Christopher K. Realized a Psychic Change Happens Once the Fighting Stops

Welcome to the Sober Cafe Podcast. My name is Gracie Vandiver and I'm the producer and host of our show. The Sober Café Podcast is proud to bring you the latest music and interviews with musicians, authors, actors, and artists in recovery. Today's episode is sponsored by Sunlight of the Spirit Music. Sunlight Of The Spirit Music specializes in offering CDs from artists in recovery, and they have the largest selection of 12-step and recovery CDs available anywhere on the planet. If you would like to learn more about Sunlight OF THE SPIRIT MUSIC, please visit sunlightofthespirit.com. We would also like to thank InTheRooms.com for their support. In the Rooms.com is the premier, most comprehensive online social network for the recovery community worldwide. Their mission is to help, inform, touch, connect, and heal those already in recovery, seeking recovery, and family and friends supporting recovery around the world. In today's show, we're speaking with Christopher Kennedy Lawford. Christopher Kennedy lawford was born in Malibu, California. the firstborn child of President John F. Kennedy's sister Patricia and famous Rat Pack actor Peter Lawford. He grew up on both coasts and experienced the high life of Hollywood and the powerful world of politics from a front row seat. After JFK's assassination, his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to New York City where he spent his early teen years experimenting with drugs and getting into all kinds of trouble, culminating in an addiction to heroin sober now for 22 years lawford shared his personal story in his memoir symptoms of withdrawal a book illuminating the extraordinary circumstances of his life and bringing a cohesive message of survival hope and finding one's integrity his second book moments of clarity was released in january 2009 it's a book of interviews illuminating the spiritual epiphany that occur in people's lives, enabling them to move from addiction to recovery. Hi, Chris. Thanks for agreeing to be on the Sober Cafe podcast. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Well, we certainly appreciate your taking the time to chat with us. It's good to be here. I wonder if we could start off by having you tell us about your first moment of clarity. well you know um the the genesis for my book moments of clarity was obviously you know that when i when i went went around the country talking about my first book uh people wanted to know what happened to me on february 17th 1986 it allowed me to change my life and they they asked me uh with really a desperation and a need to know that i that i was surprised by quite frankly I had been sober for 22 years and had sort of become used to, you know, people having a solution to this issue. But I found out later that, you Know, SAMHSA estimates are that 26 million Americans suffer from some kind of substance abuse disorder unless 10% of those people get any kind of treatment. And that could include, you Now, walking into a 12-step meeting. I mean, so there are 24 million people out there who are actually suffering with this thing without any idea that there's hope for them. So that's why I did Moments of Clarity. My Moment of Clurity came on February 17th, 1986. I had been trying to get sober for nine years and had tried basically everything. I mean I tried, you know, graduate school, experimental drugs, psychiatrists, rehabs, everything humanly possible to arrest this issue. And nothing had ever worked for any period of time. And I woke up that morning, and I walked through these windows, these giant windows in the apartment I was living on that overlooked Commonwealth Avenue, which Winston Churchill said was one of the most beautiful streets in the world. And it was a brutally cold day, and all I saw was frozen and desolation. And I just had so much pain in my gut that I knew the only answer was to put a gun in my mouth, but I didn't have a gun. So I surrendered on the most profound level I've ever surrendered before. Now, I had no idea that's really what was happening, but that's what happened. And I don't know how I did it. I don'T know why I did It. I DON'T know Why It Happened Then. That's sort of the inexplicable nature of these things. And a lot of people consider them sort of spiritual in that way, that you can't explain what happens to you in a given moment, but your entire life changes. And that's what happened to me. I profoundly surrendered. I became willing to do whatever I needed to do, whatever anybody told me to do. I called the one person in the world I didn't want to call, my cousin who I competed with my whole life, and I said, tell me what to do and he told me. And that was the beginning of my transformation, and that was my moment of clarity. And it unfolded over the next period of still unfolding 22 years later, but it certainly unfolded Over the Next 90 Days, and my life was completely changed. Well, that's a very familiar story. Do you remember much about your first year? