Clients are in trouble when they start trying to manage their own life while in early recovery.
When they come to us they desperately need someone to tell them what to do, someone to point them in the right direction until they can learn to walk on their own. A guide, if you will.
Neither their brain nor their body is functioning right because of their drug and alcohol use. Yet as soon as they run into a few obstacles they start making unwise and self-destructive decisions.
Examples of this are when they say they need a job. Or to go to school. Or go home and everything will be okay. They want to visit their kids – kids they hadn’t visited much at all during their addiction. On and on…
But our years of experience have taught us that when a client has eyes on something other than recovery there’s a potential problem. When a client is in this mode, thinking a job or relationship or car will enhance their recovery they’re not looking at why they're in a recovery program.
It makes sense that people want to revert to things that, at one time, worked for them. The only problem with that is that if those things worked for them they wouldn’t be with us.
They could stay sober on their own.
