Drug Rehabilitation Network Drug Rehabilitation Network

This is what I remember, from my intervention: My Mom is crying and my sister is crying and my Dad is doing his damnedest and still pretty well failing to look like he’s not crying. And I am crying. I do not know why. Or, I do, but I don’t want to. Or I don’t, but I want to, and I am thinking that now maybe for the first time I know why I should be crying, about addiction and everything else.

Interventions work because they show you what you have to lose: what you have lost, what you are in danger of losing. I do not remember what my crying mother or my crying sister or my trying-not-to-but-yes-still crying father said during my intervention. It doesn’t matter. They didn’t have to say anything. It was communicated, all of it, by the plain fact of their presence, and the plain fact of the tears. I knew, as soon as I saw them. And I knew had to do something about it.

My intervention saved my life. That still gets me, even now, all these years later: My intervention saved my life. Saved it physically, yes, but saved it spiritually too; saved it from myself, and my drug abuse; saved it by showing me what I had to live for, so long after I’d forgotten everything but addiction itself.

Funny how remembering can sometimes be the greatest gift of all.