Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (43 page)

When I was married to Gary I’d go out and buy one bottle of wine on a Saturday night. That one bottle would last Gary (6'1" and 190 pounds) and me all night long. One-and-a-half glasses for me and three for him, that was our big party night. I never wanted more than that, never gave alcohol a second thought.

So the cure comes with a warning, like the lesson in a fairy tale—you get Prince Charming and the castle, you get what you desire the most, but you have to follow the rule: you have to take the pill every time, one hour before you drink. Then you don’t have the Stephen King experience. Then you can handle the monster like a pussycat, as long as you remember that it still has teeth and claws.

It’s been over three years since I first started on The Sinclair Method. I’ve been back to London to run my own fan convention, which unfortunately took place on the same weekend as the August 2011 London riots. Buildings burned down, cars were destroyed. The restaurant a block from my flat had its windows smashed in and its diners robbed by a mob of thugs. And while all that was going on I was thinking about Amy Winehouse. The coroner’s report has now confirmed what I (and maybe everyone) already suspected, that she died of alcohol poisoning. Her blood alcohol level had been 0.4 percent. Britain’s drunk-driving limit is 0.08 percent. She drank three bottles of vodka after a period of abstinence, and her brain and body overloaded. She passed into a coma. Her breathing stopped. When I heard that, it was impossible not to imagine myself in her situation. It could have been me—it so easily could have been me. I ran my convention successfully, took some guests out to dinner, had a few glasses of wine, and then flew home for my next job. No sweat.

And my career has been going from strength to strength. I had a guest spot on
Grimm
, a fantasy-crime series that’s part fairy tale, part
CSI
, and I guest-starred in a comedy pilot produced by John Wells and directed by the very funny Peter Segal. I’ve done voice work on massively popular video games like
Halo
,
Guild Wars
, and
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
with Joan Allen, Christopher Plummer, Lynda Carter (the original Wonder Woman), and Max von Sydow. I even caught up with my old
Babylon 5
friends at Mira Furlan’s house for a reunion party. Bruce Boxleitner and Bill Mumy were there, and Pat Tallman, with her new man, Joe Straczynski. Joe and I spoke for the first time in a long while, and it was great to recapture some of our old camaraderie.

There’s a happy ending to the story of my mother and me. She’s still the most important person in the world to me, the person I love the most, and I’m forever grateful that we survived the highs and lows. Our relationship has now mellowed into a happy continuum of love and communication.

And I’m single again. David is still very much in my life, we’re still very close friends, but they haven’t invented a pill that lets me keep a relationship together longer than three years. God doesn’t owe me a job or a lover. Being cured is no guarantee of happiness. I had to dig deep to realize that only I could make myself happy. I needed to stand on my own two feet and live my life. I think that you can’t really help others until you’re able to set your own house in order, and in many ways I think my journey, my battle with addiction, was about growing up, about maturing to the point where my sense of self-worth comes not from how I can meet my own needs, but rather from how I can help serve the needs of others.

That sense of purpose has given me the freedom to try again, to rebuild my life. I’ve just bought a new home, a gorgeous 1920s Spanish Revival house in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve poured all my life savings into it, and my mother and father have offered me their love, talents, and even money to help make it a place where I can have a new beginning. I’ve caused them so much pain, yet they keep coming back, giving their love and support in a way that only parents can. The house is a big step, but I’m not even slightly afraid. I know myself, I know the enemy, and I’ve learned that the best way to win a war is not to start one in the first place—to treat the symptoms, to address the first causes. And I’m going to redesign the house just the way I want, but this time without the monster on my back. This place will be a reflection of the new Claudia, a more integrated Claudia. This time I’m finally coming home.

I’ve been blessed to build a career doing something I love. Acting is a vocation. By 2013 it will be thirty years since my first television job, and I’m proud to have been gainfully employed in one of the world’s toughest, most competitive industries for most of that time.

I’m grateful to have inspired people with my portrayals of strong, intelligent women, but now my mission is to help those who have suffered from the same disease that nearly destroyed me. I want to save people the years I spent looking for a way to reclaim my life.

There’s a stigma attached to being an alcoholic, a popular perception that you’re weak or immoral. The simple fact is that it’s a physical addiction, a learned behavior that the brain cannot unlearn on its own. If you treat the addiction, the symptoms of the disease disappear.

