From Rock Bottom to Redemption: Raw Stories of Addiction, Trauma & Healing

Breaking the Chains of Addiction | with Timothy Reigle

Michael: And that's what most people don't understand. It is simply a coping mechanism and addiction is this thing that until you, you like really sit in the, the harvest of your seeds, for lack of a better way to phrase it, it's one of those things where you're like, wait a second, hold on. I am, I'm reaping what I've sown here. And for a long time, because it's so avoidant, it becomes this rinse and repeat pattern where you're like, I screwed up. I go to the addiction, I made a mistake, I go to the addiction, I hurt someone's feelings, I go to the addiction, I didn't show up for myself. I go to the addiction. And then next thing your life's in complete turmoil. And I try to tell people all the time, like when I ended up at 25 years old, 350 pounds smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep, cheating on my girlfriend. I can promise you that those were all coping mechanisms. Nothing about my life. And obviously, people of the show know my story, my background, being homeless as a kid, a drug addict at 12. Like nothing about my life had set me up for anything but that kind of life, and it really becomes this question of nature versus nurture, and there are people will, who will hear this and they'll go Timothy's life really wasn't that bad. How did he become an addict? And it's Addiction doesn't care if your father was a preacher or a drug dealer, addiction doesn't care if you're white or black or what side of town you grew up on addiction as a biochemical response to stressor. Addiction is this thing that we seek because the dopamine hit is so good. This is why you hear people who've done heroin, they will say the first time I got high was the greatest day of my life, and I've been chasing that experience ever since. And no matter what, they never get there again. And so we're chasing, and chasing. And I think it'd be remiss of me not to really go into the question that I think is incredibly important. Human sexuality is a part of our experience. And I think to negate that is dismissive to what it means to be a human being. And so I'm curious, how do you Like, in that time, did you have any healthy sexual relationships with yourself, with others, or was it all strewn through the scope of addiction?

Timothy: Once I got older and got married, I did have a, all throughout this time, I had a healthy sex life with my wife, I was in long term relations before that, but especially after I got married in the first 10 years of our marriage. We had a happy, healthy, positive sex life, right? Obviously there was some hurt there when she found out about some of the things happening. But it wasn't like I wasn't getting what I needed on the surface level, on the sexual level from her. It wasn't like I was going to porn and going to other girls because they would do something or providing something that my wife wouldn't or my wife wasn't willing to do. To be open to me sexually because, and I was able to do that because my issue had nothing to do with sex was just the outlet, like you say, it could have been any of these number of other things, drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, whatever mine was porn and sex, but what's so dangerous about porn and sex versus some of those other things. Is that it always has to be new. You're always like you say, with heroin, you're chasing that first high. It's the same thing with this, you're constantly trying to up it, constantly trying to find the next new thing. The next new thing, the next new thing. Whereas like with an alcoholic, you just drink more, right? You just drink more, you build up a tolerance, but you just drink more. With porn, you don't just watch the same porn video over and over again. You got to find something new and what might start off very vanilla, and you find guys getting into really dark. Kind of stuff they're almost disgusted by just because they constantly need to be upping that dopamine dose in their brain. And that's the biological side of it too. And why it, it has the same somewhat effects on the brain. The medical studies have shown this as drug abuse does there's all these kinds of different things that, that go into that, but at the core of it, The cause of it is an emotional issue, not a sexual issue. And so the trying to deal with it on a sexual level Oh, we'll just have sex with your wife. I did. And that doesn't work because my problem wasn't sexual. My problem was emotional.

Michael: And often, you find that problem, and you mention this, has nothing to do with your partner. Has nothing to do with the people in your life, and those people, because I've been down this path personally, is you look at this in all sorts of addiction. There's almost nothing I haven't been addicted to. And I sit here, I look at my life today and I go, Okay. What it used to be. And I say this now in jest and I get to laugh at it, but I used to just always be like, I'm all in, or I'm all out, which does apply to a lot of my life. And I'm very happy, I'm all out on most things these days. But back then I'd be like, this is just how I am take it or leave it. And in that, what you come to realize is it's not even. This is the darkness of it, right? Of whatever the addiction is. It's not even the pain that you're causing yourself that's so devastatingly bad. It's like looking in the eyes of the person across from you and having to tell the truth. And that's where people get trapped in this conversation. And that's why there's no taboo subject on this show. And that's something I've held very close to the heart. Because we all have struggles. We all have this thing that we have to work through. I remember constantly especially in my late teens and early twenties, cause I had an amazing girlfriend who was supportive. I was making good money. I had an awesome place that I lived in that was like this constant self sabotage that was happening. Now, I didn't have the words then. My words then is like, why am I fucking up all the time? And so I'm wondering like Where did the cognizance of the issue really start to come to place? Like, when did it really start to make sense to you? We're like, wait a second. Something's not right here.

