Diamond Mind
Science, philosophy, spirituality, technology, green energy, current affairs. Hosted by scholar, activist and author, Tam Hunt.
Diamond Mind
Diamond Mind #5: Resilience and Recovery: One Man's Journey from Trauma to Sobriety
After surviving a severe e-bike accident and enduring over two dozen surgeries, my brother-in-law, Jason, shares his story about resilience in the face of overwhelming physical and emotional pain.
What if the very treatments meant to heal you instead threaten your life? Jason shares his harrowing experience with misdiagnosed infections, sepsis, and the battle against a flesh-eating bacteria that led to the removal of metal implants. We discuss the precarious balance between managing pain and the risk of addiction, and how his journey was profoundly shaped by the powerful impacts of antibiotics and oxycodone.
Honesty becomes a lifeline for those drowning in addiction, and Jason's path to recovery is no exception. Through our conversation, we emphasize the transformative power of facing hard truths about our selves. Jason opens up about his struggles with self-medication, and the pivotal moment when recognizing that his victim mentality led to self-awareness and growth.
We explore the role of family, professional help, and the courage it takes to move forward from denial to acceptance, illustrating that honesty is not just a personal commitment but a crucial step toward healing and connection.
His journey of sobriety didn't end with rehab; it was a continuous path that Jason navigates day by day.
As he rebuilds his life, the importance of community and connection with loved ones and a higher power becomes evident.
Okay, so I'll speak a bit more. Okay, here we go. All right, jason, we're live and I wanted to talk to you about the new Jason and your experiences in the last couple years with going through some really traumatic injuries and then some substance issues and then, in the last few months, going fully sober. So maybe you can give like a quick introduction to all that and, what's more, some of the ideas and things you're going through yeah, the just working backwards in short, elevator speak.
Speaker 2:I've had a little over than two dozen surgeries in the last couple years. I was after a bike wreck in sun river, oregon on july 1st 2022, I was on an e-bike getting my bearings and twisted. My ankle fell down, put some more weight on it and passed out spiral fractures that needed to be fixated with metal to keep the metal together so that I could come to Port Angeles and have a proper surgery where the metal was finished as an internal fixator when the swelling subsided from the injury.
Speaker 1:And 24 surgeries later, you were somewhat healed and you were returning to various self-medication options for the pain and everything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, everything had a pretty organic path, like if you told me that this would be the finish line, I wouldn't have made it to the finish line and I feel like I'm at the finish line now. It's a great feeling, but what had occurred is I picked up an infection on the second operation and that, with some doctor dismissals when I brought it up, allegedly being COVID or whatever, it exceeded to a point where I fell septic and, as a result, had to have all the metal in my leg removed because the flesh-eating bacteria had hosted itself on the metal, grown up the rod and stayed dormant and silent until it was strong enough to attack me and when the metal was removed you could actually put your finger on the metal and string the bacteria like slime off the metal. The funny thing is that at that time the surgeon was supposed to culture a sample of that bacteria and test antibiotics against it before administering them. Instead, he surmised it was a common disease in hospitals called MRSA and put me on an antibiotic, a heavy one called vancomycin, which is great for MRSA. It's a broad spectrum antibiotic.
Speaker 2:I went through a very similar social experience with him and patient to doctor, where he for the second time told me that it was the side effects of the antibiotics and potentially the side effects from the pain medication, which was oxycodone, and my usage at that time was actually pretty minimal. I was probably using 25 milligrams a week at best for pretty extreme pain at that time and he said even that was too much and to back off of the medication. I went septic a second time and discovered the MRSA wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't MRSA, it was klepsia. Oxytocin and vancomycin wasn't the correct antibiotic. I had been on it for 45 days on a pick line, which is a tube that goes from your forearm to your heart and it's hooked up to a machine that you wear around your neck 24, 7 and every day. Every 24 hours, you have to report back to the hospital for a fresh bag of antibiotics. You can't go anywhere.
Speaker 2:You're on basically house arrest in a local area hospital yes yeah, and I started to get better, but my bone wasn't healing and I was using minimal pain medication. This story kept repeating itself. He, he dismissed me four times.
