Me - Easter

In this episode, it’s just me.

No guest, no buffer, no one to hide behind. Just me and the question that was left from the previous episode and where it took me.

This one moves into inaction, collapse, and what it actually takes to change. Not as ideas, but as lived experience.

The conversation comes straight out of Easter. Not the version most people focus on, not the story or the history, but the pattern underneath it. Death and rebirth. Collapse and what comes after it.

I go back to a moment in my own life where everything had fallen apart. Addiction, violence, blame, running the same story over and over again with different people and getting the same outcome every time. Eventually there was nowhere left to run. That point where inaction is no longer an option. That point where something in you either breaks or changes.

The shift from believing everyone else is the problem to realising the common denominator might actually be me. Not as shame, but as responsibility. And how confronting that is when the story you have built your life around starts to fall apart.

I also go into something that gets missed a lot.

That what I was chasing in addiction was not the substance. It was the feeling. The connection. The relief. And how easily that gets transferred into something else. Work, success, money, relationships. Different form, same pattern.

This is not about recovery as a concept.

It is about what it actually costs to stop running. What it takes to drop the story. What it takes to stop needing to be right and start looking at what is actually happening.

I talk about the moment where the ego cracks and something deeper has a chance to come through.

The question I leave for the next guest is this.

What would collapse if you stopped being right?

It’s You, Oh Fuck, It’s ME In Session with a Psychotherapist
Hosted by Chad Taylor

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Just real conversations.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

