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

Let's have an AA meeting. My name is Tia, and I'm an alcoholic. Welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the NAVA Club. We're a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one or a year more of sobriety told, his or her story. This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in our personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view the way they establish their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives. We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on abluchipspeaker.org desperately in need will hear our speaker, and we believe that it is only about fully disclosing ourselves and our purpose that we are able to hear our speaker. We hope no one will consider these problems, that any of us shall be persuaded to say, yes, I am one of them too, I must have this thing. Tonight, our speaker is Rick, and let's welcome him. Hey, how y'all doing tonight? My name's Rick, and I am an alcoholic. And I'm up here, I guess, to share my experience, strength, and hope, and that some of you might get something from my message. If not, you can go to sleep. That's okay, I won't mind. I'll try to... entertain you as best I can. I don't know. I'm not much of an entertainer, but... To start off, the first time I drank, I was 12 years old. And I got drunk. Drunk as a skunk with my friends. I had a few beers, and then I started mixing martinis in my mouth out of my parents' liquor cabinet there. And that's the way I would drink pretty much for the rest of my life. You know, when I drank, I drank to get drunk. I never had just a few drinks. Never tried to manage it in any way whatsoever. I was just a hardcore alcoholic right from the very beginning. I don't know if I had the genes or whatever. Don't really matter. All I know is I have this thing, and it's got me, and it tore me apart for years and years and years. By the time I was 14, I was, you know, hanging out with the lower crowd. I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I... I was in sports, and I grew up in a pretty good family, upper middle class. It was a little crazy, dysfunctional, just like everybody's family, but more or less normal until I came around and started using. It was... Alcohol was my love. It was my D.O.C. But I dipped and dabbed in other things as well as a kid. And I quickly got... really into just being a bad kid, you know, not the good kid that I had been when I was growing up. It wasn't unusual for me to tip my dad's gotch bottle in the morning when I was in the eighth grade and go to school drunk like that and then meet my friends and smoke some weed and, you know, that was school for me. It quickly went downhill. When I was 16, my parents moved from Pennsylvania to Conyers, Georgia. That was quite the culture shock for me. Being a Yankee and then living out there in cow country was pretty crazy. And I right off started hanging around with the lowest of the lowest crowd and partying and drinking. I was the worst of the worst of the worst, unfortunately. And these kids got sick and tired of me, taking me out on weekends and I'd get so drunk that I wouldn't know my own name or where I was going. And that was pretty much the way it went for me through the rest of high school. I did manage to get into college. I went to the University of Georgia. After my third quarter, I had a 0.03 average. It summarily discharged me. They told me that I needed to probably go to another school, get my grades up a little bit, see if I could come back. I had a relationship while I was in college there and that culminated into pregnancy. And my girlfriend disappeared on me when she got pregnant. And I'll get back into that story a little bit more. I was never able to see my son grow up. But today I have a relationship with him. I met him. I didn't meet him until he was 30 years old. That was really, really hard. I did a lot of drinking over that one. But he's a good kid now. He went to Georgia Tech, got a double E degree in engineering and did real well and then decided that he wanted to go to New York City. So he got the job and he's now in New York and lives in New York City. He gets out of engineering and now lives up in Blairsville up in the hinterlands of Georgia. As far as I know right now, what he's doing is more of a door dashing. But he's happy. He wasn't happy as an engineer. You know, it kind of has something to do with my career too. 1 0 3 Peachtree was a real nice place back then. I don't know if any of you have been in there since. It's a dump now. It was like Club Meg. We had swimming pools and tennis courts and baseball field, pool table, a nice big old color TV. Do you still like that? Do you still like that? I still like that. It got better because I was there. It's rotting. It's rotting, man. Yeah, I haven't been there since, and