Michael Pond’s harrowing two-year journey to sobriety takes stops in abandoned sheds, dumpsters, ditches, emergency wards, intensive care and, finally, prison
After two decades of helping clients battle addiction, Mike Pond, a successful therapist, succumbs to one himself. He loses everything and ends up destitute in a rundown recovery home populated by a cast of characters straight out of Dickens.
The Couch of Willingness… is a real couch in that home; a couch where Mike must sleep until he surrenders and admits he’s powerless over alcohol. But just when Mike gains any measure of sobriety, in sashays his other powerful addiction, Dana, a can of Red Bull in hand, 26’er of vodka in her purse.
And so begins Mike’s harrowing two-year journey to sobriety with stops in abandoned sheds, dumpsters, ditches, emergency wards, intensive care and prison. Mike’s riveting account crackles with raw energy and black humour as he plunges readers into a world few will ever have the misfortune to experience.
Along the way, Mike the drunk finds himself shamed and stigmatized by the very system in which Mike the therapist thrived. The dissonance rankles for Mike and, by the end of the story, for the reader too.
You’ll see yourself and others in The Couch of Willingness
The “couch of willingness” is a real couch in a real recovery house in British Columbia. The picture above isn’t the real couch, but it’s what you might imagine the couch to look like. What exactly is the “couch of willingness?” Mike Pond said in a Breakfast TV interview that the couch symoblizes surrender—surrender to a program of recovery. And in the book, he finds himself on the couch more than once. As in, sleeping on the couch, living on the couch, because that’s where the inmates of this particular recovery program begin.
You’ll see yourself in this book. That’s why it’s “riveting” (to me, the writer of this post). You may be the alcoholic or addict in the terminal stages of addiction, or a so-called “functional alcoholic” (see the image of Mike on the right when his drinking seemed, despite increasing warning signs, to continue to be manageable).
You might be the child of an alcoholic or someone who has lived with an alcoholic. You might be in recovery or know someone in recovery. Or, quite simply, you might be one of the people who is approached on the streets of hundreds of towns and cities every day by desperately ill alcoholics and addicts, hearing something like, “Can you spare a loonie?”
They’re all in this book—we’re all in this book. Mike Pond’s searingly personal story reveals not only the wreckage alcohol—in the hands of pre-disposed addicts—has wrought upon individuals, families and communities, it also reveals our collective inability to provide anything near immediate, effective, and humane treatment to the thousands of people who so desperately need it.
We speak with Michael Pond.
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CityTV brings awareness to ‘Mental Health Week’ as author Mike Pond explains how he became an alcoholic therapist and battled a broken recovery system. Breakfast Television Vancouver (May 5, 2014)
The Couch of Willingness—Book Trailer. After two decades of helping clients battle addiction, Michael Pond, a successful therapist, succumbs to one himself. He loses his practice, his home and his family to alcoholism, ending up destitute in a down and out recovery home. Pond’s harrowing two-year journey to sobriety takes stops in abandoned sheds, dumpsters, ditches, emergency wards, intensive care and, finally prison. Along the way, he finds himself shamed and stigmatized by the very system in which he used to thrive. (May 9, 2014)
