Ep. 10 A Car Accident, Opioids & The Breaking Point That Nearly Ended It with Former Attorney Wayne Basist

What happens when the life you worked so hard to build is the very thing that starts breaking you? In this deeply honest conversation, Wayne Basist shares how the relentless pressure of practicing law, combined with years of underlying anxiety, quietly pushed him toward a breaking point he didn’t fully see coming. But it wasn’t just burnout it was a devastating car accident that changed everything, setting off a chain reaction that would challenge him physically, mentally, and emotionally in ways he never imagined.

As chronic pain led to opioid use and his world began to unravel, Wayne found himself facing moments that forced a life-or-death decision. What followed wasn’t a quick fix, but a long and deeply personal journey through trauma, recovery, and transformation. Today, he’s using those experiences to help other attorneys navigate the very struggles that nearly took him down. This episode invites you to rethink stress, resilience, and what it truly means to rebuild your life from the ground up.

Contact Mark Astor:

Website: https://mentalhealthaddictionlawfirm.com/

Phone number: 561-517-9405

Email: mark@astorsimovitchlaw.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markastor

TikTok: Mark G. Astor (@astorsimovitchlaw) | TikTok

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I firmly believe that if I can do it and if I can change and be transformed, anyone can. And in particular, as you mentioned, I've chosen to focus on my former, still an attorney, but I don't practice as you said, but my profession and take and do whatever I can. If I can save even just one attorney from going through what I was experiencing and what I subsequently experienced, then in a sense, my sponsor would say to me, You've done your job. Just like sponsoring one individual in the program. Helping one person recover is doing your job.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

It's the journey with drug and alcohol attorney Mark G. Aster. Welcome to the Journey with Mark Astor. I'm your host, Mark Astor. I've spent a lot of years sitting across the table from people during some of the most challenging moments of their lives as an attorney, as an advocate, and as someone who understands that the road isn't always straight. What I've learned is that success, recovery, and growth rarely look the way we expect them to. There are detours, hard conversations, and moments that change everything. On this podcast, I talk with people who are willing to be honest about their journey, what worked, what didn't, and what they wish they knew sooner. So today I have an incredible guest. His name is Wayne Bassist. Wayne is a lawyer. He does not practice, but many years ago he did. And he was like many other lawyers, and he was grinding it out. The billable hours, the late working late at night, coming in early in the morning, which was causing anxiety and stress. If you're a lawyer listening to this, I'm sure that sounds very familiar. And then something happened to him that really changed the course of his life. He was involved in a car accident, which left him severely injured. And if you go to his website, you can see him walking on crutches. And that led to issues with regards to mental health, with regards to drug use. And but he was like me, he was fortunate to have a really great family around him, and that makes a huge difference. And in 2016, with the unwavering support, he had a sponsor, which, as I've said before, is very important in the recovery process, who helped him emotionally and spiritually. And he, this is his words, the gift of transformation, right? We call it the miracle of recovery, but I think that the gift of transformation is equally appropriate. And these days, he has this amazing, for lack of a word, business service, and he helps other lawyers to deal with the stress of the practice of law. And Ewayne this is so appropriate. I was putting out some content the other day, and I tell lawyers this all the time when I do a CLE. Our profession, if you are a member of the legal profession, you are twice as likely to develop some type of behavioral health issue. And you went through a horrific car accident that left you in considerable pain for a long time and unable to walk for quite a period of time. So you had the stress of being a lawyer plus this horrendous car accident, and here you are helping other lawyers. So I'm really glad that you came on today and thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Thank you, Mark, and it's entirely my pleasure to join you today. And it's this is another of the gifts that I get to experience in life, which is sharing my story, my experience, my strength, and hopefully offering hope to others out there. I firmly believe that if I can do it and if I can change and be transformed, anyone can. And in particular, as you mentioned, I've chosen to focus on my former, I'm still an attorney, but I don't practice as you said, but my profession and take and do whatever I can. If I can save even just one attorney from going through what I was experiencing and what I subsequently experienced, then in a sense, my sponsor would say to me, You've done your job, just like sponsoring one individual in the program. Helping one person recover is doing your job. Okay, where are you based right now, Wayne? So I actually live in a small town called Willis. It's about 50 miles north of Houston, Texas. Where'd you grow up? I was a New York City boy. I grew up in, I grew up in Queens and really had a classic sort of New York City upbringing, six-story brick tenement, and playing all the street games that back in the day all the kids in the city were playing, like stick ball and punch ball and stoop ball, and all these kind of street games that I don't even know if they play them anymore.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

