Transcript of Inside Intervention: Candy Finnigan on Alcoholism, Family, and Recovery

We are the messenger, and we have a message. Our life work is helping people who suffer get better. We can't make them better. We can offer them to get better. Our reward is being authentic human beings. Whether you like us or not, doesn't matter. We have learned how to be true to ourselves. I have a voice, so do you.

If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call One Call Placement. That's 888-831-1581. If we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. One Call Placement is affiliated with Carrera Treatment, Wellness & Spa, and One Method Treatment centers. Candy FINNEGANS.

Richard Tate.

How are you?

Well, I think I'm okay.

So everyone, Candy FINNEGANS is a world-renowned interventionist, but not just a world-renowned interventionist. She is what, the first or one of the first?

One of the first three women interventionists.

One of the first three. How long you been doing this for?

Thirty-two years.

Thirty-two years. We do it completely differently, but we'll talk about later. But what I want to hear is, did you have a drug problem yourself?

I would say it was leaning towards more alcohol. But if you had some drugs, I'd probably use them. But I'm a good Irish alcoholic. Knee walking, tongue chewing, alcoholic, as I used to say. I stopped drinking Jamieson's because people told me I was obnoxious. I don't think so. But I tended to be more maudlin, like, I love you so much, one of those which people didn't enjoy. And I went to become a wino. And so I think if I detoxed off of anything, it was sugar because there's so much sugar in wine. Right. I was still high functioning. My mother-in-law was a social worker from Ohio. My husband was from Ohio. She came to visit and busted me. I hid my wine in the back of the toilet tank. It was always cool. No one could see it. She caught me. She was going to take my kids away. I'm adopted. Your mother-in-law. Taking my kids away.

Your mother-in-law. Mm-hmm. Good woman.

Never, ever said anything to my husband, her son, because he wasn't raising the kids. That's where the and he started.

What a great woman.

She was 6'1. My husband was 6'7. I'm 5'2. Well, I'm probably 5'1 now, but she just wasn't messing around. She was the bailiff, the welfare participant, the divorce investigator. Oh, yeah. You were finished. She was in a small town. Good for her. Yeah, of Dayton, right outside of Dayton, and she was not messing around.

How are your kids today?

My kids are spectacular. My daughter is a nurse, and she just moved back last week. I needed a nurse.

Why didn't you call me?

From Portland, Oregon. She's right. And Steve moved home with me, and my son is another musician.

That's fantastic.

That's fantastic. And neither one of them belonged to my club because I would have had to kill them.

Well, also because when you have a mother that you got your shit together when your kid was six.

Six and three. Right.

So the three-year-old doesn't even remember you drinking, and the six-year-old has an idea but doesn't really remember. So you got there in the nick of time.

Well, and I think the other thing, too, for me, Richard, is that I was so frightened to ever relapse because I'm the ego-maniac and the Wonder Woman I knew I would never go back. Because I thought, I'm not getting another one of those poker chips. Are you out of your mind?

Yeah, that wasn't my... As you know, that wasn't my thing. I've had more sobriety dates than there are dates on the calendar. But I want to the funniest stories about your interventions, the ones you've done.

No names, but I need to hear it. Well, I'd have to say memorable much more than funny. I had some funny things happen, but one of them was on the show, Intervention, that I had a privilege of being on. He was a lightweight champion. He was, at this point living in New in Connecticut at the 711. Actually, I think it was the Circle K. The mailman is the one who asked the show if they would intervene. Wow. Which never we allowed before. It had to be immediate family. We actually brought him to where his ex-wife and twin boys lived, who he hadn't seen since they were 11 days old. And he'd had a stroke, of course, not getting any medical care. Because we didn't think it was fair to not preserve the best of him because he lived on the streets. He basically had no clothes and no shower, no hygiene. So we actually, which was very unusual for us, let him He had acclimated in a hotel and bought him some clothes because the show never meant to embarrass anybody. No.

No, it's not celebrity rehab.

Oh.

Okay. I know. Don't even get me going.

Thank you, God.

Anyway. Don't even get me going.

Yeah, don't get me going. Really, what happened was we…

One of the- Dude, come on the show and explain yourself. I'm dying to hear One of the field producers acclimated him and made sure he was...

