Live the Life of Your Dreams Now . . .
Because Having Goals and Accomplishing
Those Goals Are Two Different Things.
Mind is the Method, Your's is the Power!
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| Dean's Very Brief Rehab Story |
Always due to my legal problems, I went to three rehabs before I found my personal answers at a high end Malibu Dual Diagnosis Treatment Center for Drug & Alcohol Addiction Rehabilitation and Co-Occurring Disorders.
Going to rehab in Malibu was the best thing that ever happened to me. However it took two decades of half hearted attempts at recovery to finally get me to a place where my life literally began.
Here is how my rehab career began in my early twenties and ended in my forties:
When my video production career was in the final stages of crashing I used my health insurance for six weeks at the long defunct HealthWest’s Pasadena Community Hospital in 1982. I’m sure it was a fine program but I was still in my twenties and just not ready.
After I made my first short film and had no insurance I went to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (Acton Rehabilitation Center). I was twenty-three years old and it was the first time in my life I was clean and sober for three whole months. The day I got out I went to the dentist and went back out on codeine.
I managed to stay out of serious legal trouble, (although my disease got progressively worse), for a decade or so, and therefore only dabbled in AA and did not go to treatment again until after I got married.
During my marriage I worked for big insurance companies and mostly went to a lot of counseling and therapy. I also went to Kaiser Permanente’s Chemical Dependency Program both outpatient and inpatient at their College Street Mental Hospital in Chinatown. You had to be pretty fucked up for Kaiser to commit the resources to treat you inpatient for alcoholism in the 1990’s and I was that guy. Big mistake on my part because I coerced Kaiser into putting me on psychotropic drug therapy, thinking that I could take a short cut to sobriety. Doctor dope is still dope and Klonopin, Lexapro and all other mood altering substances is not the answer for any addict. You’re better of smoking weed until you are ready for reality. You can come off of weed in a week. It took me years to fully detox from prescribed psychiatric medications.
Then in a cosmic act of divine intervention my life painfully and brilliantly crashed all around me creating the proverbial “bottom” which was necessary for a hard head like me to wake up and smell the prospect of life in the California prison system. In one six month period I was going to jail every few months for doing stupid drunken things, my wife left me and I had to sell the marital residence, I got fired from my job, my mother died of cancer and my family was done with my bad acting. And so I did the only intelligent thing I could think of. I started using methamphetamine to fix up the house and sell it, and close up my indoor marijuana cultivation operation for one last big score. I ended up with lots of cash, a broken life, and a special prosecutor assigned to put me away as a career criminal.
Everybody was telling me to go to rehab. My friends in the legal profession said, “You have lots of money, go get help.” My father said, “Go to rehab.” I said no, no, no, I’ll just go to AA and drive to the civil war battlefield at Antietam, MD in my RV. My attorney said, “No, you have to go to rehab, if even just outpatient to give me something to work with here.” It was the damn criminal defense lawyer that convinced me.
So, I found a sober living in Malibu and they eventually had to come and pick me up at my father’s house. The rehab director and his marketing person upsold me to inpatient treatment. I wrote a personal check for $1,675 for thirty days inpatient and thirty days sober living, and ended up staying for a year and a half! I met my first sober coach. I took myself off psych meds cold turkey (Do NOT even think about trying this, I am a hard core animal, you are not, you could die doing this.) My life changed. Sober living played a big part in all of this. I just wanted to get the logistics down of how I got to the greatest rehab in the world, the one that worked for me. I will give you the details of how I changed and how that qualifies me to coach you to change throughout this website.