Speaker 2:It resulted it I am assuming this is why he was either terminated or left. But it was like a not talked about why he suddenly had to leave. I had filed a complaint with the hospital and suddenly his house was up for sale and he didn't tell me. I was lucky enough that another surgeon picked me up and he connected me with a pain specialist. I was having quite a bit of issues with pain. I had a specialized pain doctor and an infectious disease doctor and the pain medication just really started to increase. But it was planned. The background of that doctor is that he's in recovery himself. The first one or the second one my pain doctor that prescribed me a majority of my medication going into this. We went into it with an exit plan and he's like this is what's going to happen. You've been a patient for, at this point, a little over a year. You've been on pain meds. I'm prescribing you more. There's nothing. There's no reductions happening here. Addiction will take place and that that's these are various oxy yeah.
Speaker 2:They're opioids, yeah, and he's prefacing this entirely to me he's. This does end in you within the realm of recovery, because it's going to take you down a hole of addiction?
Speaker 1:why is he prescribing only opioids when during this period, the last two years, it's been well known the opioids are highly addictive and there are other things that are equally effective, that are not as addictive as opioids. Actually, there's no. Pain is subjective.
Speaker 2:Pain is so subjective that this debate will continue for the entirety of medicine. We'll cure cancer before we figure pain out. There's just so much going on between the actual pain itself and the neurology of the human body not just the mind, but your body can have different pain tolerance levels at different times in your life for a variety of factors, and that evolved for me. Sometimes I was going through excruciating pain that I could barely manage and I was like, oh, I'm doing great. And then there was other times where I had that equal level of pain and for some reason my body wasn't responding well. I couldn't physically get out of bed, but it was no more or less painful than the day before, and I never, personally in my experience, never felt a point where I could like reliably know what kind of pain I'd be in from moment to moment, let alone day to day. And there was definitely a patch there where it was just so much my body, like I personally, couldn't tolerate it. And, to answer your question, not only did we try other alternatives for periods of time that were notable as alternatives, we continue to do that. That's an ongoing thing.
Speaker 2:While I continue to get better, my leg continues to heal. I'm every day the pain that I'm left with, a lot of the pain I'm left with now, is growing pain. I'm growing muscle, I'm growing nerves. That's a painful experience. It's astronomically painful to build muscle at this time of your life. When kids are falling down in the playground with charlie horses because their muscles are growing, it's the same thing when you injure yourself. Pain tolerances as an adult are completely different as a child. I don't know why I'm sure there's somebody that writes about that but but kids are. We know, as humans we've observed children endure things that adults just do not. I don't know the background on that, I just know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're a year and a half in. You've been through a couple dozen surgeries. You've had serious pain issues. You've had all sorts of infections you're getting over. Yeah, you've had a lot of um turmoil at home because of all this yeah, and you're drinking is part of your self-medication.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are all these, those external factors, and I think a lot of the question that you might are you asking, like, what's going on inside? At that point I'm trying to draw the narrative out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of how we got to where we are today. So you're a year and a half in at this point and you're talking about the pain and what they're prescribing you, but you are doing a lot of things yourself to try and combat the pain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my thought process there at the moment is anything that's an anesthetic is free game for me.
Speaker 2:Anything that puts the pain of the leg away everything that puts the pain of the lack of trust in medical care, which is a very scary place to be when you are willfully walking into a hospital that scares you because that's your resource, especially in a rural community. Many people were like why couldn't you have gone to UW? At that point I was on a daily pick line change. It would have required an entire residency change, leaving my family and my job and many other affairs outside. I would have had to walk away from everything in my life.
Speaker 2:I don't look back and wish I had you know at this point. I get to look back and see there's only one perspective I can have of this. I just see a guy trying his best and observationally just not doing very well, that guy being you. Yeah because the world is getting to see addiction take place, which is the stigma around that it's hard to get rid of. Addiction destroys family. It family. It kills people, it takes their lives.
Speaker 2:It's stigma for good reason. I those are the observational patterns. My behaviors were just drunken and eccentric and hurting people by hiding the sequence of events. I tried to get talk about it with those closest to me. But if you can't even get them to understand like a pain level, like you're not going to go to the next level and get into like emotional right, there's a trust barrier on the social there too.
