Adele was at a new kind of rock bottom.
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She’d lost her job, she was penniless, her parents had become estranged from her, and her husband and kids were done with her.
Her addiction had taken everything that was good in her life.
“I was at the point of losing everything,” the former teacher from Bendigo recalled painfully.
“So I guess you make a choice: Do you want to keep going down that track and end up dead, which is where you would be, or do you want to pick your life back up and realise that there’s something better out there?
To people who’ve never suffered from addiction, that choice may seem like a no-brainer.
To an addict, it’s not that simple.
“You’re still hanging on to what you’ve always known,” Adele said.
“Walking into the unknown is really hard.”
Adele is one of more than 20 residents part-way through their 12-week stays at Shepparton drug and alcohol rehabilitation space The Cottage.
She is a voluntary resident who checked herself in, someone whom The Cottage folk refer to as “from the community”.
She is one of only four current residents from the community.
The balance has been bailed to the facility from prison, but all willingly, and all are actively engaging in the programs and learning how to use the tools they’re stocking their armoury with against their addictions.
Adele had tried rehab elsewhere for her alcohol addiction but said the 28-day program was not long enough to make effective changes.
“You can bluff your way through 28 days, so three months is good,” she said.
Having now surpassed that first rehab stint by two weeks at The Cottage, Adele said things felt different from her first experience at the other facility.
“You’ve got to settle and it takes really three weeks to settle to get through not being at home and get through not having your addiction,” Adele said.
“Here, you can’t do anything for the first four weeks. You’ve heard the boys (in the morning’s sharing circle) talk about how hard that is (not being able to leave for the first four weeks).
“That’s because you’ve got to sit with yourself. So as addicts, we’re not good at doing that, we tend to take our drug of choice so we don’t have to sit with our emotions and our feelings.
“We’re not very good at emotionally regulating, whereas here you don’t have a choice, you have to sit with that, so you will feel a myriad of emotion, particularly in that first week, then you start to develop the skills to start to deal with that a little at a time. If you’re honest with yourself.”
Her advice to others is, “Don’t give up until the magic happens.”
“I feel so different this time; really, really different. But I was at a different rock bottom,” she said.
Adele’s struggle is made a little trickier by being afflicted by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Professor Edward Ogden, affectionately referred to as ‘Dr Ed’ by The Cottage community, visits the facility every Friday.
He is an addiction specialist who also looks at the link between ADHD and addiction.
It means Adele’s medication is still well managed and she can still easily access counselling for her ADHD while she rehabilitates from her addiction.
Testament to her efforts to get well, Adele also attends six Alcoholics Anonymous sessions each week, on top of daily programs at The Cottage.
“It’s hard work, you’ve got to be willing to do it and committed to doing it,” she said.
“I think I’ll always be an alcoholic. But do I call myself a recovering alcoholic? Yeah, I do now, I certainly feel like I’m recovering, it’s that feeling, are you recovering? Yes, I am.
“I’m certainly more well than I was. The first two weeks I was here, I just felt locked in my addiction, I was definitely, just, an alcoholic.
“I don’t think you’ll ever find someone who calls themselves recovered because I don’t think you’re ever recovered.
“One drink or one hit and you’re gone.”
Adele is determined not to have that drink upon her re-emergence.
She is feeling positive about her future; about mending her relationship with her husband, 20-year-old twins and 11-year-old; about finding a higher purpose and a meaningful career change.
“I’m looking forward to limitless possibility, I don’t know what that looks like,” she said.
“I think here’s a stepping stone to something, I think meeting all the boys from jail is a stepping stone to something. I think it’s certainly changed my outlook on addiction and crime and on the jail system.
“I’ve got a whole different perspective on a lot of things that I wouldn’t have gotten any other way.”
Viewing an addiction as a blessing in disguise might be a bit of a stretch, but as with the yin and yang of life, all things have a silver lining.
After her struggle to find support for her own children throughout the trauma her addiction caused, Adele is considering a career in AOD (alcohol and other drugs) counselling, focusing particularly on the children of addicts.
Like the staff and volunteers at The Cottage who have all battled their own addictions and are now helping others through theirs, it’s evident that often people who make the biggest difference in the lives of others are those who’ve lived the experiences themselves.
∎ For more information on The Cottage, visit thecottage.org.au
∎ If you’re struggling with addiction, call DirectLine 24 hours a day, seven days a week on 1800 888 236
Senior journalist