- Alcohol
- Faith
Jeff was a go-getter who found professional success at a young age. He was a principal on Wall Street at 25 and spent 18 years as an executive in finance, specializing in trusts for wealthy families. He seemed to have it all together, but what his colleagues and clients didn’t know was that Jeff needed a gallon and half of bourbon just to get through each day.
His job was to take people out and entertain them. Ironically, he didn’t drink during those work outings because he didn’t want to be seen as a lush. Instead, he was an at-home drinker. He became a partner at three different financial firms before the age of 35, eventually working as my mom and dad’s boss.
Unlike many others who battle alcoholism, Jeff didn’t have his first drink until he was 18, when he graduated from high school. He quickly made up for lost time, though, and this good Christian Texas boy really learned to drink at his Christian university. While work seemed to be going well, Jeff’s drinking did take its toll in his personal life. He’d been married and divorced, but, conveniently, everything was everybody else’s fault.
“I was the fun drunk, but if I took one drink too much, I turned,” he says.
The wake-up call came after Jeff relocated to Houston for his dream job and then lost it. Looking back, he can see now that he was fired because of his drinking, but at the time he was still in denial. After that, financial problems followed.
“I was losing the house and hadn’t had a job and no one wanted to hire me,” he recalls. “There are two things you don’t do in that industry: don’t lose money and don’t get caught using. I had done both.”
Meanwhile, Jeff had begun a relationship with a girl he’d known since fourth grade, and it was her kids who eventually ratted him out. They would later marry. She scheduled an intervention, and Jeff went to treatment for 60 days. While there, his wife wrote him a letter and said, “You’re going to have something else to do.” Jeff had always loved sea turtles, so his wife wrote a story about those creatures, comparing the turtle to the addicted person and the shell to the addiction.
“We’d escape into the shell and never make progress. The turtle only makes progress when they stick their neck out, and it was time for me to stick my neck out,” Jeff realized.
Today, the sea turtle is a symbol of his new life, not just in sobriety but in a career of helping others get clean through his business: healingseaturtle.com.
He still remembers that first call, asking him to help someone’s son get into treatment. Jeff hoped to do 10 interventions that first year. He did 58. Of those, 100% have gone to treatment. He can’t guarantee that they’ve all stayed sober but he knows his job is simply to get them the help they need.
Today, he looks back at his career in finance as on-the-job training. “That was God prepping me for what I do now. If I didn’t know how to handle dysfunctional families with lots of money, I wouldn’t know how to do this,” he says.
Even after getting sober, there were still plenty for Jeff to learn. He remembers, “When I was a drug addict, I always thought I was different because what I did was legal. One day, a drug dealer said to me, ‘You drive around and drink your special water with two kids in the car. That’s a felony. I’m a misdemeanor, so shut up!’”
Now Jeff can see that his real issue was perfection and failure. He would move the line right before he got to it. He knows he needs to stay alert to stay on top of his disease. “My issues can always come back,” he admits. “My disease likes to screw with me.”
Today, he works hard but he says he wouldn’t trade it for the world. “My wife says we’re ordained. Jeff couldn’t have made this happen. I have no credentials but I do understand their minds,” he says.
What he wants to tell them is that recovery doesn’t have to be painful and it’s so worth it.