Speaker 2:So I never really enjoyed talking about my pain, just because it's a. It's just so hand in hand with the drug talk. And then it put the user in that situation. Is the on, is the defendant in every case. That's a pattern I notice. It may seem like common sense, but it's a. It's just an institutional way of how you deal with these things. Is that the addicts, the defendant and this society puts you in a box and this is going to be your forever thing and it just doesn't have to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me drill into that a bit. So I do recall, because you and I were talking through this process pretty regularly, and I do recall you did not talk much about the pain itself, and not that I didn't want to hear I didn't want to hear about it. I'm not saying I didn't, like I didn't draw you out but yeah, you talked more about like doing this and that and the doctors are doing this. It was more like you observing yourself?
Speaker 2:clinically.
Speaker 1:Is that because you didn't want to really drill down onto what you're going through experientially, because you were worried you would bring it back in some way, or you didn't want to burden people with that?
Speaker 2:mirrored pain. Yeah, and there's a valuable footnote here to like pain at this point in my life when I start taking this pain medication. I've been raised in a house with a mom that lives on pain medication, heavily addicted, and her pain has been up to so a lot of stigma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So at the point that I start taking this medication like I'm already feeling like on the defense with myself, like hey, whoa, this isn't, this wasn't part of the agreement. We were doing everything, not like your mom, and I had to break a little bit of my morality to have the will to just get up like that's all I was looking for. I just wanted to keep going. I just wanted to keep living l-I-V-I-N Without a ton of pain.
Speaker 2:Like literally I wanted to keep breathing and I wanted to wake up the next day and have the will to do it and not go down a dark path Of psychological barriers.
Speaker 2:So I thought, if I could just bookmark this chapter in my life Anesthetically, I could basically just zombie myself Through this. I'm like I'll just go to work. I I'm like I'll just go to work, I'll just go home and I'll just drink a lot the entire time and I'll just use a lot of drugs, and then my leg will heal and I'll come out of it.
Speaker 1:So you're just checking out emotionally while you heal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll put myself into a waking coma for three years.
Speaker 1:However long it takes. That was the opioids. Yeah, that was alcohol. Yeah, it was anything you get your hands on, because at the end of it like on and I'm just.
Speaker 2:I practice in the. We can talk about this in another part, but they talk about this in recovery programs. This rigorous honesty it's very helpful with addiction. I highly recommend it for anybody who's listening, who is addicted to anything, and dealing with that.
Speaker 2:The rigorous honesty is what's going to keep you alive, whether you're using or not, and so I truthfully believe that the more we talk about this, the easier it gets for everybody involved. The shitty conversations are had in the world's a better place practicing that rigorous honesty. I believe that I knew I could handle addiction. I was like in my life. I know that I can get addicted to something willfully, throw my life at addiction to save my life later, like I'll get to the addiction when I'm done with me as a body. I just got to keep me alive, like just literally alive. Don't get in any car wrecks, don't kill anybody, don't hurt anybody. Just get up out of bed, do your best you can and cope with humor and laughing and drugs and alcohol Favor laughter.
Speaker 2:You can turn into just a giggling maniac, which was great for me. I'd take that whatever it took, and I would try anything at that point, anything that could just check me out. I had it like. This is just. It was like a little premeditated but in a sense like at the point that I didn't know what to do. Do this was how my body just decided to lay this out, because I was wrecking myself like I was like honestly thinking about taking my life, often because of the pain, because of the pain physical and otherwise, in the lack of certainty on how this was going to play out.
Speaker 2:I'm like I was even okay with losing my leg that I was at peace with I didn't want to die, like I didn't trust that I wasn't going to that, like when that trust with the medical world was broken. When I say I was in a world of fear, that this all connects to that, because I had to do a trust fall after they had destroyed my, like, innermost self and I like to believe that wasn't intentional, that it's just how the cards fell. It was a matter of one wrong decision after another. Engrossments like negligence not I don't think that anybody had it out for me or anything the addiction aspect becomes such a survivable force for me at that point I'm like I just repeat myself feel like I could handle that better than I could. The lack of trust in the hospital and my own body for that matter.
Speaker 2:There were several situations where I'm like at at the end of all this even if they got it wrong, why couldn't my body just fight a bacteria Like where was I physically? In retrospect, I learn about one particular disease and learn about it later, after all this damage is done. Nobody had told me I had to look this up in medical journals. It feeds on the sugars created by alcohol, loves it and I was fueled with it. I think that everything was in the right one.
Speaker 1:You had, or that was the one, that was the first one. I had oh and there was, it wasn't even it wasn't misdiagnosed.
