Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - Jeff had no idea the road his addiction was going to take him on and being a pharmacist didn’t help

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Jeff Simone started using substances in his teenage years and once he found prescription pain medications his life started the unraveling process and Jeff was in love. Jeff didn't draw a sober breath in his 20's. Jeff would begin his career as a pharmacist and you could say this was the perfect job for someone addicted to prescription pills. Jeff’s addiction took him on a journey he wouldn’t wish upon his worse enemy. Jeff would have to make some choices about the direction of his life. Jeff is an inspiration to so many and this is Jeff Simone’s story on the sober motivation podcast. ---------------- Follow Jeff on Instagram Follow Sober Motivation On Instagram Download the Sober Buddy app today  

Welcome back to season two of the Subur Motivation Podcast. Join me, Brad, each week is my guests and I share incredible and powerful sobriety stories. We are here to show sobriety as possible, one story at a time. Let's go. Jeff Simone started using substances in his early teenage years. And once he found prescription pain medications, his life started the unraveling process. And Jeff was in love. Jeff would begin his career as a pharmacist.

and you could say this was the perfect job for someone addicted to prescription pills. Jeff's addiction took him on a journey he wouldn't wish upon his worst enemy. Jeff would have to make some choices about the direction of his life. Jeff is an inspiration to so many. And this is Jeff Simone's story on the Sober Motivation podcast. Before we jump into this week's episode, I had a thought I want to share with you. A lot of people ask how to get sober. There's a lot of different things you can do.

But I think the better question to ask yourself is what are you willing to do to get and stay sober? What are you actually willing to do consistently for yourself? Are you willing to show up to the meetings? Are you willing to go to rehab? Are you willing to go to detox? Are you willing to get a therapist? Are you willing to join online support groups? What are you willing to do?

Because we can always list off a whole bunch of things that a whole bunch of people have done that are able to stay sober. But it really means nothing. If you're not willing to follow through on any of it or do any of it, or say that you've already tried it and it doesn't work, nothing's going to change if nothing changes. If you could use some more support with your sober journey,

be sure to check out the sober buddy app. Inside of the app, we have 10 live support groups per week. There's also a thriving and very supportive community and you can connect with other members of the app, people who are on the same journey. Together we can be so much stronger. You don't have to do this alone. Check out the free trial now.

Test drive the sober buddy app and see if it's something that can help you on your journey. Welcome back to another episode of the sober motivation podcast. Today we've got Jeff from Reaction Recovery with us. Jeff, how are you doing? Good morning, Brad.

Thanks for having me on. Of course. Well, we usually start the podcast out with what was it like for you growing up? Let me just say that I appreciate the invite. I like coming on shows like this, you know, because my own personal journey in recovery, okay, which is to say after the addiction, you know, in terms of like mental health, feeling better. It's been incredibly long and slow and, you know, full of, just full

of suffering at times. I mean, I know that this is the experience of so many people, which is why I really try to talk about it so much. I mean, there, there is this myth out there, I think, that once an addicted person stops using drugs, that his life just magically becomes wonderful and I don't think that it works like that. I think for a lot of us, things can get bad after we stop using in terms of internal suffering, like the internal stuff, you know, mentally, emotionally. So the world sees us and we look a lot better, you know, that we're not getting arrested, our hair is washed, you know, our face looks clean, we're not passing out when we're talking to you,

But we need a lot of support. So, you know, thank you for this show and, you know, for all the work that you do in this space. Awesome. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. So, you know, I grew up in, in the Philadelphia area, Philadelphia suburbs. I had, you know, safe upbringing.

My parents were and are together. I had an older brother, younger sister. I didn't suffer any, any big T traumatic events, you know, that we typically. associated with trauma. You know, my, my, my, my, my, uh, ACE's score, you know, the adverse childhood experiences score, that was Vincent Felitti's work out of Kaiser health system. The score wouldn't register today as any reason to, uh, to refer out, you know, for more like intensive childhood intervention. And for a lot of years, even, even well into the heroin and methamphetamine days at the end, I remember, I remember crying just, you know, by myself,

thinking like how I had this such a wonderful, perfect childhood. And I have no reason for things to have turned out like this, you know. Now, I'm not sure if you guys are familiar, you know, if your listeners are familiar with Gabor Matei and the addiction and trauma researcher from Vancouver. I'll assume that most of the listeners are at least somewhat aware of his work. And if you've heard him speak, you know, you will have heard that what he calls this happy Happy childhood challenge, right? And what that is is he's talking to a group of people who have admitted to having

addiction issues, right, either past or present. And then he asks them about their childhood. Who confess to an addiction but remain adamant, you know, that they had perfect childhoods. He will ask them to come up on stage, you know, purely voluntary, of course. And then he starts, you know, firing questions. about this said perfect childhood. And typically it only takes a few minutes before this person is in tears and something deep

and previously unidentified has kind of surfaced. And if you haven't seen this kind of stuff on YouTube, I would encourage everybody to look it up. What he'll do is that he asks you to consider times or situations in your childhood that were painful or scary or shameful or embarrassing. And then he asks what age you were when these things were happening and who you talk to about it, right? Because they get a healthy home and a healthy upbringing, the one that fosters, you know, just full expression and love and secure attachment. If a four-year-old, right, or a six-year-old or an eight-year-old is, is, you know, terrified and confused or broken-hearted.

