- Alcohol
- Faith
submitted by: Susanne Johnson
“Let’s go run in that,” Turner’s friend said as he saw the flyer to the Heroes in Recovery 6K at a coffee shop in the Nashville area. Turner is from Franklin, just outside of Nashville. Today, Turner has ten years of sobriety after he started drinking at age 14 and struggled with his alcoholism for many years.
He was married at the time of his addiction and the woman he was married to confronted him about his behavior. She told him that he is the problem and something inside him shifted; he finally accepted the idea that the time had come to change his thinking. He could not blame anybody else anymore for his alcoholism, his behaviors, his misfortunes and more in life, it was time to accept that he is the problem and that he needed to change. Today he is happy that she confronted him and no longer enabled his bad behavior. However, although the change happened they still got a divorce seven years ago.
Turner is happy about the development in his recovery. He is living an active and healthy life today and lost about 35 pounds by changing his lifestyle. “I take better care of myself,” he says. He sees a big improvement in his relationships in general, not only inside his family, with his daughter, and also in his business and with friends. “My business started to get a whole lot better, as I stopped doing all those crazy things,” he says. He considers himself a much more consistent performer at work today.
“To have success in recovery, you need to be consistent,” is one of Turner’s mottos today. He sees that those people that are consistent and show up and participate, whether they have a good day or a bad day, are the ones who make it to long-term recovery. He points out that he is well aware that he may lose everything he worked for if he stops showing up.
Turner started his recovery by going to outpatient therapy and has gone to 12-step meetings ever since. “It is not the alcohol, it’s the spiritual disease that I needed to recover from the most,” he states. He typically still attends about four meetings a week. He got a sponsor and is currently re-doing the steps and also has sponsees. He loves to go to newcomer meetings and watches people showing up in tears and sees them grow and change in the first few months of their recovery.
Turner’s relationship to his higher power is improving over the years and he feels happy to have a deep faith and trust in it today.