Speaker 2:It was grossly just wrongfully diagnosed. There was no diagnosis. To just say you have MRSA is so speculative and specific. If you understand infectious disease, no matter how common something is, you can't make that assumption.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you've got to culture it right. You've got to be careful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can have the same symptoms between MRSA and Klebsiellox. I had the same symptoms. There wasn't anything different between the reactions from an observational standpoint. That's why you gotta get another microscope.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Not to pick a scap too much, but tell me a bit more about the transition from okay, I'm self-medicating and I'm getting through this to your recognition that things are really falling apart.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I appreciate that, because I don't like to get into it and I want to go back to what happened and what was going on inside me. And alcohol was my thing, that was my anesthetic.
Speaker 2:The pills never really were for me. You go into a recovery program, which I did later on, and we can talk about that experience. Um, it's. This is difficult because rigorous honesty begins with the self and when you lie to the people closest to you, I believe that you've lied to yourself first and you're constantly having to go back and clarify the truth with yourself first, or the the correct response, which is a lot of just moving yourself out of a victim position and putting yourself into just a human position where you're neutral and evaluating the self rather than pushing it down.
Speaker 2:And, um, the, the coma worked. It was, I recollected, as just consuming as prescribed. I never fell out of prescription, the only I wasn't prescribed to be drinking while on those drugs, but as far as what the label on the front told you to do, minus the alcohol warning around the back, I'd stay on that level. Some days it would mix bad, like probably about 10 of the time which is a lot, actually, 10 of the time I was drinking. It would mix bad with alcohol and there'd be some negative social interaction that I'd have to deal with the next day. And those became a little more often as I was aggressively trying next day as in people were a little more often, as I was aggressively trying.
Speaker 1:The next day, as in, people were like dude, what was that? And you're like oh sorry, that was my medication.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I'm just like I had a bad day At that stage in your life. You're not like I had a bad reaction with medication.
Speaker 2:You don't even want to tell people you're taking the medication as prescribed. It's just a no-go zone socially. There's not a lot of social like check-ins or accountability that are required to build on the self. Those are like pillars of the self, of evaluation, and it's like looking outside yourself who's the best person to ask the person next to you, literally outside of yourself. And and when you limit that, you isolate and you start to sight of yourself and you'll wander off. And for me, I'm using this as a metaphor for increasing use, or continuing, which is increasing. It's more time, more usage that those just add up and they chip at the block. They chip at the block of your morality, what you're willing to do to stay asleep, and then they chip away at the block of your social and business relations and eventually there's nothing left and a lot of people call that a rock bottom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, People check, they're like okay. I can't deal with him anymore. I can't tell to his face so they start to avoid you, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's important to to note here, I'm in early recovery. I'm just under 90 days. Yeah, it was a big step in my life. I mean, I had always been using something I I drank on a daily basis up to the point that I broke my leg. Right up to the point I broke my leg and uh, so in this, everything was set for that.
Speaker 2:Like I was, I had readied myself for addiction without really knowing it. People had asked me if I had ever considered like a sober-tober and I'd always joke and looking back, just being like an asshole about it. To the person that was doing it, I'd always make sure they were offered a drink. It. To the person that was doing it, I'd always make sure they were offered a drink. Just like, absolutely retrospect, like even I strongly against the concept of addiction. Walk us through your recognition that things got to a point where you're like okay, I need external help on this.
Speaker 2:That's not entirely my story to tell, but from my standpoint, just like, everything fell apart perfectly.
Speaker 2:They fell apart perfectly more when my oldest son, my firstborn son, showed up at a restaurant booth that I was at with my brother and I thought they were just out to lunch and I was like sit down, let's hang out. And they both just looked at me and were like dude, like you basically got kicked out of the house last night and I wasn't really fully accepting it. Like it had happened, like this conversation where I needed to not be in the home, boundaries had been set. I don't know how deep I want to get into that, but the result was my oldest son asking me what it would take, and he was very sweet about it. He was just. He told me what it would take and he was very sweet about it. He was just. He told me how it was affecting him and had a conversation with me about it that had my guard down for good. I was listening to my son. I was wanting to hear what he had to say, what he was experiencing he had caught me at a pretty sober moment.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, pretty brave if you can think about your. What kind of kid at 18 wants to be telling his dad that like shit got weird last night and like I'm your leader here, like I'm gonna hold you accountable, dad, and I was just thinking like that's one hell of a corner, that's blood on it. It was just thinking like that's one hell of a corner, that's blood on it. It was just a different feeling than I had gotten from any other external wife, boss, anything, any other experience I'd ever had. And I told him what I knew and at that point in time I had experimented with going sober on my own, without talking to anybody. And by that time, for about six months I had known that I had a physical reaction but I stopped consuming alcohol. So what that told me at that point?