and they choose to keep that inside, right? Just to live with those secrets at such an early age. Things gone terribly wrong. You know, something's gone wrong. And that was my childhood. And I don't blame my parents for any of this. I mean, they are incredible people. I have a wonderful relationship with them,

and they are so good to my kids. None of it was their fault. I mean, they learned that stuff from their parents who learned from their parents. And when I'm not consciously aware of this stuff myself today, that's the way that I react with my kids, you know, to be honest. And, you know, like my kids are seven and five, so they're right in that kind of pivotal range also.

But I never told my parents anything, Pat. You know, anything where my behavior wouldn't have been acceptable to them, right? Or if I did tell them, it was just some twisted story in a way that it would sound acceptable. and I kept secrets for as long as I can remember. What I learned from the earliest age is that successful and impressive little boys get loved and bad little boys get punished, right? Or worse, they get ignored. So, I mean, how did I react to that?

Well, really, in the way, I guess, that any, like, little kid would. I showcased all my wins, and I, and I, suppressed or I repressed all the losses. Let me tell you is a great strategy. You know, if you're if you're seven years old and you're and you're trying to impress the most powerful people, powerful and important people in the world, you know, which is your parents. But it's not such a great strategy when you're older and it can get us into some precarious situations, you know, so, you know, 15 years later when I'm years into a daily opioid, habit that was just rotting me from the inside out. It's like, is it any wonder that I kept

all that stuff to myself? And I was unable to tell, you know, a single person in the world about it. You know, Gaborvite also says trauma isn't what happened to you. It's what happens inside of you as the result of what happened to you. Now, the insecure, like, attachment of relationships don't, don't predict adult substance use disorder. They're a vulnerability, right? They're a vulnerability and a risk factor, sure, but they're not, they're not predictive by themselves. I mean, there does need to be some kind of,

just some kind of injuries, you know, some kind of injury or, or series of injuries. And what happened to me and like what happens to children with, just maybe if they have these insecure, like attachment patterns, is that they will typically overattach to their peer group, right? You know, which kind of looks okay sometimes from an outsider perspective. I mean, if it's a, you know, if it's a decent group of kids. But it's incredibly dangerous, right?

Because young people are immature, and now you're writing just so much of this developing adolescence mental health on some immature creature with issues of their own, right? And, you know, so I had some, I had some, like, abandonment, you know, stuff happened, maybe like around the age of, like, 19 or, you know, 20 or so. And so painful and, and so confusing. And I was never able to find words to describe it. I still, I mean, to this day, right now, you know, I still, I still struggle to find words to describe what that period of time was like.

And I talk to nobody about it, ever. which is what I learned from an early age. You know, I was, I was embarrassed and confused. And it was right around that time, you know, so right around like 19 or 20 that I discovered Vicodin first, you know, and then, and then Oxycontin. And that was an absolute miracle drug. I mean, I had been using other drugs.

You know, I pretty much tried everything over those, you know, those couple years there. I was getting into 18, 19, 20, but not until Oxycontin did I have that, just that absolute falling in love experience. And that's the way that I describe it now. And that's the only way that I can describe it. Like, I have to use those words, you know, because that's, that is what it felt like. And now I know enough. I mean, I know enough now, you know, about opioids and how they mimic the endorphins, which are our natural love and bonding chemicals. So it's no, it's no mysterious coincidence that as soon as my primary attachment got severed, that I immediately

found something else to chemically replace it. I found opiates. You say you found it. Was it the peer group or like how do you get introduced to something like that? The first Viking then I took, it was, no, it was it was somebody's, you know, it was just somebody's family member's pill bottle, grandmom's pill bottle or something. That's how we first, and then we got. And then it was either me or somebody else did get a prescription, like a wisdom tooth surgery or something.

And then we had 20 more and we kind of shared them with each other. A typical story, right? So we just swallowed them at first. And then somebody probably said, oh, you know, you can snort these. All right. So then we're crushing them up, snorting them. And then somebody says, you know, you realize, that's like 98% Tylenol, right?

That you're snoring up your nose. And like, no, and I didn't realize that they're like, yeah, look, there's these new pills. They're more expensive, but it's because you're basically getting like 16 percocets and one, right? So it's, you know, oxycod and it's 80 milligram. It's going to be $50 for the pill, which sounded absurd at the time. And I guess it's, it is absurd to pay that much for a pill. But it's going to last a long time. And I used to be the guy that kind of regulated all that stuff for my friends, you know.