I'm Chad Taylor, psychotherapist and author of It's You, Oh Fuck, It's Me. No tips, no fixing, just real conversations. So today's episode is just me. You don't have to deal with me for the next 10 or 15 minutes, unfortunately. I'm gonna go straight into what the last podcast guest left, which was Sarah, and she left a question at what point in your life did inaction cost you? And for me, I think there's been plenty of times in my life where inaction has cost me. And I think there's also been plenty of times where too much action has cost me. So what I want to speak to today is we've just come out of Easter, and it can be a big time for a lot of people, Easter. For a lot of religious people, it's a time of resurrection, it's a time of death and rebirth. And I think we're so fixated on this man that lived 2,000 years ago, a bit over 2,000 years ago, that I think we're losing the real understanding of Easter. Easter's pretty profound for me as well, because even though it wasn't the exact date, my last the last time I drank or drugged was Easter Sunday 2001. And then Easter Monday, which was yesterday, I was on my way to a detox facility against my will. And what was happening there was my life had gotten so bad that there was no place else for me to go. My story was that for anyone out there that doesn't know it, that it had gotten pretty bad through losing jobs and the inability to hold down friendships. Relationships were never a thing for me just because I drank and drugged more drank than drugged for me, but I just lived a messy life. I was definitely one of those people that when I started drinking couldn't guarantee my behaviour. And I had no idea. The worst part about all this was I had no idea that this was even happening. I truly believed right up until this point of hitting detox that everybody else around me, all my peers, all my friends I'd grown up with, were doing drinking the same way I was, were partying the same way I was. So here I am, it's Easter Sunday. I've had another altercation with somebody, there's another physical fight happened, and my mum is trying to break me apart from somebody with a broom, and she's really unwell at the time with cancer. And I just remember looking over at these two little kids that I didn't even know were staying in my mum's house with my auntie, looking at me out the window, and here I was carrying on like a fucking idiot, really is what I was doing, and had no idea that that was happening. So, what happens next is I obviously leave that night, and all the projection and the blame in the world. Fuck you, it's your fault, fuck you, fuck you. And I go down to a friend's house. We lived in a rural coastal part of Australia on the south coast, and I went down there and then the next morning I came back with my tail between my legs and was expecting probably to sneak back in in a way, just come in because when we're alcoholics or addicts, it's all about us, right? We're just victims, we're we're victims. We think, poor me, poor me, poor me another drink. It's all about me. So I come in, and mum almost stops me at the door and says, Look, you're not going in unless you agree to go into an institution. And of course, 22-year-old Chad who can't imagine a life without drinking almost tells her to fuck off. And unfortunately, I'm not proud of it, but that's what I would have said in those words. So I go inside and I pack my bag, little things I had left, and we lived on a property, and I walked up to the gate, and the highway was about for me, was about 300 metres away from my my front gate of my house that I grew up in. And I remember thinking, fuck them, which is my family, everybody around me that isn't on board with me living and destroying my life because it's all about them, right? It's not about me, it's all about them, they're the ones causing all this problem, and they always have been. Poor Chad doesn't really have any part in this. He's the victim. Can't you see? So I think I'll go out there and I'll hitchhike, and I'm I'm going to if I go south, I'm going to Tasmania as far away as I can. And if I go north, I'm going to the tip of Australia. I'm not going to Sydney or Brisbane or the Gold Coast, and I'd tried a lot of those places, and I'd always ended up in mental health institutions or losing jobs and ending up destitute, and my family would have to come and rescue me. But this was the projection. I'll get as far away as from here as I can because the problems here, unbeknownst to me. We know where the problem is, is inside of us. So I I go, and then there was another part of me that's thinking, I've still got half a case of beer. I'm not sure around the world if anyone's listening to this, but in Australia we sell our beer in 24 packs generally. I knew I still had 12 beers at a friend's house, and there was another part of me that was almost, I'll just walk down there, I'll get on the piss, I'll get drunk, I'll get high, and I'll worry about this tomorrow because that was the story of my life. It was never about dealing with the problems in them in the now. It was always I'll drink and drown myself out, and then I'll deal with how I feel today, tomorrow when it comes. But then there was this little part of me that was this little window, I guess. And in my book, I talk about the egocentricity cracking. That wall had built up so strong in me, but there was a little tiny crack. Leonard Cohen wrote a song about this. Rumi, the poet, the Sufi Islamic poet, wrote about this. It's the crack in Japanese culture when an item breaks, a lot of the time a vase or something valuable, they restore it with gold because they believe that the gold, the repairing of the crack is the most important part of the item. So there's a tiny bit of me that thinks, fuck, you're just really ruining your life. And I know enough now to see that there's tiny windows of this. So I picked up my bag crying, and I walked down the driveway, and I virtually said, I'll go, I'll go, I'll just fucking go then. Because at the time I honestly thought my mother was gonna die of cancer because it had been going on for a few years at this point, and it kept going away and coming back and going away and coming back. So then I found myself two days later on my way to detox, or one day later, pretty much, which was Easter, and here I am on my way there, and I'm full of fear, and I'm blaming and I'm projecting, and I'm if anybody's done an intervention with a family member, we generally don't go easy. It's not a nice just okay, thanks for the help, and I'll just go in here willingly. I was fighting it the whole way. I had to go two and a half hour car trip with my mum, and I blamed her the whole way and did these horrible things because I was full of fear and I didn't want to go. It was her fault that I was like I was, it was my father's fault that I like. I get to this detox, which I I thought I was going there to learn how to drink normally. 