The challenging thing about recovery is that there is no universal cheat code that unlocks the secret of making it work. Recovery, and what that means—looks, sounds, and feels different for everyone. Inevitably, the addict finds their way to it in some shape or form, and we make it work for us the best we can, learning from others along the way. This is also what makes it frustrating when things don’t go according to plan. When we’ve been putting in the work. Doing our best. We see others doing well (or so it seems), and we want to know the secret—why isn’t it working for us? What are we doing wrong? Can anyone truly tell us what the answer is? Joe V.S.. is all too familiar with this narrative, but he’s piecing it together his own way and figuring it all out day by day. Which, in the end, is all any of us can really ever do anyway.
For Joe, one of the hardest parts of recovery is that he does not yet fully know who “Joe” is without drugs and alcohol. “The past fifteen years have just been not me. All I’ve known is using drugs and alcohol. Just lying and cheating. I haven’t really gotten to explore what I like.” That is the strange cruelty of long-term addiction: by the time someone is finally ready to recover, they are not only trying to stop using—they are also trying to meet themselves for the first time. For Joe, sobriety is not simply about abstinence. It is about trying to understand what is left when the chemicals are no longer riding shotgun, when the chaos quiets down, and when he is finally left alone with himself.
Joe was adopted by a loving family in Long Island—a home that was loving, but deeply shaped by trauma. When he was five years old, his mother was in a devastating car accident. A truck rear-ended her car from behind and crushed it. She was in a coma, forgot how to walk, talk, and function normally, and Joe’s life changed overnight. His father, a lawyer with a relentless work ethic, had to close down his practice to care for her. His older brother was already fourteen at the time, old enough to process things differently. Joe was five. “For me, it was everything.” He recalls the atmosphere at home becoming one where his mother’s needs understandably came first. He does not say this with blame. In fact, he speaks about both of his parents with a great deal of love and loyalty. But the impact is clear. “As a five/six-year-old, usually it’s the kids who come first. It became a lot of putting my mom first instead of me.”
That experience left something lasting in him. Even now, Joe describes being afraid to interrupt his father if he was busy, and admits to carrying a constant sense that whatever he did was not good enough. “I just put myself down constantly.” He watched his older brother—driven, focused, successful, someone who seemed to know exactly what he wanted from a young age—and felt a kind of painful envy. His brother became a pilot, then built a successful private aviation company, seemingly untouched by the same internal chaos Joe has wrestled with for years. Joe, by contrast, drifted.
By fourteen, alcohol had entered the picture. By sixteen, it had become something else entirely. Joe was no longer just partying with friends; he was drinking alone to numb, slowly becoming aware that something was not right. The first unmistakable signal came when, blackout drunk at sixteen, he shoved his mother against a wall and threatened to kill himself. That landed him in the psych ward for the first time. “That’s when I was like, ‘Fuck, this is not normal. Sixteen-year-olds are not going to the psych ward on the weekends.’”
But self-awareness did not stop the self-spiral. Joe graduated high school and went to college only to spend an entire year partying without earning a single credit. He came home, enrolled in community college, kept drinking, added Xanax and cocaine, and by nineteen got his first DUI. To avoid charges, he went to rehab. Then another. Then another. And another. That was the beginning of what became a revolving door of treatment centers, sober houses, detoxes, relapses, and start-overs. “I’ve been in and out of treatment since I was nineteen. I’ve been to twelve rehabs.” The longest sobriety Joe has ever had is eight months.
A lot of the relapses came attached to relationships. One of which led him to Florida. She left him after two weeks to go back to an ex-boyfriend, and Joe found himself untethered in a state where he had no real community besides his parents, who had moved there previously. The pattern repeated there too: assistant manager jobs, sober houses, weed, alcohol, more rehabs, women, collapses, and start-overs. At one point, Joe was living out of his car for almost a year, doing Instacart for gas money, smoking meth, sleeping with prostitutes, and parking near his parents’ gated community just so he would not get caught passed out somewhere else. Eventually, another DUI. Another arrest. Another bottom.
