No drug addict can get sober without help. I learned that lesson the hard way. Three times, I tried to quit using cocaine myself. Three times I failed. Miserably. Finally I decided to check into a professional drug treatment center, where addiction treatment professionals could give me the care I needed to get better. And it made a world of difference.

Rehab centers are vital to addiction recovery because addiction is not a choice. Addicts don’t willfully decide to use drugs, and they can’t just willfully decide to get sober. Cancer patients don’t get healthy outside of hospitals. And drug addicts don’t get healed outside of rehab centers. That’s just not the way it works.

If you’re here, reading this, you already know what drug abuse can do. You know it ruins lives. You know you can’t beat it on your own. Now, you’ve got to get help. Rehab centers can’t do anything until addicts seek them out. For your own sake, let today be the day you find a rehabilitation program that can work for you.

 If drug rehab saved me it can save anybody. That’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I had a monkey on my back for more years than I’d like to admit and it definitely had it’s grimy little hooks in me. You can ask anybody I know. I was a bonafide wack job for years on end and nothing seemed like it could pull me out of the grave. I was two or three hits away from taking a dirt nap and it almost felt like I was leading the charge to make it happen. I’ll be real, I wanted to cash in my chips and check out. I honestly felt like death would have been the only effective way to end my tormented way of life. That’s when drug treatment changed everything.

Once my mom and my step dad got a hold of me, they sent me right to the best addiction treatment center they could find. I fought it at first, but things started to take shape after I was used to being there. Withdrawal sucks ass, my friends. That’s for sure. But you’ve got to take it all in stride and continue telling yourself that it’s for the best. And actually, it is. I just looked at it like instant physical karma that you’re paying back to everyone that you’ve hurt while addicted. It didn’t help me when I was going through it but it’s definitely going to help me never go back.

Alcohol abuse is about pain as much as anything else. That’s how it was for me, anyway: My alcohol addiction was about pain, or more precisely the escape from it. I hurt. I could give you the long-winded sob story, but it wouldn’t change the fact of the thing itself: I hurt. That’s why I drank, why I became a victim of alcohol abuse in the first place. I hurt. Alcohol made me feel better. Everything else more or less took care of itself.

Every alcoholic has demons, when you really get down to it. There’s always a Source of alcohol abuse, a kernel of intractable pain that makes alcoholics turn to the bottle. It doesn’t matter what it is; it’s simply enough that it exists. So long as it does…so long as it’s There…an alcoholic will continue to be an alcoholic. If alcohol treatment is going to work, on the other hand, it’s got to help you get over it: help you dig down into the guts of whatever it is that’s eating at you, and teach you to cope with it in a way that doesn’t involve booze. It’s not easy. But it’s worth it. Alcohol treatment saved my life. It made me stop hurting. And no price could be too high to pay for that.