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What is Eminem's sobriety date and what does his coin mean?
21 April 2020, 16:23 | Updated: 26 May 2020, 12:03
The US rapper celebrated 12 years of sobriety this week on social media by posting an image of his coin, but do you know what it means and what finally made Eminem get clean?
Eminem has celebrated 12 years of sobriety this week.
Taking to Instagram, the Slim Shady rapper shared a picture of his sobriety coin, writing: "Clean dozen, in the books! I'm not afraid."
But how did the superstar rapper become clean, what's his sobriety date and what is the significance of the AA or NA sobriety coin he posted? Find out the answer here.
What is Eminem's sobriety date?
Eminem's official sobriety date is 20 April 2008.
What was Eminem addicted to and how did he get clean?
The Monster rapper suffered from a serious addiction to prescription medication. which almost killed him and saw him take lethal amounts of Vicodin, Valium and Ambien.
After getting briefly clean and entering rehab in 2005, he suffered from an overdose at the end of 2007. He later found out that the pills he'd acquired from a friend were methadone and were the equivalent of four bags of heroin.
It was after this brush with death that he decided to get clean. Narcotics Anonymous and his famous sponsor Elton John were instrumental to his recovery.
"When I first wanted to get sober, I called [Elton] and spoke to him about it,", Eminem told The Guardian in 2009. "He's somebody who's in the business and can identify and relate to the lifestyle and how hectic things can be. He understands ... the pressure and any other reasons that you want to come up with for doing drugs.
"I reached out to him and told him, 'Look, I'm going through a problem and I need your advice.'"
According to the rapper, Elton John would reach out to him every day in the early days of his recovery, calling him from wherever he was in the world.
What does the sobriety coin mean?
Sobriety coins are tokens given to those in alcohol or drug recovery, who are taking part in the 12 step recovery program, and mark how long a member has been sober.
The triangle represents service, unity and recovery to what is thought of a disease with three parts, mental, physical and spiritual. The circle represents one-ness or wholeness.
What is the 12 Step program?
The 12 Steps were created by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous to form guidelines for the best way to overcome an addiction. They have now been extended and adapted to service other forms of addiction.
The 12 steps are:
- Admitting you are powerless over alcohol–that and that your life had become unmanageable.
- Coming to believe that a Power greater than yourself could restore you to sanity.
- Making a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God as you understood Him.
- Making a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.
- Admitting to God, to yourselves and to another human beings the exact nature of your wrongs.
- Being entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
- Humbly asking Him to remove your shortcomings
- Making a list of persons you had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
- Making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when you were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as you understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, trying to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all your affairs.
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If you are affected by any of the topics in this story, please seek help and advice from the resources below:
Action on Addiction:
0300 330 0659
www.actiononaddiction.org.uk
Aquarius
0121 622 8181
http://aquarius.org.uk/
City Roads Crisis Intervention:
020 7278 8671
DAN 24/7 (Wales)
0808 808 2234
www.dan247.org.uk
Families Anonymous:
020 7498 4680
www.famanon.org.uk
UK Narcotics Anonymous:
0300 999 1212
www.ukna.org