Timothy: I think there was two situations there. The first was a conviction that it was wrong just from the get go, and some of maybe that is my Christian beliefs that I believe it's wrong from that level. The unfortunate part is a lot of that came with a lot of shame. So I wasn't, I was taught that. Porn was bad that premarital sex was bad all these things, but that was it just it's wrong. Don't do It's a rule I wasn't taught why that's a rule or why you know that sex is actually a happy healthy thing that God wants us to have We just need to learn to Use it in a healthy way in the way that he designed it for so there was a lot of shame that came from that and then I Like you said earlier, you do something bad. You feel bad for doing something bad. You need to escape that feeling bad. So you do something bad again.

From Prison to Freedom after Trauma | with Eric Karnezis

Michael: Everyone who's ever experienced that because it's when you are in the wrong homes, which obviously sounds like you got frequency of, there's no doubt that children are looked at as checks. And I saw that vividly in firsthand I guess you'd call it secondhand. I never lived in the homes, but I was in them enough. It was never in the system, but my stepfather's mother was a foster care parent and I have said this publicly, she's arguably one of the worst human beings I've ever known. But then I think to myself, God damn, how bad was her life? Because this is hurt people, at the end of the day, but you did something really interesting at such a young age and you chose homelessness, you chose to leave, you chose to get away. For me, it wasn't a choice at eight years old getting bounced around like that. I had no idea. I thought it was just like my life. It thought it was normal to sleep and spend the night in a van, but you chose it because you realized that you wanted something more. But here you are now in this position where I would have to imagine there's this really interesting juxtaposition and internal argument that you're having where on hand it's like, you could be warm tonight. And suffer or you could be cold tonight and be free. How did you guys get to that point? 

Eric: The, it took some months of really suffering and just understanding that it was never going to get better because we went from one foster house to the other. And it was just always a nightmare. And it was, the most exciting that we felt was when we were out walking by ourselves out of the foster homes. And it was also not something that we planned. It was, we were at our last foster house. It was really terrible. And we had just gone through so much and the emotional side, I think was the worst part. Okay, you can starve me. You can wake me up with spray bottles, and you can try to molest me, all the weird shit that people do, like you're all predators and you all suck and fuck you all. That was my mindset back then. And none of that really matters to me as much as what mattered was how good I felt when I was outside in the sunshine with my brother doing our things. So we're in this house and it's like the straw that broke the camel's back. It. I can't, it was so insignificant. I don't remember the trigger. I just remember that I came into the foster home after being outside and immediately was just confronted and yelled at and belittled. And it was condescending talk and it was just, I could feel like hatred and anger bubbling up. Tears were coming out of my eyes. I wasn't like weeping. And I wasn't red faced or anything, but I was just getting this like emotional uproar. And I remember that just the, like a knee jerk reaction. The only thing I could do was just turn and run. And so I just turned and I just ran out the door and Anthony ran out beside me. And the two of us just ran as fast as we could, as far as we could, for as long as we could. And just never looked back. Yeah. And we ran, CPS obviously comes after you. They kidnap children all the time and there's all kinds of stuff I'd like to talk about for that on another time. But they came for us for about six months. They'd come skidding around the corner like DEA agents and try to box us in. And we would hop fences and get away. And after about six months, they just stopped coming. They just gave up, and that's at that moment, we were finally warred to the court. We were finally free. And it wasn't easy. We were, freezing cold at night and shivering and wetting the rain and having to break into garages to escape it and eating candy bars and raw hot dogs. It was rough, but yeah, we chose it for sure. It was better than foster care. 

