who were also enrolled in the program) was the whole purpose of those meetings.
It was also comforting to hear the stories of other families – stories very similar to my own. And so for weeks, Alex and I gathered with those assigned to our Wednesday night family group session. I ranted and railed and commiserated with the other spouses and parents of the alcoholics / addicts. I told Alex how truly rotten it felt to be manipulated and lied to and what it was like to suffer through one broken promise after another. And, when he’d throw in a ‘yeah but…’ or a ‘but, you…’ at me, a group member or the family therapist would say, ‘let her speak.’
I listened to the children – those brave enough to speak up – and vigorously nodded my head in agreement, for their stories were my children’s stories. But, I soon realized Alex wasn’t ‘hearing’ me, and that infuriated me even more. He gave lip service to ‘getting it’ (what all he’d put me through), but I’d heard and trusted those kinds of words many times before (it’s why we were still so stuck). So, I would look to someone from the treatment team to tell him for me, believing that if they told him, then he’d listen. It was crucial to me for Alex to understand and own what he’d done. But nothing worked and my anger festered.
So you can imagine my reaction when the family therapist suggested I get help. ‘Me? Why me? He’s the alcoholic!’ I’d argue. She explained that my getting help would not only help me, but it would also help him. While I wanted to help him, I didn’t have time, I argued. I was already juggling life ‘outside’ while he was in residential treatment. The last thing I wanted was to have to do one more thing to help him. I’d been doing that for years, I complained.” (Frederiksen, p. 38)
And that’s how I first learned of Stephanie Brown and her work. I scoured the Internet and library for books on what happens to the family and found two of Stephanie Brown’s books; books that helped transform my life. They were books I’d found that documented the family’s experience and what the family could, should and shouldn’t do to help themselves and in turn, help their loved one.
The first is The Family Recovery Guide: A Map for Healthy Growth (New Harbinger Publications, Inc., 2000), Stephanie Brown, Ph.D., and Virginia M. Lewis, Ph.D., with Andrew Liotta. The second is The Alcoholic Family in Recovery (The Guilford Press, 1999), Stephanie Brown and Virginia Lewis. I can’t recommend these books highly enough.
I also got brave enough to call Stephanie Brown and ask for her help in finding a therapist for myself and then again, two years later, for my daughters. Why her? After I started reading her first book, I knew Dr. Brown understood what happens to the family and that the family needs their own help, separate of their loved one’s recovery journey. In the course of our phone calls, she listened and gave me several names of therapists affiliated with The Addictions Institute whom I then interviewed. I’d been in therapy and couple’s therapy at times during the previous 20 years, but therapy with a therapist who understands addiction and the impacts of addiction on the family was a life changer.
Not surprisingly, Stephanie Brown is one of the Founders of the National Association for Children of Addiction, as is my next honoree, Claudia Black, Ph.D.
Claudia Black, Ph.D. – Addiction Author, Speaker, and Trainer; Co-Founder of the National Association for Children of Addiction
Claudia Black Ph.D. is a renowned addiction author, speaker and trainer, internationally recognized for her pioneering and contemporary work with family systems and addictive disorders.
As the daughter of an alcoholic, I found the NACoA website a godsend (as was Al-Anon, by the way, another resource I used in my secondhand drinking recovery), and I turned to Claudia Black’s book, It Will Never Happen to Me, Hazelden, 2002.
Like Stephanie Brown’s work, Claudia’s work spoke to me. She knew the child’s experience, and knowing she knew opened me to digging deeper into learning more about my experience as the adult child of an alcoholic (ACOA) and what all happens in a family when the disease is not understood or treated for what it is — a brain disease.
And as a mother who loves / loved several alcoholics (persons with alcohol use disorders), I turned to Claudia’s book, Straight Talk from Claudia Black: What Recovering Parents Should Tell Their Kids About Drugs and Alcohol, Hazelden, 2003. Why this book when I wasn’t the person in alcohol recovery? As I wrote in my post, “Mothers Who Love an Addict|Alcoholic,”
“Mothers who love an addict | alcoholic have it doubly hard in my opinion. We not only try to help the person with the drinking | drug abuse problem and/or addiction, we try to keep our non-drinking | non-drug abusing children safe in all manner of ways. We don’t want them to know what’s really going on because we don’t really know ourselves. And so we dig in, trying desperately to protect our children, and in the process, we often make a muck of it.
I know I did. I am such a mother. The havoc wrecked in my life and then by me in the lives of my daughters made most holidays – but especially Mothers Day from my perspective – something to get through because joy had long been absconded in our family. I didn’t feel I deserved their cards and gifts and unconditional love. I felt like a bad mother. I felt guilty that I could not make things better. I felt sad that they carried an unnameable sadness that wasn’t apparent on the outside, but I believed to be there on their inside, and as expressed in this anonymous letter shared with me, it was an unnameable sadness that was, in fact, likely there.
An Unsent Letter to Dad: the Impact of Secondhand Drinking on Children.“
Caroll Fowler, MA, MFT – Family Program Therapist
Caroll Fowler, MA, MFT, has over 30 years experience working with addiction family systems, creating and managing family programs, and providing therapy to family members of persons with a substance use disorder.
There will never be enough words to thank Caroll Fowler, MA, MFT, for all that she did for me, personally, and for the thousands of family members and families with whom she worked in her more than 30 year career as a leader in the addiction and recovery field. She was the family therapist who suggested I get help in the story I shared above.
Caroll worked tirelessly with me and my family – not only during our time at the treatment center where she worked and I first met her – but for years after. She voluntarily held family group meetings on the first Saturday of the month, and I attended those group meetings for six years (as I recall). At first – because I desperately needed to hear what she and the others in the group had to say. In time, it was to help give back to the new comers. For when your loved one enters treatment you can feel overwhelmed, confused, angry, hurt, frustrated, scared, DONE – done with what you don’t even know – but when you encounter a therapist who understands the family system, like Caroll, your entire world can change.
Caroll taught us about boundaries and how to set and keep them. She helped us understand the brain disease of addiction in a way we could let go of the anger at our loved one and instead focus on what we needed and could do to take care of ourselves. Most of all, she was filled with a peace and joy that only recovery can bring – not only her own as a person in long term recovery from alcohol and other drugs, but as a family member in long term recovery on the family side of this disease.
To my readers – I hope you find your “Caroll” in your search for family healing and recovery.
Thanks for Reading…
And for those who’d like to share names and/or information about the women leaders in the addiction and family recovery movements whose work has been influential in their lives, please do so. As I said earlier, there are many. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of them.
Lisa Frederiksen
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