Forty years ago, August 27th, 1984 I made the decision to enter treatment for my addictions. I grew up in an alcoholic home. My father’s alcoholism and untreated trauma oppressed, terrified and ultimately fractured our family.

I swore I’d never be like him but I started drinking at the age of twelve and by my late teens I too was an alcoholic. Not long after that I developed a torrid addiction to cocaine and within a few years these compulsions brought me to my knees and denuded me of everything decent in my life, a pile of money, a marriage, custody of my daughter and my own dignity and self-respect.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my addictions were driven by complex post traumatic stress disorder. Physical, sexual and verbal abuse left me bereft of self-esteem and in a constant battle with depression and anxiety. I was often suicidal and despairing. Self-medication was the only way I knew how to find some freedom from the pain.

I’d started therapy in March of 1984 and my therapist recognized my addictions and counseled me to seek inpatient treatment, but stigma and fear of that kind of serious reckoning prevented me from committing.

After another blackout where I became verbally abusive and had to be restrained from attacking my estranged wife, I woke up the next day appalled by my behavior. I decided to seek treatment. I wasn’t confident I could get well, but at long last, I’d  been given the gift of desperation.

I completed treatment and committed to doing what I had to do on a daily basis to stay clean and sober. The days turned to weeks, the weeks to months and the months to years. Bit by bit, I built a life.

Forty years later I am semi-retired from a job helping others into sobriety. I have material security and most of all, a close and healthy family.

I want to tell anyone out there who is struggling with addictions and trauma that there is another way. Treatment works. People can and do change. Finding a way to be clean and sober will offer you the same things it’s offered me: the opportunity to be the person you’re meant to be. To reach your potential and to gain control over your physical, mental and financial health. The chance to reach your potential rather than always letting others down.

You CAN do it!