- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Clifton likes alcohol, particularly vodka. This love brought him to treatment a couple times. He admits he is an alcoholic and couldn’t stop by himself. He needed help and found it through residential inpatient treatment several years ago, so he has done treatment once before. He had checked himself into the facility and had a good experience at The Oaks in Memphis.
He stayed sober for about three years and relapsed and was back to drinking on and off for about a year. As he had enough of this constant striving and failure to make it in sobriety along with a relocation from New Orleans to Memphis, he decided to go back to the same facility and do the program once more. He wanted to reach that recovery life that he knew well again, but couldn’t get there by himself. He didn’t fail in recovery since he kept trying and knew when it was time to reach out for support again, since his solo attempts were unsuccessful.
Clifton did recreational drugs for the majority of his young adulthood. He was using marijuana, cocaine, and even methamphetamines, but was drugging socially– not on a daily schedule. Surprisingly, he didn’t drink much at all during those years. When he grew up and started to work in sales, he started to enjoy alcohol. Alcohol was legal, it was socially accepted and there was lots of it around in the profession he was working in. It started out to be a social drinking and snowballed quickly into nightly drinking. This turned into drinking most nights and then finally, into drinking around the clock.
Clifton used to have an active life, played tennis and was athletic, but as the alcohol took over, he quit all those activities in favor of booze. He is hoping to get back to this exercise and workout life soon again. Today, he has several weeks of sobriety. “I can hear birds singing today. I feel much better. My thought process is clearer. I play tennis again, and I tried to run the 6K race today, although I’m not a runner,” Clifton states about his new life in sobriety.
“You don’t know what you are missing until substances are out of your life. Once the addiction is removed, it gets better from day to day. You start to hear things, smell things, see things and feel things that you missed out on previously without knowing it,” states Clifton.