Because he wasn't physically very stable. We got him a hotel room, and he got to pick out the cutest velour jumpsuit. We really get all of it. It was a moss green color. But anyway, he walked in We had done a pre-intervention. We had his sister, the twin boys. One of them had just graduated from Howard and the other one, Grambling.

Wait, he had two twin boys?

Yes, and he hadn't seen since they were 11. Oh, my God.

Hold on. Hold on for a sec.

Eleven days old. He hadn't seen them.

Okay, go on.

They were so beautiful. One of them was 90% deaf, but he had graduated the top of Howard University. His sons didn't know his name. They called him Champ. So we got the boys in. One of them was getting married in three months, and they were 22 years old, and they wanted some lineage. They wanted to know. The mother always never badmouthed him, even though he had left her. Then two days before the shoot, we found another son that lived a quarter of a mile away from the other boys, and they didn't know that they existed. I don't remember, but I don't think Camp knew that this other boy existed. So we brought him, and the boys bonded. It was spectacular. When he walked in and saw these people. He didn't know who they were. It still breaks my heart. He introduced himself and shook hands. We'd gotten him a cane because he was so unstable. He wouldn't use a walker. And he introduced himself to the boys, and they got up and just melted. I can't say that... He was certainly an alcoholic, and he certainly was not cognitively all there anymore. But I don't know whether it was alcohol or the stroke.

So he sat down and wanted to tell all of us who he was, which we, of course, never happened in a regular intervention. And there was a woman sitting in a chair to the left, and he got up and said, Excuse me, I'm so sorry, I was rude. I want to introduce myself. And she jumped up bawling and she said, I'm your sister, Evelyn. I mean, it was just like What's going on with him today? He died.

How did it go after that?

He went to a treatment center in Louisiana that had professional athletes. We always joked because when you drove in, it looked like a moat, and we'd always say, Can't leave, there's alligators. And he believed us. And so I felt so badly. He was there eight and a half months. And I think it was not only sheltering him, but it was a safer environment. He did go to his son's wedding, and he had Richard, he had this cry, this catawalting cry that was so guttural that it was like a primal scream. Of what He, for an instant, even in his cognitive delay, realized what he'd done to his family to be champ. And so we allowed him. I didn't take him to treatment that day. We allowed him to spend time with his kids, and we allowed him to spend time with his sister. And then a nephew of his from another sister, he had a large family, and I think they were from Seattle. They came in. So it was like two days of family reunion because he was not used to sleeping in hotels and having soap. But I have to tell you, 90% of everybody that walked into this circle, K and New Can in Connecticut, went over and talked to him.

He was that special. And gave him money and called him Champ. He'd lost his belt and he had no idea where, and the show was able to get it replaced. The show was more gentle and kind than probably with anybody else we ever did.

Well, he needed it more.

Well, he He just couldn't believe what had happened to him because he had been very ruthless, had no money, was running up with women in pink Cadillacs. He was small in stature. I'd say he was maybe 5'8. But his dad, when he was six weeks old, his dad started calling him Champ. So it was one of those situations where he had no choice. He was going to be this. And he started training at six and a half years old to be a boxer. So talk about brain injury. And the punishment was extreme if he didn't win. And we found all of this out from his sister. He had no recollection of it, and there wasn't any reason to go back and dig it up. So he lived about. And then after he got out of treatment, he went to with his sister. That's fantastic. He didn't remember ever drinking. Good. But he knew he'd been a bad person and a bad dad, and he tried to make it up to his kids. I'm not sure what the extension of the relationship was with the children, with the boys, but I do believe they stayed in touch with him, of course.

How long did he live after that?

Do you I'd say maybe six years.

So he had six good years?

Yes. Well, they were good because he wasn't drinking.

Well, they were good because he went ahead and he made his living amends to his family.

Yes. And they made their living amends to him.

How so?

Because he didn't make them proud. When he was boxing, yes, but when he became a homeless immigrant on the Street. I think there was a small amount of time they looked for him, but he had nothing left. He was married twice, once as a very young man, and then maybe two or three years before he was champion, and that's where the boys came from. All right. You got to remember, the boys were 21. It had been a long time. All right. But I think for me, two doing what I do, it wasn't like anything else that was ever planned. We, of course, did a pre-intervention, and I had statements. But when he walked in, I went, We're going to talk from your heart and get rid of that paper? Because it would have not been sincere to him.

