Ep. 27 - Substance Abuse & Addiction

Have you or anyone you've loved ever experienced substance abuse or addiction? 

Personally, I've struggled with both and find myself reflecting on it all this morning. 

Why am I thinking about this?

Currently doing the "Past Authoring Program" or the Self-Authoring Suite.

What is the Self-Authoring Suite, you ask?

The Past Authoring Program helps you remember, articulate and analyze key positive and negative life experiences.

The Present Authoring Program has two modules. The first helps you understand and rectify your personality faults. The second helps you understand and develop your personality virtues.

The Future Authoring Program helps you envision a meaningful, healthy and productive future, three to five years down the road, and to develop a detailed, implementable plan to make that future a reality.

Doing the "past authoring" work and find myself working what is effectively the outline of my life.  The self-authoring program is structured this way and accordingly, it is proving to be an effective tool as part of the work I am doing to finding "my passion, my purpose, and my why."

So...what qualifies me to talk about "substance abuse & addiction?"

This is an important question for the challenges that come along with this topic.

Context:

• Past Authoring / Autobiography
  • Pre-Grade School 
    • Significant Experiences
      • My First Memory
      • Reading to the Kindergarten Class
      • One More Time (riding bike / broken nose)
      • Skipping Stones (age 6 or 7, 1st or 2nd grade)
  • Grade School
    • Significant Experiences
      • ...no boys allowed (story of my sister's fort)
      • Running Around
      • Diagnosis of Epilepsy
      • Dealing with side effects of medication
        • Skin peeling
        • Itching
        • Emotional
  • High School (Mid-Late Teens)
    • Significant Experiences
      • From Bloody Nose to Best Friends
      • Leaf Collection'
      • The Discovery of Cannabis
      • The Apartment
      • Athletics and Beyond
      • Finding The Stash
      • Outpatient Rehab
        • First experience of Alcoholics Anonymous
  • College Years (Late Teens / Early Twenties)
    • Just started today 
    • These are the years of the "most experience" with substance abuse / addiction
    • Including a DUI at the age of 23
      • Second experience with Alcoholics Anonymous

Not being even 50% complete with the self-authoring / autobiographical portion of my life, I find myself struggling with sharing this part of my life.  There's shame associated with it.

Acceptance.  

Giving myself a break.

Allowing people to see my own fault.

Demonstrate what and how I've done the things to overcome adversity in my own life.

Sometimes, life is hard.

People want to pick on us.

We are our own worst critic.

Substance abuse & addiction is to be taken seriously.

Learn from everyone, everywhere the best ways to deal with it.

Do not have fear about doing so.

Love yourself enough to do it.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:14

