Eligiu
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2017
- Messages
- 1,428
So, I've had this thing happen multiple times in recovery discords. I tell the channel what my plan is for addressing my use (normally getting a trauma informed drug and alcohol counselling service and starting regular SMART attendance again) and basically without fail someone will pipe up with the same old line;
'Have you tried going to NA, getting a sponsor l, and working the steps?'
I usually respond and tell them politely that I'm not interested, to which they usually say they think I should because they really think it would help. I decline again, and they say that a sponsor would really help me. Again I decline, and this time I add that my relapse in December was caused by my friend and ex mentor in recovery who in 2017 put me on my path to recovery and never gave up on me nor judged my drug use one bit, until his new partner came in to his life and her ex husband is an IV meth user and a fucking nasty one at that, so my friend had this issue of cognitive dissonance where he disparaged the drug use of the ex husband (for obvious reasons) but tolerated mine, when we used the same drug in the same way. Because of this his views on my drug use significantly shifted, he stopped mentoring me suddenly when I really needed it and drifted from me. I know it was on this issue because if I needed help with drugs he wouldn't text back for a week or so, but if it was self harm he would text back immediately and then call that evening to let me know he cares about me. In fact, his views shifted so dramatically that in around 2018 or so he once said 'Eli if you ever are choosing between jumping off a building to end your life and shooting up meth I actually want you to shoot up meth, every single time. I view that as making a good choice' to the 180 rotation of 'Eli if you ever do meth a single time more then we just can't be friends anymore.' So when it became clear it was done between us I was looking to score and copped in 4 hours, and I didn't give a shit I was losing 18 months off gear which was the longest I'd ever lasted, because honestly when I kept using once or twice a year and kept it to that I wasn't actually unhappy with my substance use and none of my friends cared cause they were just thrilled I wasn't doing it all day every day anymore. So the only reason I made it to 18 months in the first place was him saying if I used again we wouldn't be friends anymore. Well, we weren't friends anymore, so why not use? Can't stop being friends with me twice lmao.
I made the critical error of putting the foundations of my sobriety in the hands of a fallible person, who ended up changing their views on the literal common experience we both shared and the issue that pulled us together as close friends to the extent he would never even talk to me about his previous cocaine addiction anymore and denied it even happened and didn't even bother to text asking if I was okay when I used heroin for the first time in 4 years in June last year. He used to always, every single time text and ask if I was okay, how much I used, what I used, whether I had any left, and if I was safe at my place. Heroin? Radio fucking silence.
So I told this guy no, I really actually do not ever want a sponsor again. What if something happens to the sponsor and this same thing occurs and I relapse again because my sobriety was based around that person? No, I'd rather put the foundations of my sobriety in the infallible nature of SMART recovery meetings. Smart meetings won't change their veiw on my substance use. They won't stop being there for me, except on public holidays. It's an abstract concept, it can't be influenced. It's dependably there week after fucking week, and perfect for my needs.
So then he comes out with the statement that it just seems like I'm not interested in getting sober, which slightly pissed me off because remember I never asked for his input or suggestions, so I tell him that I also don't like NA because when I went there at 17 I had adult men tell me after my 18th birthday that they found me super hot but they had to patiently wait a couple of months until I turned 18 and was finally legal to fuck. Yeah, yikes from me. And the fact that this sort of behaviour is so fucking prevalent and ingrained in NA and AA that there is a colloquial term called 13th stepping actually sickens me as a CSA survivor. So many vulnerable women escaping abusive violent relationships end up in NA only to be preyed upon by apparently spiritually blessed older cleaner members. Fucking hell.
Like, no other recovery program would ever allow that to happen, let alone become such a common feature of the program there is an unofficial term for it. SMART facilitators would shut it down, my intensive outpatient program was run by a specialist addiction Psychologist and that would result in someone being banned from the group. Other places don't allow that because people shouldn't be preyed on when they're trying to recover.
And furthermore, why the fuck would I go back to the place I was sexually preyed upon as a minor child when I have access to several other evidence based gold standard treatment options which have been proven in my life to work better, and when I know that due to not being an addict and my use being caused by shame and the desire to self punish that I actually require professional trauma intervention?
This still didn't seem to make him stop. Told me that he was just trying to help but he clearly shouldn't even bother because I'm just another addict in denial.