it wasn't quite so nice. I got a good education. I got that education about alcoholism and what it is and the disease of alcoholism and the obsessive thinking and the compulsive drinking, but I wasn't ready. I stayed sober for about nine months and then started drinking again. I remember after that, nine months. The first time being sober, drinking that first beer was like the most wonderful feeling that I think I ever had in my life. I was like right back to it. Within three days, I was drinking Bacardi 151 up in a hotel somewhere. Yeah, just guzzling it down. I got real, real sick, real sick. My brain kind of snapped on that relapse. I went into Peaceburg again. I went into their detox. They had a locked ward back then. I was in that detox for 10 days. I had only drank for about six days. They didn't know what was wrong with me. For the next year, I was in and out of treatment facilities, relapsing, and then ultimately into my first mental hospital. They had diagnosed me with severe depression and anxiety disorder. I've been diagnosed. It's just about everything since then. I did come back from that. When I was 24 years old, I finally put the plug in the jug. I would ultimately stay sober for 22 years. During that time, I was sober in AA. Sponsored and worked the steps. I sponsored people. I did a lot of service work. I was a GSR, DCM, chaired committees at the district level, at the area level. I was very involved. I met my wife. Ultimately bought a farm. It was a 16-acre farm up in northeastern Connecticut. I raised pigs and chickens. I was a beekeeper. I did all kinds of cool stuff. I went to school. I went to graduate school up there in Connecticut. I got a PhD in cell and molecular biology. In 1998, I started off on a career in that area. Did a couple of post-docs. Worked as a professor at the University of Connecticut. Then up at Northeastern University, I was a professor up there. I had students. I labbed the whole nine yards. I had too much going on, folks. I had to farm. I was commuting from Connecticut. I went to Boston, which is a terrible commute, and I was trying to run a program, and I burned out. I started to have that anxiety again that I had experienced when I was younger. I went to the doctor, and the doctor gave me some pill for the anxiety, and the pill was Klonopin. Klonopin worked really well for the anxiety. I took the first one. I took the second one. I took the third one. I took the fourth one. I took the fifth one. I took the sixth one. Compliantly, everyone after that took it as I felt I needed it. That was more than enough. I should have been taken. Quickly got addicted to that drug. What about that time? I used to ride back and forth when I was working at the University of Connecticut. I had a seven-mile commute. This was before I was working at Northeastern. And I had a moped. I had a little moped. Zing, zing, zing, zing. That would do me my seven miles on a couple of sips of gasoline. And I'm cruising home one day and come up a hill and then down around a corner and I get that sucker doing about 30, which is its maximum speed. And there's a deer coming the other way. So I'm doing about 30 also, which is about its maximum speed. And you know, physics and all kind of resulted in us being in the same place at the same time. And that meant the moped stopped and I went. And I went over and landed on my head. Fortunately, my wife, a couple of weeks before, had demanded that I wear a helmet on this moped. I didn't crack my skull, but I did crack my back. I had 15 rib fractures. Wow. And I was a mess. They said, you need to take Percocet for this. And I said, yeah, I need to take Percocet for this. So they gave me about 90 Percocet and I started taking Percocet with Klonotan, which you're not supposed to do, opiates and benzos. That set me off on a real great tangent there. After the Percocet. The Percocet I spent, that was the Oxycontin. And the Oxycontin got up to about 80 milligrams a day. And then they started titrating me off. They said, you can't be taking so much Oxycontin anymore, especially with these Klonopens that are going to have to titrate you down. And they titrated me down until it got down to about, I don't know, 10 milligrams. And I started to feel really, really bad. Now, I worked for a drug development lab. That was my job. I was Northeastern. At that time, we worked on cannabinoids and stuff. You know, those guys are those things that THC reacts to, CBD and all that happy marijuana stuff. I knew about drugs. And this was early Suboxone. I figured I needed to get on the Suboxone plan to get off these Oxycodones. And so I went to a Suboxone doctor. And that was back when they gave you the little tabs that you get. Snort it if you wanted to. You can't chew them because they have no Trexone in them. But you can snort them pretty good. So I started snorting the Suboxone. I