Getting Ready to Go

This section is about leaving. While we're at PEP, we start to feel like we're inside a kind of protective bubble — people call it the PEP bubble, or the treatment bubble. It's the safe space where we can say anything, out loud, without judgment and without fear of being looked down on or laughed at. For a lot of us it's the first place that ever felt like that.

Here's the thing I most want to pass along before you go: that same bubble exists on the outside — but nobody hands it to us. We have to go find it. Out here, it's whatever 12-step meeting becomes our home group. For me, I find it in the rooms of Gamblers Anonymous. For others it might be AA, or SAA, or Al-Anon, or somewhere else. The room matters less than the fact that we have one.

A lot of what we do at PEP is quietly preparing us for this — our relapse prevention plan chief among them. But the single most important thing I can say is this: the moment we get home, we have to start rebuilding the bubble. Don't wait for it to feel right. Don't leave that first meeting without a temporary sponsor.

I tell people that in this case we're looking for Mr. Right Now, not Mr. Right. We're not choosing a lifelong guide on night one — we're grabbing a hand to hold while we find our footing. Then we do what they suggest. Early on that usually means daily phone calls, and I mean daily. We follow the suggestions our sponsor gives us, even the ones that feel unnecessary. It took me a couple of trips back to treatment to understand how much that one relationship was carrying.

My sponsor says that treatment is about discovery and the rooms are about recovery. We're finishing one of the best, most intense discovery programs there is — and when we walk out, we'll have only scratched the surface of the recovery. I'll be straight with you the way I would want someone to be with me. If we don't follow these suggestions, our lives go back to the way they were. I know this to be correct because I had to experience this a couple of times before I was successful. Complacency is the biggest enemy in this fight. Not a dramatic relapse out of nowhere — just the slow drift of doing a little less, calling a little less, until the bubble we were supposed to rebuild never got built.

So we build it — starting day one.

The first days home

• Attend as many meetings as possible each week. Meetings make it.
• Get a temporary sponsor. Don't walk out of that first meeting without one — Mr. Right Now, not Mr. Right.
• Do what the sponsor suggests. Follow the early suggestions even when the point isn't clear yet.
• Get telephone numbers at the meeting, and use them. Call your sponsor often — daily if you can — and try to reach one other person every day too.
• Find a home group. Try out various meetings to find the one that seems to fit you best — this is usually the meeting where you'll find your permanent sponsor.
• Bring the relapse prevention plan home and use it. It was built for exactly this moment.

Remember that everything and anyone that we put ahead of our recovery, we will eventually lose.