At that stage I flew off the handle and told him to stop shoving his fucking stupid religious cult down my goddamn throat when I've literally told him multiple times that I don't want to do it, explained that I've already tried it and it didn't work, and gave several other reasons. I also pointed out that I didn't ever actually ask for his input or suggestions, I just wanted reassurance or support that I was making a good choice for MYSELF by taking some initiative and going back to what worked. And I told him he was being a dick and also lacking the ability to consider that people have addictions for various reasons and just because my non identification as an addict and statement that my IV use is a mechanism of severe self harm doesn't make sense to him, that doesn't mean it isn't valid. I got told by my intensive outpatient lived experience mentor in 2017 that I didn't have a drug problem. She told me she couldn't tell me what it was, and that I'd have to figure it out on my own. Well it took me until December 2021 and a big relapse later but I finally figured it out. I should be getting congratulations for having such a major breakthrough about my addictive behaviour, not treated like I'm using it as an excuse. Frankly, I don't think identifying as an addict is good for recovery at all. I'll not tell people to stop, but I will point out that there's no real evidence to suggest that addicts don't actually have a choice every time they use a substance. In 95% of cases, the user of the substance has full physical control of putting the substance in their body and taking the drug, and they also decided to take several steps to acquire and pay for the drugs. They also made the decision at some stage in their life to quit and try recovery, so logic would stand to reason that if quitting was a choice then naturally using was a choice.
The reason using doesn't feel like a choice is because there are two main broad reasons that people end up needing treatment.
The first is that their substance use (like mine and many many others) is nothing but an extremely maladaptive coping mechanisms developed during formative years and repeated until it became such a deeply ingrained habit that a person's neural pathways are so strongly wired to resort to that behaviour in times of emotional distress, stress or many other negative or even happy emotions, that it can truly seem automatic. It isn't. You can rewire your brain and train it to develop and form brand new neural pathways and practice using them until THAT becomes a new deeply ingrained habit. This is alllllll neuroscience, which is the real good good shit brain science, better than the flimsier Psychiatry. Sounds simple in theory but it takes time, effort and patience to achieve. It also requires mistakes and the allowance for slip ups on the way. This is why a program which mandates abstinence as a measure of your worth in the program and promotes shaming as the correct response to relapse or slipping up can never ever work for a person like me. I need a program where I'm permitted to focus on minimising the amount I use, and how I use it to lessen the risk to myself while I work on learning more adaptive coping mechanisms. I also need a program which will pick me up and support me when I fall down, not shame me and tell me it happened because I have character defects (I already think I'm broken and defective because of abuse, thanks heaps for adding to that) or unresolved resentments I need to let go of (no, I'm going to keep hating my nonce narcissist of a sperm donor thanks. And yes I will die mad, I'm entitled to that). It just won't work. It actually made me so much worse when I did go there and made my substance use rapidly escalate when I eventually relapsed after a year in the program. I went completely off the rails because of the beliefs I was taught about the nature of my addiction and that didn't change until I went to rehab in 2017.
I also was never told about any one single alternative recovery program other than AA instead. I left, thinking I would end up in jail, an institution, or dead - and I was gunning to achieve the latter as fast as I could, because I'd been brainwashed. That type of shit is literally the stuff leaders of cults tell the people they trap, that if they leave they will die or if the cult is destroyed the all have to mass suicide. I'm sorry if it offends people but my actual honest experience of 12 step programes was that it was a cult which shamed people who relapsed so badly 2 people in my homegroup overdosed on heroin together by suicide because they'd relapsed after a decent period of clean time and they couldn't handle the shame of returning to a meeting and being treated like a newcomer and viewed as having moral failings. The program killed two people I was friends with. The people who worked that program did to. To me it's a cult that does that, and allows serial sex offending against vulnerable women and children.
I would never send anyone to NA without giving them a warning about what it's like.