I was the one that was the most controlled out of everybody. So I would hold on to our supply. And if we said, you know, like I'm only going to do a quarter of this pill today, I was the one who is kind of like responsible for, all right, here's our 20 milligram, you know, quarter. We're going to break that up into 10 milligrams now, 10 milligrams, you know, a couple hours later. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, it's wild when you hear when it starts. Yeah, I mean, that story is all too common. And I can relate to that 110%. That's exactly the same route I took. having conversation with people over the years. That's the story that so many people share. What I'm curious, though, is did you have any awareness going into this, what this was going to look like? Withdraws, addiction, dependence.

No, no, none. Even well, so well into my pharmacy career, all right, as I believed myself to know more about these drugs than anybody. still I got into any kind of you know personal research any kind of like investigation into recovery I mean with you know of course I I figured out about withdrawal right that you know you get you don't have to you don't have to go out of your way if you become strung out on this stuff and you stop using it you're going to be unbelievably sick and I can remember the first day actually I can picture myself experiencing opi withdrawal for the first time and I didn't know exactly that that's what it was, but I remember this, this, just horrible feeling. And then realizing that,

oh my God, like, I, I, I need to take this stuff every day just to, just to function, you know, because I was in school. I mean, I was studying. These classes were incredibly difficult. It's like, you can't just be sick and, like, expect to, you know, kind of compete with the, with the caliber of people that were, that were there, like in these rooms. And I do remember thinking that, like, oh fuck you know i'm in i'm in i'm in i'm in big time trouble right now uh but no back then god in like my early 20s i mean this stuff was perfect i think i was able to like dissociate from the pain you know i could wake up on time i could go to my classes i could perform well in school you know i graduated i went to pharmacy school i graduated towards the top of my class

I moved out to Southern California. I was managing some of the largest pharmacies out there for about six years. You know, I mean, like a lot of us, and that's a story that I hear, you know, maybe not those exact specifics, but just that story of, you know, you can really do that for a period of time. It's a little different now, of course, with this was before the fentanyl years, you know, fentanyl, I mean, fentanyl completely changed the game. I got out right as fentanyl was, you know, sweeping into the,

country, you know, in that 2015, 2016 range. But I didn't draw a sober breath in my 20s. So from age 20 to 29, there was not a 24-hour period where I was off opiates, not one. Had suboxone on me. You know, I didn't have a prescription forever, you know, but I always had it. So times where I happened to run out of something or, you know, maybe the like before pharmacy, the person I was getting it from, maybe he wasn't able to get it. I would always have that to kind of, lean on for a couple days and then I would go back and it went like that for a while. But no, no, there weren't, there was not a 24 hour period where I was, where I was off completely. 2013.

Okay. So this is like almost exactly 10 years ago. So, you know, daily, you know, I'm kind of jumping around just a bit here, but I was, like, my habit was over a thousand milligrams of oxycodone. I was taking Xanaxoma, adderol, all day long. I was in the pharmacy, you know, so my habit was able to get, you know, had, I had a type of access than most people have. And then, you know, May of that year, a moment of clarity or a moment of stupidity.

I'm still not sure how to categorize that, but I was called into the office at work, which I had been several times before. And I was questioned about some of the inventory numbers. And I was the manager over there, you know, so I was kind of like, initially I was sort of trying to help them solve the problem. It was one of those things. Whatever reason, I confess to what I was doing. Fraction, actually.

Just kind of like a percentage of what I was doing, but it was still a confession. And, man, I was so delusional back then. I really thought that I was so valuable to this company that, you know, that they would just be kind of pulling some strings to get me some help and be, you know, supportive of the recovery process and saying, oh, Jeff, you know, you're not a, you're not a bad person. You know, you're just, you're just a sick person right now. We've got to get you better. And that's not at all what happened, right? They, you know, they told me to kind of sit tight in the office while they figure out what to do. And then maybe 15, 20 minutes later, you know, these two LA County DEA agents walked in and I was walked out of work in handcuffs. And my life

changed forever. Changed forever. I was, I was, I was court ordered to do 90 days residential treatment, which was horrible. I mean,

I basically cold turkey to stuff, you know, they wanted me to get onto some, you know, some kind of like transition medications, you know, long acting opiates. I didn't want to do that.

So it was, it was really hard. It was an incredibly rough detox. But I did that, you know, I was doing better for about five months. total. I was plugged into a 12-step group. I worked the steps. I was working the steps. I was actually sponsoring guys at the time. I read what felt like every piece of 12-step literature that

was ever written. And I was really feeling like I was doing better. And then at five and a half months, I was allowed back into a pharmacy. Okay. So everything that I was writing to these guys and the letters I was getting. So I got a somehow got a really good position, despite the fact that I had to disclose what was going on with me. You know, I mean, so I got a position at a high-end fertility specialty pharmacy in Beverly Hills.

