On the 10th day at Ridgeview I experienced anger.  I remember the night before sitting in bed thinking about all of the money this place was charging and how we were expected to do those “chores”.  Wasn’t this place supposed to be club med at $1000 a day?  Why were the beds so hard that we slept in, and the pillows weren’t even soft?  I know now that these were psychological tricks for all of the patients.  Basically, they were trying to push our buttons to get us angry.  The next morning I had my regular visit with my main psychiatrist.  I told him that I had calculated how much money the treatment center was bringing in and it was ridiculous that our living conditions were so terrible.  I also mentioned the doctor’s salaries and apparently pissed him off because it turned into more of an argument than a session.  Soon after leaving his office I encountered Susan (the halfway house manager).  Susan told me that since I failed to make up my bed that morning that I needed to write a paper on “Why it was important to make up your bed in the morning”.  This was the final straw, I became absolutely furious.  I got so mad that I gathered up all of my things put them in my suitcases and walked straight out the front door.  The funny thing was on my way through the parking lot I encountered my second psychiatrist coming up the hill in his truck.  I chatted with him as if nothing special was going on (with my suitcases in hand) for whatever reason he thought I was just doing laundry or something.  After talking with him, I walked across the street went into the lobby of an elderly care facility and called a taxi.  I had the taxi driver drive me home to my garage apartment (behind my parents’ house).  I then convinced my parents that I could just continue going to AA meetings and save them a lot of money.  However; later that evening Dr. Sommers (the psychiatrist that I ran into in the parking lot) called and convinced my parents that my chances of recovery were slim if I did not return to the treatment center.

My parents were smart enough to listen to the doctor.  After staying home for two days (without relapsing) I returned to the treatment center.  I noticed that when I came back to the facility that Susan actually treated me better than she did before.  I think there were two reasons behind this, one I had finally gotten angry and two they knew what I did when I got angry (leave).  Getting angry (or pissed off as hell), I found was part of the recovery process.   So basically, the entire staff was intentionally doing things to try and aggravate me so that I would get angry.  The place was rigged from the chores down to the hard bed and pillows.  The anger did not come from the money being spent, or the paper that I was told to write, it was the direct result of all the grudges and resentments that I had been holding onto for years.  Most addicts have a lot of resentments that need to be addressed.  The 4th step in Alcoholics Anonymous helps to remove these resentments or grudges.  This step helps you to see where you were wrong and how you actively participated and caused some of these problems.  It also helps you to heal from bad events that were not your fault.

Now that I’d completed the anger part of the treatment center, what the heck was next?  I sure know that the cravings were killing me.  We were all completely obsessed with drugs and alcohol.  Almost every conversation ended up with drugs and alcohol being mentioned.   We had a conversation about what everyone would do if they were to relapse with $20,000.  People made fun of me because l stated that I’d buy a pound of weed.  They all thought I was nuts and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to buy coke.

My second roommate was a professional football player who drove a two door BMW coupe.  Jay said that there was so much coke in his car that he felt he could get a good bump off the powder between the seams in the leather seats.  Of course we had people who were relapsing which gave us something even more exciting to talk about.  There was a guy who disappeared for an entire weekend on a crack binge.  He and some others were sent off to a place in Texas.   Texas was not a good thing, I knew that for sure.  It was stated that:  “In Texas they didn’t just show you where the water was, but they also showed you how to drink it.”  Whatever the heck that meant, I do not know, but I did not want to end-up on that 3 to 6 month trip.  It was fun to laugh again, but it sucked craving for anything and everything.  I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and going nuts.  Thank god cigarettes were still cheap back then.
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This is my stopping point right now, but I will continue my story soon.