Road to recovery

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

For Audrey Kishline, having a husband and two kids, being famously controversial for 15 minutes, and appearing as a guest on “Oprah” weren’t enough to protect her from her personal demons.

Audrey’s journey from role model… to liar… to killer has brought her back to a snowy mountain pass in Washington state.

Audrey Kishline: I just feel incredible deep sadness that I’ve just an incredible deep sadness. 

A spot in the road on the Interstate-90 marks the before and after of her life.

Kishline:  It just makes it so incredibly real what happened.

The story of Audrey Kishline is really an American tragedy. Her flaw was self-deception. The consequence was sudden death.

Growing up
Audrey studied not just to be a ballerina but the one you remembered and admired—a perfect dancer.

Kishline:  I didn’t take it just as a little hobby.  You know, I’d get up couple hours before school—get off school early, dance all day...  you know, that was my only passion in life.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent:  Drive to the point of obsession? 

Kishline:  Yes. I couldn’t imagine being just one of the line dancers.  I wanted to be the prima ballerina.

What the old family snapshots from those years don’t show was the pain of dislocation, always being the new kid in school. Her family moved 21 times before she turned 10 years old.

That’s when her parents divorced.

Kishline:  I adored and worshipped my father.  And then, to suddenly have him gone, it was just a really difficult part.  I mean, every time I would walk down a street or saw a car go by, I’d think he was in it.  And I, you know, almost never got to see him. 

Not until she was 16, did her father invite her to come live with him in Washington state where he ran a construction company.

One day, he asked Audrey if she’d like an after-school job out on the sites working with the hard-hats and she jumped at the chance. More time, she thought, with dad.

Audrey’s ballerina slippers went into the closet and she never looked back.  And it was at the construction sites that teenage Audrey met her first true love --  alcohol.

Kishline: I remember the very first beer.  I remember exactly, I thought to myself, “this feels good.  This is how normal feels actually.”

As a young woman, Audrey continued to let alcohol play a prominent role in her life.  When she was 28 years old, she became engaged to a software engineer named Brian Kishline. Audrey acknowledged before the wedding that she might have a little drinking problem. So she checked herself into a treatment center.

Kishline: Course after I had been there for about a month I said, “There’s no way I’m as bad as these people.  They’ve lost their homes, their jobs, their this, and their that.  I’m not that bad.  I’ve been mislabeled.” 

She checked out of rehab and stayed sober. She wouldn’t even allow herself a taste of champagne at her own wedding. But sobriety didn’t last for long.

Kishline: Within two or three months after this, I started secret drinking. 

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Secret drinking meaning what?

Kishline: Husband out of town. Drinking at noon. By the time he’d get home, it’d be off my breath.

For the next few years, Audrey was a sneak drinker. It wasn’t hard as  her husband was often away on business.  But when she became a mother—first to daughter Lindsay and three years later to son Samuel—she says she got a handle on the booze and simply quit when she wanted to, no problem.

Kishline:  And, here’s where my experiment with this told me in my mind then, “I’m no alcoholic.  I could quit drinking through the pregnancies. I could drink when he was gone and not get hung over. I could control it.”

Murphy:  Get kids back from school, dinner’s on the table and--

Kishline:  Oh yeah.  Doing all the normal motherhood things. So, I really felt I still could control it.

Moderation: A new idea
Still, Audrey figured she could probably benefit from cutting down on her drinking.  And that’s when she got her idea.  She began to do some research on alcohol addiction and spoke to experts.  Some of them surprised her.

Kishline:  They said, you know, “Moderation programs can work for some people.”  I thought, “Oh wow.  There are alternatives.  And, maybe this would work for me.”

Audrey decided to create a support group for people she believed were just like her:  problem drinkers who simply needed to reduce their drinking. She called her approach “MM” for Moderation Management.

Kishline:  I just thought that I would write this little, you know, 12-page pamphlet based on some of the little research I had done up to that point.  And, I thought that I would start a little group at a church. 

But her little group caught on in a big way with chapters cropping up in five states.   In fact, that’s when we first became acquainted with Audrey back in 1995.

Dateline 1995

Dennis Murphy: So who is in MM?  Who is it for?

Kishline:  Well, it’s for people that are just beginning to realize that they have a drinking problem...

