Overcoming Alcohol Addiction
Matt’s Story
When his family sent Matt to rehab, his brother said that if Matt were a cat, he would have used all of his nine lives. As a result of his years of substance abuse, he broke his neck, back, and ribs multiple times and totaled several cars. Somehow he would survive the falls and accidents, each time returning to substance abuse. When his family sent him to Narconon South Texas, that was the end of that self-destructive pattern.
Matt’s first drug was LSD when he was in high school. This was followed by drinking until he was completely drunk at parties and then smoking marijuana.
Despite the drug abuse, he kept his grades up in high school and then in college. It didn’t take long before he was using marijuana and drinking first thing in the morning, just so he could get himself going.
At the same time, he was going to college, he was working as a musician, playing gigs with his band. That brought him in contact with cocaine that was being distributed at the restaurants where he was playing.
After graduating, he started landscaping. He focused on installing landscaping in spring, which left him plenty of time to play music and abuse drugs and alcohol in the other seasons. He’d drink so much sometimes that he could not get onstage and play, but cocaine made him alert enough to play. So his habit grew.
His band struggled because he was losing drummers and bass players. “I was demanding of the people I worked with but not in a nice way,” Matt commented. “I’d throw guitars or beer bottles at the other players and if they wanted to fight, well, we’d fight. And then the players would leave.”
This was about the time that Matt started getting tickets or being arrested for DUIs and getting into serious accidents. First, he got a DUI but then the second time, he hit a stalled car going 65 miles an hour. He broke his nose and some ribs and went to jail for a while. His boss suggested rehab but he thought that was a stupid idea. By this time, he had been drinking heavily and using other heavy drugs for seven years.
Another arrest while he was waiting for his trial from the accident still failed to wake him up. He still wasn’t thinking of rehab but his mom intervened and made him withdraw from all the drugs and alcohol at home. Within a couple of months, he was drinking again and that led to yet another arrest. “No one would bail me out that time,” Matt remembered. “My family left me in jail for a couple of weeks and I lost my fiancee over that incident.” The family started putting pressure on him to go to rehab.
He went to a Twelve-Step based rehab for 28 days but he didn’t feel it really helped much. A few months later, he had another severe accident, smashing part of his face and his neck when he hit a truck while riding a bicycle. It didn’t stop him from drinking again as soon as he recovered.
All his drinking began catching up with him in terms of several years of probation and a revoked driver’s license. Finally, he fell off a roof after drinking all night and broke his skull, neck and back again. This was the last life he had to give. He felt like he was ready to die. Instead, his parents found Narconon South Texas. They realized he was at the end of the line.
The whole family confronted him with the need to go to rehab and he was ready. He knew he would lose himself and his family if he didn’t do something really different this time. Since a Twelve Step program hadn’t worked for him before, the different type of program at Narconon South Texas appealed to him.
He started to remember things better after he went through the Narconon New Life Detoxification, one phase of the overall recovery program that flushes out old drug toxins that are stored in the body. He started getting back the feeling in his hands that he had lost after all his accidents.
The communication skills he learned on the Narconon program were instrumental in helping Matt turn things around in his own life. “I was never comfortable in my own life,” he explained. “When people looked at me, I was never comfortable. I learned that sobriety was incredibly uncomfortable. I could never confront myself or realize that I had become an alcoholic.”
“As a result of this rehabilitation program, I learned how the chaos of my own life could be resolved,” Matt recalled. “I learned about caring for other people. I didn’t have to be mean and hostile anymore. I could help people and I would win as a result of helping other people. I finally made my mom proud of me.”