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I had always, I means, you now, I had a great desire to get sober, but I was always baffled and ultimately defeated by this concept of living life on life's terms, which basically a good part of life is painful and unpredictable and uncomfortable and difficult. And I could never deal with those kinds of things. I just, you know, every time I felt any kind of bad feeling, I would medicate it. So, you now, much of early sobriety for me was about learning to live life on life's terms and become aware of a different way of looking at things. I think that that's another part of this transformation that happened with me, which was basically, and obviously this is spiritual in nature and that you become willing to look at things differently. I had always thought of pain as something to be avoided, and now I began to understand that actually when the things that are painful in my life are usually the greatest gifts that I get because if I move through them and work through them then I get these enormous gifts on the other side of it in terms of understanding or whatever. So that was certainly a huge part of my early recovery and continues to this day. The process of writing a book is a very long process, and I'm wondering how long did it take from when the first idea came for Moments of Clarity to when it actually went to press? Well, I would say the total amount of time from the moment I thought that I might want to do a book like Moments or Clarity to when It was published was probably a couple years. and it took about, I would say, a year to put it together in the sense of, you know, and that was, it's not that long of a book. It's a 250-page book but I had to get 44 people to agree to sit down with me. I did all of the interviews myself and I sat down with all the people and I basically asked them all the same questions because I wanted some kind of uniformity. I was kind of looking forward to see if there was kind of a formula in this moment of clarity business or what Carl Jung called the psychic change moment or what Bill Wilson called the change of heart, this idea is there a way to prepare oneself sooner for this or is there way to sort of quicken the onset of something like this? Because the purpose of this book was to give people hope that there was an answer to their dilemma of addiction, but also hopefully examine whether they could find a way to get there quicker. And I quite frankly didn't find that. I think everybody has to come to this in their own time. Most of the people that I interviewed for this book said that they couldn't have gotten their moment a minute sooner than they got it because they weren't ready and it happened at exactly the right time. I do also want to say that the moments of clarity, these are not just a purview of alcoholics and addicts. This is a human condition. This is something that happened in the human experience, and it's available to all people. It's just that addicts and alcoholics, we pay attention to them. We have to find them because usually our lives depend on it, but everybody has these windows of opportunity, and they can transform their lives, too, and alter the trajectory of their lives if they notice them and take advantage of them. That's absolutely true. You mentioned in the introduction, you said, it seemed as though whenever I doubted the wisdom of doing this book, a lightning bolt of inspiration would be delivered in the form of one of those I interviewed. Can you share with us what some of those lightning bolts were? Well, I'll tell you this. I mean, I think that, you know, I didn't want to do moments of clarity. It was the last book I wanted to do. I didn't write my first book as a recovery book. I wrote my first work as a piece of writing. I intended on, you know, establishing a writing career and writing other things. I was beginning a novel about a guy trying to figure women out. And this doing a recovery work wasn't on my list of things to do, I didnít really want to do it. My agent saw an opportunity to do something and she was the one who pushed it. And the other thing was this incredible need that I saw out there. So I didn't really want to do this book, and it was a huge pain in my butt to do it, quite frankly. I had to ask people who were people that – many of whom I knew very well for something to give me something that was very valuable to them and that they probably didn't want to give Me. And I didn' t like doing that. I didn''t have to do It. I didn ''t really want To do It.'' I also had to wrangle all these people to sit down with me. These are people that are busy. There were different parts of the country. It was a logistical nightmare. So it was – I didn't really enjoy doing this book on any level, but I will say this. Every time I sat down with one of these people, and that's what I meant by a lightning bolt, it was not anything specific that any of them said. I mean, you can read the stories, and you'll see the light bolts in those stories, but every single person I sat down with profoundly moved me, made me feel things that I hadn't felt in years, made me aware of things, enlightened me, made me laugh, made me cry. They were just profound, profound connections of listening. And my biggest fear was that I wasn't going to be able to capture the essence of those interviews on the page. But I think that we did a good job. I had a brilliant editor who worked with me on this named Jan Werner who helped me do it, and she really did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of taking the raw interviews and making them into these first-person narratives, and I think did an amazing job. But that was it. The lightning bolts are these essays. I really enjoyed reading the book and could barely put it down. And one of the things that stood out for me were how many messages of hope came through with every story. And I think in recovery, it's important to know, you know, that we're not alone, that we are always connected to other people in recovery and it's up to us to ask for help. