We don't have to hit rock bottom in order to choose recovery. Some of us will.
That's what it will take. From the outside, it looked like I was experiencing a lot of bottoms in my active addiction, including overdoses and suicide attempts.
Although my most difficult times spanned only a decade, the intensity of my dysfunction meant that my life was often blowing up around me. I didn't know when or how to stop; I didn't even know that I could.
Those physical bottoms were not what caused me to change. Those weren't the moments when I said, "I can't do this anymore.
I need to stop." One of the bottoms that finally caused me to change came many, many months after I had stopped using most of the substances that were destroying me. It came when I looked in the mirror and saw nothing but deadness in my eyes.