And I relapsed on the first day, you know. It was actually during the orientation. I hadn't, I hadn't planned to. I thought I was on firm spiritual ground. I guess I wasn't. I was, I was face to face with a bottle of viking.

Okay. Back then, viking and the hydrocodone products were schedule, we're schedule three narcotics, meaning that you could just keep them on the shelf with their regular inventory. You didn't have to lock them in the narcotic safe. You know, I got that job. I was there for a little bit. After a couple weeks, I was back at nearly my old levels.

I mean, it's incredible how quickly the tolerance comes back. It kind of seems a little bit unfair. but um and i wasn't telling anybody you know like not that i not that i wanted to keep it a secret from like recovery friends because i think i like these guys you know and i kind of like embrace the whole honesty and transparency transparency thing and i was the authenticity i was trying to do that i mean at least better than i had been the previous bunch of years you know but i was still on probation. I needed to get letters of good standing, you know, from my outpatient treatment center. And the guy that was running that place, he was like friends with my sponsor, right? So like,

everything was enmeshed. Everything was like, so I always felt like if I confessed this to anybody, that I would end up back in jail. So I didn't. I end up faking drug tests for about nine months or so. I was on probation with the criminal and like the administrative courts. I had a, God, I had this really long, like administrative hearing. It was like three hours long where they just, it was like a movie. You know, I'm sitting up there on the stand and they're just asking me everything about everything. It was brutal.

I had to deal with those guys. Faking, faking drug test finally caught up with me. I used to carry urine around all the time. I've heard a lot of people that I used to think that that I was the only person that did stuff like that, but I've since heard that story a lot. I would have to check this website, okay, like every day. And I would have to test maybe three times a week. You didn't know what days it was going to be.

So you had to, you know, just check this website thing. They would tell me that when I had to go. So I would have to basically leave like wherever I was at, drive home quickly, you know, get the urine, heat it up to a, they said that the alcoholic life seems the only normal one. Okay, this was my normal life, right, for a while. I had heated up to a certain temperature. I knew that after a five-minute drive to the lab,

that it would slip back down into the right temperature range. And I used to do that for a while. And this one day they had me waiting there, I guess, for too long. You know, there was something going on in the back. So, like, I sat there for like 20 minutes. And then when I was in that room, I gave him a test, it was a cold urine, you know, which means that it was below the... you know, the normal urine temperature.

So I failed that test. And then I needed to turn in my, my California license. So at this point, at this point, I had no job. I had no, like,

no license, no transferable skills that I could recognize. Now, now it turns out that I do have a lot of skills, right? You know, but at the time, at the time, it's like my confidence was destroyed.

I mean, I really thought that I could either work in pharmacy or, I don't know, you know, sweep the floor somewhere or something. You know, like those are my two, like my two options. Life had just gotten pregnant with my son. And I couldn't handle it, you know. Just that, that tidal wave of all of that, it just completely overwhelmed my ability to cope with life. There was a guy that I knew from rehab that I had met who he sold heroin and meth. And I, you know, they hooked up with this guy. And Brad, I mean, that kicked off the darkest, scariest year of my life.

You know, that was that was 2015. Wow. I guess that was maybe 2014, yeah. 2014. I'm wondering, too, before we skip forward here into this part, I'm wondering what it's like to have this whole thing. You're rested at work. You're losing your license.

What does that do to, what did that do to you mental health-wise internally? How did that feel? It completely overwhelmed anything that I was able. Any tools, right? I mean, I didn't, they have many tools. I had developed some stuff from having gone to, you know, to this treatment center. It was a good treatment center. I had been in the 12-step program for a little bit.

So I did feel that I was, you know, a little bit maybe more mentally prepared to handle some things that I was before. But not this. You know, this was, it was just too much all at once. The pregnancy, the losing, like, my ability to make money, okay? And then my identity, which was, you know, me as a high-performing pharmacist. It was sort of all those things mixed with the fact that I, I mean, I eat. still craved drugs like intensively right so it's like all of that stuff i was i was you know struggling to get a couple days separated from this stuff it's it's like i mean looking back it's clearly i didn't

have a chance you know just just because i was still so connected to my drug dealer he was so accessible like i had my i wasn't i wasn't locked away anywhere i had my i had a wallet with some money in it i had car keys. I had a phone, you know, a phone and all of this stuff was happening. It was like the likelihood that I'm just going to spontaneously snap myself out of that is zero. So your wife is pregnant. And this is your first time you're introduced to heroin at this time to 2014? 2014 was the first time that I did heroin. Yeah. Come about. This guy, this is what he sold. And, and, and, and, and, they, The heroin on the West Coast is tar, you know, which I don't, I mean, I didn't know that.

