The Mental Obsession Went Quiet Only After I Quit Asking My Own Brain to Fix It – Rick M.

About This Speaker Tape

Rick opens at the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the NAVA Club with self-deprecating humor, then tracks his drinking from age 12 — beer and mixed martinis stolen from his parents' liquor cabinet — through a 0.03 GPA at the University of Georgia, an unplanned pregnancy with a girlfriend who then disappeared, and years running with the lowest crowd after his family moved from Pennsylvania to Conyers. He got sober at 24 and stayed sober 22 years in AA: sponsor, GSR, DCM, committees at the district and area level, a 16-acre Connecticut farm with pigs, chickens, and bees, a wife, a PhD in cell and molecular biology, and professorships at UConn and Northeastern.

Then came burnout, a Klonopin prescription for the returning anxiety, and a moped crash into a deer at 30 miles an hour that cracked his back and broke fifteen ribs. Percocet, Oxycontin, and Suboxone followed. As a drug-development scientist, he knew enough to talk his way onto the early Suboxone tabs and snort them. He kept going to AA and sponsoring people while lying to everyone. After his wife divorced him he spent roughly three years mostly in bed on the farm, cycling through Peachford, Talbot, Ridgeview, Lakeview, Discovery House, and Breakthrough, taking more than thirty ECT treatments, surviving three heart attacks in late 2017 plus an overdose that blew his stents and left him intubated ten days near last rites, and finally stacking two DUI collisions in a single week that cost him a two-hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit and five days locked down in a quarantined jail cell with food pushed under the door.

The turn comes at Peachford when his sister tells him she just wants him to be her last relative — to grow old with her. That inkling of purpose, plus Breakthrough's structure and yoga, plus a sponsor who walks him through the steps again from Step 1 as powerless over drugs as well as alcohol, restarts him. On a friend named Ruth's back stoop he admits the mental obsession is going to kill him. She tells him to ask a Higher Power to remove it. He does, nothing happens, and then a few days later he simply isn't thinking about drinking anymore.

At the time of the talk he has three years and three months back, sponsors men, starts each morning by saying out loud that he wants to live, and has just passed the CARES certification to work professionally with other addicts. His PhD, he says, wasn't the answer — he was a fool living a fool's life, and loneliness is the real disease.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Tia opens the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the NAVA Club and introduces Rick
• 3:00 First drunk at 12 on beer and martinis stolen from his parents' liquor cabinet
• 7:30 Family moves from Pennsylvania to Conyers, Georgia; he finds the lowest crowd in cow country
• 11:00 0.03 GPA discharge from University of Georgia; college girlfriend gets pregnant and disappears
• 16:00 First nine months sober, then Bacardi 151 relapse and a 10-day locked detox at Peachford
• 21:00 Sober at 24; 22 years of AA service, Connecticut farm with pigs, chickens, and bees, PhD in cell and molecular biology
• 27:00 Burnout, anxiety, Klonopin prescription; moped-versus-deer crash and cracked back open the opioid door
• 34:00 Still sponsoring in AA while scripting Suboxone and Oxycontin across multiple doctors
• 42:00 Three 2017 heart attacks, overdose blows his stents, two DUI collisions, five days in locked-down jail
• 50:00 Sister tells him she wants him to be her last relative; Ruth tells him to ask a Higher Power to remove the obsession, and a few days later the craving is gone