But yeah, I did the same thing as again. I was always constantly playing in the street because we didn't have those devices that connect us, that disconnect us from our friends and family and reconnect us with who knows what. So I'm with you. And that was my childhood too. Tell us about your home life.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

What was that like? The truth is that my home life was uh was pretty dysfunctional. The we went through some we went through some tough financial struggles. My father had been in the military in Korea, and he suffered with PTSD. He could be an amazingly loving individual, but then he raged. So it created a very unstable household. And unfortunately, those impacts, you know, some of the emotional trauma, and there was physical too, because I'll just add to it that out in the street, I was a scrawny little kid, and I used to get bullied and me too. I hear you. And so I have one sister and it was cute. We used to build little fort, and it was a our little apartment. It was a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment, maybe 900 square feet, give or take. So we used to build a fort, and that's how we would hide and feel somewhat safe when the fighting ensued. There was a lot of fighting in my household. And siblings-wise, how many siblings did you have? I have one sister. I'm the older brother. Um, and I was really the object of my father's attention and at times wrath in a way that it was very different from my sister. I was pretty yeah, I was pretty good. I actually played basketball at UCLA where I went to undergrad for a couple of years. Now, I always like to clarify with people that I played on the junior varsity team because the guys that were playing on the varsity in those days uh generally ended up then moving on to play in the NBA. And I was not quite gifted with the athletic skills they did. But I did get to play there. And I'll just add, Mark, it was really cool, particularly special for me. When I was a kid growing up in New York, I I loved playing basketball. I played in the schoolyard all the time. That was my place of salvation, uh to go to the schoolyard and play basketball when the stuff was really.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

And I played soccer. That was my place of salvation.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Right. In those days, UCLA was winning national championships every year with John Wooden as the coach. So as a boy, my dream was to play basketball at UCLA. And I'm telling you, when I had the opportunity to put on that jersey and run out on that same court where all those great players like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton had played, it was how often as a kid do you get to realize a childhood dream like that? So it was awesome. That's how you went from New York to UCLA because that's a bit of a jump, right? Well, yeah, there was an intermediate step. We actually moved to Maryland, and at one point, I mean, we were really in the boonies. We were living in this brand new development surrounded by cow pastures. I used to joke that with at my high school, I played soccer as well. And when you were out there playing, man, you just prayed the wind was blowing away from the field. Because when it wasn't, man, it was like a it was almost like a hazardous situation. Odor was so bad. And then we went to California. So the re we relocated from Maryland to California when I was in high school. It was a huge adjustment for me. I grew up as a kid in New York City, kid. We didn't have any money. My father's business improved in Maryland, but then we're living in the country. And I show up at high school and the guys are wearing overalls, right? And things got better for him. So we move into this really what was like an upper middle class neighborhood. I show up to school, and there's kids driving Mercedes and BMWs. And I'm like, what? The people I actually related to more in the beginning were actually the kids that were coming in from the iter city, like South, South Central Los Angeles. I had more in common, frankly, with those kids than the ones in that community. And as far as with the surfing and that skateboarding and that lifestyle, that was just completely foreign to me. So it took me a time. But the beauty of sports is enables you to become part of, at least to become part of the school with your teammates. And that that that helped. It was a challenge, man. I definitely was, it took some time. But it worked out great because I made some wonderful friends, and there's five guys, man, that to this day, 50 plus years later, we're still like this. So when you were at UCLA, did people know that you were part of the basketball program? They did. In those years, the junior varsity games were at home, were always played right before the varsity games. And the students, in order, in those days, the teams were so good, students used to sleep out to be able to just be able to get seats in the student section. So they would open the doors for the kids to come in right before our game started. So at least I got to play in front of the students. Students, students got to know who I was, and I was also very good friends with a couple of the guys in the varsity. They'd see me hanging out with those guys too. It was so much fun, man. It was those were a couple of special years. So at what point did you decide to go to law school? How'd that happen? All right, this is a story in and of itself. My father's dream was that his son was going to become have a profession. I don't know if I want to necessarily, I'll make the joke. Especially back in those days. Doctor, lawyer, accountant.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

