The Last Time I Went to Treatment and A Retrospective About Yours Truly
- Brainz Magazine
- 10 hours ago
- 8 min read
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional, but undeniably effective.
It was 16 years ago, nearly to the day, when I landed in (hopefully) my very last treatment facility. And, boy, was this one comprehensive! Getting up early, attending at least three group therapy sessions daily, weekly individual counseling, meeting with a psychiatrist, and mandatory self-help meetings in the evening hours.
We were fed our meals there, provided with linens, towels, and toiletries, shared a room with anywhere from one to four roommates (so much for privacy), and us clients were saturated with all-things-recovery. In the evenings, when we boarded the big white vans to take us to the self-help meetings, we affectionately referred to the transportation vehicle as “The Druggie Buggy.”
I remember doing my intake paperwork with a really kind woman, and she asked me, “So, why do you want to be sober?”
“I don’t,” I replied, “but if I don’t stay sober, I’m facing a few years behind bars, and I don’t ever want to go back to jail, so that’s what landed me here with you.”
“Well, so let me ask you this,” she continued, “What do you want to accomplish while you’re here under our care?”
I thought for a beat, and I told her, “I don’t need you guys to teach me how to stop taking drugs and drinking; I’ve done that like a hundred times. I just can’t stay stopped. I need to learn how to live again. I don’t know how to live without drugs. I’m happy to be here, honestly. Getting out of lock-up, I guess anywhere is up, but in my head right now, all I’m thinking is, ‘Please don’t take my drugs away.’”
I was scared and grateful, full of trepidation and a little sprinkle of hope, all rolled up together.
See, the drugs never stopped working. They were the one coping skill I could always rely on, and I loved them. I loved them more than most anything else in life. I loved them like a best friend. Or an actual lover. I loved them on that kind of level.
What I did not love were all the losses that I had incurred in my active addiction: loss of trust, loss of reliability, loss of jobs, loss of reputation, loss of friendships and contact with my family, loss of lodging, loss of obscene amounts of money and pawned valuables, and, most importantly, the loss of my spiritual values.
No love lost there.
When I would run out of my drugs—and I’d always run out at some point—I would get intensely desperate to find any way possible to get my hands on money so I could re-up and avoid the horrors of opiate withdrawal. By this point, I wasn’t having fun with substances anymore. By all intents and purposes, I was just using them to feel “normal,” functional, able to survive the workday, and what little came next.
I had burned every bridge by that point—no one wanted to spend time with me, no one was comfortable loaning me money, my dealer wasn’t comfortable with the promise that “I’d pay him next week,” and I was intensely isolated and alone. My checking account was perpetually in the negative. What a small life I had created for myself! I would not have wanted to be around me either. I was a puddle of misery. Like a dead man walking.
My whole existence relied on finding a way to get the next $80 bucks, over and over and over again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Beyond that, I didn’t have much of anything. Though gainfully employed and pulling a decent salary, my money was spent before the direct deposit ever hit my account.
That loss of values I referenced before? That led me to becoming a sneak thief. An outlaw, I suppose. I would round up money from other users with a promise to come back soon with their product, only to return with some ridiculous yarn about how I had been ripped off, and a fabricated “sorry,” knowing that I had just lost the trust of the world’s most distrustful population. They wouldn’t be trusting me to head off into the night with their cash ever again.
I would raid the medicine cabinets of people’s homes; it did not matter who, always hoping there might be a controlled substance sitting on the shelf. If there ever was, it became mine without a second thought, though the little voice of conscience was forever whispering quietly, “You shouldn’t be doing this, Josh. There’s a better way to live,” and so on. I was, by then, very adept at tuning out that voice, but it never went away.
I would dress myself up in a suit and tie and schedule appointments with medical doctors, claiming that I was from out-of-state and that I had been in a terrible car accident just a few months earlier, only to be prescribed a miracle drug called OxyContin, which was the only thing that gave me the relief and mobility to show up to my “very important job.” All it ever earned me was the nickname “Doctor Josh” in the treatment programs I attended throughout my 20s.
I would spend hours in emergency rooms claiming fake injuries, reporting that on the pain scale mine was a 9 or a 10, only to walk out 7 or 8 hours later with enough prescribed dope to get me through a day or two. So much time wasted for such little return on the investment. Desperate people do desperate things. I must have visited about 20 different ERs over that span.