Audrey shared with “Dateline” her personal story as a kind of case study:  she maintained that she was a problem drinker who didn’t fit the AA model which tells people they are alcoholics who should never drink again.

Kishline:  When I decided I didn’t have a disease and I wasn’t an alcoholic all of a sudden I didn’t binge anymore.  I could have one or two drinks and nothing happened.  There was no lightning bolts, nothing happened.

Audrey explained the ground rules of MM —first an initial month long period of abstinence.   Women were then allowed up to 9 drinks a week and men could have 14.  Members were asked to go 3 or 4 days a week without any alcohol.  And there was another rule—

Kishline: MM has a zero tolerance policy about drinking and driving and that kind of thing.

Audrey’s group attracted tremendous buzz.  People wrote her, eager to start groups in their own communities. And Audrey got a book contract.

MM also came in for heavy criticism. It’s very premise was a direct challenge to the conventional treatment for alcohol problems.

Dr. Nicholas Pace (1995 interview): I’m afraid her experiment is doomed.  

Dr. Nicholas Pace who treats alcoholics issued his warning in our report that aired in 1995. 

Dr. Pace: Unfortunately so many alcoholics will try to go back to social drinking.  It doesn’t work.

We confronted Audrey back then with the doctor’s gloomy prognosis.

Murphy:  Audrey, there are critics out there and they think you’re going to get some people in there who are going to get themselves in trouble who sign on for his program and say, “Oh boy, you know I really can have a drink, this is OK , it’s great.”

Kishline: People, if they understand that this program is not for chronic drinkers, not for alcoholics I think that they would understand more.

That distinction was Audrey’s mantra: she said research showed that there are two kinds of drinkers--  “problem drinkers” like her with “mild to moderate” levels of alcohol dependence who could benefit from MM and “chronic drinkers” who may experience withdrawal symptoms, liver damage and who Audrey believed should attend an abstinence group like Alcoholics Anonymous.

In the media spotlight
The national media caught wind of the controversy and invited Audrey to make the rounds. She went on “Good Morning America,” “Leeza,” among other TV talk shows.

Murphy (2006 interview):  So Audrey, MM is a great success.  And you’re its chief proselytizer.  You’re the author of it.  And you’re out there.  You’re on the national television shows. Were you believing at the time—and I’m talking about ‘94, ‘95, ‘96-- in what you were selling in effect?

Kishline: I totally believed in it.  I really believed I was helping people. 

Audrey was running the national MM organization and still leading her  group in a small church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, still reassuring the members that she had her own drinking under control.

We wondered back then how hard it was for her to fight temptation.

Murphy (1995 interview):  Do you ever have a really bad day where you feel like going on a bender?

Kishline: No, I haven’t.  I haven’t at all since I’ve been moderating.  I’ve had days when—I maybe tempted to over—you know, go over my limit slightly.  But, it’s usually a fleeting situation.  And, I would never act on that.

Murphy:  You don’t feel yourself straining against the chains?

Kishline:  There’s no magnet pulling that me to drink more and more.

Murphy (2006 interview.):   Were you being straight with us?

Kishline: No.  I wasn’t—

Murphy: That wasn’t the situation.

Kishline: No.

Murphy:  Were you in fact drinking over your limits?

Kishline:  After a period of time I definitely was. And I wasn’t truthful about that.

The founder of Moderation Management was failing at her own program. 

Kishline: For a long time I hid my drinking, you know, that I was going over the limits.

Murphy:  What did you go to?

Kishline: Three or four drinks every day.

Murphy: Every day?

Kishline: Every day.

Murphy: Seven days a week.  So 28, approaching 30 drinks a week. You were way outside the MM rules.

Kishline: Oh yeah, definitely way outside the rules.  And then when I would binge, it would be you know, seven or eight drinks.

Murphy: As you look back on it, was MM something you devised to give yourself license to drink because you didn’t want to abstain?

Kishline:  I do think that deep down as an addict, that was the purpose.

Murphy: All the good research that you did and the presentation of it to a national audience, it was really to justify it for you as a drinker.

Kishline:  It would legitimize my drinking.

MM continued to grow with about 50 chapters nationwide.  And Audrey continued to drink far more than her own group permitted. 

Kishline:  I felt trapped.  How could I let all these people who thought I was doing so well? How could I now tell ‘em the truth?

Her great fear was being exposed as a hypocrite. She had no idea what was in store for her.

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