“I arrived at Renascent kicking and screaming, metaphorically speaking,” Sunith says. Although he’d asked his employer for a leave to attend treatment, “there was no sincerity on my part,” he admits.  “My plan was to come to Renascent and ‘tick a box,’ knowing I couldn’t go back to work without having completed a program.”

Sunith spent his first week in treatment plotting his next drink. He told his wife the inpatient program ended a day after it actually did, planning to spend the extra night alone in a hotel, drinking. “I may have been high functioning, but I was morally bankrupt,” he says. “I broke every rule there was to break.”

By the second week Sunith’s perspective began to shift, although slowly.

“Renascent did a great job of schooling us in the Steps, especially the first three,” he says. “But coming to acknowledge a higher power was challenging for me personally; I had completed post-graduate work in psychology and was fond of saying that man had made God, not the other way around.

I now know that was absolutely the wrong way to pursue recovery. Not surprisingly, I relapsed after seven months.”

Reflecting on his journey, Sunith realized his relapse was driven by both his lack of attendance at meetings and his inability to fully surrender to a higher power.

“I realized I still thought I could control my addiction,” he admits. “I had mistakenly believed that abstinence was more important than admitting my powerlessness, as Step 1 calls us to do. After seven months, I was still trying to do things on my own terms.

I recalled a counsellor saying I was like a dump truck on the highway – moving fast and looking fine on the outside, but always ending up at the dump. That analogy stayed with me. I knew I had to get off that road.”

The realization marked the start of a profound transformation.

“In active addiction, life was a constant cycle of planning, lies and deceit,” he says. “Today, I’m honest. I feel lighter. I’m liberated.  I don’t have to hide anymore. The only person I need to work on is me, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how willingly my family has accepted me back.”

Sunith describes recovery as a “cheat code” for living. “Renascent helped me discover and accept that I had a disease, and the 12-Step program helps with recovery,” he says.  But still, he emphasizes, “there are no shortcuts. Recovery is like a garden. If I stop tending to it – if I ignore the weeds of my character defects – I’ll relapse.  I’m learning every day, and recovery is something we never graduate from.”

Most importantly, after years of saying he’d changed, Sunith’s wife recently told him he’s again the man she married. For Sunith, it’s a testament to the miracle of surrender and steady work. “I don’t know where I’d be without treatment,” he says.

“And I don’t want to know.”