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Recovery in the News
Alcoholism Series: Former Congressman John Sweeney says getting sober was a matter of life and death
PATRICK H. DONGES
The Saratogian
March 13, 2011
For John Sweeney, the decision to sober up was a matter of life and death.
“I was contemplating hanging myself,” he said, recalling his thoughts as he lay in bed after his April 5, 2009, drunk driving arrest, his second in less than two years. “I found myself in a place of despair that I couldn’t get out of. I had reached an end.”
Instead of reaching for the belt, or for the bottle, he began to think of his obligations to his family, especially his three children, and experienced what he described as “an awakening.”
“I thought about what I had left on the shelf that I hadn’t done as a parent. I made the decision that I needed to surrender to something else,” he said. “There had to be something else out there that would help me change. I wanted to live.”
Sweeney, who represented the 20th Congressional District from 1999 to 2006, says he was predisposed to alcohol abuse.
“I grew up in a place and at a time when it was prevalent and it was accepted,” he said. He felt closer to his parents, especially his father, when alcohol was involved. “It was part of the maturation process.”
He took his first drink at age 14 or 15, the consequences of which were almost immediate. He stole and totaled his girlfriend’s parents’ car while drunk.
“I was personally sort of lost for a while,” he said of his adolescence, recalling how he was referred to by family members as a “late bloomer,” most likely due to his preoccupation with partying. A popular athlete in high school, Sweeney continued to drink to cover up what he characterized as a hole in his self-esteem.
“I wasn’t comfortable with myself. Drinking made me feel good. All the things you wanted to be, you could be, in your head anyway.”
His earliest alcohol-related scrapes and his ability to sidestep reprimand allowed him to keep alcohol was at the center of most activities.
“It was compulsion in that I built my life around it,” Sweeney said. “I always manipulated and tried to find a way to make drinking part of what I was supposed to be doing.” He would return home late after nights of drinking and tell his first wife he was “networking.”
Part of his attraction to his second wife was that she was a bartender and would not complain about his drinking.
While Sweeney said he would infrequently drink while in his Washington, D.C., office or at the Capitol, he continued to incorporate alcohol into his work as a congressman, a job he loved.
“It was a huge part of who I was, to me, not just to the world,” he said. “This gave me value. This gave me a sense of purpose.”
He was sober his first 10 months in office, but a vacation to Cabo San Lucas with friends changed that, and he was once again “off to the races.” His ethic was work hard during the day and play hard after business hours.
“It was almost a manic existence of go, go, go, go, go, until you couldn’t go and then you slept,” he said. “For a couple of years it was a lot of fun, I won’t deny it. I was invincible, at least that’s what I wanted you to think, and I wanted me to think it, too.”
He is proud of his record in congress. “I thought just doing that part of the job was enough, without recognizing all this chaos and unmanageability,” he said. When he lost re-election to then political newcomer Kirsten Gillibrand, he lost the main focus of his life and headed back to the bottle and, eventually, landed in jail for felony DWI.
“The only identification I had was that I was really good at my job. I lost the one centerpiece of my identity, then everything spiraled down at an accelerated pace,” he said.
The dawn after that dark April night during which he experienced his “moment of clarity,” he contacted friends and family who had already told him they were concerned about his well-being, and proceeded to a therapist who prescribed detoxification and rehabilitation.
“It gave me some answers and got me focused in a positive direction,” he said of his first round of treatment.
On April 6, 2011, he will have been sober for two years.
Today he has a girlfriend and a baby daughter, and he is working with a 12-step program and surrounding himself with supporters that include friends who are also in recovery.
“I’m hopeful, and there is hope, and that comes from a period of hopelessness,” he said. “I’m pretty honest with myself these days.”
Sweeney currently works as a compliance control officer for Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment, a program founded by the Rev. Peter Young that offers treatment and training options to turn addicts and the homeless into “taxpayers.”
The organization is currently reviewing location options for an “extended supportive living” location in Saratoga County, where those who have undergone alcoholism and addiction treatment would live independently with others in recovery as a final treatment step.
“He knows government pretty well,” Young said of Sweeney, who deals with contracts made with state agencies.
“I’m helping people now in a different way,” Sweeney said, “I get fulfillment out of that.
“I’ve got a lot of wreckage from my past that I am still trying to clean up, and it will take me years. One of the things that I’ve come to recognize is that many of those things always involved alcohol consumption. Almost every time a drink was somewhere nearby, coming to that recognition was not easy,” he said. “Hopefully, I can be an example of hope for people, especially anybody familiar with my story.”