My dad gave me the exact same spiel.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

If a professional man, you'll always make a living. Right, exactly. Exactly. It's got into my senior year, and one day, and I was not really ready to go to law school. I hadn't decided I really wanted to do it, right? All of a sudden, one day, my father turns to me. He says, Hey, did you apply to your send in your law school applications? And I said, No. And literally, Mark, this is give you an idea of the passion of this man. He literally calls my uncle, who's an attorney at that time in Beverly Hills, and says, Can we come over right now and can you sit with Wayne and help him get his law school applications done? Because he's coming up on the deadline. Literally, run to his house and he sits there with me and he helps me write out my personal statement, which he had to include, right? But here was the thing. I made a point of applying to law schools I knew I couldn't get into. And my father didn't know from that. And my uncle, he didn't know what my academic record was in high school. So an opportunity comes up for me to become a high school basketball coach in LA. And I'm like, wow, this is gonna be so cool. And I tell my father, and he says, No, you're not. If you are, then you better plan on hanging and support yourself starting tomorrow. And I acquiesced, and he's you're gonna come work in sales for me. And he was a manufacturer's rep for office furniture. So that's what I did for a year. During the course of that year, Mark, when I was meeting a lot of these salespeople and I was hearing their stories about getting laid off and having to find jobs and stuff like that, the instability and security, I was like, okay, now I'm ready to go to law school. So that's when I made the decision, and I in fact did then apply to schools. And I end up attending Loyal Law School in Los Angeles. Okay. Were you a good law student? Uh I was a good student. I I my first year, I finished in the like top 20%. But what really ticked off many of my classmates who actually had higher ranking was that during the my first and second year of law school, I externed, I worked for a federal district court judge. And he was a very famous judge, actually, because back in the Watergate days, there was a case, the federal government, they went after the guy by the name of Daniel Ellsberg, who was um had worked in national security, and he was the one who released what became the famous Pentagon Papers, which was a report done internally that basically stated how the government knew they couldn't win in Vietnam almost from the beginning. So the government went after him, and my judge was the one who threw the case out. So he was really well known. And as a result of that summer externship, when we got into the second year and people started getting interviews for that second summer clerkship, I was getting interviews from firms that kids who were in the top 10% weren't getting. So the guy who was in the top 20, which is still good, was getting interviews that kids that had done exceedingly well were not. So worked out really well. And another time I can share some stories about my summer. I saw some really incredible, stunning things. The sentence, I'll just tell you, but we won't get into it. But the sentencing, day one, there to witness the sentencing of a guy who had been had pled guilty to espionage selling secrets to the Soviet Union, that was pretty intense. And then there was another where was the judge give him life without parole. He really laid the hammer down on him. But that those were the days of the the Cold War. And then I was uh I happened to also be observed and do some work on a seven-defendant criminal Rico mafia trial. So I it was quite a summer, and then like I said, but yeah, that it I ended up landing a good job when I started my career. So, where did you start your career? I started out working for Morgan Lewis Mbacchius, which today is considered an AMLOR25 firm, huge global firm. At that time, it was actually the fourth largest in the world. And what kind of law were you practicing? At that point in time, I would describe it as business litigation. Initially, it was doing some work on a very large antitrust case, securities litigation cases. I was on what was called the special litigation team or like a version of the SWAT team. There were 12 of us that all worked on this team under the one senior partner. How'd you like that? Did you enjoy that kind of work? I the work itself was certainly really interesting. But the demands and the pressure and the toll of working in a firm like that were really affected me in the very negative ways. Besides getting really super stressed and anxious and the mental fatigue, the physical fatigue. I was I developed actual illnesses and physical symptoms that were getting me sick from all that.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Spend a couple minutes and talk to us about the kinds of pressures. Like what because obviously, if you're working for a big firm, you have certainly a lot of pressure to bill a certain amount of hours and work a certain amount of hours and maybe walk us through some of the things that just really just started to frankly crush you.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