Yeah, I was just expecting powder. I was expecting to snort it, you know, like I had snorted everything else for the last 10 years. And then this guy breaks out this like one gram chunk of, you know, that would look like, you know, fell out of like a car exhaust pipe or something. And, you know, I sat in his car and he taught me how to smoke it. And he showed me what to do with, you know, with the meth. which I kind of looked at as just a, this is just a souped up version of Adderall. You know, I've been doing, it was doing Adderall every day for years.

So this is just, this is just a step up from that. And that's not correct either. You know, meth, in my opinion, is the scariest drug ever invented. I mean, that had to be moving in and out of acute psychotic episodes. Just, I mean, full-blown, you know, auditory and visual hallucinations. some of these episodes I still think about today. I mean, they were, they were so intense and traumatic. Just, just basically like, it was like a full-blown nightmare,

but I was awake throughout the entire thing. Once in a while, like, I'll hear somebody in recovery and they'll say, like, I don't know what all this talk is. You know, like, everybody's talking about trauma. Now, I don't have any trauma. I've never experienced anything. Like, well, I seriously doubt that, first of all, all right? Even if that were the case.

Okay, so everything was perfect for you before you started using drugs. If that was true. The addiction itself was traumatic, right? Like, drug addiction is by definition traumatic. So, like, no matter what else happened in your childhood, you will need to work through some of that stuff. Yeah, just kind of like an aside. So anyway, so my wife was was terrified.

All right. You know, like her and I decided to move back east. I wasn't doing heroin and meth anymore at this point because I just sort of flew in here. Like my son was born in 2015. And it still took me about about six more months, I would say, to find, you know, the desire to change. You know, I talk about these. these windows of opportunity, right? These just these little windows that open that come from somewhere.

Maybe it's, maybe it's God's grace. You know, maybe it's just that your frequency matches that of the universe in this one beautiful moment. I don't know what it is. Whatever it was, I had one of these moments. Just that, that, you know, seemingly undeserved gift of willingness where I, wanted to get better. The point I was back in the pharmacy on the East Coast, kind of, you know, living the same way that I lived before. I had this realization that, that if I stayed in pharmacy,

that I was going to die. That's the fact that I was now kind of completely rejecting that whole ideology. You know, just, just the pill for every ill. I was starting to think like I'm, I'm actually hurting more people that I'm helping every day by, you know, the stuff that I'm giving them. The whole thing kind of became like repulsive to me at the same time. Maybe that was just my, my higher self trying to separate myself from this, from this world, right? So those were the thoughts that were kind of penetrating through my mind.

I still sort of think of it the same way. I mean, you know, this is kind of an aside. And this is just my personal story, okay? I mean, certainly there's, there's a place for all this stuff. But, but me personally, I mean, I have filled one prescription in the last six years. and that was an antibiotic after after a surgery you know i was in a car accident in in 2020 um so i i had to leave that world completely you know i had to completely disconnect myself from all that stuff uh because i tried to do the you know one foot in one foot out and i did that for

years and years and i was just um and i was dying so it's you know now it's 2016 i'm at detox all winter long in the back of a of a 12-step room. I sold furniture for a little bit. You know, I worked I worked my uncle's pest control company, you know, so if you had a, if you had a rat or a German cockroach infestation in 2016 and he lived in Philadelphia County, I might have, I might have been to your place. You know, you might have come across me at some point. Jeff would have, Jeff would have fixed that up real quick for you. Pretty good at that too. Yeah, I believe it. It would be pay close attention to detail, right? That's right.

And figure them out. Now I'm wondering, too, what that day looked like for you. Was there one specific day that you can recall? Like, what went on that day where you had that sort of aha moment and things finally made sense? Like, was there an event or what brought this on? I mean, I can tell you what was different this time. And I've thought about that question, you know, quite a bit. And I've always kind of, you know, come back to these three very specific things.

but I want to make sure that I'm not accidentally giving, giving off the impression that, you know, that it was this white light experience and I was, and, you know, kind of God spoke to me and told me to stop using drugs. And it was not that,

okay, I, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I left, I ended up leaving, you know, the pharmacy,

I, I pulled myself out this time. Okay, I wasn't, I wasn't forcibly let, but I took a month's worth of stuff with me. Okay, just all my regular,

like my amphetamines. opiates, benzo, muscle relaxers, my whole deal, my whole little cocktail. I took that stuff every day for months. And then I slowly started running out of each one. Right. So, so like my, like my sobriety date. And again, we had just kind of moved, you know, move back into this area. So I didn't, I didn't have any dealers.

I didn't, I didn't even, I didn't know about Kensington. I didn't know the way you could just drive up to different places. I know all about the whole game now, right? But at that time, I was very disconnected. from from anything other than than the pharmaceuticals. And I just started running out of things one at a time. And it was hard, right? So it was like this months-long detox of like, okay, now the amphetamines are gone.

