#78: When Willingness Isn’t Neat: The Messy Truth About Going to Rehab

In this episode of the Unbreakable Boundaries podcast, I talk openly about what it looked like when I was actually willing to go to rehab—and why that willingness did not make things neat, calm, or straightforward. My second time in treatment was very different from my first. The first time, I was more cornered than committed. The second time, I was desperate and broken enough to try again. I did not know if I wanted to live, much less if I could stay clean. I remember leaving for rehab terrified, uncertain if I was capable of doing what recovery would ask of me. At the same time, there was real relief in knowing I was going somewhere safe, away from outside chaos, where I could breathe and try to clear my head. I was not happy about my life, but I was grateful for a chance to survive.

Early on, a major conflict arose between my mom and me. I was in a peer-run rehab, run by addicts for addicts, with no formal clinical or medical staff. My mom wanted me to transfer to a different program with more professional support and, just as importantly, to get me away from my then-husband and the environment she believed was unhealthy. From her perspective, my refusal to move looked like a red flag. From my perspective, it was the first real “no” I had ever said to her and a critical step toward taking ownership of my own life. I was not trying to hang on to a bad situation; I was trying to stop running. I felt a deep need to face the mess I had created instead of being “rescued” into a fresh start. I could not fully explain that at the time, but in hindsight I see it as one of the best decisions I made. What looked like resistance was actually a green flag rooted in responsibility.

That experience taught me how hard it is to read red flags and green flags in early treatment. A behavior that looks defiant can be a healthy boundary. Something that looks cooperative can be driven by avoidance or manipulation. No one knows how things will turn out, and that uncertainty makes this period emotionally intense for everyone. Inside, I was incredibly fragile. My brain felt damaged from the drugs. I struggled to form clear sentences. Every little thing could trigger tears, anger, or anxiety. I walked around with constant tension and burned off energy by doing chores like sweeping the facility over and over. My anger was not really at anyone else; it was bound up in facing who I had become and the destruction my addiction had caused.

This is the emotional reality for many people in rehab. Once the drugs are gone, you are forced to confront the person you became in addiction, the choices you made, and the lifestyle you built around using. The lifestyle itself is addictive, and there is real grief in letting it go, even when you want recovery. If you truly want to stay clean, rehab is often scarier, not easier, because you know that when you leave, you will have to build a life you do not know how to live and become a person you do not yet know how to be—without the substance that has helped you cope for so long.

The first six months of recovery are almost always messy. Mood swings can be extreme. Many of us look and feel “bipolar,” and sometimes we are labeled that way when, in reality, our brains and emotions are just recalibrating. Our emotional growth is often stunted at the age when we started using heavily, so families see flashes of adult insight next to reactions that look like a 10-year-old’s. Both can exist at the same time. This is one of the reasons I emphasize that families need their own support. In this season, what you think is a red flag might actually be a green flag in disguise, and what looks positive might be a warning sign when you see the full context. No one can predict the future, but you can learn how to interpret what you are seeing and how to respond in ways that are supportive without rescuing or enabling.

If you are walking through this with someone you love, you do not have to guess alone. At TheRecoveringFamily.org, you can find my contact information and schedule time to talk through what you are seeing, what worries you, and where you feel stuck in sorting out red flags and green flags. In the next series, I will be focusing on the transition from treatment into sober living: whether sober living is the right next step, whether returning home makes sense, and how to choose the environment that best supports long-term recovery. My core message is this: willingness to go to treatment is a powerful and hopeful sign, but it does not erase the chaos of early recovery. Treatment is not a finish line; it is the beginning of learning how to live and grow up without substances—for the person in recovery and for the family alongside them.