I would say one certainly were the bill, it and it's more than billable hours, right? Because you're you're working, there's work you're you know, there you're doing things related to work that you can't bill for, right? Such as there were administrative tasks that I would be asked to do in support of certain cases where I would be told, you I need you to do this, but you can't bill for it. It's been honestly too many years to tell you exactly what it was. But one of the things that they used that, you know, and of course they wanted doing some pro bono work in there too. But so you had the billable hours, there were non-billable sort of administrative things that you would be asked to do. And but for me, the challenge was that I was a very anxious person to begin with. And that it that insecurity drove me to where I could never stop thinking about the cases I was working on, because the pressure that was coming from the top and making its way down, because the partner at the top was a great lawyer, but incredibly intense. And back in those days, man, there was yelling, there was screaming, there were moments of frankly humiliation being called out in front of your peers. And man, that that just took my internal stress to really high levels, and so there was this need to feel like I was doing a perfect job, that I was not missing a case. This was litigation, so that to somehow I wasn't missing a case out there. I felt like my job was always at risk, that I was one mistake away from losing that job. And at that time, I was married, and we were we and my wife got pregnant, and man, I was like, I got and so there was the expectations on the partner side that you turn in, it needs to be perfect, man. God help you, if you missed a case and the one of the partners, even the senior associate, got blindsided at the hearing, it was and it would that was brutal. It but it was this non-stop fear and inability to be able to ever quiet my mind from it, and the stress of everyone above me, it seemed like everybody's stress just flowed down on top of me. And I would say that yes, the volume of work was intense. The late nights of working into the wee hours or polling.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

You ever have to sleep in the office?

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yes. I slept on the floor because there was it didn't have access. The partners had the couches in their offices, but their offices were locked. So I was on the floor, and I actually I did I pulled all-nighters, I pulled back-to-back all-nighters, and stay awake that long. I'm sorry, please depict. How'd you manage to stay awake that long? It would could be you it could be tons of caffeine, pop and no douze pills, and sometimes cocaine, sometimes cocaine. In those days, you didn't have you didn't hear about Adderall, right? Or some of the other there were amphetamines out there. That was not some the route I went because they enjoyed coke too. And that was very cool. Oh, just the energy, there would be heightened focus, and just that overall uplifting effect. The problem was then you come down, right? And the only thing I'll say is what saved me in those days was that in the back of my mind, there there was a fear I had again about getting caught with the burgeoning new young family and so forth. And so the issues with the drugs really enters into my life later on. But the other thing that was very drinking was really common in those days, right? Those were days where lawyers were drinking at lunch, the old two martini drinks or other cocktails. Every Friday we had these soirees where the firm would just break out all this alcohol and stuff. And when you could see the alcoholics in the firm, but you would see them functioning. So you plants this idea that oh, if they can do that, then I could do it too. But again, at that point, I would say my much greater challenge was on the mental health side.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Do you think that there were other associates in the firm who were also dealing with the mental health issue and the coke use and the alcohol use?

SPEAKER_00 22:07

I had I absolutely. There's no qu no question about that. So how long did you work for this firm? I was only there for two years. I had gotten I was dealing with really painful gastrointestinal issues. And I was constantly having to go see this doctor and taking medications and always, in other words, always walking around. I thought I had a knot in my gut when I was in my first year of law school. This was a whole different story. I was dealing with some pretty intense pain and so forth, which of course introduced me to pain medications and opioids.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

Did you ever say to yourself, you know what, this isn't worth the aggravation? Who needs this? Who even wants to practice law at this point? Because I think there's this notion that the practice of law, because LA law and some of these other law shows, that being a lawyer is, for lack of a better word, a sexy, profitable profession.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

But I don't know if that's necessarily true anymore. I I spend a lot of time now with younger attorneys. It's a very, it's a very different environment. The today's young attorneys, they want they they're seeking to have a better quality of life. They want like they talk about work-life balance. But back in my early days, you didn't dare talk about that stuff. You get fired. If you mentioned you would find I had one guy in particular that I was able to at least, you know, offload and feel I felt confident that I could trust him and I was able to trust him. He never said anything to anyone. But man, if you hinted that you were stressed, anxious, or having any issues, you were right away viewed as weak, not cut out. It almost seemed like there was a bit of a bullying aspect to how then they almost wanted to put the screws to you even a little bit more. That's funny. I'm having flashbacks. You ever seen that movie with Tom Cruise, The Phone?