Speaker 2:Several times over, probably six or seven times, I tried this once I didn't know I was going to be hospitalized, so I couldn't prepare in any way. I couldn't have access to alcohol for five days. I started to notice that I'd shake and my heart would race and things would get weird. I even sparked like 140 fever worms. I knew that I wasn't going to get out of this without a detox, and that's what I told them. I told them anything I do would definitely have to start at the hospital and I was for the first time when I said that out loud.
Speaker 2:Camden looked so relieved because he could. I now I'm speaking. This is why I say this is not my story to tell, because he might be shaking his head with a little slightly different version, but I believe that he did a great job connecting with a human being at that desperate, what became a desperate moment, and I was like I don't know what I'm doing, but it's not working. I have to go to this center. I was like this is my time, it's my call, my time's up, I can get it from here.
Speaker 2:That's me talking to myself. I'm now awakening. It's like being tapped out. Hey, I feel like he came to me on a spiritual level and told me it's time to give up the charade. Everybody knows, we all know. And the me. It's time to give up the charade. Everybody knows, we all know. And and the leg things are starting to come together here. You're healing your body's healing. You don't want you to be the end of this, like where it's in your core and I didn't know what the process with detox was like. I did that for four days under sedatives At the hospital. Yeah, highly recommend it. For anybody listening that is addicted to anything, just start at the ER. They'll take it from there, and this was a hard thing because I was walking through those doors for myself with a hospital that I didn't trust to handle the most sacred asset I have in my life because it gives me access to my family, and that's myself.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I went back into a coma. I went, I slipped out of one coma and went into another. This one was held in public and available for anybody to know. They didn't have a plan, but I remember coming out of it and being told I was being discharged and I didn't know how many days I'd been there two, five because you're a sedan most of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't really this whole time, yeah, and I'm still like on the effects and I get shown the door. I'm not refusing to leave by any means, I'm like. I'm just basically woken up and said, hey, your detox has ended. Now this is as long as we can keep you on a detox, and that facility that we hooked you up with and promised you transport you don't have. So here's your cell phone and there's the street and thank you for coming to us. And they did it in the kindest way and I was very agreeable because I'm still an addict, I am detoxed and my body is absorbed of.
Speaker 2:I'm naked for the first time internally for the first three years and my first thought is let's go get a drink. And I don't have a car. And I called a friend and I was just like I think I'm going to stay at your place tonight while you grab me. And then I just started getting phone calls like crazy before I had even arranged that, getting phone calls like crazy before I had even arranged that. And one in particular was a great friend of mine and he somehow, through the grapevine I don't even know what HIPAA things I might have signed or not signed. I probably signed waivers for everything, I don't remember and I got picked up and transported to my sister's and the hospital couldn't line me up with a bridge. My sister was working on helping me get a bed with my wife somewhere. I was like anywhere At a rehab facility.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at this point I'm just like. Now I'm out of body. Up to this point, the entire experience has been inner body and I've just been keeping myself asleep. And now it's like I'm standing outside myself trying to lift myself out of this waking coma for the first time. I'm like, hey, I'm with them. We've got to come out of this and start living and reintroduce ourselves.
Speaker 2:And it becomes a split thing because that's what it takes like. It takes the community to pull somebody out of those depths and it takes the person willing to do it with them. That's something I've I've hounded into my brain by the people who've helped me along the way I gave up all decisions. People, even the professionals in the treatment facility, were like are you doing this for yourself? Are you doing this? Because people came in here along the way I gave up all decisions.
Speaker 2:People, even the professionals in the treatment facility, were like are you doing this for yourself? Are you doing this? Because people came in here and I just realized that I didn't need to answer any of those questions. Right then, with myself or otherwise, the most important thing for me to do was to listen and let the hurt and then let the life live and bring yourself back into life. And that's my like lollipop version and it's the best I can do. Again, early recovery. I'm infantile and I have no knowledge of what that looks like for the rest of my life. I don't, and I'm not trying to answer that question right now either.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about rehab for a second. So you get a bed at rehab eventually. Yeah, you go from your sister's to rehab, yeah, and you're in rehab for 38 days.
