Morning Drift #15: 4 Stars - Would NOT Recommend

Just Up the Street

I live on the same street as the Sharp McDonald Center, the rehab center where I went for inpatient treatment and later Intensive Outpatient, or IOP. I pass it literally every day. Going to work, coming home from work, going shopping, picking people up. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s about a quarter of a mile up the street from me. So it’s always there, a constant reminder of where I went and where this whole journey into true sobriety started.

True sobriety. What does that even mean?

Now I’m starting to sound like a screaming deacon, an old AA term for someone who gets overly preachy about the program and how sobriety is supposed to be done. That’s definitely not me. If anything, I’m what some of those screaming deacons would call a white knuckler, someone staying sober through willpower rather than following the prescribed path of sponsors and Steps.

White knuckler is usually meant as a criticism. Fine. Fuck you. You’re right. I’m a white knuckler. I’ll own it. It reminds me a little of Yankee Doodle. The British used it to mock the Americans, and the Americans took the insult, made it their own, and turned it into a point of pride. That’s how I feel about white knuckler. If you want to call me something negative, I’ll turn it into a positive.

But lately, passing McDonald Center every day has had me thinking less about what I call my sobriety and more about what actually happened inside that building. I knew I wanted a change, so to make that change, I planned going into treatment.

It wasn’t a rock bottom. It wasn’t because of a court order. I wasn’t admitted to a hospital and then sent there. There are all sorts of reasons people end up in rehab, and how you get there really isn’t the important part. If you’re there, use the opportunity.

That’s kind of where I’m going with this Drift.

Before I went, I actually researched the places in my area where I could go. In other words, I kind of shopped rehabs around. And, of all things, I went on Yelp and Google to see if they had reviews.

Sure as shit, they did.

Checked Bags Included

The reviews were kind of a mixed bag, although for the most part they leaned positive. There were the “they saved my life” reviews, people talking about insurance, people who had relapsed and were trying to get back in, and one person who basically said it was a great place until they found their own path. That one makes me laugh a little now for obvious reasons.

But going back and reading those reviews, I had to take a step back and consider the baggage that comes with reviewing a rehab. I don’t mean that disparagingly. I was one of the people who went there, and I am one of those alcoholics we’re talking about. It’s just not the same as reviewing a restaurant because you didn’t like the food, or a hotel because the room wasn’t what you expected.

People arrive at rehab under very different circumstances, and they leave under different circumstances too. Some are there by choice, some aren’t. Some stay sober, some relapse, some want to come back, and some probably never want to see the place again. All of that is going to follow you into whatever review you write.

So maybe those reviews weren’t any less honest or useful. They just came with baggage. And if you really think about it, baggage isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You take baggage with you when you travel because it carries the things you need, the things you’ve accumulated, and sometimes things you probably could have left at home. Maybe recovery baggage isn’t all that different. We all bring something with us.

And now, looking back at my own experience, so do I.

So what would my review actually say?

One of my biggest criticisms would probably be that McDonald Center leaned heavily into twelve-step recovery. I’ve written enough about my problems with parts of AA that I don’t need to relitigate all of that here. There are also things about AA I genuinely enjoy. I enjoy the fellowship. I enjoy some of the messages. I enjoy hearing people’s stories and what they’ve achieved.

But the prescribed program, sponsors, Steps, one path for everybody, that never completely worked for me. And that matters when I review McDonald Center because I’m not sure where I would be today if one person there hadn’t recognized it.

I believe her name was Kelly. She was a nurse. Kelly pulled me aside and handed me the SMART Recovery book.

That detail matters.

It wasn’t the program suddenly changing for me. It wasn’t somebody standing in front of the room announcing that there were different ways of approaching sobriety. It was one nurse who apparently saw something and realized that I might need something different.

I honestly don’t know if I would have stayed sober if she hadn’t done that.

Not because SMART Recovery eventually became my answer either. It didn’t. I found problems there too. But that book showed me that there was another path. I didn’t have to force myself into something that wasn’t fitting just because that was the recovery structure being put in front of me.

And I think that would be part of my review. Not that McDonald Center was wrong for using twelve-step recovery. It works for a lot of people. But just like everybody doesn’t respond to medicine the same way, everybody isn’t necessarily going to respond to recovery the same way either. A treatment center should recognize that.

Kelly did.

I’m not sure the program itself did enough of it.

Terms and Conditions Apply

At the same time, there are parts of that structure I understand much better now than I did when I walked through the door. One thing I’ve come to understand more clearly through my own sobriety is that sometimes you have to surrender before you can regain your agency.

I don’t mean surrendering your will forever. I mean surrendering to the fact that something else has been controlling it. For me, that was alcohol. I had to let go of that control before I could actually take my own back.