And then, oh, shit, now the muscle relaxers are gone. And the benzos were last. And so my sobriety date, my sobriety date is the last date that I was able to find drugs in my house. That is my date, right? So it's no, it's for no more noble reason than that. I mean, for that whole first week, because I used to hide stuff everywhere. I used to, I used to, like, intentionally get high and then high drugs, knowing that I was going to, like, that I would forget where I put it.

And maybe later I would, you know, surprise myself. So for that whole first week, I'd be just crawling through, you know, sweatpants pockets and little secret zippers and jackets and all kinds of everywhere that I could have potentially put stuff. And I probably found stuff, you know, a couple of the days. But yeah, like my sobriety date just happens to be the last date that I was able to find anything in my house. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Hearing this list of stuff, though, Jeff, I can't help but wonder how in the heck did you make it out of this in one piece?

Like benzos, meth, adderol, muscle relaxers, soma, pill, like oxycott and Vicodin. you ever wonder that oh i think about that all the time and and actually the so so mental you know i think that we break down we break down spiritually and then mentally and then physically and then i think that we recover in the reverse direction so we recover physically and then mentally and then spiritually i think that there are a number of people right who who don't get to that willingness place until until they start breaking down physically and it's I mean it's it's sad sometimes and and and some don't even I mean you go to any you know you go to the liver transplant floor anywhere right and you see people that are that are as

in or in as bad physical shape as you possibly could be and the doctor says you know if you if you drink one more time you're going to die and they're yellow and they're still drinking right So it's like, it is certainly not that physical pain alone is going to do it. Yeah, but for me, there was, there was physical consequences. You know, I was starting to retain water, you know, I gained maybe 30 pounds in like, in like a month or just something absurd, right? And my nutrition wasn't great, but it was fluid retention. My kidneys weren't excreting fluids, right.

If I would press down on my wrists, you know, I had like that, like pitting edema, it would take a couple seconds to spring back up. it would take like a minute to start peeing and like a minute to stop, right? Just everything was like physically things were starting to fall apart for the first time. Whereas before I was always able to hold it together in terms of like physically, you know, I mean, I was going to the gym. I used to, I used to snort 80 milligrams of oxygen and then go to the gym and like, mean, like max bench press.

I mean, that was that was my life, you know, for a long time. But yeah, I wasn't able to do that anymore. Yeah. Gotcha. So what changed? When you got sober, how were you able to keep it going this time? And how are you able to keep it going? You know, everything felt different this time.

I mean, I could, God, I could talk for days just about the, you know, like the difference this time compared to all those, you know, attempts previous. But I can boil it down to, you know, three things because I've been asked this question before. One, I wasn't in a rush. Okay. for the first time in all the previous recovery attempts, you know,

I wasn't trying to get better, faster, uh, or, or make up for lost time, you know, um, I accepted that,

I accepted that I was going to stay sober, even if I didn't start to feel better, right? You know, which might sound a little bit weird, um, to people, but I,

I, I believed to my core that I was now as sober person, and my physical body was going to probably heal quickly, you know, At least that's what I thought, and I was right. And I believe that I was going to live 60 more years, right? So these first one to two years here, you know, in terms of mental health, were just a sacrifice. And I held in my mind this symbol of desert time.

And anybody who's heard me talk has heard me talk about desert time. And, you know, desert time is the time after you've been freed from slavery, right? But before you've reached the promised land. and I believe that we all need to do our 40 years in the desert. You know, it's a lot of, it's a lot of wandering and, and bumping into things and confusion and depression and uncertainty. And that's the desert time, you know.

I read a ton of books, you know, about like the value of suffering and the value of sacrifice. And I just held that concept. That was the dominant thought. that sort of was flowing through my, my brain over that, I mean, at least the first year, you know, a little bit longer. I mean, I read Man's Search for Meaning, you know, Count of Monte Cristo and modern man in search of a soul and power versus force and like all these books that kind of help

they reorganize my thought life around, just around like the reality of what was happening, you know, like, and the reality was that I had done a lot of harm to my brain. And that was going to take a long time to heal. So yeah, first thing is that I wasn't in a rush. Second thing is that I stopped taking things personally. I mean, I don't know how this one even happened. So I can only assume that it was just the universe or God acting on my behalf because this was just opposite of how I had lived the previous 30 years.

I used to take everything personally, right? And again, I mean, it was some, you know, some books. I read the, you know, four agreements. That was incredible. I would suggest that to anybody. It's a very quick read. And I just listened to hundreds of hours of 12-step speakers back then, you know, Clancy Eye and Sandy Beach and Russell S and Johnny Harris and Earl H.

And just all these guys absolutely changed the way. that I thought about life. And that was all happening before I finally got sober, by the way. I was court-ordered into rehab in 2013. I didn't get sober until 2016. So during those three years, right, I used to, Brad, I used to drive down, like, PCH on my way home from work. I would pull over, you know, I would smoke heroin off of tinfoil while a Clancy emosal tape was...