don't know how much Suboxone I was taking. I was taking more than I should. I was, I don't know. I didn't get things off the street or off the Internet. I could have. I tried. I thought about it. But pretty much everything. I got, I got my script. But I had doctors, you know. We had different doctors. Get us different things, different amounts, different times. We figured these things out. And sometimes you got to go to the emergency room, right? My pills got stolen from my car. What am I going to do? And they would go, oh, yeah, you seem, I'm a doctor too, man. See, I got a piece. I'm not a drug addict. And they would give me what I wanted. That was pretty much my relapse. And I hadn't drank yet. I hadn't drank yet. And I was actually still going AA, man. I was still spouching people. I was still doing service work. And all these drugs, you know, were just because I needed them. Because I had a broken back and I had a broken head. I knew I was lying to myself. I had people in AA who I was lying to myself. They tried to. They tried to straighten me out. And I got rid of all of my spongies. And I tried to stop. And I went into programs. I went into a place. I was up in Connecticut at this time. I lived up in Connecticut for 30 years. I'm really a Connecticut boy. I'm not a Georgia boy. But I've been here for five years now. So I'm getting used to it. I'm getting used to the traffic. Boy, I hate the traffic. The traffic's horrible. Driving around here is like, I just close my eyes. And it's hard driving, so. Yeah. Just get in the river there. I'm just waiting for those drive-your-own or drive-themselves cars so I don't have to drive this. Are we okay? Okay, so. So, you know, I finally get honest with myself. And I say, you know, I need to do something about this drug problem. And I come down from. Connecticut, I come down back to Peachford again. Because I knew Peachford from like 30 years before. I thought it was a good place, you know. It was like Charter, Peachford or something. And I came in and I loaded myself up with all the Suboxone and all the Klonopin that I had. And I was just really wasted when I was in there the first couple of days. And I thought, well, I've been off these drugs for two days. Now I must be doing pretty good. I guess I'm not going to have problems with withdrawals. And I told my psychiatrist that. And he said, yeah, maybe you'll be okay. But I didn't take anything while I was in the hospital. But I had so much in me. And then finally, after the third day, it came out. And something about Klonopin withdrawals or Benzo withdrawals. If anybody had them without any titration, it was pretty freaky, man. I started going off. In a realm that I didn't think was even possible. I was floating up in the top of my room there, man. I was just like writing letters to my ex-wife at that time. Trying to figure things out. You know, trying to solve the problems of the world. I was just going completely crazy. And then the anxiety hit me and I just like ramped out. And I went down to the nurse's station just begged for something. Fortunately, my psychiatrist was still on call. He came. He came by and he gave me a Valium, I think. And I chilled out, at least for that night. But then I went into, up to Peachtree, I went into Talbot. Anybody familiar with Talbot down there? Down there in the College Park area back then. There's still around other places now. For, it was for professionals. You know, doctors and nurses and airplane pilots. The airplane pilots always got off in like six weeks. I don't know why that is. Because they kept us for three months with the airplane pilots. You wonder about that. You think the airplane pilots just stay a little longer and then end up there flying planes and get a little more severe treatment. But no, they let them out in six weeks. I didn't do well at Talbot. But I had sunk back into that, mainly I was just coming off the drugs. You know, they titrated me off the Suboxone pretty fast. They titrated me off the Klonopin pretty fast. And I just went sideways and I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't function. I was a complete utter mess. And ultimately they boosted me out. And then I went back up to Connecticut and I spent about, three years, folks, let me tell you, just about three years just lying in bed. Not functioning, not working, not doing anything, a complete mess. That was when my wife had divorced me, but she didn't kick me out of the house. We still had this big farm. She was taking care of the farm and I was just taking care of the beds. Not really helping her at all. I went that way for. Oh, boy. This is. This is where I started going into mental hospitals and ECTs, folks. I've had over 30 ECTs in my life. Electroconvulsive therapy where they suck your brain with 30 Joules of electricity and you go into convulsion and they say, you're