Transcript

Jen: 0:00

Welcome back to the Unbreakable Boundaries podcast with your host, myself, Jennifer Maneely. Now this is going to be the episode where we talk about what does it look like when someone is willing to go to rehab and what is their experience like in that. Now the last episode, remember, we talked about what it looks like when someone's not willing to go to rehab and what their experience is. I have been doing some thinking about how I wanted to go about this episode, and I just decided that the easiest way to talk about it really was through my experience. What was it like for me when I was willing to go to rehab, when I was so desperate, and what the experience was like at that point, because I have both sides of the equation, right? The first time I went to rehab, it wasn't that I was unwilling, I just, I was just more backed into a corner than just really willing to want to go there, so the second time that I went into rehab was a very different experience for me in a lot of different ways, so I just figured I would come about this episode, through that, now I remember the day that I left to go to rehab. I was scared shitless, to be honest with you. I didn't know if I really wanted to be clean, but I was desperate enough to kind of just maybe give it another shot, and it wasn't that I didn't know if I wanted to be clean or not. It was more like I didn't know if I wanted to be alive or not. I didn't know if I was capable of being clean. I didn't know if I was ready to do what it takes, and it, it wasn't the, that I was unwilling, it was just literally I did not know, but I was also pretty defeated and broken at that point, so I was actually excited, is maybe not the right word, but we'll call it excited, for a lack of a better term, one, because I was not having to deal with anything on the outside, I was going to be put into a safe place, and I could just take some breathing room, just get my head a little bit more squared on, and that's what I did, and so when I was there, I, there was, I just remember that I wasn't particularly happy about life, I was happy to be there, was grateful to be there, I was for the first time kind of being like, oh my gosh, I might actually survive this, and so in that regards, I was, I was ready. Now, there was a situation, and this is, you know, unique to my situation, but it is something that influenced me, and in what my journey was. But I remember, you know, talking with my mom, and because this was the second time, and there was just a lot going on. My mom actually wanted me to go to a different rehab than the one that I was in. The one that I was in was, it was a, it was a rehab that was run by addicts for addicts, so there was not like any sort of therapy or nursing staff or any of those kinds of things, and I think my mom wanted me to go somewhere different, and and I think a big motivation, which I would have to re-talk to her and reconfirm this, but I think a big motivation for her was also it would have been a good way to get me out of the situation that I was in, get me out of, because I, you know, I was married at the time, and she wasn't a particular fan of my, what is now my ex-husband, but she wasn't a particular fan of him for obvious reasons, and so I think she thought that it was going to be a good way to get me out and also get me a good, good level of care, a higher level of care that she thought maybe I needed, and I was fairly resistant against that idea, to her that was some red flags with me being resistant, plus it was one of the first times I think I ever remember saying no to her. So we got into it a little bit. My motivation for staying was a little bit differently, one, because I was pretty intertwined into everything. It wasn't that I felt like. Like you know, I had to stay, and I wanted to stay in a bad situation, or anything. I was looking at it more like I can't keep running away from my problems, and I really feel like I needed to start facing things, and I knew that was my motivation at the time, but it was also really hard to articulate, especially in such a way that made sense to anybody, like I couldn't really articulate what was going on and what my motivation was, but I just knew deep down that for me I thought it was really important that I just stay and see things through and clean up my mess, and believe me, shit was messy, and I bring up that really important piece of all of this to say that sometimes the red flags and the green flags aren't always very clear to me, and the outcome was one of the best decisions that I think that I made for myself because of my motivation of being willing to take responsibility to stick and stay to see things through to not allow my mom anymore to come in and take me out of the problem and try to get me to just start over clean fresh because that's that's kind of what it was to me at the time, is like, oh, you know, here's Mom coming in to swoop, swoop me out, and, and, and I didn't want to do that for someone else, though, depending on what the motivation was, that very thing could have been a red flag, so the green flags and red flags in this period of time, it's pretty hard to decipher, because we don't always know how things are going to play out. Now, I will say, during this time period, as well, I was also very emotional, basket case. I'm not sure that anybody really believed at that time, including myself, if I was going to make it or not. I mean, my brain was so far gone from all the drugs that I was having a hard time forming complete sentences. I was a mess, really. Every little thing would kind of trigger me into some sort of emotions. I was, I was pretty upset and angry all the time, but not at any particular person, like I wasn't trying to take my anger out on other people, but deep inside I just felt like I had this tension inside that just wouldn't go away, and in the rehab that I was in, we had