We had a little problem with the audio there, but Jeff was just talking about a speaker tape he was playing. So those voices were populated my head. I just had these guys in my ears all the time for years. So when I was finally ready to stop, I did carry that stuff right along with me. And then when I stopped taking things personally, man, like suddenly I could just tolerate distress. It's my belief that single biggest differentiator of somebody who ends up recovering, covering and somebody who gets just gets stuck on that on that hamster wheel is the ability to tolerate stress right you know both both positive and negative so like you stress and distress and

and and like when things aren't when things aren't personal anymore um and you know the other people's words and and their moods and their actions like when all that crap isn't personal man it's like the amount of stress in my life just, it just plummets and things, things stopped feeling so hard. You know, so because like the withdrawal on the detox was going to be hard enough and the protracted withdrawal symptoms. I didn't need to deal with all that other stuff at the same time. That's, I like that. That's incredible. And I think, too, I did a post a little while back to on Instagram too, and I'm kind of maybe hearing this in your story is that you can start the process before you're necessarily ready to maybe make the big jump.

And I think a lot of people, and that's what it was like for me. Like I went to rehab. I went to counseling. I went to 12 steps, celebrate recovery, smart recovery. So many different things for so many years. Like I started rehab. I went for 12 months when I was 17. And I didn't get sober after that.

But I felt like everything kind of came to a point. At some point, it was like you mentioned, that window of opportunity opened up. I can't explain it. No idea what it was. But one day I woke up and everything I had learned over the years, just I got this big flashback about maybe this is possible for me. I think that's an important thing for people to recognize. If you are struggling,

if you are having a relapse or a slip, if you are looking to get started, like get started on something. Listen to the speaker tapes is incredible because you can multitask that. but just start taking a little bit of action to where you want to be. We do it with everything else in life. If we want to get to other places, we listen to all these motivational speakers who are going to tell us this stuff

over and over again. I think it's so important. And I like that you shared that part of your journey that you were doing that stuff before it, before, you know, things worked out. And it's so much easier than it is,

you know, 20 years ago. I mean, you know, maybe 20 years ago they were starting to burn some, you know, some DVDs where you, you know, they might have a couple of speakers. And, you know, but you had to go somewhere in person, like, where they handed them out. It's like, now you download an app. You download, like, the speakers app. And they, all those five or six names that I just rattled off before, they're there, right? And it's like, they organize it for you.

I mean, you don't have to, it's, you know, there's certainly challenges, right? in in 2023 versus 2003 or 1993, but there are a lot of advantages to. Yeah, for sure. So what are you up to now? I mean, that's an incredible story. Like, I've followed you for a while and I've heard pieces of it, but I definitely haven't heard this much of it. And I'm sure, like you mentioned before, we could go on for days.

I'm sure there's so much more there to unpack. But I think this is a great, like, that's a great. amount of stuff and that you're you're doing this stuff so where what's up now with you uh yeah i mean and just just to kind of you know close the loop on like what i was just saying and i won't kind of dive into this one too too much but that that you know a third part that changed this time versus uh you know the first 50 times is that i did i stopped casting moral judgment on my own behavior um you know that i used to think that that you know getting sober just meant um that i had to be some some kind of, I don't know, some kind of paragon of virtue, right? And now I had to just be this

perfect moral and upstanding, you know, citizen or something, which, and maybe that does tend to happen with enough, you know, so over time, we certainly act better for sure. I don't think that it should be the goal in itself, you know, I think that a lot of that stuff is going to come. But in the beginning, I mean, if you're staying absent from that primary drug of choice and If you're, if you are recovering to good purpose, you're doing well. You know, you're doing well. And if you, if you act out sometimes or if you explode on your spouse or if you yell at this person or if you, if you behave in a way that makes you feel bad, you can, you can tell people about it. Maybe you can share with somebody close to you. But, you know, there's no reason for any of that stuff to to kind of weigh way too much on you. Because a lot of it is just automatic, you know, a lot of it, a lot of that is coming from parts of our brain that we're not consciously controlling.

So it's like how can you, I mean, that would be like when my dog just, you know, does something, that would be like me being angry at him for a month, right, for just some random automatic behavior that he did. And it's kind of like that with us too. So just kind of really, really giving myself a break for the first time. Yeah, that's so important. Work in the recovery space. I've been in the recovery space for a while. I work in a product development designing, implementing, trying to operationalize digital and automated efforts to improve patient access to care, to improve health outcomes.

I also work one-on-one with folks with a reaction recovery. And that's, you know, reaction recovery is something that started off as a passion project, you know, a couple years ago. and that has sort of slowly become the more dominant role in my life to where it is now. I think that we're doing some incredible work. I mean, I've tried to build something. I've tried to build exactly what I feel like I needed back then, right? And not necessarily 2016, but just all throughout that middle time as I was struggling to get this. Yeah. For those of you that, you know, don't know or the don't, you know, some of you guys might know me from social media. I guess I'm, I'm most active on Instagram. I always would like to be more active on some other platforms, you know, but they take a lot of time. And my, you know, my wife and my kids get the majority of my attention these days. So I try not to spread myself too thin. But I'm there and I have, you know, hundreds of posts. A lot of them have these long captions. So.