Due to the serious nature of this topic, let's just get right into it. Because personally, I've struggled with both substance abuse and addiction in the past. And I find myself reflecting on all of that this morning. So why am I thinking about substance abuse and addiction, right? Like what what brings that up? Currently, I am working through the past authoring program of the self-authoring suite. And what is the self-authoring suite, you ask? Well, this is basically how it's broken down on the website, self-authoring.com. The past authoring program helps you remember, articulate, and analyze key positive and negative life experiences. The present authoring program has two modules. The first helps you understand and rectify your personality faults. The second helps you understand and develop your personality virtues. The future authoring program helps you envision a meaningful, healthy, and productive future three to five years down the road, and to develop that detailed, implementable plan to make that future a reality. Okay, now doing the past authoring, like I've been doing this for a while, and I find myself basically outlining my life, my life to date. This uh the self-authoring program is structured that way, and it's proving to be an effective tool for part of the work that I'm doing to find my passion, my purpose, and my why. Okay, that's that's all well and good, but look, look, Rob, why, like what qualifies you to talk about the challenges that come along with substance abuse and addiction, right? Like, for those of you who either deal with it or for those of you who are dealing with loved ones who struggle with this stuff, like why should I like what what qualifies me? What what right do I have to talk about substance abuse and addiction? Alright, so to provide a little bit of context, what the past authoring autobiographical part of the self-authoring program does is it has us outline six or so significant experiences from our pre-grade school years, and mine were my first memory. Reading to the kindergarten class, one more time, a story about riding my bike and a broken nose, and the reflection on skipping stones. Skipping stones in the Metro Parks with my grandfather and my father. And then there's another section of the grade school years, and we cover the significant experiences there. And that was memory about a fort that my sister made when she was probably around seven years old, and my brother was 10, I was 13. Just a story about running around in the neighborhood. Memory and reflection of my diagnosis with epilepsy around the age of 13. And then dealing with the side effects of the medication that I was first prescribed during those first few months. The loss of weight and hair falling out and skin peeling off my hands, and just a number of things. And then we jump into high school in the mid to late teen years. And I've got some stories and experiences about how I met a friend, we went from bloody nose to best friends, a leaf collection, on the discovery of cannabis. And then a story about the apartment that some friends and I rented so we could more effectively party. Athletics and beyond finding the stash when my parents found the dreaded devil's lettuce. I shouldn't, I I shouldn't say that. Okay, you know, and I'll I'll get into that in a little bit. And then basically what happened after finding the little stash of cannabis that I had was I went into outpatient rehab. In my senior year of high school, the latter half of the year, I was in outpatient rehab and accordingly was sober. I had my first experience with Alcoholics Anonymous and sobriety in the early half of my 18th year. I just started the college years of this past authoring program this morning and quite frankly hadn't done much work on it over the past month or so because I did not like a lot of the feelings and emotions that came to light on account of the memories associated with my own experiences with substance abuse and addiction, right? Um it's it's when you're and and look, I down the road um I ended up struggling with substance abuse and addiction further to the point where I got a DUI in my early twenties. And that was my second bout of sobriety. And I remained sober for a year and a half or so at that point, and I can talk about you know why I left the program maybe another time, but having experienced that twice, two different lengths of sobriety, I learned some tools and some mechanisms to help me manage that more effectively for the rest of my life, and you know, one thing that I have struggled with continuously as an adult, and quite frankly still struggle with to this day, is my addiction to nicotine. I have gone back and forth over the past four years of smoking a tobacco pipe, and I could, you know, justify it because it was cool and yada yada yada, but at the end of the day, smoking is smoking is smoking is smoking, and I couldn't handle that, and I had to take a similar approach to you know getting off of that as I did other substances in my earlier epics of my life, and that's what a word is used in the self-authoring suite is epics. So that's that's what I've I've been dealing with, um, and or that's what I've been thinking about rather, and these experiences of substance abuse and addiction and outpatient rehab, the rooms of alcoholics anonymous, um, those were formative, those were, you know, formative experiences that took place during my formative years, right? Like during my late teens and early twenties, I spent as much time in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous as I did outside of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous learning how to get there. So I crammed a lot of experience into a short amount of time, and like many other things in my life, I learned how to do certain things at an accelerated pace to try and become proficient in that thing as quickly as possible, and that is in a sense what I did with alcohol and drugs in my late teens and early twenties. Now, I wasn't a fan of hard drugs, and we can even begin to have the debate and discussion about what drugs are, and you know, um, because that's changed over over the years as well, with the legalization of cannabis in various ways and in various states. And while it remains illegal at the federal level, there's this gray area of cannabis, and whenever someone wants to talk about the addictive nature of cannabis, everyone suddenly becomes a doctor or a medical expert and expounds upon the medic uh you know the medical benefit of cannabis, which I'm no expert on, but certainly have some experience with on account of epilepsy, and there is a lot of value to cannabis for people with chronic neurological disorders. But at the end of the day, it's something that one can become addicted to, and it's something that one can abuse, and just like alcohol, just like nicotine, just like the energy drinks that I used to consume every morning along with my breakfast pizza, all of these things can be abused and can fall under the category of substance abuse and addiction. Now, I'm not even 50% complete with the self-authoring or autobiographical portion of this exercise and of my life. And I have found myself struggling to return to that exercise on account of the emotions that it's bringing up and the way that it's making me feel about myself. And that was part of the reason why on the website that I had, robKiser.me, I ended up password protecting the website because I was using it as a blog in large part, and you know, it it once I started sharing this stuff, like I was sharing all of the experiences so everybody could read them as I was writing my autobiography, basically. And then I got into this aspect of my life and I felt uncomfortable sharing it, so I password protected my site in addition to some other things that I was thinking about in terms of starting up side hustles and having a website and directing people there to learn about who I am and what I do, and thinking that this self-authoring suite should be just a part of that, and maybe uh password protected within my web page. But so there's some restructuring that needs to be done, but at the end of the day, um that is why substance abuse and addiction is on my mind, and you know, it's not something I've decided that it's not something to be ashamed of. I need to just accept the fact that all of this is part of my life. It's part of what made me the man, the individual that I am today. It's part of my life experiences that you know that that created me today, that resulted in this podcast right here, right now. And the process of doing that, accepting that, is also giving myself a break and allowing myself to be vulnerable. Man, you want to talk about vulnerability? You know, just give yourself the opportunity to let others see your faults because what we view as our faults may actually be our strengths, or some of what become our strengths. You know, we can use these experiences as opportunities to demonstrate what and how we've done the things that we've done in our lives to overcome the adversity that we've experienced. I mean, sometimes life is hard and people want to pick on us or, you know, point out our flaws and all the reasons why others shouldn't necessarily listen to us. And yeah, I mean that sucks, but we are our own worst critics. And you know, to in an effort to wrap things up, uh, as I'm getting close to where I park, it's muddy and bumpy and it's a mess. You can- I'm sure you can hear that. But the issues regarding substance abuse and addiction are to be taken seriously. You know, I don't know how. I've never been in a position where I've had to deal with someone else's issues, although I think you know, I've always had to deal with my own struggles, I guess. So I I I don't really know what it's like to cope with someone else or witness someone else who's who's doing this. But it's gotta be tough. But maybe if you are or have, you know, you can chime in and share your own experiences with that, and hopefully hearing something from someone who's struggled with the issues themselves is of value as well. But I'm I'm hoping for the people that are out there listening, whether they're in the position of struggling with it themselves or dealing with others who struggle with substance abuse and uh and addiction, I'm hoping that they and everyone can understand that there is value in learning everything from everyone in terms of applicable skills and knowledge to learn from other people's experiences and uh learn ways to apply it in your own life. It is dark out in order to achieve results and um find the best ways to deal with the problems that come along with substance of use in addition. Don't fear doing so and ultimately.