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Amy Miller* couldn’t stop. When she ate, she devoured two meals’ worth of food. When she shopped, she bought double the number of clothes she needed. Eventually, she gained 100 pounds and amassed a wardrobe that filled her apartment — as did bills from credit card companies and threatening letters from debt collectors who finally garnished her wages.

“Behind both my eating and my shopping lay the same underlying problem,” says Miller, 30, a youth advocate in Chicago. “Raped by an acquaintance when I was 17, I was so ashamed of what happened that I never told my friends and family about it. Instead, I turned to compulsive behavior to distract myself from my pain.”

Miller suffered from what psychologists call addiction transfer: having multiple addictions or hop-scotching from one compulsion to another. Like others with her condition, she experienced a rush of elation followed by a letdown whenever she succumbed to her addiction (defined as the drive to do something despite negative consequences). And like other sufferers, she had an emotional wound fueling her compulsive behavior.

Women are more likely than men to have co-occurring addictions and to develop serious health problems and even to die as a result. If you’re among the 26 percent of Americans who struggle with addiction — or the 20 percent of addicts who have multiple compulsions — you may fear that your problem will never improve. But experts say that full recovery is possible if you make the right choices — and if you get the right help.

Just Can’t Get Enough
Whether addicts are hooked on drinking, drugs, sex, or shopping, their problems often follow the same ever-worsening trajectory.

Take Meredith Finnegan,* 28, a mother in Jacksonville, South Carolina. “Growing up in a home where there were problems with hoarding and other compulsive behaviors, I didn’t have healthy role models, had a lot of anger, and developed an eating disorder when I was 14,” she says. “By the time I got married, I was still bingeing and starving myself. Then I miscarried my first child and developed alcoholism on top of food addiction. I would down seven gin and tonics in a night. I was totally out of control.”

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There's a small church on a corner on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, where the pastor spends part of his day trying to shoo the drug dealers out of the church parking lot. Weeknight gang fights are not at all uncommon. Poverty, addiction, pain, and sorrow have taken up residence there; and there is nowhere to hide from it.

On Sunday mornings, a small congregation gathers in the sanctuary. Sometimes people will wander in off the street, just looking for a place to rest. The service comes straight out of the hymnal, but during the prayers of the people, the assisting minister offers a long moment of silence, and that is when the voices start: “Please pray for my son. He is addicted to heroin, and he is trying to get clean in my basement.” And, “Please pray for me, because I didn’t have a drink yet this morning, and I want to be able to stop.” And, “Please pray for my family, because I went to the casino and I lost the money for the rent, and
now I don’t know what we're going to do.”

The voices go on for as long as there are prayers. Sometimes those prayers seem to stretch on forever — the needs of the members inside are as great as the needs of the neighborhood outside.

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