unknown 24:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Listen, man, let me tell you, I that was that was me. Young. I thought it was a hot shot right away. In fact, I was so cocky about the results of the bar that I actually went and got myself a BMW before I had the darn results. But had the BMW, and then not long after after we bought the house and working late nights, working weekends, looking all frazzled just like he looks there, the impacts on the home life because of you're tracking it all into your home. So it has all those, yes, but I I tell people, I said, you want to know it was like in those days? Fortunately, my firm though was not doing anything illegal or that's the good news. The best to the best of my knowledge. So talk to me about the accident. When did that happen? So the accident occurred on October 2nd of 2002. That's a date that was forever imprinted on my brain. At that time, I'll just back up quickly. So I left Morgan Lewis to go to a boutique firm. And in the ensuing years, I actually worked at a couple of boutique firms, and the demands were less. But the interesting thing was, didn't really change how I was reacting to the practice. So I was still dealing with a lot of these anxiety and health-related issues. But eventually I made the decision that I was tired working for others, so I started my own law firm. And thinking that'll be less stressful because I'll be my own boss. And as someone I know who has Welcome to my world. I had no appreciation for the responsibilities and the pressure of being a solo practitioner and then eventually building out a firm. My firm was doing incredibly well and was really on a quite an upward trajectory. And then I'm driving in my car down Pacific Coast Highway and Laguna Beach, beautiful, one of the most beautiful spots in the country. And I stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk because it in California they have the crosswalks and the pedestrians get right aways. I stopped, car behind me just plows into me. Young person, they were on their cell phone texting, and that was the moment where my life was forever dramatically changed. How badly were you injured? It was interesting. So I suffered at that point, there was whiplash, so there was head concussion from that. And I had it what started out is as this enormously shooting, a spinal, I suffered a spinal injury at the time. So I was just experiencing really sharp intense pain and then the head pain. And but the process and the impacts just kept snowballing from there. And it left me, and I can explain more of the details, but ultimately it's what left me totally disabled. I was able to, in a sense, I walked away in a tremendous amount of pain and had to get rushed to the hospital. Did you have any surgery? I did have surgery, and since then I've had nine spinal surgeries because of the initial damage, and then over time, sort of the fallout. Because with the spine, you injure one part of it and it can it trickles over time because I ended up having to ultimately I had a fusion in my neck, and over time it impacts everything. So you had to, so there were a lot of surgeries, a lot of other related medical challenges that went through physically.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

Yeah. I got rearrended a couple of times. I have 280 discs on my neck. I go for an epidural every 90 days and I take a medication. But I also had a college roommate of mine who was also re-rendered, and he ended up taking his life just about a year and a half ago. Couldn't take the pain anymore.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

Couldn't take the pain. And that was that became a particular challenge in my life because here it is. I had this firm. It was doing seven figures in revenues. I was the sole revenue producer, rainmaker for the firm. And if I tell you, I walked out of my law office on October 2nd and I never practiced. That's not true. I tried the practice. I was in all this horrible pain. And that's when I started the path of the opioid drugs.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

Okay. Hold that thought for a second. How were you able to support your family? You said told me, told us you were married, you had a little one. How are you able to support the family? Obviously, it sounds like you couldn't work properly. And when you're a solo, you're the one who's making the phone ring.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

I fortunately, I was really fortunate. First of all, 10 years prior, I had been nearly paralyzed in the snow skiing accident, where I actually not only ruptured two discs, but I actually suffered a contusion of my spinal cord, which left my upper right quadrant of my body, arm, everything paralyzed. So that was a story in itself. But the result of that was that I came to understand the importance of having private disability insurance. So when I started my own practice, that was like one of the first things I did was to get some private disability coverage. So I had that income and I was able to negotiate an agreement with one of my associates who bought out, bought the practice from me. And so I had continued, I had continual income that I was receiving from the business for the next few years.