What makes Joe’s story especially painful is not simply the using—it is the sense that through all of it, he has remained unsure what exactly he was trying to fix. He knows there is pain. He knows there is depression, anxiety, shame, and a lifetime of self-rejection. But unlike others who can point clearly to one event or one wound, Joe often feels like he is digging through fog. “I don’t know what I’m trying to fix. I don’t know exactly what it is in my childhood.” He remembers bits and pieces, but not much before eighteen or nineteen. Whether that is trauma, drugs, or both, he does not know. Joe only knows that he has been existing more than living. “I don’t know what it’s like to be peaceful.”
That uncertainty is part of what brought him to Beit T’Shuvah. A sober friend from Long Island, Max Truen, whom he has known since childhood, reappeared in his life while Joe was in Florida. Max told Joe about this place and, at first, Joe brushed it off. Later, after another relapse and another collapse, the Max told him directly, “I think you should go to LA.” Joe had nothing left to lose. Max bought him the plane ticket, arranged the Uber from the airport, and sent him packages once he arrived. Joe landed at Beit T’Shuvah on December 10th.
For Joe, what has made BTS different is not some magic formula. In fact, what he seems to appreciate most is that there is no single formula here. There is space. There is time. There is depth. “They give you enough rope to hang yourself here. These other rehabs, dude, you go in for thirty, sixty, ninety days—it’s not enough.” Here, for the first time, he has been given the chance to stay long enough to actually find his bearings. “Sometimes I feel like I’m observing myself outside myself for the first time. I’m seeing my character defects and my flaws and what I do.”
Joe has thrown himself into the process in the way he knows how: fully. He talks about his therapist with deep appreciation. Their sessions go in directions he does not expect and pull things out of him he has never really thought about. He appreciates the range of groups here, from adoption group to sex and love, and how BTS does not pretend every person fits neatly into one story. He has also found structure in service—working house monitor shifts, learning the camera system for Shabbat, exploring video editing, and interning with Jesse. He has even started looking into Santa Monica College, where he could finish the twelve credits he still needs for his associate’s degree in liberal arts. Joe is slowly learning that purpose may not arrive as one giant revelation. It may come as the accumulation of small honest interests, followed consistently.
There is still fear. A lot of it. He is honest about that. Joe’s four months sober now, and while others tell him he is doing well, he still hears the nagging voice in the back of his head asking ‘when the other shoe will drop’. He worries about leaving, relapsing, returning to Florida, and being pulled back into the same dead-end loops. Joe wants to be there for his parents—knowing that he cannot truly be there for them unless he is sober. “How can I help my parents if I’m not able to help myself?”
Joe is also beginning to understand something else: that recovery may require him to forgive himself in a way he never has before. He carries deep regret—for the cars he totaled, the jobs he lost, the girls he used, the years he burned through, and the way his parents have had to watch him suffer. “I’m my own worst enemy.” For years, Joe lived in the wreckage of the past and then used over it, only creating more wreckage. Here, he is finally beginning to see that shame has not helped him. It has only kept him frozen.
That, perhaps, is where Joe’s spotlight really sits—not in some perfect redemption arc, but in the difficult, uncertain space of honest momentum. He does not claim to have cracked the code. In fact, his whole story resists that kind of tidy ending. He’s still scared. Still figuring out what Joe likes. Still trying to understand spirituality after years of anger toward God over what happened to his mother. Still trying to decide whether staying in California is the healthiest move, even if it means being far from his parents. Still learning that progress might look less like certainty and more like willingness.
For the first time in a long time, it seems like “the real Joe” interests him. And maybe that is enough for now. Not the cheat code. Not the grand answer. Just the willingness to persevere. He’s got a good heart, he’s been doing the work for some time. Day by day, he is piecing together recovery. And what that looks like for him? No one will ever be able to give Joe that answer. But perhaps this time, he’s finally asking the right questions.