When I met with Dr. Eskapa, the author of
The Cure for Alcoholism
, he looked over my naltrexone diary and concluded that I have a physiological makeup that’s extremely well-suited to The Sinclair Method. Some people will have the same response as I did, while others will take longer. Twenty percent of people won’t get any benefit at all, but a near eighty percent success rate is enough to inspire me to get to work.

I’m meeting with friends and fans who have reached out to me. I’m in discussions with a North American Indian tribe about starting up naltrexone trials. That came about through Phillip, my white buffalo medicine man. He introduced me to a man named Bear who’s now working in partnership with me and believes The Sinclair Method can make a positive difference. And I’m talking with people in the entertainment industry—fellow actors, celebrities, and creative professionals who are drinking to get through tough jobs, drinking out of despair for lack of work, drinking because they’ve forgotten life before they needed to drink. The word is getting out there.

There’s been such a turnaround in my life—it’s nothing short of a miracle. I’d prayed for one that was for sure, I’d asked to be healed, but I didn’t think that God was returning my calls. Now I see that something good has come out of my dark days. With my healing has come a new calling, or rather a way for me to realize an old calling. I’ve become a spokesperson for The Sinclair Method. I’m doing what I always wanted to do—I’m helping people.

A FINAL WORD

Alcoholism touches everybody’s lives—not just the people suffering from it, but their families and friends as well. It takes a great toll on our society.

If you are afflicted by alcoholism and my story resonates with you, then please look into The Sinclair Method. It might help you as it did me.

If you know of someone suffering alcohol addiction, then please share my story or information about the availability of The Sinclair Method with him or her. Dr. Eskapa’s book,
The Cure for Alcoholism
, is available from BenBella Books (also the publisher of this book) and there are countless resources on the Internet.

The Sinclair Method saved my life. It’s my sincere hope that it will help many others as it becomes more widely known as a treatment option.

I’d love to hear your stories and help, as best I can, anyone suffering from this disease. You can reach me on my Facebook fan page, at
www.claudiachristian.net
and at
[email protected]
.

We all have monsters to battle, and, if nothing else, I hope this book lends hope to those who are walking a similar path to mine. Have faith, forgive yourself. I wish you every strength and much light on your journey toward peace.

AFTERWORD By Dr. Roy Eskapa

Two years after publication of my book on The Sinclair Method (TSM),
The Cure for Alcoholism: Drink Your Way Sober Without Willpower, Abstinence, or Discomfort
, I received an inspiring phone call from the bright and talented actress Claudia Christian. While she was introducing herself, I ran a quick Google search and saw there were over seven million references to her. I listened intently.

Claudia told me that she had been losing the battle against alcohol addiction for many years and that my book about the treatment had saved her life. I had already received many emails and calls about how TSM had transformed and saved lives—and this was always immensely gratifying—but there was something different, more urgent, about Claudia. I could tell intuitively that she genuinely cared about others and wanted to share her life-saving discovery with the world.

In her struggle to save her career and her life, Claudia had resorted to all manner of practices, potions, and prayers. She had fervently and repeatedly tried to control her drinking—which she calls her “monster”—on her own and via hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, very expensive traditional detox, abstinence, faith-based inpatient rehabs, and AA.

As with the vast majority (85 percent) of the 18 million Americans who have drinking problems, Claudia’s attempts at recovery had failed. However hard she tried to control her drinking, she inevitably relapsed back to heavy, dangerous drinking bouts.

Claudia was determined not to become another statistic—one of the 105,000 Americans who, according to the American Medical Association, die from alcoholism each year. She did not want to join the World Health Organization’s figure of 1.8 million worldwide deaths from alcohol—double the number of deaths from malaria and equal to the death rate from lung cancer.

Fortunately, fate intervened when she discovered TSM in the nick of time. She was able to reclaim her life.
Babylon Confidential
demonstrates how resilience, determination, and luck led Claudia to discover The Sinclair Method—a safe and cost-effective cure for her addiction.

No one walks into a bar at eighteen or twenty-one, has a beer, and immediately loses control over his or her drinking. The addiction takes time—many drinking sessions over months and years—to
learn
through a process known as
reinforcement.
Some people are faster learners than others, but once the addiction has taken root in the brain
it remains incurable for life
. Or at least it had been incurable. In the past, Alcoholics Anonymous was right: once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Today, however, the situation has changed, thanks to the research of Dr. David Sinclair. Today most cases of alcoholism can be cured.