It felt like I was going in at the deep end, but I didn't drink. I didn't particularly enjoy it either."Despite this Charlie stayed sober for a year and a half. After this, a friend asked him if he was still off the drink and Charlie joked that he only drank wine that cost at least pounds 100 a bottle. Unfortunately the friend had a case of the stuff, and that was that.
Charlie went back to Promis, this time for six weeks, and checked himself out - against everyone's advice. Again he chose not to participate in the clinic's aftercare meetings, though he does attend some AA meetings. For Charlie, who has a busy social life and a thriving wood business, the idea of becoming a professional ex-addict does not appeal.Dr. Robert Lefever, a former GP and the director of Promis, does not dispute the notion that recovering addicts seem to turn going to meetings into the new compulsion. "Therapy doesn't work for addiction because an addict can outwit anybody on a one-to-one basis.
You need a 12-step programme." Lefever says the residential part of the programme is like a kickstart, and that the aftercare is vital to sustain the recovery.Psychologist Oliver James, author of Britain On The Couch, questions the efficacy of the residential kickstart on its own for addiction problems. "They are too short term to make a fundamental change to a person's personality and way of behaving," he says.Though James thinks fellowship groups such as Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous are good for a couple of years into recovery, he thinks meetings need to be supplanted by therapy. "People are brainwashed into thinking it is a disease and that is OK in the beginning, but further down the line you need to get into the causes behind it."Clea Carryer, a counsellor at the Priory Altrincham, says that the whole residential programme is precisely about helping people to cope with the real world. "Very often problems are more acute than people realise because when they go back out into the world, they are not out of their minds on drugs, so they see how difficult it is," she says.Surely this would be an argument for making the Priory less "nice"? "But people coming into a programme like this need to feel safe in order to get on with therapy," says Carryer.Once outside the caring, sharing environment that is the Priory, do the non-famous fare any better than their higher profile counterparts? Yvonne, 30, who spent five months in residence at the Priory Altrincham for tranquilliser abuse, has taken a slightly more circuitous route back into real life. "After the five months in the Priory, which broke down into a three-month stay, then a relapse and then another stay, I went into extended care in a secondary care unit, where I lived for six months with other recovering addicts," she says.A self-confessed former wild child, Yvonne says she lacked the resources to cope with the real world, that she had never worked or run a home.
"The secondary care unit gave me life skills and a routine," she says.Yet Yvonne, like Charlie, describes feeling a mixture of exhilaration and fear when she first got out. "You have all this support, and then you are left to your own devices. I went to NA meetings and back to the Priory aftercare groups, but I have always been my own worst enemy."Despite all the good reasons for staying off the drink or the drugs, ex-addicts are often the first to admit that getting pissed and doing drugs can be fun, and they miss that. Clea Carryer says she has seen people come back who say that life didn't feel fun anymore "Recovery is hard work. When people complain of boredom we say to them that perhaps they are not doing something right."The other big problem is the sense that everybody is either treating you with kid gloves or waiting for you to slip up. But Carryer says that the people who do come to meetings often say it's not as bad as they thought it was going to be.