You know, if you want to basically know, like, my thoughts about anything, there's a, you know, there's like a 400-page book on that, on that page, if you ever, you know, cared to read through any of that. So, reaction recovery is, it's an intensive one-to-one service where I'm meeting with folks, you know, virtually every week, you know, communicating with them every day. and we were designing daily, weekly, and monthly goals based around some basic pillars of long-term sustainable recovery and a thriving lifestyle. Okay, so that's, there's seven basic pillars. So it's community and connection, morning and evening routines, nutritional and dietary intervention, fitness and mindful. movement. Five is career and finance planning, strengthening primary relationships, and then finding

purpose and direction. And it's been my experience that if we're missing the mark on any one of those, that it will reflect on our, on our day-to-day well-being and just lead to distress. And like I said before, you know, it's my belief that distress tolerance. So the ability to tolerate being uncomfortable, that's the number one distinguishing factor between, you know, people who seem to get better and those who don't. And it's intense, man. I mean, we fill in, you know, weekly goals into an app, you know, like I have this, like this app that I use.

And then we're talking every single day, right? Like as much as you want. I mean, I say it's in the trenches of everyday life. So it's not, it's not just kind of this fluffy, you know, you should behave like this kind of thing. I mean, we get in there. right, to make sure that these goals get accomplished. We have a curriculum. All right.

So, like, there are, there are worksheets and, you know, therapeutic activities like you might expect with like an outpatient program, but it's a lot different than that. You know, like somebody, somebody recently wrote in a review and I like this. Maybe I should make this as one of my little taglines. They said, it felt like a, how kind of what they say, it felt like an outpatient program on steroids. I was like, oh, thank you for that. I'm going to, maybe I'll use that. Yeah.

No, that's incredible. Because since this is coaching, right? And it's not therapy. I get to be all up in your business. I mean, and I tell people this right off, you know, so I do these, these, you know, free 30 minute consultations where I'm just talking to people nonstop. And I love it. And there's no obligation. I mean, you can just schedule a, you know, a thing just to talk for 30 minutes about something that's going on.

I encourage people to do that. and I'll tell folks, if you don't want me all up in your life, you know, stay away from my program. If somebody lived an obsessive, drug-addicted life for 15 years and then you have now arrested that particular obsession, all right? So you have abstained from that. You know, you did cocaine for 15 years. You don't do cocaine anymore. You're not just going to become this wonderful, perfect, you know, like I said, paragon of like mental health. It's like that obsession, that, think of it as like a cloud, right? It's an obsession cloud that was on cocaine and it was destroying your life. It's going to go somewhere else, right?

And it's like, we need to make sure that it goes somewhere in a healthy fashion because you can, you know, you can become obsessive about your kids and your work and, you know, different things that are, you know, it's a lot better than maybe swinging right into gambling, you know, or, you know, straight into a sex. or, you know, straight into, just even like video games. I mean, some people can, can really, like, if you spend all night long doing a certain thing, that can stop you from these long-term goals that you're trying to accomplish, right? So it's like this, it is this balance between we want to stay absent and recover from our primary addiction. I mean, that is first and foremost. So, like, we're not going to be hard on ourselves about it.

But at the same time, tracking and keeping an honest inventory of what you're, you know, we're doing on a day-to-day basis. That's the whole, that's the whole point. And it's, and it's action-based and it's intensive. And my job is to push you, you know, right up to the brink of discomfort, you know, without, without just running into that resistance, you know, that makes people, that makes people like us shut down sometimes and want to give up. Like, I'm inspired so deeply by your, your story and you take. the jump out of your career that like I can only imagine how much work you put into making that a possibility, the investment, the time. And there must have been some passion or some desire

there to do that and to kind of leave that behind to improve yourself. Yeah, to improve your life and give yourself a shot at this. Like that's powerful stuff. I mean, I didn't, I did a kick in screaming. I'll tell you that much. I resisted that move, you know, as, as much as I could. And then, yeah, you know, the threat of death tends to be motivating at times. That's the truth. That is so true. But thanks again, Jeff. I really appreciate it. I know people are going to love this. This was great. Yeah, thanks, Braddon. I'll be back anytime. Well, another incredible episode in the books for the Subur Motivation podcast, Jeff really opened up the door for us to share his journey of recovery. If you enjoyed the episode with Jeff, be sure to send him a message on Instagram, reaction recovery.

Let him know you enjoyed the episode and maybe he'll join us again in the future. Also, if you've been enjoying the podcast, don't forget to leave a review. Share it with two of your friends. and I'll see you on the next episode.