This is when you know you’ve got an alcohol abuse problem:

It’s 2 AM and your car is wrapped around a telephone pole. You are, somehow, unhurt. You weren’t wearing a seat belt…mostly because you couldn’t see straight enough to fasten yourself in. You have been, as you will learn later, thrown clear of the accident, and are at this point sitting on the ground staring at the wreck and thinking only and entirely of how much you’d like a drink.

This is alcoholism. This is when you know you’ve got an alcohol abuse problem. This is when you, if you have capacity for rational judgment left in you booze-wrecked brain, have got to at the very least consider the possibility that maybe it’s time to get alcohol treatment.

This is what you tell the cop who’s the first to arrive on this scene: this alcohol abuse confession. It is what you tell the paramedics on the way to the hospital, and the doctor who checks you out in the ER. It is what you tell your wife, when she shows up with red eyes and a blue parka over the pajamas with the ducks on them. It is what you tell the judge, and the court-appointed counselor, and the head tech at the alcohol rehab center to which you are sentenced by the state.

This is what you tell yourself, this recognition of alcohol abuse for what it actually is. This is what you repeat like a mantra, again and again and again and again, until you believe it, and until you become it. This is what you tell yourself, until alcohol treatment works, and until you get sober, and until you finally have the good goddamned sense to know alcoholism when you see it.

It’s a question every addict eventually asks: What makes drug treatment successful? Why do some rehab center patients get better while others don’t? The answer, in the plainest possible terms, is you.

If you’re a prospective Malibu rehab patient, you’ve got to understand that the ultimate effectiveness of your drug treatment program lies with you: you and no one else, you and you alone. Yes, you need help from a Malibu rehab center if you’re ever going to beat drug addiction….but that help is only what you make of it, in the end, and no rehab center in the world can get you sober if you aren’t willing to play an active and engaged role in your healing.

The rub? If Malibu rehab’s going to work for you, you’ve got to work in Malibu rehab: You’ve got to be game for a fight, and ready for a struggle. Malibu rehab centers can only help Malibu rehab patients who want to be helped, and who more importantly are committed to helping themselves; the drug treatment you get from a Malibu rehab program is, at best, a vehicle by which you can make sobriety a real and lasting and meaningful thing.

So: What makes drug treatment successful? You do…and you’d be a fool to believe that your Malibu rehab destiny is in any hands but your own.