I believed that about myself. I couldn’t develop my own positive image and was constantly looking to borrow other people’s images of myself, to try and make their approval my own. That never really works.

This deep inner dissatisfaction caught up with me after a while. It started small — I cut class, went off campus, and before long, I was asked to leave. In a short period of time, I yo-yoed from one yeshivah to another, wandering around, losing the last shreds of my self-esteem. At 19, the last yeshivah showed me their door.

I ended up in a pool hall, blinking under strobe lights and the lure of the green table. I got to know the regulars and threw myself into the game with the intensity of a yeshivah bochur. I read books on pool, schooled myself in tactics and moves, and got good at it. But there was more: In the back of the pool hall was a poker room.

But I knew there was a better world beyond that poorly-lit, smoke-filled room, and at that point I was still attempting to be part of it. In 2001, I signed up to the Agudath Israel COPE Institute for Business — a vocational place that called itself “the school that’s not a school.” It was located at 225 Broadway in Manhattan, and I turned up on the first day holding my hope in my palm. On the second day, I went to the big Staples on the corner of Broadway and Vesey to get some notepaper for school. The sky was blue and clear when I walked in on that September day.

When I walked out of the store, the sky had gone dark. I saw one of the Twin Towers ablaze — the first plane had hit. In front of my eyes, I saw ten, twelve people jump. Behind me surged people covered in soot, running — all of us — for our lives.

COPE reopened a few weeks later, and I made my way through the war zone of lower Manhattan, the phantom buildings, the rubble everywhere. I sat in class and started to feel nauseous and dizzy. I left. It was midday, and I didn’t know what to do. I went to watch a movie and  just sat there in the back of the room sobbing through the movie, all that trauma congealed inside me for two weeks just bleeding out.

That was it with COPE. I’d had one chance and left.

I buried myself in the action and analytics of poker, again with yeshivah-like intensity, and got very good at it. I made real money. Eventually, I moved to Brooklyn to be closer to the illegal underground games. Poker was my life. I had nothing else. I was nominally frum at this time. I never didn’t believe in Hashem, but I was very far from a Torah-true Jew.

During this dark period, I wasn’t interested in dating or marriage. It wasn’t just the commitment thing, because actually, I was desperately looking for a depth of connection. It was more an abysmal reflection of my self-image: If you’re interested in me, if you think I’m any good, there must be something seriously wrong with you.

Inevitably, somebody offered me weed. I liked it, I liked what it did to me. Except that my poker results took a nosedive. Apparently, you don’t make optimal decisions when you’re high, and I wasn’t making real money anymore.

In the deepest pits, Hashem is there. And He’ll send you something to wake you up, to reach out. He’ll give you an opportunity for change even if it doesn’t look like one. A car accident, jail for the night — I’d seen it happen to others. To me He gave a different sort of opportunity — a shining, beautiful chance that I didn’t deserve. A friend of a friend suggested I meet a certain girl. By dumb luck she was a genuine good thing. She saw through me, past the pain, to my personality, to my smarts. Finding her was a pure neis. We got married.

I quit smoking weed, I quit gambling. Life was good for a while. But inexorably it couldn’t last. I was an addict, and even if I was able to keep myself “dry” for a bit, I was what they call a “dry drunk.” I fell back into gambling, first. I remember that first game after I’d won $270. I can’t forget that number. I drove home, and somehow I knew those $270 would cost me dearly.

But I still did it. With addiction, it’s like you’re taken over and the seichel part of you has no say. Once you start again, you’re off to the races — you’re going to fall, again.

I had to be sneaky about attending poker games, and then I went behind my wife’s back and started smoking weed again. I’d lie to her, I’d make excuses. Denial is deep. The biggest tragedy of addiction is not those who’ve died — the tragedy is in the leibedige toit. I was like the living dead — here, but not here. Not for myself, nor for others. And in all the lying, the confusion, and the fear, my wife was living with a ghost of a person.

We had a couple of kids, beautiful, G-d-given gifts, and to this day I can’t look at pictures of the kids from that time. I just wasn’t there for them, and it kills me to see those pictures: tiny, sweet, vulnerable children who had no dad to speak of. Not to mention my wife — she was a living almanah.

Around that time, an old rosh yeshivah of mine who’d kept tabs on me tried to help me and took me to see an addictions specialist. I don’t remember the conversation but I recall one thing the rosh yeshivah told him: “I love Eli, but he’s dead right now.”

Addiction is a disease, and I was in the throes of it when someone offered me opiates. So for me, at least, weed was definitely a gateway drug. Soon enough I was taking levels that would kill an ordinary person.

At one stage, my dealer couldn’t get hold of the stuff, so without getting into details, I escalated to other, even more toxic, substances. Things came to a head one Shabbos, and an ambulance came to take me to the hospital to detox. Rehab came next. It was brutal. I was shut away in L.A., far from my family, for five months. Even if I’d sort of checked-out emotionally for years, the physical distance was much worse — the loneliness, the agony of facing everything myself. When you’re doing drugs, you shut your emotions down. In detox and early recovery, your emotions come back — and that remorse, guilt, and pain is all so overwhelming.

