- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Friends & Family
submitted by: Susanne Johnson
At age eleven Shawn started the use of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana. His addiction naturally progressed through many drugs like ecstasy, mushrooms, opiates, and cocaine over the years before he landed on his drug of choice, crack cocaine, at age 19. He mixed it with a lot of alcohol and tobacco and it took him until the age of 24 to finally get clean and sober from all these substances with the exception of tobacco. Today he is 34 years of age and still struggling with the tobacco, like so many other users too.
His childhood was very complicated. His birth mother was a prostitute and drug addict and gave him away. His adoptive family raised him and it was a back and forth between them and his biological mother for some months. His adoptive family thought he was deaf since he didn’t react to anything as a baby due to early abuse. He came to a family with a lot of siblings, which gave him the outside stimulation he needed to heal him to a degree. He was sexual abused in his early childhood for a long period and was scared to talk about it. At age 13 he came back into Foster Care and spent the next 11 years of his life there as well as in jails and prison. He was in several treatment places during his teenage years, but he never realized that he was there for treatment. Being property of the state, for him it was just another bed to sleep at, another place to stay.
During the years of his drug use he didn’t realize that he had a problem. He saw only that he was practicing behavior that others don’t approve and that are potentially harmful for him. At this point he didn’t consider it a problem; he still considered it a solution. His parents were not aware of his situation at first. They knew he was smoking and sometimes even drinking alcohol at an early age, but he kept asking indirectly for help and didn’t get the reply he needed. He wrote a suicide note at the age of ten and he handed a bag of marijuana over to his parents at the age of 13, all his attempts to receive help early on. Drugs and alcohol were his solution to his suicidal thoughts, he never thought about suicide again until he was sober.
For Shawn, the law was his intervention. He was finally so tired of being locked up in a penitentiary or jail that he had enough of it. He felt that if he ever has to go back there it is the equivalent of death for him. His motivation was clearly that he didn’t want to be locked up for the rest of his life. It was unclear to him at this point if treatment would provide him with all he needed; he was just hoping it would. On the second day of his treatment he was positive that this was what he wanted, what he was searching for. He wanted sobriety.
Prior to that, he was making a decision in prison that this time he would not get in trouble when he came out. He wanted to change his life. He was engaged in this thought for over a year. At the day he was released from prison after a four-year-sentence, his worst nightmare came true as he found himself with a glass wine at first and later smoking, snorting drugs and getting in trouble with the law again.
After he was sober and through his own 12-step spiritual retreat, he asked his mother if he can do a sober living in a room in her house and bring people home to help them and she agreed to it. That’s how he started. He was working at the retreat where he got sober in the meantime. Then he met a lady and was going to get married and they bought a house. The relationship broke up, but now he had a house. He opened a sober living and had a dream to help people even better. Today it is a small, intimate treatment center with doctors, therapists and nurses, caring for dual diagnosed clients near Nashville.
“Your heart can take you where you want to go if you follow it,” Shawn says. He had a vision and followed his heart to save his life and those of others. “Don’t give up, no matter what. If you want to quit, dig your heels in and keep going,” he likes to tell people new to recovery.
Today Shawn goes to meetings on a regular basis, has a sponsor, does breathing exercises, and practices mindfulness and meditation. Beside this it is important for him to share his testimony with others, hoping it will help them. He also likes to be active with his clients, they go to the gym, go hiking, go to the pool, and love to fly kites and more.