“I had no idea how to behave as a teenager, and I was a teenager until I was 34.”
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Jenny Valentish was sexually abused at the age of 7. At 13 she began drinking alcohol; at 15 she was “blind drunk every day after school.”
Her new book, Woman of Substances: a journey into addiction and treatment, is part memoir and part dissertation on how women are affected and categorised by drugs and addiction treatment.
It’s a wild, painful, sobering book to read. Valentish doesn’t spare the harsh details of a life spent out of control. She details the pharmacopoeia of drugs she consumes over decades, licit and illicit; the abusive relationships; a rape outside a bar; blackouts and bruises and paranoia. There’s theft, homelessness and humiliation.
Perhaps most painful is the details of her fraught relationship with her family in England. Screaming matches lead to deception, to silences and outright hostility.
But this is not a book that wallows in the misery and mystery of substance abuse. It’s a disciplined, rigorously researched examination of the reasons why women react differently to men when they are caught in addictions. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny at times.
Valentish speaks to healthcare professionals and authors; she does a prodigious amount of research about female reactions to drugs, to alcohol, to stress and to a myriad of conditions: low self-esteem, eating disorders, sexual addiction, impulsiveness.
The book doesn’t pretend to have defined answers, because there aren’t any. Valentish offers ideas for ‘emancipation’, for escaping the grip of addiction to substances by exploring other physical and mental highs: those offered by sport and by meditation,by games and by love.
Jenny Valentish spoke to Caleb Cluff.
What brought you to the point where you could write this book?
I’m actually the archetypal female case study here. There definitely could be far worse examples, but a lot of the things that happened to me – if you talked to somebody who worked in a treatment facility, they could tick the boxes.
I never really thought of my story being gendered, but when I came to make the notes I thought ‘God it really is.’ As a journalist I realised I had amazing privileges to find out the answers to my puzzling behaviour.
What have you learned, both generally and about yourself, that you didn’t know before writing Woman of Substances?
I didn’t know I had ADHD, that was interesting, although I don’t know how much weight to put on that; it doesn’t really change much. When I first discovered it, when I was writing the chapter on self-medication, I realised, ‘wow, my whole life has just suddenly fluttered into place’. But that’s a bit like reading a horoscope, applying whatever you read to your current self.
It was interesting to find out that certain mental illnesses and disorders have a very high co-morbidity with substance abuse; ADHD being one and OCD. And the chapter Pretty Intense, which has no memoir, is interesting because it talks about how women are over-pathologised. Do we self-medicate more because of our place in the patriarchy, or are we just being told, “There, there have an antidepressant”?
It was interesting to find out that ‘borderline personality disorders’ are basically constructs; it’s a result of childhood trauma but it’s so hard to get that kind of thing recognised and dealt with that people end up being put on more and more medication. And then they will drink on those medications and turn into a big rolling mess.
What you are writing in this book is that women are told, and portrayed, what is wrong with them, rather than finding and defining for themselves a narrative?
Yes. At the end of the book there’s a chapter A Call To Arms. I had no intention of this being a call to arms. I was going to write about the female experience; there was no agenda. I deliberately didn’t use the word feminism. I was aiming the book at women who are struggling and not everyone identifies with that.
I ended up with this chapter because I discovered on this journey that the norm in the treatment industry and in the research industry is the male experience. You’ve got treatment programs that are ‘one size fits all’. Whereas women, if they have got to the point of severity that they are seeking inpatient treatment, they are bound to have a traumatic history.
So really there needs to be a trauma-focussed care or compassion-focussed care so that these sensitivities are dealt with, rather than just the addiction is dealt with.
And a lot of medications are only tested on men. Men are not the norm in addiction.
You write about vigilance, meaningfulness, altruism – the things that you put at the forefront of how to approach life. How much have you changed as a person in writing this book?
Even though I was detailing this really chaotic behaviour, I was already quite self-aware. It’s not as though every chapter was a revelation.
I juggle frantically. Especially in times of stress, we all have our coping mechanisms. I can tell you writing this book was the most stressful thing in a long time. I took up smoking again, I watched porn – I don’t mind saying that because it’s in the book – any kind of distraction, I would juggle.
It’s really frustrating because you think, ‘Gosh, surely I’m over this behaviour now’ – but it’s really connected to the way our brains are wired. My brain is quite possibly low in dopamine. There’s a chapter that talks about that. I don’t know that for sue but it’s quite likely because I always need to be generating some kind of excitement and stimulation.
So in a way writing this book made me feel despondent, because I’ve got all this information now, but it doesn’t mean you've got the tools to change things. You can just be more aware. Realising that I’m impulsive, and that that’s a thing. I can talk myself down.
Jenny Valentish’s Woman of Substances: a journey into addiction and treatment is released next week by Black Inc. Books. Ms Valentish is a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Saturday Paper.