Michael: Yeah. And that's the same thought I have about living with my grandmother. She took, she had taken one of my little brothers. I had been living in an abandoned house by myself for about six weeks in the blistering hot summer of Indiana, stealing food from the big lots on the corner of 30th and Georgetown, mainly candy, ‘cause I was like 11 and I didn't know. And I was one night, she comes by the house and she's like, where's your mom? And I say, I haven't seen my mom in weeks, I'm literally, there's no water. There's no electricity, the house smells disgusting, it's scorching hot. And she's like, all right, you're coming with me, ‘cause she already had one of my little brothers. And so I go stay with her, and I really didn't want to be there. My I'm biracial black and white. My grandma's an old racist white lady from a town in Tennessee, you never heard of. So imagine the person who's supposed to love you and help you calling you all these horrible racial epitaphs with a copy of mine comp Hitler's autobiography on the kitchen table, my uncle's in the Aryan brotherhood, like the whole thing. She'd give me white boy haircuts with the chili bowl, imagine this hair, getting those haircut. And you're like, okay, wait a second. This is better, this is the alternative to being on the street. And sometimes it is that, and while it was reversed for us, it was still the same thing. This suffering is better than that suffering. And my mom would disappear for weeks at a time. No one knew where she was. My stepdad had taken my baby brother and he was like an over the road trucker. Never talked to that guy. And I remember people would ask me like, are you talking to your mom? Where is she? What's going on? Where's your stepdad? I have no idea. And so it was like really just in the streets, just doing whatever it took to survive. And so I'm curious, were you in communication with your parents at all? Did they know what was happening? 

Eric: We weren't, but I would, I do want to say you're making me feel almost blessed to have this foster system that was a nightmare, because for you to have war within your own family, like your own grandma, I couldn't imagine what that must have been like for you, and what you must have been going through I'm sure emotionally we've dealt with a lot of similarities but that's wow. I've always been able to have this idea of like my perfect mom and dad. And if they weren't in prison, how they'd be for me. And my grandfather was pretty amazing for me, and so I just, my heart goes out to the young you that, that I'm sure that you're hugging right now and you've healed, but my heart goes out to him and that's crazy. But as far as my parents go I was in touch with my dad, never. But he was shipped off to prison a few months before the DEA raided our house and I lost my mom. So he was he got locked up in August and he would call the house once a week, we would chat. Before my mom got locked up, he'd call the house once a week and we would chat and then he was off. And then they came in and raided the house and took my mom. And at that point, we didn't talk to our dad again for many years. My mom, for the first few weeks, we would go visit her. My grandfather would come and take us to go visit her. We were squatting in the house similar to you, and my grandfather would come by and check on us. He'd bring us old expired food and stuff like that, that was his thing. He shopped at flea markets and stuff. He showed up one night with a garbage bag full of expired crackers or something. And so we would, like squat there and do our thing. And we had our grandfather, so we were happy and he'd take us to visit our mom. So we were in touch the first six weeks. But then he died. He came over and died in the front yard. And that's like a whole other tragic story. Just how much more can you lose as a kid? We have this one guy we're hanging on to. And he passes away in the front yard in front of us. And it was one of the, one of the worst experiences of my life was losing him. But at that point, we lost contact with our mother as well. And from then on, it was just a memory. Looking at the moon, remembering things she'd say, listening to a song, and, hanging on to it. And then, that living in the past and that's how you get these codependencies and this depression and this anxiety and all the things that you battle as a young adult are all coming from not letting go of the past and hanging on to something. And, we were just set up for this anxiety from the start. And it was, looking back, it's. I wish I was me then it would have been so easy. 

The Key to Breaking Through Stress | With Hosein Kouros-Mehr

Michael: Do you think stress is the precursor to what happened with you? And if so, like, where does the stress come from?