to do chores and stuff, and sometimes I would just go around the whole facility just sweeping like crazy, just trying to burn some of the excess energy, because I had a hard time sitting still. It was hard for me to, to really reflect on anything. I think that's maybe part of the reason why I was so angry, is the best word I can come up with on that. I just couldn't process at that time to face the level of destruction that I had caused in my life and the person that I had become was really hard to to embrace at that moment and that is something that a lot of people are struggling with when they are in rehab is all of a sudden having you know taking the drugs away and having to actually face the person that we had become, and it's really kind of unrecognizable, even for us, is the things that we had to do to stay high, it's a pretty traumatic experience for everyone involved, and now we're having to go through this really hard period of time without drugs, and it doesn't feel very good, so every little thing is going to kind of upset us, to trigger us. We don't know how to live life. We're still trying to figure out how to let go of even some of the lifestyle stuff, because the lifestyle is very addicting as well. And I know that sounds very counterintuitive, but there's a big grieving process that happens especially when we're in rehab and it's, it's really, really hard when it's actually something that we want to do and we want to stay clean because it's a very scary period of our life because. Is I don't think anybody knows if they're gonna actually stay clean or not. When someone doesn't want to be in rehab, it's almost a little bit easier to suck it up and do what you got to do to get out of there, because you know you're going to go back to the familiar ground, you know you're gonna go back to doing what you want to do when you get out of there, when you're able to escape, and you start trying to figure out, like, you're gonna learn how to hide it a little bit better, so people don't try to put you back there, right? But when you want to be there, it's almost scarier, because that means that when you leave out of there you're going to have to deal with a whole new life, a life that you don't know how to live, and be a person that you don't know how to be. It's terrifying, and you're having to do all of this without the very thing that's helped you cope with life for this long, and it seems impossible. I say this, and I share, you know, kind of my story, and some of the challenges that we face while we're in rehab, because it's. I want to reiterate, and acknowledge that either way you go, this time period is a little messy for everybody. This isn't just a, we go to rehab, and then we are magically fixed and cured, and everything is okay. And now we can just pick up where we left off, and all of the dreams that we put down, we can just pick them right back up and move on with our lives. It can't be like that. The first six months of recovery, and I know we're talking about rehab, but I just want to kind of say this. The first six months of recovery, I think we're all a little bipolar. We got our big ups, we got our big downs. When we go to the doctor, we describe what we're feeling. I think we're all diagnosed bipolar, but really, all it is is early recovery. I'm not saying that there aren't some people that legitimately do have bipolar. I'm just saying that if things seem a little messy for a little while, that is a perfectly normal thing. It should be a little messy for a little while, to be honest with you. They are gonna still act sometimes like a little 10 year old kid, because their executive functioning is, we almost have to go back to where our emotional growth got stunted, and then learn how to grow up from that point in rehab. Yes, you're, you might see glimpses of them getting better, and a lot of what you're also going to see is glimpses of their 10 year old self continuing to stay present, because they haven't learned how to be a grown up yet. Now, because either way you look at it, whether they want to be there, whether they don't want to be there. Either way, this time period is really messy, and this is why it is extremely important that you, as a family member, get help for themselves as well, because what sometimes red flags are to some people are actually green flags, and what green flags are to you may actually be red flags, and it can be very confusing, and we don't know exactly what's going to happen, right? Nobody does, but there are some predictors, and it's hard to kind of establish what those predictors are without having more context, but at the end of the day, nobody knows what the future is going to hold. We can't be fortune tellers, so this is where it's good to have your own work for yourself to know how you can handle certain situations, and what you need to be looking out for, and then how can you get help for yourself to be confident in handling whatever's getting ready to happen that we don't even know about yet. I highly encourage you to just go check out my website at The Recovering family.org There is my phone number on there, as well as you can just schedule an appointment, and we can get going, and you can just talk about what you're seeing. And how maybe I can help fill in some of the gaps. What are red flags? What are green flags? And what you can do to support them and help them, especially when they get out of treatment, which is going to be what our next series really is, is that transition from treatment into living a sober lifestyle, answering some of those complicated questions. Is a sober living the best choice? Is coming back to live with you the best choice? What's the best choice for them, and why is that important? That transition period is really important. So, we're going to dive into that on our next series. Anyway, I hope this has been helpful, and I hope to hear from you soon. Bye.