Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [97]
These talks riveted me, and I got really excited by some of the personalities who came, people who had been sober for twenty years or more and had stories to tell that were often hair-raising and sometimes tragic. But some of us were hard to reach, and I heard later that there was quite a lot of drug taking going on in my unit. Sundays were family visitation days, and this is when substances could be smuggled in by friends or family. I didn’t do anything myself, only because I didn’t know anyone who would bring me anything.
My problem was of a different kind. Hazelden was not a single-sex institution, but fraternization between the sexes was strictly forbidden, and patients were expected to report anybody seen doing this. But flirtation was a daily practice, and attempted liaisons were fairly common. I did manage to have a couple of dalliances with girls without being caught. I achieved this by somehow persuading my counselor that I was entitled to a room of my own, and once I got this, I set about trying to get girls to come and visit me. I succeeded, but only at risk to other people who knew it was happening. If they had been found out for not reporting me, we would all have been thrown out.
Hazelden was one of the first clinics to have a family program, and toward the end of my stay, Pattie flew out to undergo a five-day course designed to teach spouses and family members what to expect, and how to reapproach their relationships when the patient finally returned home, hopefully sober. It also encouraged them to look at their own role in the family structure, to see whether there would be a possible need for them to get help as well. It has become generally accepted in these matters that no one holds a gun to the head of a person involved with an alcoholic. They are almost invariably there for their own reasons, and in many cases this is because they are addicted themselves, even if it’s only in a caretaking fashion.
If this is the case, their foundations are often shaken and their roles threatened when the addict takes steps toward recovery, because they can no longer practice their own addiction with satisfactory results. The Hazelden family program, among other things, focused on the need for family members to look really honestly at the nature of their relationships and learn how they could identify and, if necessary, redirect their own needs in order to share their lives successfully with someone who didn’t need looking after anymore.
For Pattie, these sessions were to prove incredibly helpful, not least because she got to meet other people who were in the same situation that she was. I think she felt she had been acting as a surrogate mother most of her life, starting with her siblings, and continuing the role in her relationships. In her life with me, I think she yearned for an independent identity, but was rarely allowed to account for herself because I was always the focus of attention. For years all she would hear was, “What are we going to do about Eric?” or “Eric’s such an annoyance,” “Eric’s done this, Eric’s done that. Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he awful?” Until she came to Hazelden, nobody ever asked her, “Well, who are you, and what’s your reason for being with him?”
Of course, at times I felt I’d never make it through the whole month, and some did give up. One very wealthy guy actually had his wife fly a helicopter into a nearby field and left in the middle of the night. I got through what was to be the first of two visits to Hazelden by what I later learned was called “tap dancing.” I figured out exactly what it was I thought they needed from me, and I gave it to them. I also watched the counselors