good. You're cured. And I don't know if they help me much, but I sure did like getting put to sleep. That was nice. Ketamine. Couldn't fall or whatever else they throw at you, puts you right to sleep. That was nice. Now, I don't think these ECTs help me very much. I don't know if they help anybody. They do ECTs at Peaceford now on anybody as much as they can. They run you through like, I'm not kidding. That's their opinion. That's that's what they think helps. So that's what they do. So I went that route and I was in psychiatric. Facilities and most of the time when I was in a psychiatric. So how you doing, Frank? Good to see you. Late, but good. Frank heard my story a couple of weeks ago. I'm moving along really fast, too, so we're going to get out of here early. So don't worry about that. But I do I do want to talk a little about recovery. So somewhere along the line. Recovery did come. I finally I don't know. It's just like my third or fourth time in Peaceford. I was 10, 13. I came down to Georgia again. I was in a treatment of a residential facility called Discovery House. Out there. And where is that? Gwinnett used to be easy one, two, three meetings when I was up there. Good, good little group up there. Clarkson is the best. I'm a member of Clarkson. And I would carp out. I'd go nuts when I was up in this place and tell him I was going to kill myself. And I'd take him to the hospital and they'd 10, 13 me. I was in Ridgeview, Lakeview twice, Peaceford. Last time I was in Peaceford. I had this sister who was a blessing. My sister has saved my ass more than once. She's pulled me out of hotel rooms, brought me to detoxes. She's put me up. I had three heart attacks back in 2017, October, November, coronary blockages. It puts fence in me. And then I OD'd and I blew the stents and I had two more heart attacks. They had to paddle me awake. And I was intubated for ten days. I'm really, really, really sick. They were getting ready to give me last rites. So I was close to death. Tales, institutions and death. You know, so I've been to the death and I've been to the institutions. And guess what? I went to jail too. . That's another story. I'll tell that real quick. I was in jail for five days, two weeks, three weeks ago as a result of I got two DUIs in one week and they were both collisions. I hurt people and hurt myself. Got scars to prove. Got sued two hundred thousand dollars. So one of them got from me. And I was down here in Georgia and the DUIs were up in Connecticut. And I was down here in Georgia for five years before they caught up with me. My sister kept in touch with the police officers and told me, he's down here. He's in treatment facilities. He's getting help. He's getting help. They said, OK, just call us again in six months. So she kept calling them in six months. And then when I finally got out of my last, I was in Breakthrough, the last place that I was in. And I finally got out of there. Someone called up somebody and said, yeah, he's out. So they got in touch with me and they finally arrested me. I hadn't got arrested for the DUI. So I got a lawyer and she was trying to push to get dumped because it had been so many years and it was all kind of messed up. The paperwork and everything. But prosecutors wanted me to do at least five days. So I got to do five days. I was in a hard jail and a nasty, disgusting, horrible jail where we were locked down the whole time. I couldn't take a shower. They stuffed the food underneath the door. They would not unlock that door. We were in quarantine. I couldn't make a phone call. I didn't know if they were ever going to let me out. I was freaking out. I was really like, I can't imagine anybody who's done hard time for a long time. And because I would have gone crazy. Unfortunately, after five days, they let me out. And I was very, very grateful, very grateful. So jails, institutions and death. Come, come, come close to death. And I've pretty much done everything else. So anyway, back the story up a little bit. So I was in Peachford and my sister, you know, she was trying to talk to me. I said to her, I said, you know what? What makes you want to why do you want to live? I couldn't understand it. It was just life was just so horrible. It was so painful. So much anxiety, so much depression, so much misery. And she said, I just want you to be my last relative. I want you to do OK. I want you to get better. I want to grow old with you. And something about. What she said and the way she said it made me have an inkling, an inkling of like, you know, maybe there's purpose here. Maybe I've got something more to do in this life. Maybe, maybe this isn't the end. And, you know, the drugs had started to get out of my system. And that was when I went into breakthrough and I started to feel a little bit better, still struggling, waking up in the morning with a lot of anxiety. But, you