Now the Real Work Begins
Recovery, Relationships, and the Patterns That Survive Sobriety
I spent years living with severe alcoholism while maintaining a career in law enforcement. Behind that professional identity were blackouts, secrecy, physical deterioration, and a progressively desperate struggle with alcohol. Eventually, I reached a point where medical detoxification and residential treatment became necessary. Within months of getting sober, my twelve-year law enforcement career collapsed amid public controversy. Rebuilding my life would take years.
Now the Real Work Begins is a vivid, ugly, and uncensored account of that experience and the psychological work that followed. It explores the shame, pride, fear, defensiveness, and deeply ingrained patterns that can survive even the most dramatic changes in someone's life.
Why integrated recovery?
AA helped me establish sobriety through community, honesty, and accountability. As recovery continued, I began questioning whether prayer and the language of character defects could fully explain or change deeply ingrained psychological patterns. I also reconsidered alcoholic identity and sweeping claims about relationships.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy gave me ways to examine shame and unconscious defenses. Trauma treatment, attachment work, and relationship therapy offered practical ways to approach intimacy, conflict, and repair. Buddhist practice helped me understand craving, aversion, and the pull toward control. Together, those influences shaped my understanding of integrated recovery—addressing the emotional, relational, and psychological work that continues long after drinking stops.
When knowing the language wasn't enough.
“Before treatment, I had already spent more than a year around AA. I knew the structure of meetings, had heard plenty of speaker stories, recognized the common phrases, and could repeat enough recovery language to sound like somebody who understood what people were talking about. None of that had stopped me from leaving meetings and buying vodka on the way home.”