Rachel Jones

About

The myth worth retiring is that you have to hit some cinematic bottom before treatment becomes available to you. Most people I work with never had a dramatic collapse. They had a slow, private erosion that nobody else could see. Addiction rarely announces itself; it negotiates, it makes reasonable-sounding deals, and it moves the line a little at a time. We look at those deals honestly and without theatre, and we go at whatever pace lets you keep telling the truth. I am not interested in your worst night as a spectacle, only in what it tells us about the job this habit has been doing for you. I grew up in a household where someone was quietly managing something, so this territory is not abstract to me. I do not flinch, and there is no threshold you have to cross to deserve an hour of attention. If you are wondering whether it is bad enough to warrant help, that question is usually its own answer.