know, they they gave me structure, which was something that I hadn't had. They got me up, they got me to yoga, yoga, three days a week. And they got me to groups and the groups were OK. And I was talking to people. I was getting to know people again. And I was opening up, talking about my feelings and stuff. What's going on? What's going on in my head? Because I was so alone in that mental craziness, loneliness. Loneliness, I think, is something that is the most one of the most painful things. Addiction, loneliness. It's a disease of loneliness. You know, during this time of me being in and out of places, I would I would relax. I would relax because I just couldn't stand the way I felt anymore. And it wasn't like, oh, I forgot what drinking would do to me. You know, I knew it was going to happen. I knew I was going to end up in a detox somewhere. And I went on this one drunk. It was pretty much like the last bad drunk I went on. I'm not sure what happened, but I ended up in a hotel. The last thing I remember drinking was like six pack of 16 ounce Budweiser. I don't remember drinking. Everything after that. But apparently I didn't drink a lot because at one point I was running around naked in the Continental Breakfast Parade. I remember that they brought they brought me back to my room. They didn't call the police. I was a fixture there, I guess, for a week. I must have been drinking like a lot of vodka because that's what they found the bottles there and ultimately my sister found me like she usually does. And they came in the EMTs and brought me to the hospital. And I was I had 0.4 alcohol content. So I was dead, supposedly. I was in an alcohol coma for three days. They couldn't bring me to this local hospital. So they sent me to Hartford, the big hospital there. And I only remember a little bit of that. I was at one point they had me in a bed with a cage over it. So I guess I was trying to escape or something like that. And they had me strapped down. Boy, I've been strapped down a lot, too. Anybody been strapped down before? Yeah, that's a blast. Ridgeview used to do you in a rubber room. Yeah, with your your ankles and your wrists strapped behind your back. And they'd be on your stomach. And then they'd come in, they'd peek in there and see if you're doing all right. They'd give you a shoot of booze and put you out. And then you'd wake up and you'd be going crazy. Strapped down a lot. I go crazy when I drink. I'm really a pretty mellow dude. When I drink, I just go off into some other kind of realm. I'm another person. I'm a beast and I'm just a little dude. And I'll go trying to beat guys up towards my size and get the shit kicked out of me. Not bad. Anyway, I digress. I started to get my act together when I was up at Breakthrough. And slowly but surely, the days got better and I got better. You know, we did our thing there. We did our fun Fridays. Anybody go to Breakthrough? Fun Fridays? Nobody knows about fun Fridays. They're not fun. You're sitting in a parking lot and it's hotter than hell. And you're moving like backwards a little bit farther to the end of the parking lot so you can stay in the shade. As the day gets longer and longer. And the guy, Chris Jay, he's the guy that runs the place. He's a character. Yeah. But anyway, it was a good place for me. It saved my ass. It truly saved my ass. And it was where I needed to be at the time. And that was where my sobriety started. I got a good sponsor. I had gone through the steps many times before. But this guy took me through them again. And it was, I started over, you know, I started from the beginning. I started on step one. I was powerless. I was powerless over alcohol, powerless over drugs. See, I didn't think I was powerless over drugs. And that's why I got back to them. The drugs took me down just as hard as any alcohol would. And the alcohol was always going to come after the drugs. And my life was entirely unmanageable. I had a really hard time with the obsession. Anybody have that problem? I want to drink. I don't want to drink. I want to drink. I don't want to drink. I'm going to drink. I'm not going to drink. That drove me crazy. And I was with a friend in her back stoop. And I said, you know, Ruth, this obsession is driving me crazy. If it doesn't go away, I will never be able to stop drinking. I will always pick up drinking. She said, why don't you ask God to remove the obsession? And I said, I've done that. I've done that a thousand times. And He just won't do it. I don't know why. I don't understand. She said, ask Him. Ask Him. And I asked God to remove the obsession. And nothing happened. And then a few days later, I wasn't thinking about drinking. You know, and that was a miracle for me. That was an absolute miracle for me. And I hit the ground running after that. Came to believe that our power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. You