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Change report from the
front lines:
Jewish recovering alcoholic shares her story
By Donna Gordon Blankinship
Transcript Editor
Have you heard the one about the Jewish alcoholic? No, you haven’t.
Why not? They don’t exist, you say. Allow me to introduce
Mimi Weiss, a Jew, a recovering alcoholic and a Seattle resident.
That’s probably not how Mimi would introduce herself. She
would also mention her age, 70, her psychotherapy practice,
and her work as a singer, speaker and trainer for corporations
and nonprofits, focusing on communication, conflict resolution
and finding a spiritual base for your work. But our recent discussion
focused on her experience as a recovering alcoholic and prescription
drug abuser — 19 years of being clean and sober —
and how she accomplished that change in her life.
“I feel like it’s time to get my story out there,”
she said in the livingroom of her comfortable home in the Madrona
neighborhood.
Her story begins on Long Island in 1927, in a dysfunctional
Jewish family filled with conflict, poverty and self hatred.
To hide from bill collectors, her family moved 12 times during
her first 12 years. She remembers feeling lost, abandoned and
abused by her parents.
She started drinking in her early teens, at a local tavern and
was, in her words, “an instant alcoholic.” In 1943,
after Weiss and her mother viewed a movie about a family similar
to her own, she raged and screamed and threatened to kill her
mother. That’s when her weekly sessions with Dr. Herman
Kimmelman began. He prescribed daily doses of drugs for anxiety
and depression and she became addicted to the pills.
She remained an alcoholic and drug addict for 16 years, while
continuing psychoanalysis throughout, as that was the source
of her pills.
The beginning of her new start came when she was fired from
a job with a major department store (after a series of impressive
positions in the fashion industry) and she went back to school
to study education and get a teaching certificate. “I got
many nudges to stop drinking. I wasn’t ready,” Weiss
recalls.
She still wasn’t ready when she got a job at a drug and
alcohol treatment center. But Weiss says all along God was sending
her signals that she had to quit abusing her body. Then one
morning after “a horrific drunk,” she woke up and
said, “I don’t want to do it any more.”
Weiss calls this experience a spiritual lifting, although she
stopped drinking she did not acknowledge that she had a problem
with addiction. Five months later, she moved to Portland, Oregon,
and moved into a house three blocks from “the most beautiful
Alcoholics Anonymous facility in the city,” and since she
was no longer going to bars to meet men, she decided an AA meeting
might offer other opporunities. She found support and friendship
and a lifeline away from addiction.
And now Weiss is exploring her Jewishness and looking for ways
to get involved in the Jewish community. “I’ve not
particularly lived my Jewishness. It’s like the piece I
left out,” she explains.
Weiss has some simple advice to offer Jewish alcoholics: stop
drinking immediately and don’t try to do it alone. Get
into a treatment program and a 12-step program. “Alcohol
is just a symptom. Other drugs are just symptoms. When you take
away the drug, if you don’t deal with who you are, then
there is a good change you’ll turn to another addiction,
something to take the edge off.”
Another caveat: change is an ongoing process. You can’t
just finish the 12 steps and go to the movies.
Recently, she has begun re-exploring her Jewish identity and
getting involved in the community and the religion. This has
been a mixed experience for Weiss, as a recovering alcoholic.
She tells the story of a Passover seder she attended a few years
ago in Seattle, where she sat and watched two children, 8 and
10 years old, get drunk. The adults made amusing comments about
the situation, but no one seemed concerned enough to stop the
children from drinking. Weiss says she talked to one of the
boys’ relatives after the evening because she was so worried
about the possibility they could be heading toward alcoholism.
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