Eight straight answers.

1. Is week three really the worst one?

It is the one people describe as the worst afterwards, and it is rarely the one they expect. The first week is often relief with a strange silence underneath it. Then sleep goes, the flatness arrives, the old company starts texting, and the first proper urge turns up — frequently on a Friday, frequently around six in the evening. None of that means treatment failed. It means the building and the timetable were doing more work than anyone told you, and you are now doing it yourself.

This is James's observation from his own discharge and from several years of living among people at every stage of theirs. It is not a prediction about you, and nobody can tell you in advance which week bites.

2. My aftercare is a weekly call and an appointment in eleven days. Is that normal?

Depressingly normal, yes. Most aftercare cliffs a man off at exactly the point he needs it. The weekly call is not the problem in itself — the problem is that tonight is now, and the call is on Wednesday.

What is worth doing in the first week is getting the plan in writing and reading it as a contract rather than a reassurance: what exactly is provided for the next ninety days, who provides the medical part, whether that person is employed by the clinic or was just in the room, and what happens if it goes wrong on a Saturday. What is available beyond that depends entirely on where you live, so this site will not tell you what your local services are — it will tell you which questions get the answer out of them.

3. Am I supposed to be craving sugar this badly?

Almost everybody does, hard, for months, and hardly anyone is warned. Biscuits, fizzy drinks, chocolate, three desserts. It is wiring rather than weakness, and it is not a sign you have swapped one addiction for another by teatime on day four. If it is affecting your health, particularly if you are diabetic, that is a conversation with a doctor rather than a conversation with yourself at midnight.

4. Should I be on medication now that I am home?

That is a doctor's decision and it is not one this site will make, hint at, or second-guess. There are medicines used after treatment for alcohol, and there are good reasons some people are offered them and others are not. What this site will never do is name a drug, a dose, a schedule or a timetable for you, and the guide will refuse the same way.

Which routes exist, who prescribes, what it costs and how it is reviewed all depend on which country you are in, so the guide asks where you are before answering anything of the sort. The sourced reference pages about the medication routes are not printed twice across this network: they live on the encyclopedia on sober.guide, which is the sister guide for the decision to stop.

5. Is this a clinician, and is it James?

Neither. The guide on this site is an AI, it says so in its first line, and it is not James replying in real time. James is not a doctor, a therapist, a counsellor, a key worker or a sponsor, and he is not in recovery as a profession. He went into residential treatment at a residential centre in Cheshire in June 2020 after twenty-seven years of drinking every day, and has not drunk since. He then spent several years running a guest house in Tenerife where a good number of guests were in recovery, from several countries and several treatment systems. That is the vantage point, and it is not a qualification.

Anything that should come from a clinician — diagnosis, medication, withdrawal, what your body is doing — the guide says so plainly and sends you to a doctor.

6. What if I have started drinking again?

Then the useful thing is the physical question first, not the moral one. If you are drinking heavily again and shaking in the morning, sweating, retching, seeing things that are not there or badly confused, do not stop suddenly on your own and do not let anybody talk you into a taper — alcohol withdrawal is one of the few that can kill, and that is urgent medical help today. The safety page sets out the routes.

Once that is dealt with, this is still the right site if the question is about the ninety days. If the question is about last night specifically, there is a separate guide in this network written for the day after a slip.

7. What does it cost, and what happens to what I type?

No price is written anywhere on this site and the guide will never quote you one, because a figure written into a page is a figure that goes stale. Membership is one annual membership run by the network console, and the current price is shown on the join page only. Nothing commercial is ever put in front of somebody who is drunk, ashamed, frightened or in the middle of a bad night.

Your conversations are stored in your own browser on your own device, not in an account with your name on it. Messages pass through the AI provider to generate a reply. The privacy policy and cookie policy list exactly what is kept and for how long. Do not name your clinic, your key worker, your employer or other people here: nothing typed into a chat window is confidential or privileged.

8. Why should I trust a site about rehab that is not paid by one?

That is the right question and the answer is the model. No clinic, broker, aftercare provider, fellowship or medication supplier pays for anything here, and no referral fee, commission or hospitality has ever been taken from any of them. There is no arrangement under which a clinic can appear here, improve its position here, or have criticism removed. James is a declared past paying patient of a British clinic, which is a conflict, so it is stated wherever it could matter rather than left for somebody to find.

If you have a ninth question, ask the AI guide. If it arrives more than twice it gets added here. The rules this site is written under are published in full.