Unlike NA, I actually carry the real message of recovery. I work the 12th step better than they ever could hope to. Where they carry the message of the NA program to addicted people in need, I carry the message of any program I know, yes including NA because it works for people who have zero ability to exert any self control and because they thoroughly enjoy taking drugs but don't have an explanation like 'i was abused as a child' or 'i have a severe mental illness' or 'my parents used drugs around me' or whatever other more socially acceptable reason one might develop an addiction to explain why they did what they did, they worry they'll look bad if the actual reason is just that they like drugs so they rely on this completely non medical definition of being an addict which makes them part of a special group different from the normies where if using is a choice you are a normie and you don't need NA and if using isn't a choice (you think, remember neural pathways. Or you just like drugs, one of the two) then you are an addict. It is a nice easy way to avoid responsibility for the consequences of your behaviour while using and if you relapse too. It is not medically accepted. If you just loved doing drugs until the negatives outweighed the positives then you gotta wear the heat from that and make up for any shitty things you did. Yeah it sucks that people will have less sympathy but that's kind of natural given the situation. So because they like drugs so much they can't exert self control, I'll admit openly that this group of people will only recover with an abstinence based program because they actually DO spiral into a disastrous relapse if they do so much as rack a single line of cocaine. The thing is, by NA standards I'm actually considering a normie now because I believe using is a choice and I acknowledge that on every occasion that I take substances I've willingly decided to do that. I always get told that I'm just not a real addict so I didn't need the program anyway.
No, I didn't. What I actually needed was 3 days a week of 2.5 hour a day evening sessions of gold standard evidence based intensive outpatient rehabilitation for 2 years which boasts an 88% success rate for long term abstinence from methamphetamine. Then 2 more years of fortnightly drug and alcohol counselling from a trauma informed social worker at another outpatient rehab. Then 3 months of drug and alcohol counselling at a third service. And 5 attempts at opiate maintenance therapy which were so unsuccessful that I ended up on the injection because I'm so fucking dumb I think 6 months is long enough to treat almost a decade of opiate use.
So, I think that establishes that my substance use well and truly meets the benchmark for being a serious addiction. I've probably actually done more evidence based treatment than most people in NA. I didn't need NA, and I would have been better off without it. If my parents had been a bit less lazy and not just sent me to the place they knew from movies and looked up my cities local youth drug and alcohol counselling service which I later ended up at anyway my use may have ended when I was 20 and I never would have gone to an NA meeting and heard people get up and share about how fucking amazing doing a thick shot of meth was and how it felt like they were touching god, which was the moment 17 year old Eli sword he would never stop drugs for good until he shot up at least one single time. Another gift I got from the program. Never send a teenager to NA, ever.
When people ask for suggestions on what they should do about their substance use or addiction, DO NOT just suggest the one program which worked for you. It worked for you, that's great. So by all means do suggest it, but you don't live under a goddamn rock, you KNOW for a fucking fact that other recovery programmes exist. Do the right thing by people who need support and carry the actual message of recovery, not just the message of NA. Because if you tell a person who should have gone to SMART that they should try NA and they try it and give it a real go and it just never works for them, they're going to end up just like I did when I left. Thinking I was gonna end up in jail, institutions, or dead in the ground. And not having any fucking idea that there were multiple other options I could have signed up for or attended within less than a week. I just gave up, and that person may also do that. And if that happens because you were so arrogant to think that addictions are all the same for every single person and everyone needs the same cookie cutter approach to treatment and your program is the one single program that works, you have caused an avoidable tragedy to occur and that's on you. Do better. If it happens, it's because you were too arrogant and egocentric about your consecutive clean time (and may I add, using cumulative clean time where you aggregate your abstinence between X and Y period by removing events of use it can show like in my case I've been totally abstinent around 90% of the time since August 2017 until now. That's compared to before that USING 100% of the time. That is objective success. And just because I might use on and off, I don't actually think someone with 5 years consecutive clean time actually knows that much more about recovery than I do with my more than they have cumulative clean time.
I don't hold back. I give people every single option there is because I just want them to find any program, any service, any counselling, anything that will help them at all. I don't care if they don't come to SMART. I literally don't give a single fuck what treatment they use. If they get clean using NA then I'm fucking thrilled it worked for them, they're one of the lucky few.
Honestly this is something I feel really strongly about because I loathe how due to my inability to get consecutive clean time cause that's just how I function, my life is literally perfectly fine and was so during the 5 years I would use once or twice a year and there was no reason I couldn't just keep doing that forever, that my voice on recovery is less important or valid than someone who has less cumulative clean time but more days straight in a row. Even at rehab the program only officially ran 16 weeks but they let me stay on 2 full years due to my complex situation with my dad and they basically treated me as an unofficial lived experience mentor and I was given loads of respect by the psychologist running the group, the LEMS and the other clients who would constantly ask my advice.