In some ways, going into rehab reminded me of going into boot camp. You go into boot camp knowing you’re going to be torn down. The idea is that you’re rebuilt into a sailor, soldier, Marine, whatever you’re there to become. They give you a skeleton, and then you build on it.

That’s kind of how I looked at rehab.

The first day, I was afraid. I don’t even know exactly what I was afraid of. Maybe I was afraid of losing something. Alcohol had become something familiar. I heard somebody in a room once describe getting sober as saying goodbye to a friend who has become toxic in your life. You still miss parts of them. They accompanied you through the good and the bad, and suddenly there’s going to be a void where they used to be.

How do you fill that void?

There was also the fear of failure. Whatever it was, at some point you have to surrender. Talk about giving up free will.

But I don’t believe the purpose of surrender is to spend the rest of your life surrendering your ability to choose. Getting sober meant giving something up, but the point of giving it up was to get something back: my agency, the ability to make my own choices again instead of having alcohol make them for me.

And when I look back at those seven days, that surrender was happening in an environment filled with other people going through their own version of the same thing. That part gets lost when you just say, “I went to rehab.”

When I arrived, apparently I was supposed to have a roommate. The guy who was in the room moved out. As I understood it, he didn’t want a new person in there.

Imagine walking into rehab for the first time, already emotional, already questioning everything, and one of your first experiences is somebody basically saying, I don’t want this guy in my room. At first you’re thinking, what the fuck? Why does this person hate me? I just walked in.

Everything feels personal because everything is emotional. What you don’t necessarily understand yet is how fucked up alcoholics and addicts can be. How selfish they can be. How selfish we can be. I am one of them too.

Maybe the guy needed a break. Maybe he had his own shit going on. Maybe it had absolutely nothing to do with me. By the second night, I was fucking thrilled he wasn’t my roommate. I even tried to befriend the guy afterward. In my opinion, he was still an asshole.

Later I learned more about him. This was apparently his third rodeo. He was a wealthy guy and seemed to have expectations about what the place was supposed to be. Maybe he thought he was going somewhere more pristine. Maybe treatment was just something he had to get through so he could get back to his business or whatever was waiting for him outside.

I don’t know. And that’s important: I don’t know. I only knew what I saw during the seven days I was there.

Seven days is another pretty big qualifier to put in my review. Most people were there thirty days or more. I was there seven. So if I’m going to criticize the place, praise it, give it three stars, four stars, whatever, I also have to acknowledge that I experienced a fraction of what some of those people did.

But those seven days were twenty-four hours a day. You see people differently when there’s nowhere else to go. You see yourself differently too.

Some people seemed to be fighting against their own sobriety. That was difficult for me to watch because I had worked so hard just to get there. I looked at being there as a gift. Some of them seemed to look at it as a chore.

And maybe they had good reason. Some hadn’t chosen to be there. Others may have been there because somebody else had finally given them an ultimatum. I had insurance. I had time off work. I had planned this. I was allowed to go.

That difference matters.

I was actually supposed to go about a month earlier, around Martin Luther King weekend, and it didn’t happen. I was incredibly disappointed. For another month, I kept drinking.

There was this ridiculous logic in my head: Well, I’m going to rehab to quit. I’m not going to just quit on my own now. If I could just quit on my own, why would I need to go?

Looking back, that sounds almost absurd. But that was where my head was.

So when I finally got there, I didn’t see it as punishment. I saw it as an opportunity. A restart. A refresh. That’s probably why watching people fight to get out bothered me.

But now, with some distance, maybe that’s baggage too. I went there voluntarily with an agenda. I knew what I wanted. Somebody else might have arrived furious, terrified, forced, sick, broke, losing a family, or on their third rodeo and just wanting the whole thing over with.

Maybe you can’t fairly judge their reaction by mine.

Amenities May Vary

Still, I think there’s something important in the difference between seeing treatment as a hurdle and seeing it as a gift.

There’s a Stoic idea that fits here, and it comes from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, Book 5, Section 20. It’s often shortened today to “the obstacle is the way,” but the original idea has more to it than the slogan. Marcus was writing about the mind’s ability to take something that obstructs us and turn it into something we can work with. The obstacle doesn’t become good just because it’s there. What matters is what we do with it.

Maybe that’s closer to what I mean when I say the chore can become the gift. Rehab being difficult didn’t automatically make it valuable. Going through the difficult part, looking at myself, taking what was useful and figuring out what to do with it afterward, that’s where the value was.

Rehab isn’t pleasant simply because it’s rehab. You’re being challenged to look at yourself. You’re being asked to dig through your history, your behavior, your relationships, your choices and whatever else you’ve packed into that baggage. Some of it you need. Some of it probably should have been left at home a long time ago.

But how often do you get an opportunity to actually unpack all of it?

That’s where the chore can become the gift.