know, I had been, I had, I had, I had witnessed that. I had witnessed that sanity, that release of the obsession to drink. I made a decision at that point to turn my will and my life over to higher power. Something greater than me. See, I thought I had all the answers. I had all the information. I had all the knowledge. I knew everything there was to know about drugs. I had a Ph.D., man, come on. God doesn't have a Ph.D. I had a Ph.D. And it turned out that I didn't have the answers at all. I was a fool. I was a fool living a fool's life. And today, you know, I wake up in the morning and I tell God, I said, God, I want to live. When I wake up in the morning, that's the first thing I say today, I want to live. And then I start to say my prayers. Help me to work your will in my life. Help me. To work your will in my life, because that's what I need to do in order to maintain, in order to make it to the day, in order to be functional, in order to be someone who's useful and valuable. So I did my searching and fearless moral inventory with my sponsor. And I did my first step with my sponsor. And I learned a lot about myself. And the one thing I learned was I had this terrible. Terrible, low self-esteem, man. You know, I basically hated myself. I hated what I'd done to the people in my life. I hated the way I'd lived my life for all those years. And I needed to forgive myself. You know, I needed to let go of some of that self-loathing. And mostly all that was was just self-absorption, you know, selfishness. So this is a disease of self-absorption. Selfishness. And I was self-centered to the extreme. And it wasn't until I started to think about someone else, other people like my son and my sister cared for me so much, and my mother recently passed away, you know, that I started to feel better about myself and to care about you guys. You guys are here listening to me blab and I'm talking and talking and I'm going to shut up pretty soon, so go off and go home. But I cherish that. This is an honor for me to be able to do this and for you guys to maybe gain something from what I have to say. Today, I try to work on my defects of character. You know, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. I know that's not something that's going to happen like that. For me, it's something that takes work. Faith without works is dead. I was having trouble with patience there. A while back, and I said, God, man, I need help with this patience thing. And he helps me all right. I was challenged with patience everywhere I turn, especially on the road out there. And that's how it works for me. You know, that's how he'll give me that. He'll give me that. He'll relieve me of that defective character. But I need to work for it. I need to do what I need to do, what I need to do in order to to be a better person and to grow and to be somebody who's, you know, constructive citizen, not a destructive citizen. So I don't know. The program has been many things to me over the years. It's definitely saved my ass. I can't imagine. They say there are other methods to to recovery. And, you know, one thing that I'm doing now is I just got certified for CARES certified addiction recovery empowerment specialist for CPS addiction. So when I passed the test, I did all the things I had to do for that. And I want to make that my my goal for the rest of my life, to work with alcoholics, to work with people in addiction. CARES has an interesting philosophy. It's not entirely cohesive with AA, but it doesn't affect my embodiment of this program. I understand that there's other methods out there that people do get sober. I don't know how. But but they do. And and I have to respect that. That's the reality. But for me, AA is the solution. The steps of AA are the solution. These meetings, you people are the solution. I do sponsor people today. You know, I had that spiritual awakening sufficient to recover from this disease. I'm much better than I was after 22 years. I'm better than I was now. After three years and three months. There's something about a relapse that you don't need to do and you don't need to go through what I went through, but I'm grateful that I went through everything that I went through to bring me where I am today. Because I have something to offer people who go through these kind of things and they have something to offer me every day. Every day. I get up and I do this thing. I hit a meeting. I meet people. I talk to people. I let go of my shit. I try to be a functional and effective person. And with that, I'm grateful and I'm grateful for y'all listening to me tonight. I hope I said something worth listening to. That's cool, too. Y'all take care. Thank you, Rick. That was great. I appreciate you. I appreciate you. I appreciate it. Thank you for watching. I appreciate you. Thank you, Rick. I appreciate you. I appreciate it.