Eventually, on one fateful day in late April of 2009, I hit the wall hard, committed a very serious crime, and experienced the ultimate loss: the loss of my freedom. I had blazed a trail during the incident in question that spelled out the word “HELP” and was put on timeout by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the better part of a year before being mandated to the treatment center where this intake was taking place. Jail was a terrifying and traumatic experience, for the record. No rehabilitation there, just survival. And I’m no tough guy.
But, I suppose I am the type of guy who needs to learn things the hard way. And thus, my curriculum commenced:
Probation, community service, and a dire warning—if I stepped out of line just once, was kicked out of the facility for breaking the rules, or if I used a substance and was caught, I would be doing some seriously hard time for at least a few years. So, I started taking treatment seriously, and all the way seriously, for the first time ever. All of my previous attempts had been half-assed. Motivated initially by fear, but eventually transmorphing into motivation built on hope, I started my recovery journey.
Learning how to live again.
It started with learning how to make my bed every day. Getting on a healthy sleep schedule. Eating three meals a day. Showering and shaving and showing up to the groups on time. Raising my hand in meetings and introducing myself to the other participants. Sharing.
Sharing my story. At first, it was all about “the mess.” Over time, it started becoming more about “the message”—the message of the work I was committing to in order to change my lifestyle and my life, and to let people into my difficulties. Choosing the right people—the ones who were taking recovery seriously. Avoiding the ones who weren’t, of which there were many.
Attending therapy, and, over time, really opening up. Feeling safe sitting across from my helper and telling them all of my deepest and darkest secrets, and painful feelings and thoughts. Stuff I was sure I would take to my grave, never to be shared with anyone. I found that when I shared that stuff, when I let it out, it didn’t seem to weigh on me as much as it had previously.
I am thankful to those treaters who created a space that felt safe for me to do that because it was really difficult work. A lot of tears. But also, a lot of laughs. Like anything else in this life, a messy and dynamic “mixed bag.”
I was learning how to live again, from moment to moment, at what felt like a snail’s pace. Limping along. Learning to crawl, then dawdle, then walk, then jog, then run. This was not an event, I realized. This was a journey, and the journey was the true destination. It wasn’t a race, but if it were, it would be a marathon, not a sprint. I learned how to slow it down.
It was never linear. It was a continuum of change. Sometimes one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes two steps forward and one step back. But always moving, and never stagnant.
I learned how to stay on top of my laundry. I learned how to go grocery shopping for the week. I learned how to go to the gym and lift weights with the other guys from the program. I learned that some of those guys would become cherished friends, and that on some occasions, they would start using drugs again, never to be seen or heard from thereafter. Here today, gone tomorrow. Many of them never lived to see the age of 30.
I realized how my family must have felt during all my years of debauchery, recklessness, and substance abuse. These were watershed moments. Serious life lessons. I was learning how to live again. Feeling my feelings, and talking about how hard they felt, sharing in my successes as well as my setbacks in rooms full of veritable strangers, only to see them relating to my story, their heads nodding silently as I continued my share.
I learned, most importantly, that anyone can put down drugs or alcohol, and many can stop using them altogether, but never do any of the painful inside work that really changes who we are—often referred to as dry drunks. It taught me that addiction treatment is not really about drugs or alcohol at the root—it’s actually about trauma, our disconnection from self, others, and this world. It’s about being wounded and tending to those wounds in order to become better people from the inside out.
Learning how to live again.
For so long, for most of my life, I didn’t think I would be able to live in this world in any fashion that could be described as successful, if even barely functional. I learned I was wrong about that, and to not believe everything I think. I learned to embrace being wrong. It’s good to be wrong sometimes.
If you ever meet someone and they tell you, “People don’t change,” you can tell them that I gave you permission to call “BS” on that proclamation, because I am living proof that we certainly can, and so are my clients, and so are the many other inspiring figures I’ve met along this winding road of recovery’s journey.
Is it hard? You bet it is. Is it worth it? It’s the greatest gift that I ever gave to myself. Still perfectly imperfect, today I live a healthier life. A life in recovery. Recovery taught me how to live again, and in a way where I’m living in accordance with my values.
I know how to live today. You might call it “freedom.”
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Addictions Therapist
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
.jpg)