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Recovery in the News
Patrick Kennedy finds much to celebrate after a year of sobriety
John E. Mulligan
The Providence Journal
May 6, 2007
WASHINGTON — He woke up before 8 o’clock on a beautiful Thursday morning in May and the clues began to gather that it would be anything but beautiful for him. Behind the brick townhouse with the unkempt front lawn, his Mustang was missing. Behind the head full of pain medicine and sleeping pills, his memory was missing too.
There was the final vote on the floor of the House around 9 the night before. There was the drop-by at a convention of visitors to Washington — the mental health lobby, of all people. There was the quick drive home to his girlfriend. Then there was blackout.
He picked up the phone to tell his chief of staff that something had happened; there might be bad news ahead, another day of damage control on the way. He got dressed and went to work in an all-too-familiar state of anxiety.
He was in the cloakroom off the House chamber in the Capitol when he got the call and he could feel his heart just hit the floor. There had been an accident in the middle of the night. The Capitol Hill Police were saying he was drunk. The Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms was involved. All of it — member of Congress, car crash, driving under the influence — all of it was about to break over the airwaves as only the news of another Kennedy family drama can break.
“It was the most terrifying feeling you can have,” Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, recalled one afternoon last week. “You realize that you’ve been discovered. You know you’ve been found out and your jig is up.”
He was sitting on a terrace at a green picnic table outside the Cannon House Office Building, across Independence Avenue from the gleaming Capitol dome, around the block from the security barrier that his speeding convertible struck in the predawn hours of the day of his great wake-up call.
His reticence was on display. He faced his questioner through sunglasses and bowed his head over his freckled hands on top of the table. But lighter emotions were also at play. As he warmed to his story, Kennedy mined the remembered humiliation for humor.
“This was the showstopper of all showstoppers,” he said. “This was a Category Five hurricane, OK?” he continued with a laugh. “This one breached the hurricane barrier and it overturned all my natural defenses.”
His accident on May 4, 2006, spurred Kennedy’s departure for his second stay in less than six months at an addiction rehabilitation center in Minnesota. He denied that drinking was involved but later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of drugs he had been prescribed for insomnia and for a painful stomach ailment. He was sentenced to community service with a Washington youth group, a driver’s license suspension and a supervised regimen of treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction — all terms of a probation that Kennedy fulfilled shortly before marking the anniversary of his crackup, and of one full year of sobriety.
Kennedy said he has made it through the year without drinking or taking drugs, and his sponsor in recovery, Republican Rep. Jim Ramstad of Minnesota, vouches for that. As has become his practice in interviews, Kennedy avoided direct mention of Alcoholics Anonymous, the self-help organization founded in the 1930s, or to related drug-dependence programs that follow the 12 Steps that AA prescribes for recovery from addiction.
His family name and the notoriety of his accident last year have put anonymity out of reach for Kennedy, but he has explained that he sticks to terms such as “recovery group” and “program” as his attempt to honor the founding principle of anonymity. He has explained that the program steers away from identification with particular men or women, because no single individual’s success or failure should represent the program at large.
Kennedy said the passage of a year in sobriety — his first since he began to abuse alcohol and pain medication as a teenager — has allowed him to see with some clarity what he used to be like.
Kennedy lived what he called “a secret life with drugs and alcohol,” exacerbated by bipolar disorder. “When and if I wanted to escape,” Kennedy said, he would binge drink. For years, he also abused “the whole panoply of pain medication,” he said, “up and down the ladder” from codeine-fortified Tylenol to oxycodone.
As Kennedy has described it, his addictions created a vicious cycle and a nest of conflicting emotions. If he was naturally shy and uncertain of how to fit into a family of outsize personalities and large ambition, drugs or alcohol could help him hide his fears. He said his drug abuse promoted a sense of uniqueness and being “better than other people,” but it also inspired contrary sensations of shame and fear that fed the desire to take refuge in the addiction.
“I had been in a scrape or two before and I’d always managed to keep bumping along” by means of a well-tested “ability to manage crisis” and a deeply-ingrained denial that he had a problem, Kennedy said of his life prior to last May 5.
