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I was referred to Granada House in November 1989.
"Referred" is a very polite way to put it. I was a patient in a rehab
attached to a well-known mental hospital in Boston, and a psychiatrist
in this rehab had established some credibility with me, and he opined
that (1) unless I signed up for long-term treatment someplace, I
wasn't going to be able to stay off drugs and alcohol; and that (2) if
I couldn't find a way to stay off drugs and alcohol, I was going to be
dead by 30. I was 27. This was not my first in-patient rehab, nor was
it my first mental hospital.
Because certain myths about both addiction and halfway houses die
hard, I'll give you a little bio. I was raised in a solid, loving,
two-parent family. None of my close relatives have substance problems.
I have never been in jail or arrested--I've never even had a speeding
ticket. In 1989, I already had a BA and one graduate degree and was in
Boston to get another. And I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic
and drug addict. I had been in detoxes and rehabs; I had been in
locked wards in psych facilities; I had had at least one serious
suicide attempt, a course of ECT, and so on. The diagnosis of my
family, friends, and teachers was that I was bright and talented but
had "emotional problems." I alone knew how deeply these problems were
connected to alcohol and drugs, which I'd been using heavily since age
fifteen. Every single one of my mental-health crises had followed a
period of heavy bingeing on marijuana, tranquilizers, and alcohol. I
had first vowed to quit at age nineteen; the longest I'd ever gone
without any sort of substance was three months. I was convinced that
this was because I was weak, or because I really did have intractable
mental problems which only drugs and alcohol gave me any relief from.
I therefore spent most of the 1980s on the horns of a dilemma that
many addicts and alcoholics understand very well. On the one hand, I
knew that drugs and alcohol controlled me, ran my life, and were
killing me. On the other, I loved them--I mean really loved them, as
in the sort of love where you'll do anything, tell yourself any sort
of lie to keep from having to let the beloved go. For most of the late
80s, my method for "quitting" drugs was to switch for a period from
just drugs to just alcohol. Then I'd switch back to drugs in order to
"quit" drinking. The idea of months or years without any
chemicals at all was unimaginable. This was my basic situation. I both
wanted help and didn't. And I made it hard for anyone to help me: I
could go to a psychiatrist one day in tears and desperation and then
two days later be fencing with her over the fine points of Jungian
theory; I could argue with drug counselors over the difference between
a crass pragmatic lie and an "aesthetic" lie told for its beauty
alone; I could flummox 12-Step sponsors over certain obvious paradoxes
inherent in the concept of denial. And so forth.
Six months in Granada House helped me immeasurably. I still wince at
some of the hyperbole and melodrama that are used in recovery-speak,
but the fact of the matter is that my experience at Granada House
helped me, starting with the fact that the staff admitted me despite
the obnoxious condescension with which I spoke of them, the House, and
the l2-Step programs of recovery they tried to enable. They were
patient, but they were not pushovers. They enforced a structure and
discipline about recovery that I was not capable of on my own:
mandatory counseling, mandatory AA or NA meetings, mandatory
employment, curfew, chores, etc. Not to mention required reading of
AA/NA literature whether I found it literarily distinguished or not.
Granada House also provided my first experience of an actual
recovering community: there were over twenty newly recovering
residents, and the paid staff--almost all of whom were in
recovery--and the unpaid volunteers, and the dozens of House alumni
who seemed always to be around in the kitchen and living room and
offices. I made friends, and enemies, and enemies who then became
friends. I was, for six months, literally immersed in recovery. At the
time, it seemed crowded and claustrophobic and loud, and I resented
the lack of "privacy," just as I resented the radical simplicity of
l2-Step programs' advice to newcomers: go to a l2-Step meeting every
day, make one such meeting your home group, get a sponsor and tell him
the truth, get active with some kind of job in your home group, pray
for help whether you believe in God or not, etc. The whole thing
seemed uncomfortable and undignified and dumb. Now, from the
perspective of almost fourteen years sober, it looks like precisely
what I needed. In Granada House, I was surrounded by recovering human
beings in all their variety and sameness and neurosis and compassion,
and I was kept busy, and I was made bluntly and continually aware of
the fact that I had a potentially fatal disease that could be arrested
only by doing some very simple, strange-looking things. I was denied
the chance to sit chain-smoking in private and drive myself crazy with
abstract questions about stuff that didn't matter nearly as much as
simply not putting chemicals into my body.
This is not to say that the staff and volunteers at Granada House
didn't listen. The House was structured and disciplined, but it was
not authoritarian. One of the kindest and most helpful things the
House staff did for me was to sit down and listen--to complaints,
cravings, questions, confessions, rants, resentments, terrors, and
insights both real and imagined--because a lot of my early recovery
consisted of learning to say aloud the stuff about drugs and alcohol
and recovery I was thinking, instead of keeping it twisting and
writhing around inside my head. People at Granada House listened to me
for hours, and did so with neither the clinical disinterest of doctors
nor the hand-wringing credulity of relatives. They listened because,
in the last analysis, they really understood me: they had been on the
fence of both wanting to get sober and not, of loving the very thing
that was killing you, of being able to imagine life neither with drugs
and alcohol nor without them. They also recognized bullshit, and
manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading
terrible truths--and on many days the most helpful thing they did was
to laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now,
pathetically easy for a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just
not to use chemicals today because tomorrow might very well look
different. Advice like this sounds too simplistic to be helpful, but
it was crucial: I had gotten through a great many days sober before I
realized that one day is all I really had to get through.
Finally, because all the staff and ex-residents were members of AA and
NA, my relationships with them helped ease me into active membership
in l2-Step fellowships, which is pretty much the only proven method
for maintaining long-term sobriety. Now, in 2003, I no longer live in
Boston, but I am an active, committed member of AA in my new
community.
I am also a productive member of that community. Citizens or
government agencies that are considering financial support of Granada
House might be interested in the following breakdown. From 1983 to
1989 I paid almost no taxes, cost two different health insurance
companies almost $100,000 in treatments, institutionalizations, and
psychiatric care, cost myself and my parents another $70,000-$80,000
when insurance ran out, and cost two different states thousands of
dollars when my own support ran out and I had to declare myself
indigent. In 1990 and 1991, I paid no real taxes but also didn't cost
anyone anything. From 1992 to present, I have cost family, government,
and charitable institutions nothing, have paid well over $325,000 in
federal, state, and municipal taxes, and have donated a least another
$100,000 to various charities. I don’t know what it cost to put me
through Granada House for six months (I myself paid $20 a week in
rent, though this was sliding-scale because I was broke), but by even
the coldest type of cost-accounting, it appears to me that it was
worth it for everyone. |
