It took a long time for me to decide that recovery was a good idea.
That decision only came after I'd lost everything over and over. 16 years of my freedom. Jobs. Businesses. Marriages. Self respect. Friends and family relationships. I had a lot of self-induced pain.
It took over 40 years for me to start thinking it was a good idea to get sober. And when I did I never wavered and looked back with longing for the "good old days" when I was using. I was lucky that way.
And I write about this because at times I see some of us become frustrated with our residents.
We have residents and clients who relapse over and over. And we sometimes look at them with impatience. How can we help those who seem unmotivated?
Of course it's easy to discharge them. Let them become someone else's problem.
But what if that had happened to us? After all, many of us relapsed often before we figured it out.
If we look at our staff we can find many who failed more than once before they put together several years.
So why wouldn't we extend the same patience and understanding that was extended to us when we were struggling?
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