Speaker 2:I was scheduled to be there for 24 days and I extended. I willfully extended. In my second week I had a hard time because they put me back down. When I got there and detoxed me again, they tried to pull me off of the Librium and I was just doing what I was told. So they were like we'll wake you up now, we'll pull you off of this detox and see how it goes. After four days and I started shaking again. We're now nine days into my sobriety and I'm still in dt's of my own, whether they're psychological or physiological. Is it painful to be in dt's? Do you just feel unsettled? No, there's some hallucinations like there are a lot of like flames and shaking body. It's a humiliating. You can't function. I'm emotionally broken. I'm devastated, devastated. I'm crying. I can't call anybody.
Speaker 1:Everything's stripped, social, everything's gone and all you've just left You're not like locked in, right, you could walk out the door if you wanted to Correct yeah, but if you did that, you'd be like I just lost everything I've gained by doing this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's going all in. Some people do it and then they come back like a day or two later. I saw that happen probably a dozen times while I was in somebody. Somebody would leave and be like whoa that was, I was safer in there and come back and I had thought about it at one point early on. What had happened is they told me I could bring my pain medication and I was just loud about that. I was like I hadn't had to face pain on my own. I was like I will not quit alcohol without.
Speaker 1:Because your leg is not healed at this point. It's still bruising.
Speaker 2:It's still swelling. I'm in pain and it is very real to me To this day. I believe that all that pain is very real at that point in time and maybe at the end of the day it wasn't more. Not in the sense I believe in neurological pain. I do believe in pain that you're not supposed to feel, that you do. That's proven. When you take an amputee, you cut their leg off, their feet can still hurt that they don't even have. I mean so. To say it's purely physical is also a misnomer.
Speaker 2:It's a nerve-wiring thing, right yeah yeah, that pain's very real at that amputee's feeling Like even though that leg ain't there. I talk to plenty of them. I know that I was at peace with where I'd be as an amputee and for a long time we were just like not in question of whether it would happen or not. We were just doing the best we could. And I remember flipping the card over to my surgeon along the way and he was like yeah, I know you're an alcoholic, I've done enough surgeries on you, like we know.
Speaker 2:And I was like I'm working on it. He's like you don't have to do anything right now, like I just need you to just keep doing what you're doing because you're actually getting better and one thing at a time. And I actually appreciate that to this day. Uh, in a weird way, like he just focused in his department and did it to the best of his abilities and he knew what I could take. He got to know me and and then he helped me get through treatment. He visited me and detoxed several times, rehabilitating today for me, for the, for my body. I'm only just starting to realize that stuff Like my body's retaining water more often.
Speaker 2:I'm really focused on the basics, like oxygen levels, like physically. Right now I'm really just focusing on learning how to breathe, how to wait for things, how to, like you, sedate yourself for that long your body like when you come out of it you just don't know how to drive your ship anymore. And focusing on those basic things. I realize in this recovery process with clarity that life wasn't as complicated as I was able to construct that. It was that it could just be simple movements rather than many steps, many thoughts, and I'm enjoying that right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't want to mess with it right now, so I choose not to use like I'm experienced. I'm experiencing what I was looking for when, which was peace or serenity or privacy. All of these things you can have in life, and earn them too, rather than put them in a bottle and simplify it that way.
Speaker 1:So you did 38 days in rehab. You get out and you make an agreement with yourself and your wife to be sober on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, and part of that for you has been going to a meetings frequently a lot of a meetings. We're on vacation now in sedona. You've been going daily to a meetings. Tell frequently a lot of AA meetings. We're on vacation now in Sedona. You've been going daily to AA meetings. Tell me more about that and how that helps you for the future and your relationship to AA.
Speaker 2:AA is a little over 100 years old and has profound medical support for a phenomena that to this day we can only speculate, which is alcoholism, and we've made massive advancements in the last hundred years. When you look at it as a totality of civilization, especially in western culture, we have a much larger problem globally. But that gives us a lot of data points when we want to start looking at something. So recovery has came a long way. Aa as a whole, it has a tradition and one of its traditions is how the program is represented. I can basically only tell you that it's a 12-step program and it's non-denominational and it will take anybody that wants to try to get sober. It just has a desire to stop drinking. I went to AA meetings, not wasted or anything, but I was on alcohol and drugs openly, but I had a desire to stop and that's what puts you in the seat.
