For the first nineteen years of Dean’s life, there weren’t even 365 single days when his father woke up and went to bed sober. Knowing the effects of his father’s drinking on his mother and the family, Dean swore that he would never be like him. When his teenage friends went out drinking, Dean couldn’t see the appeal. He thought, “They must not know what it’s like to live with it every night.”

Dean found it impossible to do well in school. After staying up at night talking his mother out of killing herself and watching his parents rage at each other, he could not concentrate. He had low self-esteem and dropped out of school to go to work in construction.

When Dean was nineteen he married his girlfriend right after her high school graduation. Finally he felt like an adult and began to enjoy parties with other couples. He never meant to lose control; now he knows the difference between his drinking and the other partygoers’. They could stop. He couldn’t.

He recalls stopping after work at the ice house, knowing that he should be home in two hours with his wife and children. He never meant to have more than two beers, but night after night he’d come home after midnight. He was unreliable as a husband and a parent.

Dean moved on to experiment with other drugs: marijuana, crystal meth, cocaine and finally, prescription diet pills. He progressed to intravenous use and contracted hepatitis.

By the time he turned 40, Dean’s drug abuse began to extract a huge physical toll. He stayed high at work. He seldom slept. Once he stayed awake five days. Not only did he not sleep, he would not eat. In 1983, his marriage seemed over, but in one last attempt to save it, his wife asked him to try the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. PDAP referred him to a doctor who admitted him to a locked ward in a hospital. He had hit his bottom. During the hospital stay, he met his sponsor, Mark, and he began working the AA program. At his discharge, Mark asked him, “Where are you going to live, Dean?”

Dean considered the question and replied, “Well, I guess I’ll just go home and live with mom and dad.” At forty years old, a father and a grandfather, Dean wanted to go home to live with his parents.

Mark looked at him and said, “Why don’t you go live at The Men’s Center, Dean? There, you’ll be a boy among men.”

Dean decided to take Mark’s advice. Slowly he grew to understand what Mark had meant. Dean remembers how self-righteous he was and how he blamed others when in fact he had violated his own values and neglected his family. At The Men’s Center, he finally took responsibility for his past behavior and for working his own program.

After Dean moved out of The Men’s Center, he became an independent contractor, learning how to be a businessman as well as a craftsman. He met his wife in 1987 and their partnership has kept them both strong and productive.

Dean remains involved in The Men’s Center and has served on the Board and led meetings. He sponsors recovering alcoholics. He doesn’t think he has anything special to offer, but he will never turn anyone down, even if 100 people ask him in the next 100 days.

Dean recalls living at The Men’s Center only a few days when a man asked him to be his sponsor. He called Mark to say, “Someone wants me to be his sponsor. What should I do?”

Mark’s reply came as a question. “How many days have you been sober?”

“Thirty days,” Dean answered.

“Then you can show him how to get to thirty days.”

Although our stories are true, names and photos have been changed to preserve anonymity.