I am shit at remaining abstinent myself but I'm fucking great at getting other people into recovery.
'Have you tried going to NA, getting a sponsor l, and working the steps?'
I usually respond and tell them politely that I'm not interested, to which they usually say they think I should because they really think it would help. I decline again, and they say that a sponsor would really help me. Again I decline, and this time I add that my relapse in December was caused by my friend and ex mentor in recovery who in 2017 put me on my path to recovery and never gave up on me nor judged my drug use one bit, until his new partner came in to his life and her ex husband is an IV meth user and a fucking nasty one at that, so my friend had this issue of cognitive dissonance where he disparaged the drug use of the ex husband (for obvious reasons) but tolerated mine, when we used the same drug in the same way. Because of this his views on my drug use significantly shifted, he stopped mentoring me suddenly when I really needed it and drifted from me. I know it was on this issue because if I needed help with drugs he wouldn't text back for a week or so, but if it was self harm he would text back immediately and then call that evening to let me know he cares about me. In fact, his views shifted so dramatically that in around 2018 or so he once said 'Eli if you ever are choosing between jumping off a building to end your life and shooting up meth I actually want you to shoot up meth, every single time. I view that as making a good choice' to the 180 rotation of 'Eli if you ever do meth a single time more then we just can't be friends anymore.' So when it became clear it was done between us I was looking to score and copped in 4 hours, and I didn't give a shit I was losing 18 months off gear which was the longest I'd ever lasted, because honestly when I kept using once or twice a year and kept it to that I wasn't actually unhappy with my substance use and none of my friends cared cause they were just thrilled I wasn't doing it all day every day anymore. So the only reason I made it to 18 months in the first place was him saying if I used again we wouldn't be friends anymore. Well, we weren't friends anymore, so why not use? Can't stop being friends with me twice lmao.
I made the critical error of putting the foundations of my sobriety in the hands of a fallible person, who ended up changing their views on the literal common experience we both shared and the issue that pulled us together as close friends to the extent he would never even talk to me about his previous cocaine addiction anymore and denied it even happened and didn't even bother to text asking if I was okay when I used heroin for the first time in 4 years in June last year. He used to always, every single time text and ask if I was okay, how much I used, what I used, whether I had any left, and if I was safe at my place. Heroin? Radio fucking silence.
So I told this guy no, I really actually do not ever want a sponsor again. What if something happens to the sponsor and this same thing occurs and I relapse again because my sobriety was based around that person? No, I'd rather put the foundations of my sobriety in the infallible nature of SMART recovery meetings. Smart meetings won't change their veiw on my substance use. They won't stop being there for me, except on public holidays. It's an abstract concept, it can't be influenced. It's dependably there week after fucking week, and perfect for my needs.
So then he comes out with the statement that it just seems like I'm not interested in getting sober, which slightly pissed me off because remember I never asked for his input or suggestions, so I tell him that I also don't like NA because when I went there at 17 I had adult men tell me after my 18th birthday that they found me super hot but they had to patiently wait a couple of months until I turned 18 and was finally legal to fuck. Yeah, yikes from me. And the fact that this sort of behaviour is so fucking prevalent and ingrained in NA and AA that there is a colloquial term called 13th stepping actually sickens me as a CSA survivor. So many vulnerable women escaping abusive violent relationships end up in NA only to be preyed upon by apparently spiritually blessed older cleaner members. Fucking hell.
Like, no other recovery program would ever allow that to happen, let alone become such a common feature of the program there is an unofficial term for it. SMART facilitators would shut it down, my intensive outpatient program was run by a specialist addiction Psychologist and that would result in someone being banned from the group. Other places don't allow that because people shouldn't be preyed on when they're trying to recover.
And furthermore, why the fuck would I go back to the place I was sexually preyed upon as a minor child when I have access to several other evidence based gold standard treatment options which have been proven in my life to work better, and when I know that due to not being an addict and my use being caused by shame and the desire to self punish that I actually require professional trauma intervention?
This still didn't seem to make him stop. Told me that he was just trying to help but he clearly shouldn't even bother because I'm just another addict in denial.
