...and my drug of choice was opiates. When I was about 20 or 21, I just bought some pills in the parking lot from someone at college. The first time I did it, it just made me feel better than anything I had ever felt before, and I just kind of took off with it. My first thought was, "This is how I want to feel all the time, every day," and I made it happen.
It took me completely downhill. I went to rehab the first time in 2013, and I had never shot up or used needles or anything like that. When you relapse, I was really right back where I was within almost a week, and then I started using needles the second time after I relapsed. I went back to rehab, the same one, on New Year's Eve of 2014 into 2015, and when I came out of there, the doctor told me I was going to be on Suboxone for the rest of my life. I wanted to be clean off everything, and I didn’t feel any better on it. I really didn’t. I was pretty much just as miserable on it as I was on dope, except I wasn’t getting high, so there was no plus side to it. So I had to come off of it, and I detoxed myself off of it by tapering down.
Suboxone was harder to come off of than anything else I’ve ever come off of. I was able to stay sober for another year and a half. I was sober for just over two years that time, but it was absolutely miserable. I was "white-knuckling" it, as they say. I was just not happy. I didn’t want to go to work. I didn’t know how to have any fun. I was still totally stuck in addiction, basically just without the substance being there. When I came off the Suboxone, I learned real quickly that it wasn’t just that causing me problems, and it was only a matter of time before I relapsed. Of course, I relapsed right away, and it doesn’t take long to get right back where you were. I was doing four or five hundred dollars’ worth of dope every day. I had been sick so much—I mean, every eight hours I felt like I was dying. I totally hit rock bottom this time, where there was no hope and no other option. So we looked outside the box, and that’s how we found this place.
The holistic view—I’m more focused on how to live a better life. I’d been in addiction on drugs for so long that, like I said, I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how to be happy. I didn’t know how to have fun. So I needed more than just addiction treatment. I needed life treatment. There are a lot of rehab facilities that are nice and by the water and have good weather and stuff like that. You can build a building anywhere, but the people you fill it with are what make the difference. Everywhere else we talked to, one of the first questions was, "What kind of insurance do you have?" She must have talked to Kat for 30 or 45 minutes, and it was all about me—my past, what I needed, and what I wanted to get out of it—and that’s what sealed the deal.
When you first get here, you have plenty of time to adjust—you do. And the fact that it’s a 60-day program, I think everybody needs 60 days. I’d done the shorter programs twice, and when I left, I was still detoxing because I had literally still been in pretty much full-blown detox. You have a couple of up days at the end of the first month, but I was still detoxing. Here, the first week you have neuro, and then the next two weeks you have spa, and it just gives you time to get where you need to be mentally so that you can absorb the information in classes. By the time you get out of that, you’re into it and you want to go. You don’t just have to go—you want to get the most out of it because you start feeling better.
It helped me be spiritually okay, which I’ve never been before. The most important thing I got out of this program was my spirituality. I’ve never had it before—not even from a young age. I just always had too many questions, and I wasn’t able to trust myself. For me, that’s what being spiritually okay means—I can trust myself now. I can trust that inner voice and know that it’s leading me the right way. For me, it was kind of a process. The realization of it was instant, and once you realize you have it and you start trusting yourself, that’s really the moment when things start to shift—or at least they did for me.
My mom doesn’t drink. She’s never had anything that made her feel better than she felt naturally, and I never understood that until now. It blew me away. She says, "I’m happier now, right this moment, than I’ve ever been in my entire life," and it’s true for me too. I look forward to everything now. I used to dread everything—even fun things, social gatherings and stuff. My anxiety would take over, and I would seclude myself and use and just stick to myself. Now I almost feel like I can do anything. It’s so liberating to be able to trust that inside voice. I can’t even put into words how good it makes me feel just to know that I can do things—and I can do them. I have everything I need inside of me.
People who think you can’t have fun without a substance—I would tell them to come here, because you will have fun when you’re here, and you will be sober. That was proof enough for me. The way I look at it, it took me 28 years to figure out how to live like a child again. I feel that happy and that open to information, like a child. I don’t have any preconceptions of what things are supposed to be. I just know that as things come, I’ll internalize them, and I can trust myself. This place completely changed my life. If I was talking to somebody on the outside, the best part about this place is I don’t even know if drug addiction would come into the conversation, because I’m so much more excited about the way it taught me how to live a better life and to be happy.
