My Dear Poor Talented Amy Winehouse

She wrote a song about rehab and she was right: No No No.
If nothing else tells us about the failure of rehab this ought to be it. But we need to know why it is a failure. It is so obvious that I am reluctant to even discuss it; but I will to save other poor Amys the pain of it all.
The most obvious reason is that there is no science behind rehab. It involves a potpourri of a variety unproven ideas and methods that it is supposed to heal or cure: put them all together and they “all spell Dixie.”

Why is she so great? For the same reason that pre-psychotics in acting are so great. All feelings are right up on top. We can feel it and sense it and it moves us. That is their art. When I think of the great singers and actors in my life they are nearly always the most disturbed. They can project feeling because their gating system is weak or shot. And so what do they do? Take drugs that keeps on shattering their gating system. Until we get totally dysfunctional, sometimes violent poor Amy. All she was trying to do was kill the pain. Isn’t that logical? No one fills their body with drugs unless there is a need; most often unless there is great pain.

Ah but now, where does the pain come from, a pain so horrific that it creates unmanageable addiction later on. And now I become a little pedantic. It comes from birth and our life before birth. I know that is the title of my new book but it is true. The pain imprinted during that very early period is so damaging we cannot imagine it.
Especially since we can see it. It is in no way palpable. And worse, it is nearly always life-endangering. When a pregnant mother takes painkillers she is hurting her baby. When she even takes two drinks the damage is installed. And the parents are in a quandary; why are the kids so unhappy? If the mother fights with her husband all along her pregnancy she doesn’t have to wonder why her child is an addict or homosexual. Science now seems to say that fighting parents, an unhappy carrying mother can produce both, addiction and/or homosexuality. She is changing not only her own hormones but that of her offspring.

Now here is the rub. With that kind of background installed in the baby even the slightest adversity, the slightest lack of touch and warmth adds to the pain and makes the child an addict before he ever finds the drugs that make him feel normal again. When he finds that drug he is hooked. That agitated brain stem and limbic system which holds the pain is now calmed, and what a relief.

Let me tell you a story. I write music with David Foster and he had a regular singer that he used for his concerts, called Warren. A lovely guy who can act as if hypnotized and sing like Sinatra, or any other singer we choose. He was pre-psychotic. His father shot himself in front of him. No one survives that kind of pain. Nor did he. But he was hospitalized in a mental hospital for a while, Foster had a concert before the queen of England and he needed Warren. So we devised a strategy. We went to the hospital brought in a piano and decided that Warren would give a concert before the reigning psychiatrist. He did and he was released. But he was so drugged with tranquilizers during the concert that he was terrible. His feelings were suppressed by the medication. Ordinarily it is a transfer of feelings from his limbic system to ours, and we are moved. Not this time. But fortunately the queen never saw it or heard it.
Warren never survived all of this and we lost him, a dear and endearing soul who through no fault of his own died because of his pain.