THE NOTORIOUS INCIDENT last spring wound up being a potential lifesaver, by Kennedy’s reckoning, because it meant there could be “no more playing games and half-truths with myself and with the fact that I had a problem with drugs and alcohol.”
The glare of publicity forced him, finally, to take his recovery program seriously when he returned to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. During his first weekend there he got a visit from Ramstad, at the time a publicly recovering alcoholic of almost 25 years standing.
Ramstad quickly became Kennedy’s AA sponsor and has continued to guide him through a recovery based on daily attendance at meetings. Part of the secret, Kennedy said, is the seeming paradox that by acknowledging need and weakness and accepting the help of his peers, he has found a source of strength.
Another of the happy puzzles of the recovery program is that some of its greatest gifts derive, in Kennedy’s words, “from giving it away” by serving others.
In that regard, Kennedy said his line of work and his longtime interest in legislation to aid the mentally ill — and addicts — have been a boon to his recovery.
Last week, Kennedy and Ramstad joined a corps of mental health advocates and the Democratic leadership of the House at a rally for their bill to improve health insurance coverage for mental illness and addiction.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a brief interview after the rally that Kennedy’s colleagues never viewed him as ineffective, “but now knowing of the passage that he has gone through, we are all drawing strength from him.”
Pelosi praised what she called “the generosity of Patrick Kennedy and Jim Ramstad in sharing their stories” to help pass legislation that could help other addicts, as well as the mentally ill, to get the medical treatment that helped launch both congressmen toward recovery.
In another of the program’s unlikely twists, Kennedy sees a different impulse than generosity at work in his public service and in his private efforts to help “fellow travelers in sobriety,” as he calls them. In fact, he said the program counsels a habit of healthy selfishness. The addicts and alcoholics who succeed at long-term recovery tend to be those who stick together and keep helping fellow sufferers of the disease, Kennedy said. Every addict therefore has a healthy self-interest in service.
“It’s not surprising that two recovering people are carrying this legislation,” Ramstad said of the mental health insurance parity bill. “We know first-hand that we are dealing with a fatal disease if not treated.”
In separate interviews, Kennedy and Ramstad give notably parallel accounts of what the Rhode Island congressman is like today, one year into recovery. Since they visited last spring during Kennedy’s first weekend at the Mayo clinic, “there’s been a dramatic difference,” Ramstad said, “because his public persona is exactly the same as his private persona.”
The sober alcoholic “doesn’t have to put on his game face” to mask a shameful secret, Ramstad said. “You can be the same person all the time.” Accordingly, he said, “Patrick is more real.” He has become “calmer,” and “more accepting” of life’s daily trials.
Kennedy likewise spoke of what he called “the great relief” of putting away his secret life.
Another of the seeming contradictions on which the recovery program thrives: The emphasis on taking life a day at a time is unceasing, but there is room, all the same, to note milestones along the pathway.
In Kennedy’s case, the 365 consecutive days of sobriety since his “Category Five hurricane” is fit for more than one celebration.
Yesterday, he planned to mark the date at the regular meeting he attends in Rhode Island. Upon his return for another congressional work week, Kennedy and his fellows will recognize the occasion once more — at his Tuesday noontime meeting on Capitol Hill.
A certain excess will be permissible there. Kennedy has let it be known that he wants his anniversary cake — and frosting — to be chocolate. “I said, ‘Chocolate all the way through,’ ” he reported with a grin the other day on the sun-swept terrace across from the Capitol — just a few feet from the curb where his battered Mustang stood for all the tabloid world to see in the queasy aftermath of the crackup one year ago.
Kennedy will celebrate yet again with the men’s group that meets at a member’s home Tuesday nights. Then Ramstad and others will take him out to dinner, and they will raise a glass to salute Patrick Kennedy for one year clean and sober.
“We’ll celebrate over mineral water and diet Cokes like we always do,” said Ramstad — one day at a time.
© 2007, Published by The Providence Journal Co.