Isabel’s Story: for those who feel hopeless

Rabbi Abraham Twerski is a Hasidic rabbi who trained in psychiatry, and has applied that training and his ethical teachings as he writes about addiction and other life issues.

An excerpt:

In the 1960s [Rabbi] Twerski began to encounter the human wreckage of an alcohol- and drug-oriented culture, and he gained a new perspective from the personal struggles of the addicted. One of his earliest books, Caution: “Kindness” Can Be Dangerous to the Alcoholic begins with a moving dedication to “Isabel,” a woman whose story made a deep impression on Twerski:

“As a first-year psychiatric resident, I was assigned to the walk-in clinic. One day a woman came in asking for help. The woman gave the high points of her history. When she was twenty-four, married, and with a baby, she was drinking so heavily that her husband asked for a divorce. Recognizing that she was not fulfilling her functions as a wife and mother, she gave her husband the divorce and custody of the child. Free of all restraints, she now indulged in alcohol even more heavily.”

Accustomed to the fiercely family-oriented world of Hasidism, the young Twerski must have been impressed by this woman’s decision to abandon her child and husband in order to pursue the decadent pleasure of drinking. Making her story even more compelling, Isabel’s degradation was a descent from the top of the social ladder.

“Even at sixty-one, when I first met her, Isabel was an attractive woman. She must have been stunning in her younger years, when she was much sought after as a companion, being wined and dined by the social elite. As the years went on and alcohol took its toll, Isabel’s social life deteriorated drastically. Between the ages of thirty and fifty-seven, she had more than 65 hospitalizations for “drying out.” Her behavior had become so intolerable that her family eventually detached themselves completely from her, even refusing to respond to calls from the hospital. She made several token visits to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), but she never took the program seriously. Eventually she ended up in the skid-row flophouses....”

The tenacity of Isabel’s bout with alcohol made her recovery mysterious and profoundly challenging to Twerski’s sense of human existence:

“At the time she consulted me, Isabel had been sober for four years.... Isabel’s motivation for sobriety continued to elude me, and although I continued to see her until her death at seventy-four, I never did discover any specific reason for her turning her life around. All I can conclude is that within every person there is a nucleus of self-respect and dignity which, no matter how deeply concealed, exists obstinately.”

 

I’ve always found Isabel’s story inspiring. It tells me that anyone can find the power to change, that it doesn’t matter how far their behavior has taken them or what method they use. It doesn’t even matter what ‘reason’, if any, we find to enact the change. At any level we have within us the possibility and capacity for change.