Something I’ve grappled with for most of my life is the idea of addiction vs. abuse and if the distinction even matters. At one point, I was using cocaine every single day. Often, multiple times a day. I would typically pair that with a few drinks and then really just see where the day took me. At the time, it’s how I “decompressed” because it was the only coping skill I had.

When I think about the idea of addiction vs. abuse, I think about the root cause. Addiction is a disease; abuse is a response. My drinking and drugging were directly correlated to things I wasn’t ready to face head-on. Was I “getting help?” Sure. Was I doing the work? No. While I stopped relying on substances many years ago, 13 years and 8 months to be exact, I didn’t really get it until a little over 5 years ago when I made the difficult decision to cut ties with almost my entire family. We had just welcomed my first daughter into the world and I had to change the way I was living. My mental state wasn’t sustainable regardless of my sobriety. For me, I was abusing substances because it was simply too painful and too big to face my abusive upbringing and the traumas it led to head-on. Admitting the things that happened to me made me feel weak, and it wasn’t until I really decided to take my life into my own hands that I realized there is nothing weak about a lifetime of having to be strong.

In 2021, I was officially diagnosed with C-PTSD and ADHD. These diagnoses didn’t change my history, but they were what I needed to get excited about my future. It’s like when you go to the doctor with a sore throat, they tell you you have strep, and you immediately feel better because there’s a cause and solution. That was this for me. I started to understand that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) would never be enough for me because C-PTSD and ADHD both cause significant memory loss. I was frustrated that I couldn’t articulate my needs or my goals in a therapeutic setting and finally understood why. I couldn’t process my history if I could barely remember it. It prompted me to look into intensive trauma therapy, specifically, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and it’s quite literally changed my life. Not only am I clean and sober, I now have the understanding and the skills to make sure I stay that way.

Recently, I was talking to my wife, and she shared that when we got together in 2011, she wasn’t fully aware of how frequently I was turning to substances to get me through the day. This made me realize something I had been questioning: while I may consider myself to be an abuser vs. an addict, the patterns of behavior don’t discriminate, and the work needed to recover looks very similar.

Coming up on 14 years since I used my last drug, I feel more confident than ever in my sobriety. The timing of connecting with Matt, AJ & Adam was fate. Truly. A few years ago I wouldn’t have been comfortable enough in my own story to join this team. Getting clean goes so far beyond stopping substance use. It’s the work we do afterwards that allows us to find contentment, happiness, and long-term success in recovery. There’s light at the end of every tunnel no matter how many miles that tunnel may be.