Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
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Voice of the Recovery Community Award
Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR) is the recipient of The Joel Hernandez Voice of the Recovery Community Award!
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Our Stories
Ben Bass
El Paso, TX
In February of 1987 I was getting ready to attend a sales meeting at work. This was nothing new; I had been attending sales meetings for a couple of years at this place. I had been having some good sales months and so I was pleased about the attention I was getting. On this morning, however, I woke up late. I didn’t have enough time to shower or even comb my hair, so I walked across the hundred feet or so from the door of my apartment to my job and went in. Nobody even snickered but I knew I had made a big mistake. The problem was, not only did I look like hell, I stank of booze.
So it wasn’t the first time. I thought the people at work couldn’t smell vodka but I was wrong. When you have had as much as I had the night before, it comes out of your pores. The next day the bosses called me in and offered me a good deal. Either get into treatment or get on down the road. Over the next several months I was in and out of treatment a couple of times. Then two men came around and offered me a chance to get into recovery. They invited me to a fellowship meeting when I got out of that place and I accepted with reservations. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face.
Over the next few months, I started to get an idea that there was more to life than the way I had been living it. I began to have real desire to stay clean and sober. Those guys at the meetings really did know what it was like and they could do it so why not me? Then when I had about 90 days my wife, who lived a thousand miles away, had some problems and wanted to know if I could take care of the kids for a while.
That lasted until they were grown and gone. There have been many things that I became grateful for over the years, including a relationship with a Higher Power that I learned about in the rooms of recovery. I am grateful for the chance to get into recovery in the first place and the life I have today. There has been no shortage of problems as time goes by, but today that’s a part of living life on life’s terms not mine. I have been able to work and ear a living, pay my taxes, contribute to society and give something back to my community by helping the next person that seeks recovery to find it, like I did.
What stops so many from finding recovery is the lack of people who are willing to stand up and say I am successful and I am in recovery. So many people see the alcoholic or addict as that hopelessly self-centered person full of resentments and anger or under the bridge. Recovery is possible and people in recovery are successful, respected members of society who have a great gift to give. We are more spiritually centered with renewed character and we make good employees and good neighbors.
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