But I had so much to heal for, and I set about trying to heal. I got a recovery sponsor and was fastidious about recovery work — it was that same pressure to achieve that I’d had as a young bochur. I was trying to “do” something, whereas recovery is something that has to happen to you, something that you have to allow to happen.

Still, rehab had put a wall between me and the substances I was using, and it had been an intense detox. I came home. I started attending local meetings and “doing” the 12 Steps. In reality though, I wasn’t even getting to the first one — the admission and surrender that I am an addict and I am powerless. I said it time and again, but I didn’t internalize it. I processed it in my head, but never in my heart. And as long as I didn’t, I thought I could have one, just one, fix. But one led to another one and another, and before I knew it, I was back on the boat, hiding from my wife, doing crazy things to get high.

I kept the facade up for a whole year. I was supposed to go back to L.A. for a reunion on the anniversary of my rehab. I flew over, my heart in my shoes, thinking maybe I could keep up the show just for the reunion weekend. But it was futile. My wife got one of the worst phone calls of her life: We’re sorry, he’s in a bad place, this is not an anniversary weekend, this is another admission.

I was shell-shocked to find myself in rehab again, crushed beyond words. All I wanted to do was curl up and die. My wife called and yelled at me to do what I had do. I buckled down and did the work, staying for a few months. When I came home again, I was sober — for the meantime.

The stats were against me: Less than 10 percent of addicts keep clean through their first year after rehab.

Rehab is a bubble, it’s like adult day-care. Real life doesn’t happen there, and the integration period back to the “outside” is excruciating: When you come back, there’s the normal day-to-day to readjust to — often with exacerbated social anxiety — and there are other things too, like dealing with legal stuff from things that happened before or trying to find a job after a long period of being out of work. Jobs at the bottom of the totem pole are easiest to find, but it’s also there — in café kitchens or delivery depots — that drug access and use proliferates, so the lure is once again in front of you. There are huge hurdles that first year, and the motivation for recovery can get clouded. When you’ve known escape, it’s hard not to turn to it again. Add even the tiniest bit of denial (because “mostly honest” means there’s a drop of lying) can send you right back.

Those two factors — the lows of coming back, and the denial — buttress each other… and before I knew it, I’d relapsed again.

One bitter day I got into a car — my wife’s car. I’d taken too much of the stuff, I was out of it, my head was swimming, my vision blurred. Somewhere on the highway, I rear-ended a car. By some miracle, the cops who showed up were in a hurry — they made a police report and somehow didn’t notice the state I was in, or they would’ve arrested me. I got back into the butchered car and tried to get off the shoulder where we’d had our little showdown with the police. I was in a deep daze. I found myself driving off the road and into a ditch.

After a while, I crawled out of the car and stumbled to a bus station. I had $3.25 in my pocket. I got on a bus back to Lakewood. Later, I had no recollection of where I’d been, where I’d left my wife’s car. I read the ticket stub to figure out where I’d come from, and we called around the auto dealers in the area and eventually found the car.

Coming home without the car was the breaking point. I was ill, in the throes of a disease, a danger to myself and those around me. It was back to rehab — a fourth time. This was the end of the end, my last shot. They pulled all the stops out and sent me off to the Princeton of rehab centers. A friend of my father’s paid my way — at $40,000 a month!

I met a therapist there, a wise person whom I connected to deeply. At the end of our first conversation, he said to me, “You need do a ‘first step’ on your First Step.”

I am an addict — and I am powerless…

I’d been saying it all along, but somehow, I didn’t — couldn’t — accept it. I couldn’t face up to it, couldn’t absorb it emotionally. Accept yourself as you are, where you are.

I had so much inner resentment, as many addicts have — at society, at their families, at somebody who abused them — but for me, most of that resentment was directed at myself. I couldn’t accept myself, period, and I couldn’t accept that I was an addict — the reality of it and the repercussions.

Once, I was at an AA meeting in Lakewood. Someone who’d once been a noted rosh chaburah introduced himself by name and addiction along with everyone else, then spent the whole meeting weeping uncontrollably.

“Tonight is my daughter’s wedding,” he burst out in sobs, right before we left the meeting. “It’s in Monsey…” he finally choked out, “and I’ve been forbidden from attending.”

In my mind, that was where an addict got himself to — to be banished from a child’s wedding, or to die alone in a public bathroom.

That was what I saw happening to me if I’d admit it. And that’s why I couldn’t. When I’d uttered those words that should have been the precursor to the rest of the steps, it was a mind — not a heart — confession. An abstract idea that I was a drug addict. All along I’d been trying to solve the abstract idea.

The Greek philosopher Zeno proposes the paradox of motion. It’s the theory that it’s impossible to move since “that which is in motion must arrive at the halfway point before it arrives at the goal.” On any journey you must first get halfway there, and first halfway of that, and the divisions continue ad infinitum, thus theoretically it should be impossible to move.

