Breaking The Family Habit

Addiction, like trauma, can run in families. Yet those very same families can be empowered to turn an addict’s life around.

- Susan Chenery

When she woke in the morning Margie Bauer would often discover she had been doing business deals with the US in the night. “I wouldn’t remember doing it.” The founder of a multinational publishing company, she would give radio interviews in a slurred voice, punctuated by the slurping of wine. While “drinking heavily” she had 30 employees working for her company that published magazines, books that sold in 20 different languages, a retail store and a children’s clothing company. But while her business “kept growing and growing” her own life was disappearing into the bottom of a glass.

She went on health retreats every six months: “Cleanse myself and repeat,” she says. Margie separated from her husband, who stepped in to care for her children because she couldn’t. She became “the town drunk,” she tells The Weekly. “I was a terrible drunk – self-destructive and destructive of other people.”

Then, 30 years ago, Margie turned her life around and today works tirelessly to help addicts and their families turn theirs around too. She’s realised that people who depend on drugs don’t exist in isolation and that, while families can create the trauma that leads to addiction, loved ones can be part of the solution.

Margie was raised in a prominent legal family where alcoholism and sexual abuse were kept secret, and that created ongoing trauma.

“Behind addiction is trauma,” she says, “and behind trauma is pain. The pain can be unconscious – we’re not always aware of it – and we’re never taught how to be with the pain. We numb it and run from it into drugs and alcohol.”