SPEAKER_02 30:05

Okay. Tell us about your journey into substance use and mental health issues.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

So as I mentioned earlier, I had suffered with pretty severe anxiety since the time I was a little boy. And I was under medical treatment even at the age of 10 years old, taking medications and stuff because it was causing me physical health issues. And so with that already in place, all the years that I was practicing law, I was taking medications to try to address that, those issues. As a result of the accident, what I became addicted to taking, what do we want to call it? Like a smorgasbord of I had a smorgasbord of pain medications in my house because 2002, 2003, if we reflect back, Purdue Farmer, and that was the era where doctors were being told by pharmaceutical companies you can't get addicted. And the doctors were being rewarded by the pharmaceutical companies for writing pain medication scripts. The more they were writing these scripts, the better the trips to Hawaii and Europe and other gifts that were coming from the pharmaceutical companies. I had a whole medicine cabinet full of pain medications. So I was oxycontin, oxycodone, percocet, bicodin, something called maxidone. It was crazy. So I'm feeding these to myself to deal with this pain. Was I could somehow trying to practice? Did they actually help with the pain? Did they help? I would get some temporary relief, but it was temporary, right? When the medication wore off, then I had to take more. And I was doing physical physical therapy. It was crazy. I had no business trying to practice at that point in time because I was all and but because there was this period of time, and then I went into the disability, but there was a period of time I was trying and it was not good. But so one day, after the first spinal surgery, a couple of weeks later, all of a sudden I got this brilliant idea. I'm tired of taking these medications. I can't handle this. I don't want to take them anymore. And I cold turkey stopped. I then went through horrible withdrawals, like classic hallucinations, wanting to tear the skin off my body. At one point, I wanted to jump out the window of our house from the second floor, and my wife calls the doctor, and the doctor says he can't be addicted. They're not addictive. She reaches out to a recovery center in the community, and they're like, you need to get him to the hospital right now. And that is when the recovery journey began. Because I went into detox. I remember it was nine days of pure hell detoxing. And I had emotional breakdowns when I was in the hospital and these fits of rage. So they then I had to go nonstop from the hospital into a recovery program, which I went to a place called the Meadows in Arizona. And when you go into rehab, in a sense, they don't care. Were you really just purely a recreational user? Did you have a medical condition that justified using them? It just didn't matter. You treated the same. You're an addict, a drug addict. And during the course of their program, they uncovered, like I they I knew about the anxiety, but they uncovered trauma that I never thought was trauma. I just thought that's just normal. That's my household is like every other household in that community in New York, right? And they helped me start to understand, number one, I wasn't born crazy. I was really impacted by the emotional trauma of being in such a dysfunctional, raging household, the bullying out in the street. And so once they uncovered that, I started to do some trauma work, but then I had another meltdown. So they said, okay, you can't go. We do not recommend you go home. There's a trauma facility in New Mexico, Santa Bay, called Life Healing Center, and we suggest that you go there. So I went there. So at this point, of course, I'm on total disability. I'm still dealing with intense chronic pain, but they couldn't give me opioids. So it was brutal. I'm in all this pain, and now I'm dealing, I've had the curtain pulled back on all these mental health issues because I got diagnosed with major depression, PTSD. At one point, they were talking to me about borderline personality disorderity disorder, generalized anxiety disorder. So I was a mess. That accident completely broke me physically, mentally, emotionally, and I say spiritually, because quite frankly, in the 90s, we were very we were like orthodox Jews. We were very observant and religious. This happens to me, and I'm like, really, God? And I felt completely betrayed. So now, spiritually, no spiritual foundation there whatsoever. And what I'll share is that that was the beginning of that was that was the beginning of attempt the healing journey. So there was like the first phase of diagnosis of all the problems and