All right, I'm going to tell you one. I'm going to tell you one, and I was going to do the funny one, but I ain't doing the funny one after that. I'll give you one. I've done about 30 of them, 30 interventions, and I've had two failures. So I'll tell you about one of the failures. You know that early on with Cliffside, I was struggling Could have fooled me. No. Well, that's because- I mean, I know who you're. Right. But everybody thinks that whatever I do works out, and it does. But it's a struggle getting there. It's a struggle for everybody to start a business from scratch. To do a startup, especially in this climate, is very hard.

And especially where you chose to have it.

That's correct. Then, I lost my house, and a lot of people don't know that. I moved my family into a vacant treatment center. We couldn't fill it, and we lived there for six months. And that's when I felt such embarrassment and such shame that I started working around the clock. So because of that, we started doing really well. And now it was time to move out because I had clients that were supposed to move in, and I had no place. So we rented a place. And we rented it about 10 miles down the road. So right in between the center and San Monica, the midway point. I'm on my way there because Dell is telling me, You got to bring the pizzas. Because if we don't bring the pizzas for the workers, they're going to go eat, or they're going to have to come back tomorrow, and she didn't want them coming back tomorrow. She said, Do this now. As I'm driving with the pizzas, my massage therapist calls as they do. She says, Sweetheart, I need you to do me a There's a friend of mine drinking herself to death, and I need you to go.

And she's at Tivoli Cove. Well, the way God works in my life, I'm driving and 300, 200 yards to my right is Tivoli Cove. So I look up at my sunroof and I go, I'm going to get in so much trouble. But it happens and you go. That's a God shop. So I walk in and I talk to this woman. But I only had 25 minutes. That's all I had. I go ahead and I said, I get there and she won't come back with me. She will not come back with me under any circumstances in candy. This was the closest thing I've ever seen to a wet brain ever without being a wet brain. She was gone. And after 25 minutes, I just started hysterically crying.

I get it.

I told her, I said, Sweetheart, I am sorry. I have run out of time, and you are going to die for sure. I am never wrong about this stuff. I gave her aug and a kiss, and I said, I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry. I walked out. Cut two five years later, Patty's giving me a massage. She says, Do you remember that woman that I asked you to help and do that intervention at Tivoli Cove? I sat up and I looked at her and I said, Don't ever bring that woman's name up to me again. Ever.

It felt like a failure.

That woman is dead. It is my fault, and I do not ever want you to bring that up to me. Again. She said, Okay, sweetheart, lay down. Literally 15 minutes later, she says, Sweetheart, do you ever read those children's books that I give you every Christmas to read to the kids? I said, Of course. She said, Do you ever look inside of the inside flap? I said, No, Patty, why would I do something like that? She says, Oh, sweetheart, you should. I said, Why is that? She says, Because the dead woman became a world-renowned children's author, and every year she writes a note inside the flap to tell your children who her father is. Great, right?

There you go.

No funnies? I mean, we were both wrecked. We might as well do so.

I'm so sorry. You're all- The truth of it is that we are the messenger, and we have a message. But it's A lot of things associate with whether they hear it or not. I guarantee you, 80, 90, 100% of them hear it. That split second of surrender, if they believe it. Our life work is helping people who suffer get better. We can't make them better. We can offer them to get better. Our reward is being authentic human beings. Whether you like us or not, It doesn't matter. We have learned how to be true to ourselves and our families, and there are a few of us left. I have a voice. So do you.

You are a legend in this industry.

In my own mind, no.

In this industry, and everyone is better for it. How do people find you?

I don't have a website because I think they lie.

It's not that they lie. It's just people don't read them, and there's always He's a mistake.

There's pictures of me 15 years ago, and I mean, I'm not that. I'm old. You can go to Candy FINNEgan at AOL and get a hold of me.

Candy FINNEGANS at AOL?

You can't tag AOL, so I'm still stuck with it.

Do they have AOL anymore?

Oh, come on, Richard. Of course they do. But it can't be hacked by Gmail and stuff like that.

Do you use MySpace?

Myspace? Yeah. Well, it probably is still up. I don't know. Might be. I have Instagram, is Irish stew.

It's Irish stew?

Because that's what I was. You can find me. Always, if you need me- You're not taking selfies and with the big lips and singing to the dance songs, are you? I forget how you take selfies. So no, I'm not doing any of that. Atta, girl. All right. Until next week.

See you next Tuesday.

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See you next Tuesday.