22 years old, I thought I'm going to this place, they're going to teach me how to drink and possibly use drugs normally, like everybody else. And I'm going to stay in there and then I'm going to come out and I'm still going to be able to drink and party and do these things. I've just got to learn how to do it, not so destructively. So I get in there and I'm full of fear and I grab my bag and I try and leave again, protesting, looking back, hoping that she'll give in and not force me to go. I'm so glad she held strong, that tough love that we talk about. And I'm not, I'm not a proponent. There's times where people have used tough love, and then their family members have overdosed, or it's gone badly. So for me, it was what I needed in this moment. And I walked into this detox. I said, I'm not fucking talking to anyone. I don't want any junkies talking to me. I don't want anyone around me. Just leave me the fuck alone. And the nurses pretty much just said, We don't care what you do as long as you don't cause any dramas. Which was a bit of a shock because they weren't playing the game. I was obviously trying to engage them in the game that I didn't even know I was playing. So later on that day, a lady comes in, one of the staff members, and she offers to take me for a walk. And I'm pretty overweight at the time, I'm unhealthy, I'm unwell. And she takes me for a walk. And what she does, unbeknownst to me, is she what we'd call in Alcoholics Anonymous or any 12-step fellowship, she 12-stepped me. She passed on the message of change to me, right, said the right thing at the right time, but I didn't understand what was happening then. So the way she did it was she took me for a walk and she told me her story. She told me she'd come into this facility that I was in. She was 38, her life was going pretty unwell. She'd had an ultimatum from a partner, and she decided she'd come through here, she'd stay off the drink and the drugs for two years, and then she'd have a big 40th. And straight away for me, my ears pricked up. It was like, wow. Nobody'd ever talked to me about that. That had a problem. And straight away, because there was light at the end of the tunnel, I started thinking, yeah, I can do two years. Yeah, I can do that. I reckon I can do that. But the whole idea of not being able to drink ever again. If I had some more guts about me and I thought that was the choice, I probably would have committed suicide, and that was the truth. I said that back then. So she says, so what I did was in that two years, I threw myself into Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to meetings, I sponsored people, I did talks at detoxes, and I really worked on myself in through the 12 steps. And she said, and then before I knew it, I got closer to 40, and my 40th was coming around. And I'm thinking, oh, this is a good bit. This is where she tells me she started drinking normally and everything's going to be great. And she looks at me and she says, What, Chad? And I said, What? And she said, My life got that good through being sober that I didn't want to risk that and go back to the life that I come from. I've just clicked my fingers for anyone that can't understand what that noise was. That was the turning point I needed. Nobody had ever explained to me that you could have a life that was better than the one you had when you were drinking. The one that I was trying to drown out. And that's where my journey changed. And then from then on, I went to a detox. And it wasn't about learning how to drink and drug like everybody else. It was learning that I was different to everyone else, that 10 to 15% of the population, the Western population, the sort of mindful on how I say this, the colonial European type blood have this problem, and a lot more in the indigenous culture, unfortunately, that we don't metabolize alcohol and drugs the same way other people do. So for me, this made sense. It wasn't that I had no willpower, it wasn't that I was weak. It was that once I had four or five drinks, I was four or five times thirstier than before I had the first one. And then I had a choice. Something I've said before in these podcasts, and I say to clients every day, is it's not my fault that I'm an alcoholic. It's my responsibility that I do something about it. So what I wanted to share today was that death and rebirth metaphor, how it plays out in our daily lives, and what I think Easter was trying to teach. Was it about a man that got nailed to the cross? I don't know, I wasn't there. The story's pretty good though. If we can look at everything in these religious and spiritual teachings as a metaphor and as a a journey to take on the inside rather than a story on the outside that we try and pick to pieces, I think we can actually learn a lot, a lot of what we're missing, and any 12-step fellowship and a lot of other people in the world believe that that belief in a spiritual entity or a universal consciousness or a God or whatever you want to call it, a connection to that counteracts the need for the drink and the drugs we put in our system. And for me, that made sense. What I'm chasing in the bottle, or in the drug, or in the poker machines, or in the next car, or in the better-looking partner, or the new house, is that spiritual connection, is that feeling of being at one with the world, is that connection of the head and the heart to feel at one with everyone and everything. And as a man, it was the only time I ever really got to connect with other men properly on a deeper level. And I think that's what it was for me that I was chasing that deeper connection. And even now, most men that come to me through therapy, it generally comes from there's been a night on the piss, early hours in the morning, something's come up, and they've really got real the egocentricity, the egocentricity has been stripped away through the alcohol and the drugs, and there's a part of them that throws a lifeline out and says, I need help, or things aren't right, or I haven't told you this, but that's what I got out of Alcoholics Anonymous, that's what I get out of my therapist Ted. Funnily enough, we had two years of not really speaking over a misunderstanding that really neither of us can remember. So just because we get sober and clean, and just because you become a therapist doesn't mean you don't have life problems. And after me writing my book, we've just reconnected, and I'd done a lot of work of grief with this man. So it's almost like he's come back from the dead as well. It's like I grieved this person in my life, and here he is back again, and we're having a different life now, we're having a different relationship now, not the one I craved where he was everything to me, the one that I can have. So I guess what I want to leave with this podcast is also when I stopped wanting to be right and started wanting to understand what was really going on, when I took that jump from egocentricity to truth, and that was the inaction that Sarah was talking about last week. The question she left at what point in life did inaction cost you? I could have quite easily bypassed going to rehab and then not followed on with my journey that I have, and I wouldn't be here talking to you guys right now. I do not doubt I would have been dead. My benders were so strong, even at 22. I was in such a bad state that I wouldn't have lived this long. So I guess what I want to leave other people sometimes it's collapse, sometimes it's the death, or the ego collapse, or the financial collapse, or the health collapse, or you've been training for the Olympics, and all of a sudden you break your leg and you can't go. All these things are collapses. Richard Raw talks about the two halves of life, and that most of us miss the second half of life. And I think I've had multiple second halves of life. But I suppose what I want to leave the next guest is what would collapse if we stopped being right? And I'm gonna leave it there.