challenges I had that they could put labels on. And then it was trying to heal and recover. And it that's that's how long was that how long was the recovery journey for you? I didn't, I had periods of time like I was in and out of both, I was really in and out of psychiatric and trauma therapy for a period of three years. I was clean, my and I was sober, but the focus was on the mental health issues. And I also ended up going to a place in Houston called Menninger's. Yep, Menninger, I know it well. I had a stint there, and I was seeing a therapist three times a week at home and whatever. And then so I had, and so by 2007, I was starting to feel better, and I started doing some work for a friend in this business. And what became the pattern was it's like I would start to make some progress and then crash. 2007, I was at dinner with friends and they're all drinking wine, and I think to myself, I had four years probably at the time, I'm like, yeah, I can do this. So now in my case, though, what you often hear is people can right away start to start bottoming out. For me, it'd be it was just a really slow gradual. Did you relax end up relapsing? Eventually I did, but believe it or not, I didn't it I didn't ultimately truly relapse where I needed to go into recovery till 2016. But I wasn't from 2007 until 2016, I was not clean and sober. I that's when I started to, and it wasn't so much the drinking, but I started using drugs more, started using cocaine more. I would, I didn't I would somehow get some access to the pain medications. They loaded me up with all kinds of psychotropic medications. So they at first it was like Valium and what the heck was the other one there, and then clonopin, and I started abusing those because I was just always so living in chronic pain, not finding any solutions, just more and more surgeries, but no relief from the chronic pain, uh, which was affecting it was from basically my head down to my almost my whole body, and I became more emotionally unstable. I'd say beginning in 2011 is when my mental health started to really start to go down. And now more fits of rage. Um, and rage for me, thankfully, I didn't get physical, but holes in walls, furniture flying across the room, road rage, like out of control road rage, like literally trying to drive people off the roads into telephone poles or into the center dividers. I was really mentally unstable. How'd you end up finding recovery? I'll just mention to the side is I had a couple of 5150s involuntary 720s. I'll be correct. I'm familiar with it. And I'd had those along the way. But 2016, April 23rd, 2016, was the absolute bottom. Okay. Was in so much physical pain. We had some issues at home that were causing a lot of stress, and the day came where I just completely lost it. I started yelling and screaming, and I'm pounding on the walls. My wife and son were at home. My son took off. My wife went after him. So I'm there home alone. I literally I pummeled the and it wasn't a wood door I was hitting, it was the wall. So my knuckles are completely bloody and bleeding on the wall. And I'm like, I just can't take this. So I grabbed a combo cocktail of pills and I took them. And the most miraculous thing was literally, as I was starting to lose consciousness, I heard the voice, it's like, it's not time. And Mark, I dialed 911. The next thing I knew is I woke up the next morning in the ER. I don't remember a lot, but I remember my wife, whom by the way, we had recently reconciled from being separated from a couple of years, and she's there, and there's a social worker, and they're talking about what do we do with him? Should he go back into psychiatric input, which I had done multiple stints, or recovery? I remember saying recovery, because I'd had a horrible experience when I one of my experiences in a 72-hour hold was awful. I got physically abused. I just never wanted to go back into that. That was the moment because I made a decision right then and there, Mark. I want to live. I don't want to die. I know where the solution is. And my wife, God bless her, I wanted to go back to the places I'd been to. And she was like, Nope, you're going to a true 12-step focused rehab that's right here in the community. I'm not sending you away again. And I threw myself 1,000% into the program. When I was in the rehab, I was like the model patient. Whatever they said to do, even this was uncomfortable as it was, and a lot of it was, I did it. They said, get yourself a temporary sponsor when you're I got it. Sponsor said, I want you to call me at this time every day, I did it. And so that was the beginning of the journey. But I had to be this close to death in this, or right, to finally have realized, no, I really want to live. And so that was the decision I made.

