I have often heard talk about the need to “hit bottom” in order to get sober. But what is this “bottom”? I’ve heard members share that they hit bottom after being arrested or losing a job, or after a spouse threatened divorce or actually filed for divorce. Yet these members continued to act out. I know of other members who suffered none of these consequences, but they found sobriety and ceased acting out.

What then is the “bottom” that one has to reach to stop acting out and to embrace recovery? I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not an event or an action. Instead, it is an attitude change—a willingness to do whatever it takes to change and to cease doing destructive actions.

When I was an in-patient at a facility, a therapist asked if I was willing to push a baseball down the street with my nose if I was told that it was necessary for me to get sober. I was. The newcomers who enter our program with this attitude get sober and stay sober, regardless of what they have done. The “bottom” for many of them was very high: being caught on the Internet by a spouse, realizing that they are cheating their company and themselves by looking at porn, or just coming to see that they want to stop. They were not arrested, divorced, fired, etc. So, I have come to believe that the “bottom” is an attitude change that renders one willing to do whatever it takes to stop lusting, to get sober, and to get into recovery.