Hosein: Perfect. So yeah, so the 11 mental knots that I talked about, they're presented in a particular order and it starts with stress. Stress is number one. And, but there are other things that can build on that stress. Things like emotional pain, which was number two. An addiction, stress, emotional pain, those three, they're all interrelated. And, too much stress on the one hand can aggravate, let's say, an addiction on the other. But to talk about stress, I want to just mention a little bit about how the brain works. Okay, because this will help frame everything. The brain, okay, we've got seven networks in our brain. And we're just figuring this out now. So what is a network? A network is just different parts of the brain that connect to do a function. So the visual network helps you see. Auditory network helps you hear. Sensorimotor, cerebellar network help you move and sense. Then you've got three networks that are basically the key to mental well being, happiness and peace. addiction and all these other problems. One of them is default mode network, which is basically the ego. It's me, it's I, it is the location of self in the brain, and it, you'll notice it anytime your mind wanders away from the present, it'll turn on, and we're all different. For me, it's when I'm driving a car or brushing my teeth. As soon as I start that, boom, default mode network turns on. And I go off into the past or the future and the thoughts come, fast and furious. Default mode tends to be judgmental, reactive, and very emotional. So when it's overactive, it can cause stress, let's start with stress. So you're, let's say driving your car and suddenly you remember an argument from yesterday that you had. Or some childhood memory gives you some stress. Just the memory of that. So what happened is your default mode. gave you this memory of something that happened and has just given you stress, right? So that's the default mode. Now, the purpose of stress, what is the purpose of stress, right? We evolved thousands and thousands of years ago in a very different set of circumstances, right? We lived in a time where there was natural disasters and famine and life was very difficult, right? The stress response helped us survive. It told us, crap, there's a predator coming. I gotta get out of here or I gotta put up a fight or like We're gonna we're gonna go hungry the next couple of weeks. So cortisol kicks in stress response All of that helps us survive And that's why we're here. But today, the stress response is caused by our phone or our memories or thoughts. That aren't really threatening our survival, but it's triggering those same pathways. And this, all of this stress is causing damage to our bodies. It's causing, it's leading to heart disease and strokes and cancers and all kinds of problems. So this stress response, it served us a good purpose back in the day, but now it is, it's on overdrive and our thoughts are on overdrive. The default mode is on overdrive and our stress levels are through the roof.

Michael: Do you think that the and thank you for that explanation, do you think that stress today is different than stress for our parents or 50 years ago? 100 years ago? Is it more intense? Is it if you were to like, put stress today in a box versus previous decades or generations, would it be the most stressful time in history outside of maybe World War II?

Hosein: Yeah, yeah. I think so, because we're glued to our smartphones at least four hours a day, most of us on average. And anytime we look at our phone, let's say what happens in the brain is you have signals of glutamate. It's called glutamate. It's how we have thoughts. And when we have too much thoughts and too much stimulation, basically, and we got a lot of glutamate, it sets the brain up for that stress response. We're more likely to get a stress response. So 50 years ago we got stressed. There were things that made us stressed. There were probably things that were maybe more likely to threaten our survival or let's say, about to get into a car accident or get in an argument with our neighbor or something like that. But that stress response kicked in. It saved us in the moment. And stress is important. It helps us. It saves us. But now the stress response is on all the time. And when an actual stressor happens we're less able to actually deal with a real stressor. 

Michael: Is the stress being on all the time? Is that exclusively because of our phones? Because of social media? Because of work? What is keeping it on so much now? 

Hosein: Employers right now they're encouraging their workers to multitask, to, answer emails, and to be on calls, and it's, it's pretty demanding in corporate America. So, all of this is contributing to high levels of stress. And I, yeah, I think it is part of the workplace. So, I am seeing companies now investing in like mindfulness exercises and classes and things like that. I don't know how much that's helping but the culture now is gearing and moving towards a place of greater stress, which damages our bodies. 

Discover Natural Pathways to Mental Wellness | with Robert Haines

Michael: How do you get to the place where you have people who have never believed in themselves, start to believe in themselves? 

Robert: It starts to me. To me, it really starts with asking questions. And what do we know about kids? They ask a ton of questions, right?

Michael: Yes, they do.

Robert: To the point where it can drive us crazy. I have, I have five kids and three amazing step kids. And when my kids were young, they ask tons of questions. And to the point where it'd be like, Oh my gosh, stop asking questions. It's but they're so curious. They're just, they just want to learn. They crave learning and they ask and they ask questions. But what happens is we start going through, School, you go to an elementary school, the class is full of people asking questions, raising hand, bothering the teacher, interrupting the teacher, right? And as we progress through different levels of school, we are told to stop, ask so many questions, put your hand down, stop, let me finish, let me continue the lesson. By the time you go to high school, you look at a high school classroom, hardly anyone's asking questions. Everyone is just sitting there listening, they've been told, don't interrupt, don't ask questions, and we lose that passionate curiosity where we just want to learn, we want to learn, we want to learn, just so I tell people all the time, just start asking questions go back to your two, three, four-year-old self. Where you're so curious about things and you're not afraid to ask questions and almost be a little annoying sometimes to be like, so how does that work? What do I have to do next? How does that work? What do I have to do next? Tell me more about that, which is a beautiful question, right? When someone is telling you something, tell me more about that. It gets, just, that curiosity that just drives us we have to get that back into our lives and just be willing to ask and ask and even be willing to ask someone where, they might not know the answer. Okay, who else do I need to talk to? Who might have the answer? Where do I go find the answer? The answers are out there, Michael, we just need to. We need to develop that curiosity of a three year old again to go figure stuff out.