SPEAKER_02 42:03

Wait, I'm gonna move you along a little bit only because we're running out of time. Oh, gosh. No, you got a great story, and I didn't want to run over, but your company, tell me about what you do now and how and what was the inspiration for it?

SPEAKER_00 42:14

When did you find Yeah April 24, 2016? That's my sobriety date. Got an amazing sponsor, changed my life. Um, over time, even though I was still dealing with chronic pain and surgeries, I was changing, I was transforming, and my life was getting better, even though I was still suffering physically. And so ultimately I made the decision to go into life coaching, which led me to being invited and going through a training called for mental fitness. So I am now a mental fitness coach, which in short boils down to being able to have command over our thoughts, to have the awareness, because it's our thoughts that cause our emotions, which lead to our behaviors. And what I learned when I went through the training myself was that I had some core underlying sabotaging thoughts. And those thoughts, whether it was trying to be a perfect or trying to control people or situations, or being such a pleaser that I everybody, I want everybody to love me and everybody needs to think well of me. And these thoughts are what create this anxiety and stress. And if you don't have tools to manage it, that's the then that can lead you down the path of substance use. So it's uh it's an awesome program. It was developed from research at Stanford University, and it's app supported, it's self paced. So people learn, they take an assessment, they come to learn what their main self sabotaging mental thought patterns are. They learn really simple mindfulness exercises that are. Intended to be for real-time use. Because I always had a good morning program of meditation, prayer, journaling. But then what do they do when something occurred during the day that caused me to get upset? All that other work, it just I still didn't have it. This provides you with that skill, which then once your mind is calm and quieted, now you're able to perform at your peak levels. So in the end, this mental fitness is about being able to help you perform at a peak level while under the pressure, because you have the tools to keep tempering down that stress and anxiety as it arises. And then you're able to use our creativity, our positive emotions, better decision making and execution when you're in that positive mindset. So who's your typical client these days? My clients are primarily, and they're a combination of attorneys that are really they're struggling either with their anxiety and stress as they see it, or it's really brain clutter. It's that monkey brain, and they just can't ever stop the rumination. And they it goes through the night, it goes through the weekends, which is which contributes to the burnout because you're never getting a break. But it's also attorneys that want to take their performance to the next level. They're thinking more like elite athletes who you all have mental coaches now to be able to take quiet the mind and be laser focused so they can perform at their peak. And so I work with attorneys, I work with law firms to do firm Y trainings. And I also have very unique mental fitness CLE classes that are accredited for an hour of ethics, which are all based around this mental fitness approach. So someone can come to one CLE and they're gonna at least gain an understanding of their own sabotaging thoughts, and they'll learn some mindfulness exercises. Ultimately, how does the transformation really occur? It's through a daily practice, which is what my program includes, of daily practice, recognizing these thoughts, being able to catch them, and practice using these mindfulness exercises. What does it do? It actually leads to creating new neural pathways. So now you have and you now react in the moment in a way that's positive. The old pathways weaken, you develop the new, and as I like to say, I use addiction substance use as the perfect example is that for years we get something knocked us off the beam, we were upset, something go away, uh, I don't feel good, take a drug, take a drink, engage in some other addictive behaviors, right? But in time, you develop this new pathway that says, No, I'm feeling stressed, I'm gonna go call, you know, my sponsor, I'm gonna go call a friend. I'm gonna you have all these new tools, and in time, all of a sudden, the things that used to trigger you don't. It's really miraculous.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

So if there's a lawyer out there who wants to find out about how you can help him or her, how do they find you?

SPEAKER_00 47:13

They can find me either on LinkedIn, it's Wayne Basist. There's only one of me, so it's easy to find me. My website, which is mentalfitness.com, and also by email, wbesist at esqmentalfitness.com. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 47:33

Um I could have spent another two hours with you, but I don't think I got John's gotta go move on and I gotta go back to work. But I'm very grateful that you for you to share your story. And for folks out there who want to talk to us about how we can help, because our mission is to save families whose loved ones are suffering from substance use, mental health disorders, and failed attempts at recovery. You can find us online at mental health addiction law firm.com. That's mental health addiction law firm.com, or just Google me. I think I have about 800 videos out there on YouTube. You should be able to find me. Uh Wayne, thanks for coming on the show. I'm really grateful. It's an amazing story. And uh it does, I think you are living proof that you can recover.

SPEAKER_00 48:13

You you most you most certain most certainly it starts with the this is my last message on this fundamental decision to be made. Do I want to live? Do I want to die? You want to live, immerse yourself, commit 100% to your recovery. It's a fact that there are lawyers who are dying all the time from their substance use or their mental health challenges. So I encourage you get help, make the commitment, make the decision, and you can have a miraculous life, which is what I now have today.

SPEAKER_02 48:48

I love it. Thank you for sharing. And folks, that's a wrap for today, but we'll see you in the next episode.