This is when people are simply exhausted. They have broken all the promises made to self and to others and feel as if they can sink no lower as they have hit the bottom. But ever one has a different bottom, just as there are different levels of bottom, but the main thing is you know it when you hit it and it feels terrible.

• Until now, the person lives only for the moment and does not face reality
• Experiences collapse of support of others
• Experiences great preassure to change
• Is sick and tired of hassles and feels just cannot continue this way
• Is despairing and confused about where to turn to
• Asks honestly for help (perhaps several times)
• Begins to share personal feelings with a positive supportive person
• Ready for the onset of receovery from chemical dependency

Ambivalence (Sitting on the fence)

This is the "betwixt and between" stage when people sit on the fence about recovery. The past seems too painful to return to and the future too uncertain and challenging to feel confident about. People seriously consider a drug-free way of life and may begin to feel it out. This is the phase of self-doubt and self-examination.

• Resists the need to change lifestyle and is uncertain about what needs to be done
• Ackwoledges that drug-free lifestyle would be better but doubts personal strength and cannot imagine self as a drug free person
• Distrusts the non-addicted world
• Experiences great stress
• Has a very high craving whenever drugs are available
• Fantasises about ability to use drugs in future, cannot concieve of never getting high again
• Has few positive activities and friends and is uncomfortable with clean recovering people, tends to be idle and alone a lot
• Feels guilt and shame about the past
• Wants to think of self as recovering but is afraid
• Hides the past from others who are clean
• Has changeable moods, feelings and opinions
• Becomes absorbed with new values and ideals and is increasingly enthusiastic about being clean

Commitment

Now people begin to act on their ideas about recovery. Patterns of drug-free living emerge, and gradually things start to go right. Hard work healthy risk-taking indoing new things, new supportive relationships, new satisfactions, and new stability in the face of problems, all mark this period of major growth.

• Cuts of relationships with friends who are using for good
• Begins to get rid of symbols and paraphernelia of drug use
• Carefully develops new relationships
• Begins regular learning or work schedule (school or job)
• Develops new means of coping with stress or physical pain
• Develops techniques to deal with craving (which by this time is declining) and quickly uses support in case of relapse
• Helps others in a form of self-help
• Reveals personal past carefully to certain people and is very concious of being a recovering addict
• May be working very hard and has intense close relationship.
• Begins looking foward to clean social recreation and to enjoy drug-free pleasures

Integration

This phase describes recovering addicts in their new lifestyles. It is really just another name for the universal process of finding one's places in the world and it continues for a lifetime for every mature person.

• Resolves guilt and can reveal past as a personal fact without fear or shame
• Without forgetting the past, feels like a drug-free person and part of the recovering community
• Personal rules that prevent rug use applied nearly effortlessly
• Helping others becomes an essential part of life
• Openness to growth and self-improvement become second nature
• Lives each day accepting the challenges, responsibilities and satisfactions of work, love and respect for others
• Is no longer stimulated by old places, events, or people associated with prior drug use
• Social network is ever widening