Michael: So, let's go through scenario. ‘Cause I think this would be very beneficial when you're coaching people and you are helping people navigate problems. That's what people come to you for, right? Same reason they come to me. We're helping them navigate problems. Yeah. I present you with a problem and I say, Robert, here's the reality. I am. So clear about the vision that I want, but I can't seem to stop sabotaging myself. Like I know what I'm supposed to do, but I ended up playing video games. I know what I'm supposed to do. I ended up scrolling on Tiktok. I know what I'm supposed to do. I ended up going out to the buffet dinner, like whatever the thing is, right? What are they missing? What is the pattern interrupt that has to take place? Because in your journey, there were a lot of moments in which you didn't have to do the thing that led you down the path to having the life that you wanted. You could have went a different direction. So what is the, like when presented with these problems, like what are we needing to do to actually solve them? 

Robert: So my experience working with business owners for the last few years when we, when they have a, when they have a goal and we talk about, okay, what are some strategies to accomplish this goal, right? What are you trying to achieve? What are some strategies? And the strategies are the hows, right? How am I going to accomplish this goal? And oftentimes, if we don't know the how, we go find the how. We go talk to other business owners. We do some research, right? We go try to figure out potential hows, potential strategies. And then once we settle on a strategy, okay, this is how we're going to go do it. And we define some actions. Okay, these are the actions to take. My discovery, Michael, is if someone is not taking the action, It is because they lack the confidence, either, either they lack the confidence that action is actually going to achieve the result that we hope it will, or they lack the knowledge of actually how to implement the action, right? And so they might tell themselves, okay, I'm going to go do this. But deep down inside, there's a tension where they don't believe that this is what they need to do, right? So they don't do it. They go play a video game or they go. Do something else, right? What I found is if we have the confidence that this is the exactly the right action that we need to take, and we have the knowledge on how to take that action, and we have the resources, if resources are required to take that action, could be money, it could be time, right? If we have the resources, we have the knowledge, we have the confidence, we're going to take the action, right? If we want that result, Big enough if that's the right result, and if that result is connected to our vision, right? What we're trying to accomplish if all those things are in alignment, right? We have the vision. We know the result we're going to accomplish. We know the strategy and what actions we need to take. We have the confidence. We have the resources. We have the skill set. Then my experience working with my clients is they're going to take the action. They're going to do it, right? If they're not doing it, 1 of those things is missing. And I almost, when I started working with someone, I am waiting for that moment, Michael, where we get to the action and it's okay, what action are you going to take? What does that look like for you? When are you going to get it done? When I follow up with them a week or two weeks later, it'd be like, did you do it? I am waiting for them to say no. I didn't right because that opens a whole door for me. I'd be like, why not? Why did you not take it? Because something is holding them back. And it's one of those things. Typically, I don't have the resources. I don't have the skill set, or I don't even believe this is the right action to take. Something there exists that is holding them back. So that we got to discover what that is right for them to get the action. 

Michael: So how do you take it? You look at some of the elite top high performers in the world, the one thing they all have in common in their field of expertise. I'm not even saying across the board, because even for myself, I wouldn't consider this across the board, but as being an expert at what I'm an expert at, dude, I am a highly confident in my ability. How do you get people to build confidence? Like where does that come from? Because if that's one of the things, I think the how is pretty self-evident. Go ask the questions, find the answer, do the thing. But if you don't have, it's like chicken and the egg, right? You can't have the confidence if you don't have to do the thing, but you won't do the thing if you don't have the confidence. So how do you build the confidence? Where does that begin? 

Robert: A lot of it comes from other people, Michael. I tell people all the time, if you don't, if you don't have the confidence, borrow mine, borrow some of my confidence is this is the right action and the right thing for you. A lot of that is social proof, who else has done this action that achieved that result? And we, if we don't have it ourselves, we've got to go find it. And someone else either you borrow it from your coach, you borrow it for someone who's really important to you in your life, or you borrow it from someone who has done what you want to do, has stood on the stage you want to stand on, has flown the airplane you want to fly. If did they do that and did it work for them? And if so, that's confidence enough for me to try it.