And there were things about McDonald Center that absolutely felt like a chore to me. I didn’t like the jail-like feeling of being locked down, although it was certainly a jail with privileges. There was also a monitor we wore, some kind of health monitor tied into the medical system. I don’t know exactly everything it tracked, so I don’t want to pretend I do. But psychologically, it felt like wearing an ankle bracelet.

I hated that. It wasn’t conducive to feeling like I was regaining control over my own life.

At the same time, here comes the baggage again: the place wasn’t designed specifically for me. Other people were there under very different circumstances. There were medical concerns. There were safety concerns. The rules weren’t created around the fact that Dean had voluntarily checked himself in with a plan and wanted to feel independent.

So would I knock them in a review for that? Probably. Would I also have to acknowledge why some of it existed? Probably.

That’s what makes reviewing rehab strange. It’s easy to give a restaurant one star because your steak was cold. What do you give the place where you hated being locked inside but learned how much you valued freedom? What do you give the place where the recovery structure didn’t fit you, but one nurse inside that same place handed you the book that showed you another structure existed? What do you give a place you never want to visit again but are grateful you went to?

Maybe three and a half stars.

Of course, Yelp doesn’t give me a three-and-a-half-star option, so now I have another decision to make: round up to four or drop it down to three.

And unlike a restaurant I really enjoyed, I would definitely add: Would not return.

That’s probably a pretty good review for rehab.

Length of Stay: TBD

There’s another word in all of this that I’ve started questioning too: recovery.

When are you recovered?

I had throat cancer. Notice how I say that. I had cancer. I recovered. I survived. I’m a survivor.

That doesn’t mean cancer didn’t leave things behind. I still have issues with my teeth, my throat and other health effects from radiation and chemotherapy. Those things can follow you for the rest of your life. The alternative was being dead, so let’s be blunt about the trade.

But I don’t walk around saying I’m still recovering from cancer.

So what does recovery mean with alcohol? When are you good?

That doesn’t mean you have to go back to drinking. It doesn’t mean the effects disappear or that what happened stops mattering. Maybe, like cancer, some of the consequences follow you. But I wonder about the language.

Maybe that’s another thing McDonald Center gave me that can’t be put into a star rating. It gave me somewhere to start asking those questions. And maybe that’s ultimately what my review would have to say.

Go in prepared to surrender, but not surrender forever. Not your thinking, and not your agency to a sponsor, a program, a counselor or anybody else for the rest of your life. Surrender to the fact that whatever you were doing before you walked through that door wasn’t working. Let yourself be torn down a little. Take inventory. Listen. Try the things put in front of you. Then, as you start rebuilding, decide what actually belongs in the structure you’re building.

For me, some of it came from AA, some from SMART, some from IOP, and some from the people I met. Some came from people who irritated the shit out of me. Some came from a nurse named Kelly handing me a book. Even the guy who didn’t want me as his roommate gave me something to think about. Maybe especially that asshole.

Pulling the Cord

All of this gets me thinking about skydiving. I’ve never looked at rehab as something I want to experience again, but maybe it’s like jumping out of an airplane. You jump, and for a while you’re in free fall. You have surrendered an enormous amount of control simply by stepping out of that plane. Maybe it’s exhilarating. Maybe it’s terrifying. Maybe you learn something about yourself while you’re falling. But eventually you have to pull the cord.

That’s where agency comes back in. You don’t have to pull the cord. Something inside you says you should. And maybe that’s what a place like McDonald Center is supposed to help you understand. You’re pulling the cord for a reason, not so you can climb back into the plane and jump again. Remember, jumping was the choice in the first place. Some people don’t have that choice, but I think the majority of us do.

If you keep jumping, and you keep hating the free fall, at some point you have to ask why you keep climbing back into the airplane. Maybe that’s where my own definition of sobriety has ended up. I surrendered because I wanted my choices back.

I went into McDonald Center willingly because I knew something had to change. I didn’t love everything about the place, and I don’t agree with everything they taught. Some things made me angry. Some made me uncomfortable. Some of the people drove me fucking crazy. But I was allowed to be there, and that’s the part I don’t want to lose.

I had insurance. I had time. I had the opportunity. I had people there whose job was to help me. Buried inside a program that didn’t always fit me was a nurse who apparently noticed that and handed me another option. There were things I’d change, things I didn’t like, things I didn’t understand until much later, and things I probably still don’t understand. But I walked in carrying one version of myself and walked out with enough pieces to start building another.

So what’s my Yelp review? Three and a half stars, which means I have to either round it up to four or knock it down to three. I think I’ll be generous and give them four.

Would I recommend McDonald Center to somebody who needs it? Absolutely.

Would I recommend needing to go there in the first place? Fuck no.

4 Stars - Would NOT Recommend.

And maybe that’s the best review a rehab can get.