Speaker 2:You can learn from other the basis of programs, 12-step programs, all of them. What a is just one of them? It's the biggest, so people talk about it. It's the most accessible globally, so it's easy to find.
Speaker 2:Even before technology you could always walk into a church and just grab a brochure and know like you could just stumble into a town like a tumbleweed in recovery, go to a church, grab a pamphlet and know where all the meetings were, pick up the phone, call somebody in the program and get connected. It was all just about a network of like-minded people having the same experiencing experiences and sharing with themselves like what was working for them to stay sober for just one day, so that the next person could take pieces of that and do it better. It's constantly learning and evolving and it's different in town to town what it takes to keep, because every region has its own personalities and its own experiences in life, and so the one thing we all have in common is this addiction and it ties us together in this mysterious way, and if you're in recovery and listening, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:And if you're ever looking for it, I highly recommend somebody to just experience that network for some period of time in their life. I don't know how long mine will be. You know I went for today and that's a. I practice that because it's what works. I'm looking for a repetitive pattern of what's working for people and I'm watching people in this program put their lives back together or build new ones. And it's always a better story when it's another day sober, like it's just. It always in my observation.
Speaker 2:I've never heard anybody like I was so sober she kicked me out or I dried up my bank account going sober. Nothing I've ever heard has been anything other than hey, I'm working out, I'm connecting with some lost loved one that trusts me to just have a conversation with, and that's all I wanted was this like five minute conversation with this person, and it's taken 20 years to make this happen in the making, but I've been able to re-establish a relationship that was broken in a rigorously honest way that allows the people affected by this to be acknowledged and have their voices heard at the table of how your behavior impacted their lives. A great 12-step program will almost passively allow the exploration of anything that works, and that's why it invites so many different types of people.
Speaker 1:What is the basic kind of fundamental special sauce of a and how it works?
Speaker 2:it is higher power yeah, spirituality, it's the belief in something like just not nihilism. Have this belief that there's something bigger than us that ties us all together and can support you. If you put just putting language on this, if you're doing good, things will happen. Good consequences, positive, out outwardly otherness rather than selfishness. The opposite of addiction is connection and, just like an algebra problem, you can fix it with connection. So it's connection to a higher power. That is where it starts and then the connection to the people closest to you that you want to maintain positive interactions with it allows you to open up and step back if you need to.
Speaker 2:Some people realize that. I've seen alcoholics realize they need to get sober and divorce their spouse. They need to get sober and divorce their spouse or they need to leave to heal, to just come back and be with, just to strip down to themselves. And I didn't need that. Those are just varying factors as to why, but I just needed to put some time in so that I could think for myself without being under the influence. I needed that physical space.
Speaker 1:Clearing your head and being under it. Yeah, space in your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and these periods, these episodes, are just different from person to person. Some people realize they're an alcoholic before anything bad happens. Some people just understand it and start coming to the program. Nothing really happened, but I'm realizing where this could go. Some people do that and that's great, and some of them are active in the program and they really like the full spectrum of. There's a spectrum to everything. I don't levels and everybody has it in, I believe so you're 84 days sober at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how do you feel at this point, making it 84, 84 days sober? I?
Speaker 2:don't know, people count. I count because that's what I was taught to do.
Speaker 1:You got an app for it, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the trauma has put it. I also write in a journal about every meeting that I've ever been to and what I experienced, what I heard and how I felt, and I'm very illustrated about that. But I think that those are just emotional, like I'm expressing what it feels like to get sober. I don't feel like I've achieved anything and I don't think I ever will. They're in this realm, uh, because it's for me, it's a education without a graduation. Because for me it's education without a graduation. You can go as far as you want. You're going to learn what you learn. You might go back out there and relapse and come back in, or not at all and die. I just know I want to live and that's where I'm at right now. If I consume, I die. Is that clear for you Right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I could see that evolving potentially or healing. I'm taught in the program it never heals and I'm likened to believe they're correct because in every other way they have been correct. The nature of the addict is to not climb that branch, that next level branch, and stay strong-footed and think that you can drink like a normal human being when you can't. I don't know if I'm that or not.