At that stage I flew off the handle and told him to stop shoving his fucking stupid religious cult down my goddamn throat when I've literally told him multiple times that I don't want to do it, explained that I've already tried it and it didn't work, and gave several other reasons. I also pointed out that I didn't ever actually ask for his input or suggestions, I just wanted reassurance or support that I was making a good choice for MYSELF by taking some initiative and going back to what worked. And I told him he was being a dick and also lacking the ability to consider that people have addictions for various reasons and just because my non identification as an addict and statement that my IV use is a mechanism of severe self harm doesn't make sense to him, that doesn't mean it isn't valid. I got told by my intensive outpatient lived experience mentor in 2017 that I didn't have a drug problem. She told me she couldn't tell me what it was, and that I'd have to figure it out on my own. Well it took me until December 2021 and a big relapse later but I finally figured it out. I should be getting congratulations for having such a major breakthrough about my addictive behaviour, not treated like I'm using it as an excuse. Frankly, I don't think identifying as an addict is good for recovery at all. I'll not tell people to stop, but I will point out that there's no real evidence to suggest that addicts don't actually have a choice every time they use a substance. In 95% of cases, the user of the substance has full physical control of putting the substance in their body and taking the drug, and they also decided to take several steps to acquire and pay for the drugs. They also made the decision at some stage in their life to quit and try recovery, so logic would stand to reason that if quitting was a choice then naturally using was a choice.
The reason using doesn't feel like a choice is because there are two main broad reasons that people end up needing treatment.
The first is that their substance use (like mine and many many others) is nothing but an extremely maladaptive coping mechanisms developed during formative years and repeated until it became such a deeply ingrained habit that a person's neural pathways are so strongly wired to resort to that behaviour in times of emotional distress, stress or many other negative or even happy emotions, that it can truly seem automatic. It isn't. You can rewire your brain and train it to develop and form brand new neural pathways and practice using them until THAT becomes a new deeply ingrained habit. This is alllllll neuroscience, which is the real good good shit brain science, better than the flimsier Psychiatry. Sounds simple in theory but it takes time, effort and patience to achieve. It also requires mistakes and the allowance for slip ups on the way. This is why a program which mandates abstinence as a measure of your worth in the program and promotes shaming as the correct response to relapse or slipping up can never ever work for a person like me. I need a program where I'm permitted to focus on minimising the amount I use, and how I use it to lessen the risk to myself while I work on learning more adaptive coping mechanisms. I also need a program which will pick me up and support me when I fall down, not shame me and tell me it happened because I have character defects (I already think I'm broken and defective because of abuse, thanks heaps for adding to that) or unresolved resentments I need to let go of (no, I'm going to keep hating my nonce narcissist of a sperm donor thanks. And yes I will die mad, I'm entitled to that). It just won't work. It actually made me so much worse when I did go there and made my substance use rapidly escalate when I eventually relapsed after a year in the program. I went completely off the rails because of the beliefs I was taught about the nature of my addiction and that didn't change until I went to rehab in 2017.
I also was never told about any one single alternative recovery program other than AA instead. I left, thinking I would end up in jail, an institution, or dead - and I was gunning to achieve the latter as fast as I could, because I'd been brainwashed. That type of shit is literally the stuff leaders of cults tell the people they trap, that if they leave they will die or if the cult is destroyed the all have to mass suicide. I'm sorry if it offends people but my actual honest experience of 12 step programes was that it was a cult which shamed people who relapsed so badly 2 people in my homegroup overdosed on heroin together by suicide because they'd relapsed after a decent period of clean time and they couldn't handle the shame of returning to a meeting and being treated like a newcomer and viewed as having moral failings. The program killed two people I was friends with. The people who worked that program did to. To me it's a cult that does that, and allows serial sex offending against vulnerable women and children.
I would never send anyone to NA without giving them a warning about what it's like.
