- Alcohol
- Drugs
Sometimes recovery stories come full circle, as is the case with Tim. His journey began when he showed up homeless at the Florida recovery center where he now works. That was nearly six years ago.
Of course, the events that led him there started much earlier. Tim’s battle with addiction began when he was just 11 years old. Even at that young age, he was already walking on eggshells in his own home. The dysfunction seemed to hang in the air. His dad seemed angry and his older brothers were angry too. There were fistfights and tension.
Then one day, Tim was out in the woods and someone offered him pot for the first time. He took his first hit and suddenly there were no more eggshells. Not surprisingly, he liked it. And on the outside, everything still seemed okay. Tim’s dad was a well-known doctor in New York and the family lived in a prestigious New Jersey town. There may have been trouble behind closed doors, but it was hard to spot by outsiders.
Tim served his country as a Marine and is married with kids. Despite his using, he seemed to be on track. But in the years that followed, he went from Park Avenue to a park bench with plenty of stops in between. “Cocaine and alcohol were the warm-up for me,” he says. “Being an alcoholic didn’t cut it after a while, so I started cooking it up and freebasing. Addiction is a disease of wanting more. The question isn’t, ‘What’s your drug of choice?’ It’s, ‘What’s your drug of no choice?’”
When his parents moved to Florida, Tim followed. He was quickly running out of options in New Jersey anyway and, like many who try to justify an addiction, thought a change of scenery might be all he needed. He soon realized that his problem had followed him across state lines.
It was finally time for Tim to face the fact that he was sick and the disease of addiction had been blocking him from seeing the truth. A friend who had been there dropped him off at a treatment center, and Tim never left. He completed the program, took a job at the facility and then spent three years getting certified.
During that process, Tim came to realize that his addiction wasn’t just a physical thing. It was also a chronic mental disorder. “I’m 44 and sleeping on the couch. I lost my wife and kids, but I’m okay,” he recalls of his drug-warped thinking. “It’s a thinking problem. It’s a fatal progressive disease, but I can change the way I think.”
For Tim, addiction has proven to be a family affair, with two brothers still active and two in recovery. As for Tim, he’s just thankful that he got to a point where the pain outgrew the fear, the anger and the resentment and allowed him to see the truth.