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think this book, Moments of Clarity, really does illustrate that this disease affects a lot of different types of people. and some really remarkable people, whether it's a guy who spent 18 years in a federal penitentiary and comes out and gets this amazing life or movie stars or rock stars or writers or TV pundits. This is an equal opportunity illness, and there's a lot of us out there, and there's a lot of us who care about each other and support each other in all sorts of ways. But I think that the major thing of this book, of Moments of Clarity, is that the people in this book care deeply about this issue in terms of a health issue and a public policy issue. This is, according to the federal government, addiction is the number one public health issue facing this country. It is a profound issue affecting millions and millions of Americans, and 85% of our criminal justice people behind bars and 2 million people behindbars have histories of drug and alcohol abuse. I mean, what it's doing to our health care system in terms of emergency rooms and lost productivity in the workplace and domestic violence. I mean, this thing cuts across all barriers and affects everybody, economically, socially, politically, everything. So it's an issue that needs to be addressed, and there's so much stigma and there is so much misinformation out there that I think the people that are in this book just wanted to offer not only a message of hope but also a treatise on, you know, that this is a medical issue. It deserves attention and it deserves to be treated with compassion. And it also took a tremendous amount of courage for all the people that agreed to be interviewed for them to be public with their recovery. Yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, I thank – for anybody to speak publicly about this issue, it takes a lot of courage. The awareness out in the world is not, you know, people are not sympathetic to this thing. Most people think of people that have addiction or alcoholism or any of that, that they're morally bankrupt or there's something wrong with them. They don't understand that it is a mental illness. And so for people to talk about it and also the way the media treats it, I mean, for most of our history, the way the media chooses to portray this illness is sensationally and without any real regard for what people really have to endure who have it. So people in this book took a great risk, and I'm enormously grateful for them for doing it. Before we close out our podcast, I want to ask you one more question, And that is if someone is listening to this podcast and they're struggling, whether it's with trying to get into recovery or they've been in and out of recovery or perhaps they're even in recovery and they'RE having a really bad day, what would you like to say to them? Well, I think people ask me all the time why I got this thing, why I'm 22 years sober and why I didn't die because a lot of people I know did die. And the truth is, you know, what I say to them is, I didn't do anything except stay alive and stay connected to some kind of treatment. I tried to get sober for nine years, you now. And if I had given up on myself or other people had given up on me, I wouldn't be here today. I've been sober for 22 years. I have three kids who have never seen me drunk or stoned. I've broken the chain of addiction in my family. I make movies with people like Anthony Hopkins and Kevin Costner And, you know, Sean Connery, I've written two best-selling books. I speak all over the country about addiction and recovery and hepatitis C awareness, and I'm able to do that because I'm clean and sober today, and I've been that way for 22 years. I'm a useful, productive member of society who had a disease and got help and now is in remission. So that's a really big deal, and people need to get that message and know that the game is never over unless you say it is. And it's a real gift that we've been given. Yeah, it's an amazing gift that needs to be, you know, nurtured every day. I mean, I have a disease that, you now, the recovery from is contingent on the maintenance of a spiritual condition every day, and I do what I need to do every day to take care of my recovery. And, you kno, if I do that, I can have a great life. Well, we really appreciate your taking the time to share some of your experience, strength, and help with us on the Sober Cafe podcast. So thank you so much, Chris, and we wish you much continued success. Thank you. I'd also just say, you know, because I do speak all over the country, and I think people ask what they can do to, you Know, to affect change. And, You know, we have a new administration. We have a New President. I think we have A new commitment to health care in this country. And it's really important that the people that know about this illness, know about the illness of addiction and alcoholism and those kinds of things, that they get active politically, that they let people know in Washington and their state legislatures what mattered to them. Because historically we have not done that. We have not felt that it's our right to be active in that process, to make changes that affect us, whether it's insurance changes or, you know, issues with drug courts and those kinds of things that are important to us. So I encourage all of the people out there that are listening to this that, you know, once you get sober, that means you get a life and you have responsibilities. And one of those responsibilities is to be a member of society and to engage that society with the things that matter to you. And for someone who has never been active participating in feedback to our government, how do you recommend they go about doing that? How you engage the political process is you get involved. You vote. You communicate with your leadership, the people that are in Washington and the state legislatures, about the issues that matter to you. Also, September is National Recovery Month. That would be a good way to get involved? Yeah, absolutely. And there are all sorts of activities now all over the country. There was a big march in New York. There's something planned for Washington. These kinds of things, you know, need people to be involved and to organize. So certainly that our community can start to do things like that. Well, that does give us a lot of hope. It gives us hope personally and on a larger scale. So thank you for bringing that up. My pleasure, Gracie. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Chris, and we wish you much success. Take care.