So what’s the answer?

We don’t live in theory. We just move.

I was stuck in an emotional version of Zeno’s paradox. I couldn’t accept that I was an addict and the implications of that, but I also couldn’t start to really work on myself before I fully accepted it. I was well and truly mired because I couldn’t have one without the other, and that’s why I kept relapsing. The answer for me was the same as for the original paradox: Just move.

In order to recover from addiction, I have to know — really know — I’m addicted. But to know fully is existentially scary, it means I could die alone because nobody wants to come near me. If it’s too much for me to handle, but it’s the only way for me to get better — how do I do it?

By just starting the work. I don’t have to get better right now, I can just have this conversation, take a step in the direction of better. Just today I’m walking in the right direction: “Lo alecha hamelachah ligmor.” They say recovery is not a destination, it’s a journey. I told myself, “Just move, and you’re on that journey.”

And with that therapist, I did. I opened my eyes to the disease that was plaguing me. I am an addict, I said, and it was wrenching, tantamount to admitting that I have soul cancer. It was also a huge breakthrough.

To absolutely admit is to surrender — on every level. I am powerless. I can’t do this on my own, only with a Higher Power, with Hashem. Because that’s why an addict gets into it in the first place: They yearn, more than anything, for a connection with G-d. Connection is the inverse of addiction. Ultimately, being connected is the greatest healing. Spiritual connection is the only real antidote to addiction. The severe lack of it underlies the intense and incessant craving of an addict.

With a true Step One, I was able to work through the rest of the steps: searching and fearless moral inventory, prayer, and meditation. I woke up to Hashem in my life — not that I’d ever been an apikores or thought He wasn’t there — but I’d never really connected with Him, and from the depth of surrender I was able to, now. As for me, I’m a frum Jew, and I was able to find my spirituality in a relationship with Hashem. There were no euphemistic phrases for me — my Higher Power was not going to be a flower.

There’s a Ishay Ribo song, “Hinei Yamim Ba’im” — a spin on the words of the navi that days are coming when there will be a great hunger, lo ra’av lalechem, v’lo tzamah lamayim, but to hear the word of Hashem. When I heard this song, the way Ishay sings that despite the “yeridat hadorot” there is still the unquenchable thirst and hunger, it resonated profoundly. I’d felt that thirst so deeply, it had led me far and away. But as I listened to the song, to the crash of lyrics, I understood that I wasn’t bad or crazy. At the core, it was a search.

One day at rehab, I saw some literature on a coffee table about an aftercare program of coaching and random control tests (drug tests and breathalyzers) to help keep addicts clean. I realized that now that I’d genuinely taken the First Step and internalized that I was an addict and I couldn’t recover myself, it was what I needed.

The random testing of the aftercare program provides a level of control impossible to achieve otherwise. At any given point a drug test will show what’s in the bloodstream, and if something does show up, it can be addressed immediately. Mostly though, the tests are a reassurance that everything’s all right. An addict owes it to himself and to his loved ones so that they can be confident about his recovery. If you’re an addict, it’s easy to see yourself as the victim after all you’ve suffered, but those who stood by you have been through the wringer as well.

I came home from rehab for the last time. Once again, I had to integrate back into life, back into society. But this time I knew I was an addict, and I was on the aftercare program. I stayed clean for that first year post-rehab, the year with the abysmal statistics for relapse. It was one day at a time, one month and another month. It’s been 41 months — more than three years — of sobriety.

Together with Rabbi Dovid Goldwasser, a prominent rav and author of The Addicted Soul, we created CPR Recovery, a recovery program for frum Jews modeled after the aftercare program.

Denial is everywhere, and that’s why this program is first and foremost about rigorous honesty. I know how tough that is — it took me years, four separate rehab admissions. Our program is really a First-Step holder, helping people stay the course, and that helps them get to the other steps. To heal, one needs to be brutally honest. Understandably, people are afraid of that honesty. They come up with all sorts of excuses. “I can’t leave the office now,” or “I can’t do rehab, my wife needs me at home.”

We have a support team of therapists, a spiritual counseling team, and a job placement team, because someone who’s sitting around all day is not going to recover. And because the pitfalls of relapse happen back home in real life, this program can be worked entirely virtually, so any Jew, anywhere, can get and stay clean.

Once, after one of my rehab stints when I desperately needed a job — any job — I pushed carts around in Target, and I pushed pamphlets through people’s mailboxes on a dead-end local reelection campaign. Now I teach English and math in a large yeshivah, and I have another job on the side to bring in more parnassah. I’ve come out the other side. I find my connection to Hashem through learning Torah, chassidus, mussar. I am 42 years old. I want to be a proper husband and father, a proper Torah-true Jew, and Hashem has given me another chance. Because He knocks on the door, and He’s sending you something. You think it’s the lowest point, but rock bottom means there’s nowhere to go but up.

I am an addict with a life.

And I want to share my recovery with others.

The narrator can be contacted through Mishpacha.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 890)