Unlike NA, I actually carry the real message of recovery. I work the 12th step better than they ever could hope to. Where they carry the message of the NA program to addicted people in need, I carry the message of any program I know, yes including NA because it works for people who have zero ability to exert any self control and because they thoroughly enjoy taking drugs but don't have an explanation like 'i was abused as a child' or 'i have a severe mental illness' or 'my parents used drugs around me' or whatever other more socially acceptable reason one might develop an addiction to explain why they did what they did, they worry they'll look bad if the actual reason is just that they like drugs so they rely on this completely non medical definition of being an addict which makes them part of a special group different from the normies where if using is a choice you are a normie and you don't need NA and if using isn't a choice (you think, remember neural pathways. Or you just like drugs, one of the two) then you are an addict. It is a nice easy way to avoid responsibility for the consequences of your behaviour while using and if you relapse too. It is not medically accepted. If you just loved doing drugs until the negatives outweighed the positives then you gotta wear the heat from that and make up for any shitty things you did. Yeah it sucks that people will have less sympathy but that's kind of natural given the situation. So because they like drugs so much they can't exert self control, I'll admit openly that this group of people will only recover with an abstinence based program because they actually DO spiral into a disastrous relapse if they do so much as rack a single line of cocaine. The thing is, by NA standards I'm actually considering a normie now because I believe using is a choice and I acknowledge that on every occasion that I take substances I've willingly decided to do that. I always get told that I'm just not a real addict so I didn't need the program anyway.
No, I didn't. What I actually needed was 3 days a week of 2.5 hour a day evening sessions of gold standard evidence based intensive outpatient rehabilitation for 2 years which boasts an 88% success rate for long term abstinence from methamphetamine. Then 2 more years of fortnightly drug and alcohol counselling from a trauma informed social worker at another outpatient rehab. Then 3 months of drug and alcohol counselling at a third service. And 5 attempts at opiate maintenance therapy which were so unsuccessful that I ended up on the injection because I'm so fucking dumb I think 6 months is long enough to treat almost a decade of opiate use.
So, I think that establishes that my substance use well and truly meets the benchmark for being a serious addiction. I've probably actually done more evidence based treatment than most people in NA. I didn't need NA, and I would have been better off without it. If my parents had been a bit less lazy and not just sent me to the place they knew from movies and looked up my cities local youth drug and alcohol counselling service which I later ended up at anyway my use may have ended when I was 20 and I never would have gone to an NA meeting and heard people get up and share about how fucking amazing doing a thick shot of meth was and how it felt like they were touching god, which was the moment 17 year old Eli sword he would never stop drugs for good until he shot up at least one single time. Another gift I got from the program. Never send a teenager to NA, ever.
When people ask for suggestions on what they should do about their substance use or addiction, DO NOT just suggest the one program which worked for you. It worked for you, that's great. So by all means do suggest it, but you don't live under a goddamn rock, you KNOW for a fucking fact that other recovery programmes exist. Do the right thing by people who need support and carry the actual message of recovery, not just the message of NA. Because if you tell a person who should have gone to SMART that they should try NA and they try it and give it a real go and it just never works for them, they're going to end up just like I did when I left. Thinking I was gonna end up in jail, institutions, or dead in the ground. And not having any fucking idea that there were multiple other options I could have signed up for or attended within less than a week. I just gave up, and that person may also do that. And if that happens because you were so arrogant to think that addictions are all the same for every single person and everyone needs the same cookie cutter approach to treatment and your program is the one single program that works, you have caused an avoidable tragedy to occur and that's on you. Do better. If it happens, it's because you were too arrogant and egocentric about your consecutive clean time (and may I add, using cumulative clean time where you aggregate your abstinence between X and Y period by removing events of use it can show like in my case I've been totally abstinent around 90% of the time since August 2017 until now. That's compared to before that USING 100% of the time. That is objective success. And just because I might use on and off, I don't actually think someone with 5 years consecutive clean time actually knows that much more about recovery than I do with my more than they have cumulative clean time.
I don't hold back. I give people every single option there is because I just want them to find any program, any service, any counselling, anything that will help them at all. I don't care if they don't come to SMART. I literally don't give a single fuck what treatment they use. If they get clean using NA then I'm fucking thrilled it worked for them, they're one of the lucky few.
Honestly this is something I feel really strongly about because I loathe how due to my inability to get consecutive clean time cause that's just how I function, my life is literally perfectly fine and was so during the 5 years I would use once or twice a year and there was no reason I couldn't just keep doing that forever, that my voice on recovery is less important or valid than someone who has less cumulative clean time but more days straight in a row. Even at rehab the program only officially ran 16 weeks but they let me stay on 2 full years due to my complex situation with my dad and they basically treated me as an unofficial lived experience mentor and I was given loads of respect by the psychologist running the group, the LEMS and the other clients who would constantly ask my advice.
I am shit at remaining abstinent myself but I'm fucking great at getting other people into recovery.
