How NOT to Leave Welcome House
At 53 years old, John arrived at Welcome House with a plan and that plan was not a recovery program. The plan was to stay long enough to leave.
“I was already figuring out when I could go drink again,” he said.
John had just come out of detox. He knew he had a problem. He knew he could have died. But knowing those things wasn’t the same as wanting recovery. So he negotiated with himself. Set goals. If he made it one month, he could leave and drink. Then it became three months, long enough to get his blue card. Then a little longer.
More than a year later, he’s still here.
Not because anyone convinced him to stay, but because every time he reached one of those self-imposed deadlines, something happened that he didn’t expect, things got better.
For most of his life, addiction wasn’t part of the story. He grew up in a stable family. Nobody around him was in recovery. He wasn’t the guy drinking heavily in high school or college. In fact, he wasn’t much of a drinker at all.
“I could buy a six-pack and still have four beers left a week later.”
The change took years. Even now, John struggles to explain exactly why he became an alcoholic. People often want a reason: trauma, loss, or a defining event. John doesn’t have one. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was normal life stuff. Running a business was stressful. Marriage was stressful. Maybe it was psychological. Maybe it was a habit. I honestly don’t know.”
What he does know is that one day, he was a social drinker, and over the years, that turned into drinking all day, every day. The progression was gradual enough that he barely noticed it happening. That’s one reason he talks openly about his experience today. People often imagine addiction as something that happens quickly or only to certain kinds of people. His experience was different.
“This can happen to anyone,” he said. “You don’t have to have trauma. You don’t have to have major struggles.”
The thing that ultimately changed his perspective wasn’t treatment or a lecture from family members. It was sitting in a room full of other alcoholics. Before recovery, John had never done that. “I didn’t know anybody in recovery. At least not that I knew of.“
Then he attended his first AA meeting.
“What changed wasn’t what people said,” he recalled. “It was seeing that they existed. Here were all these people who had done what I thought was impossible. People who were going through life without drinking.” Until then, recovery felt like something that worked for other people. Seeing everyone in that first AA meeting, that it was possible became real.
Today, John spends much of his time doing the opposite of what he expected when he first arrived. Not only did he stay in the program, but graduated and applied to join the CORE+ Leadership Program. Part of what he does is talk to the men who are just beginning their own recovery journeys.
“I talk to people, but mostly I listen,” he said. “Some people don’t have anywhere else to say those things out loud. You have to let people talk, get the words out, work through things. Meetings are a safe place for that to happen. Talking to another person who has been through the same thing is sitting in a safe place where you won’t be judged.”
It’s a simple idea, but one that comes up repeatedly when he talks about recovery. Not treatment. Not advice. Connection. “The opposite of addiction is connection,” John said.
For someone who once believed there was no way out, that lesson has changed everything. Today, his goal remains surprisingly simple. “I just try to go to bed sober.” Setting those goals, it is the same approach that carried him through his first day, then his first month, then graduation from the CORE Program, and into CORE+. One day at a time has become more than a recovery slogan. For John, it has become a way of life.