Speaker 1:So where does it go from here? Do you see it as one day at a time, or do you see this as a lifestyle thing I kind of take?
Speaker 2:it one day at a time.
Speaker 1:In the beginning.
Speaker 2:I didn't really know what I was doing. I I didn't know if I was taking it a day at a time or not, or what I was doing. I just knew that the days were passing and I wasn't consuming, and you felt better about many things in your life yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 2:What I did is I kept my eyes open for what was already there.
Speaker 2:And what was already there was my innermost self at its core, and those in front of me and those in front of me were still my family and friends at that time, and that gave me a lot of will to know that I was stepping in the right direction. And practicing rigorous honesty is a great tool in the beginning. It's a great first tool to practice and it's the hardest one and it gives you access to everything else in a 12-step program. That rigorous honesty, because in the very beginning you have to start chipping and by chipping, exposing the truth of what got you to that point and understanding that you made all those decisions and you kept that contract with yourself. For me it was one action. It was me letting go of that morality of saying that I wouldn't let a substance take control of my life. I churned that card in willfully and said it's okay for you to do that and you being the addiction, from there you're in a no man's land of againness, willingness to do anything in that environment.
Speaker 1:And so how do you view the whole experience at this point? Is it summed up by one day at a time, or do you see an arc? Do you see where things are going?
Speaker 2:Thanks for clarifying that Arc. No, I don't know. I do know things tend to arc and that's what makes a great story, and this is definitely arguable, and that's where I'm at right now. I think that 10 years from now, sure, this will have been an arc, and I don't know that. I'm zoomed out enough to understand that which way the arc's going correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm in agreement. I mean, I'm in agreement with it and I hate to be so ambiguous, but it's just in our nature, in this almost fraternal like world you live in when you do it, wouldn't you really want to practice it? A civil contract with yourself first, that you're gonna take the wheel again and that gives you access to the 24-hour plan, which is just things over for today. It makes it so much more accessible. Yeah, it looks scary. Yeah, I use it more now. I find myself you'd think you would.
Speaker 2:The first 24 are so important, but the addict is so unwilling to look at that 24 hours in a fit of desperation. Yeah, I saw some come crawling in it. Demoralized would be a good word for that. I was definitely in that club. I went through, I was crying hysterically at the weirdest times, and this is when you came out of rehab yeah and like needing to rationalize it. So taking it a step further and trying to rationalize what was going on and how I was going to get through it, rather than, like with it, accepting it. Yeah and uh, I had to peel every last finger of myself off of myself so that I that I could evolve a little bit. I just wanted to see what a little bit of this growth felt like, and it's got to be here, and now it's my decision.
Speaker 2:In the beginning it was everybody else's decision. I felt very captive to it. But what a concept Like how lucky you are to have that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people are caring about you like one was best for you. How fucking lucky. And there's so many out there that just don't have that. Yeah, and that tells you the direction it goes. It will also expose you to bigger problems in the world. You can actually I mean it's not exactly an awakening moment to realize that there's a correlation between these two things that happen in social structures. There's a lot of it out there that some people die when you never know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, die in a gutter somewhere, yeah, under a bridge, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's not. I don't know death. I value life. I don't have anything for death. I respect death. That'll happen.
Speaker 1:But it only happens once, because you've got a great life, so why not keep it going the way that makes sense?
Speaker 2:I have eternity to be dead.
Speaker 1:This is true, why not? Right, yeah, why not? I think we'll end it on that note, unless you have anything else you want to add.
Speaker 2:I think that the best thing that I can do is make myself available to anybody that ever needs it, and if that's how the program works and know that I'm, I think about the world out there and care for the person that is ever like going through that type of an experience, and thankful to those who tolerate it too. With healthy boundaries, you're an asset to the world when you're a pillar for those around you, and we all need pillars. That's how we get through this mess, this crazy thing called life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, brother.
Speaker 2:Good stuff. Yeah, I don't know that I it's difficult to be direct. It's such an ambiguous world and it's a weakness that I work on that's Still blurred lines. That's rigorous honesty. Work on that's still blurred lines, that's rigorous honesty. I just have gratitude right now to the people around me and for my story. It isn't even beginning or ending, I don't know. I'm trying my best, yep All right man.
Speaker 1:Well, I appreciate your time, yeah, and your rigorous honesty. Some people don't like it.