I’m outside a top London hotel. These places usually allow me in through the tradesmen’s entrance but today I’m a front-door man.
The Times, in its wisdom, has decided to send me, an alcoholic, to interview Chris Prentiss, a Californian guru who has turned the approach to alcoholism and addiction upside down. With the ineffable logic of the afflicted, I go for a drink first.
A beer and vodka chaser later, I meet Chris. He’s laid-back, casually dressed, no airs and graces, and looks much younger than his 70 years. He has been briefed on my circumstances and we discuss Passages, the treatment centre that he established in Malibu in 2001 which, having treated close to 1,000 people, claims a success rate of 84 per cent. This figure makes it the most successful addiction centre in the world and can be placed in context by the sobriety rate of Alcoholics Anonymous, which has always been in single figures. Naturally I ask how the figures for Passages are calculated.
“We have two full-time staff monitoring the people we have treated,” Chris says. “We have regular reunions and we can see how people are doing. They are happy, they have jobs, and they are doing well, and we know that they are cured.”
This is where Passages goes against the mainstream, for Chris is claiming that his programme actually cures people. This is possible because he has effectively redefined addiction and alcoholism. These conditions, he claims, are not diseases — as the medical and addiction establishment maintains — but responses to underlying circumstances.
Passages seeks to identify the root causes, which as Chris explains in his book, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure, may be physical (chemical imbalances in the body), or psychological (unresolved problems from the past, or an inability to deal with one’s present situation). Once the cause has been found, and the individual believes that he or she can be cured, dependency will cease.
The inspiration behind Passages was in a way forced upon Chris, who, after an abusive childhood in New Jersey, built up a lucrative career in real estate.
Some 15 years ago a young man found himself digging a hole a few yards away from a remote Californian highway. He was in a state of anxiety, which was understandable, given that he was digging his own grave.
Around him was a group of men, one of whom he knew as Ape Man. The latter had a 10in hunting knife and was going to make this slow. The young man pleaded that he could get the money to settle his $400 drug debt. Ape Man frowned. It was like a TV show. Should he gamble for the money? Or rip the boy’s guts out? Fortunately he went for the money and the young man survived. His name was Pax Prentiss, son of Chris.
Despite his survival, however, Pax still existed in an abyss of heroin, cocaine and alcohol addiction. A subsequent beating from another dealer left him with serious injuries and large medical bills. Chris secured him in rehab, and again when he relapsed, and again, and again.
As the relapses multiplied Chris came to believe that centres with regimes of punishment and 12-step programmes don’t work, and he started to research an alternative. Having contacted practitioners from every area of healthcare — from traditional Chinese medicine, clinical psychology, marriage and family therapy, hypnotherapy, spiritual therapy, meditation and visualisation — he arrived at the concept of a holistic approach. Supported by this galaxy of practitioners, Pax came to understand that his addiction was rooted in a sense that he couldn’t live up to his high-achieving father (although Chris’s first wife’s addictions, and her subsequent neglect of her teenage son, can’t have helped) and became drug-free. Could this approach, in which treatment programmes are tailored to individuals, be used to help others, Chris wondered. With Pax, he founded Passages.
“The paradigm had to change,” Chris says. “Organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous don’t work for everyone. Step one tells you that you are powerless over drugs or alcohol. Six of the steps are asking God to help you. With a relapse rate close to 90 per cent, God isn’t listening. Most people who go to AA only go once.”
I went just the once. I recollect a quasi-religious atmosphere and a debate dominated by the people who had the least to say. It certainly wasn’t for me, though it would be churlish not to acknowledge that many people have benefited from it. But Chris insists that the premise behind such programmes is faulty.
“It isn’t true that once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic,” he continues. “We believe in a cure. How would you like to be treated by someone who thinks you are incurable? It’s not a disease. It’s a question of identifying the underlying problems.”
Doesn’t conventional psychotherapy try to do that? Chris replies that at Passages people “become willing to look their past, into the recesses of their minds and into the reasons that they were abusing substances”.
I can relate to this. I spent 18 months in one-to-one psychotherapy and came to the conclusion that my practitioner was more interested in my wallet than my mind. I remember a session when we spent the entire hour discussing the relative merits of the Beatles’ albums. I think we eventually agreed that Revolver was the finest.
Chris talks about some of his more philosophical concepts, which are an intrinsic part of the treatment and come down to a kind of glorious optimism. Put simply, he asks people to reframe the way they look at the world. According to Chris I am a perfect being living in a perfect universe in which everything that happens benefits me. That is what I have to believe if I am to become and remain sober. He pats the chair on which I am sitting: “That’s part of the universe,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, “but so was 9/11. Was that for the best?” “Well, that’s a tough one. You don’t want to start with the tough ones.”
I’ve come here as a cynic but I find myself nodding in agreement: this man has charisma. You may think his ideas are a variant on the age-old practice of positive thinking, but I like his logic. We go back to paradigms. He talks about the four-minute-mile. “It was supposed to be impossible. Roger Bannister did it in 1954 and suddenly many athletes were able to do it, because they knew it could be done. Once you break the paradigm you accept you can be cured, and that’ s the biggest healing ingredient. Dependencies can be broken.”
He asks about my circumstances and pinpoints my refusal to take up a place at an establishment university almost 30 years ago as the beginning of my progressive sense of failure. But it wasn’t a bad thing because had I gone there I wouldn’t have met my wife and had my children, he maintains, making the point that there are positives in every perceived negative. I should use my past as a springboard, not an anchor, he says. I argue that once society, and the people around you, label you an alcoholic it is difficult to escape that mentality.
“If you believe you are an alcoholic, that’s true for you,” he says. “It’s only a concept, a belief. You have to change that belief, accept you don’t have to drink, that it’s a coping mechanism. There are lots of ways to cope. Go for a walk, eat a hot dog.”
Chris is smooth but tough, unequivocal in everything he says, and I like his central idea — find the reason and you find the cure. There’s only two problems for me. One, I’m unlikely to meet the princesses Chris has treated at Passages because I don’t have $60,000 for a 30-day treatment programme, and I can see that following his alternative suggestion of putting together my own team of doctors and therapists who refer to each other concerning my treatment wouldn’t come cheap either.
Two, I’ve never liked hot dogs. But if I understand Chris, I need to change the way I think — about myself and everything else. Perhaps what I need to make hot dogs palatable is a liberal helping of mustard and fried onions. It’s got to be worth a try.
The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure, by Chris Prentiss, Power Press, £12.99
The AA's 12 steps
An Alcoholics Anonymous survey carried out last year suggested that a third of its members had been sober for between two and ten years, but inevitably those who responded were self-selecting, and the organisation acknowledges that it isn’t the answer for every alcoholic.
Its 12-step fellowship programme is used at many addiction clinics, including Broadway Lodge in Weston-super-Mare, which opened in 1974, making it one of the most experienced in this field. “The 12-step programme is often a last resort, but for people who are ready to look at abstinence it’s effective,” says its chief executive, Pauline Bissett. “It was written in the 1930s and people do get hung up on the God word, which makes people see it as a religious programme, which it isn’t.
“It’s a basic programme for living that Joe Bloggs in the street probably does unconsciously. if you mess up you think about what isn’t working, ask why, and work out how you can do things differently.”
