Holly Whitaker’s sobriety program, Tempest, offers a free-spirited, feminist approach to alcohol abuse treatment — for a price
Photo-Illustration: Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty Images Holly Whitaker, author of the 2019 New York Times best seller Quit Like a Woman, compares the moment she realized that a life without alcohol was possible to entering the Matrix. Whitaker has never identified as an alcoholic and didn’t necessarily drink to the extent we imagine alcoholics do. She drank a lot — sometimes a bottle of wine a night — but not enough, she thought, that it was a problem.
Until recently, Tempest offered a four-week intensive course for $399, which 1,000 people completed in 2021. The company decided to scrap the intensive to simplify its offerings and because it seemed to promote a sort of sobriety hierarchy, says Ruth Sun, Tempest’s CEO.
Although Tempest’s official party line is that it’s not an AA competitor, it’s clear that the company markets and conceives of itself as an attractive alternative — i.e., a competitor. In 2019, Whitaker wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous,” adapted from her book, in which she argued that AA’s foundation as an organization for upper-middle-class white men precludes it from serving women and other marginalized groups with equal efficacy.
The CDC’s standard for “excessive drinking” is likely lower than most Americans realize : eight or more drinks per week for women, 15 or more for men. For women, this averages out to 1.14 drinks per day, a figure many of my women friends and acquaintances copped to meeting throughout the pandemic’s darkest months. Having a glass or two of wine a night is, as Whitaker writes, seen as normal, an appropriate way for adults to unwind before bed.
It is, of course, not that simple for everyone; not all drinking results from a lack of information about its consequences. People suffering from severe physical dependence on alcohol may scoff at some of Whitaker’s sharp, if occasionally simplistic, proselytizing. Alcohol use disorder is a spectrum, and people on the severe end can experience withdrawal symptoms in as little as eight hours without a drink. In these cases, clinical intervention — which Tempest is not — may be necessary.
It’s true, too, that Tempest can’t be faulted for what doesn’t yet exist; long-term conclusions can’t be expected from such a young company. Short-term conclusions can, however, be overstated, and with all addictions, there is a sizable caveat to short-term success. “It’s relatively easy, no matter what treatment you choose to undergo, to do well in the near term to either stop drinking or to reduce drinking or drink more safely,” says Salsitz.