Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
I am a person in long-term recovery from a substance-use disorder.
(Applause)
And what that means is I haven't smoked crack,
snorted a line of cocaine, or touched a sip of alcohol in over 19 years.
(Applause)
I had my first beer at 11.
One of my cousins gave it to me.
I had my first line of coke at 15.
I had just gotten out of a psych ward
for being suicidal.
From 15 to 24, I drank and used my way through life,
and eventually ended up in Boston.
At that point, my addiction had gotten so bad
that I was paranoid, and afraid of everything.
I found myself locked in my apartment,
and there in the dark, huddled on the bathroom floor,
I had been using cocaine for almost 24 hours straight.
My heart was pounding,
and it felt like it was going to explode in my chest.
I knew that's how I was going to die.
And when the sun rose on Boston that morning,
do you know what I thought of?
I thought of my mom.
I thought, "Somebody is going to have to tell her
that her son died on a bathroom floor from a cocaine overdose."
And that's the last night I used.
No one ever dreams they're going to grow up to be an addict.
I found my way into a boxing gym,
and something about getting in the ring for the first time
helped chip away at my addiction.
Eventually, I saw a brochure for ice climbing.
And on the cover was this guy on a steep ice climb,
and I thought, "I want to try that."
I signed up for a class, and I didn't know it at the time,
but I had begun my path of recovery.
See, there's something special that happens
when you tie into a climbing rope for the first time in the winter.
You look up at the glacier or the climb ahead of you,
and everything else seems to melt away.
All the problems, all your worries,
all the shame and self-loathing from your addiction
that so many addicts feel -
it all drifts away and you're left just in that moment.
All you hear is the crunch of the snow under your crampons;
the sound your ice ax makes when it cracks into the deep blue ice;
the sound of your breathing as it drifts away
and is muted by the soft falling snow.
In that moment, in that place,
I caught a glimpse of the possibility
of who I could be:
courageous and confident.
Climbing would evolve into racing mountain bikes, doing triathlons,
eventually racing Ironman.
And every time I stood on top of a mountain
or crossed a finish line,
I was a little bit more a climber and a little bit less an addict.
I was fortunate; I found hope on a mountaintop.
And from that hope, I began to heal from my addiction.
But for so many people that are still in their addiction,
it can feel pretty hopeless.
An estimated 23 million Americans struggle with a substance-use disorder,
and the average American is more likely to die from an overdose
than a motor vehicle accident,
a mass shooting,
and a terrorist attack,
combined.
So many of us get a loved one plugged into formal treatment
and we think, "Now they're going to be fixed,"
only to find out that 40 to 60 percent
of people coming out of formal treatment
will relapse within the first year.
Why is that?
I think we can't talk about healing from addiction
unless we also talk about healing from trauma.
I'm not just talking about the big traumas -
growing up in a war-torn country, physical and sexual abuse.
But I'm talking about those little traumas -
what it felt like when your parents got divorced;
what it felt like when you were bullied in school;
what it felt like when you were abandoned by that loved one.
Even though these traumas don't leave a wound that we can see,
they affect how we see the world.
I believe that trauma is the number one public health crisis in our country.
(Applause)
Why was I compelled to drink at 11 years old?
Why was I using cocaine at 15, and also suicidal?
I think in part, it comes from generational trauma
that was passed from my father.
See, his father left him when he was young,
so he carried a pain that he passed to me.
My dad also struggled with mental illness,
so he would yell at my siblings and I if we lost,
and he'd also yell at us if we won the soccer game.
He would publicly shame us,
and I remember that always made me feel so...
...small.
There's also a unique kind of inadequacy that you feel
when you see a sibling that you love
being abused,
and you can do nothing to stop it.
I think about how that must have imprinted on me when I was little.
Yes, I was once little.
(Laughter)
And when we're little, we're emotional sponges.
We absorb the energy around us from our caregivers,
and if that energy is negative or traumatic,
we often internalize it as we did something wrong;
we were failures.
All of those little traumas are tiny emotional cuts,
and with enough of these cuts it can add up to a big wound.
I know what you're thinking: some of those things happened to you,
and you're not an addict.
Well, there's other ways we cope with this.
Many of us seek our emotional well-being from something external.
Maybe it's what we look like, maybe it's how much money we make,
maybe it's whether or not our sports team won the Superbowl.
Go Broncos!
(Laughter)
(Cheers)
We have love addiction,
we have love avoidance,
we have workaholism,
eating disorders,
and the list goes on and on.
So how do we heal from this?
I know standing on top of a mountain can be part of it;
that goes directly to the self-esteem piece.
But what about the opposite of trauma?
We have to learn how to build nurturing communities
for our children to grow up in.
I want you to think about that for a moment.
What kind of environment would you want your children to grow up in?
I want you to make a list.
Here's mine:
encouraging, full of joy, accepting, loving,
a place where we are physically and emotionally safe.
With the understanding of these two things coming together -
the power of standing on top of a mountain,
and the power of a nurturing community -
I thought, "How do we give this to others that are struggling?"
I thought, "How do we take thousands of recovering addicts
up a mountain in a nurturing environment?"
It seems impossible. But it's not.
And that's exactly what we did.
With a core group of people, I started a nonprofit,
and we created a sober, active community.
We've since served 18,000 people in 10 years,
in five cities, in three states.
(Cheers)
(Applause)
All of those programs are free to anyone who's 48 hours clean and sober.
They come to yoga, hiking, biking and climbing.
They find a positive coping mechanism,
and they find a peer group that supports them in their recovery.
And there's a code of conduct that frames the community.
It says that anything that isn't nurturing isn't welcome,
and with those simple boundaries in place,
it's had a profound effect on people's lives.
Seventy-three percent of people had improved self-esteem.
Eighty-two percent felt emotionally safe.
I think the other 18 were probably on that wall.
(Laughter)
Sixty-five percent had improved attitudes towards sobriety.
And three-quarters of the people that attend stayed sober.
(Applause)
Now I want you to imagine for a moment
that I'm someone who's 48 hours clean and sober,
and I show up at this gym.
I walk up to the door.
I grab the door handle.
It feels so heavy.
It feels so heavy because this is my first time as an adult
walking into a roomful of people without a drink or a drug in my system.
On top of that, I'm about to do my first CrossFit workout.
(Laughter)
So, am I even going to make it through the warm-up?
You know what?
Maybe I'll just go get a drink.
The guy at the front desk gives me the waiver and the code of conduct,
and I'm filling it out, thinking,
"I'm just going to hand it back to this guy,
and I'm going back to that old apartment where my friends are still using."
You know, that kind of apartment where addicts go to die.
Or, "I'll just grab a handle of vodka, and I'll numb out.
I'll make the pain and the anxiety go away."
This guy at the front desk, though, he can tell I'm a little anxious,
and he starts to share his own story.
This guy was a heroin addict? How's that even possible?
He's so fit.
Well, he walks with me into the gym, and in that moment,
I feel accepted here.
This guy and this other girl come over to me
and they help me set up my weights.
They give me a white PVC pipe and they start to warm me up.
They're teaching me the clean and jerk.
I learned this lift when I was in prison,
but never with technique or form.
"Strong back," they say, "stand it up, triple extension, high pull."
Now we go back over to the weights.
The room is full of people.
We line up at our barbells,
and the clock starts to count down to start the workout.
Five, four, three, two...
I look around the gym.
Everyone in here is in recovery.
I can feel that they believe in me -
me: a junky, a drunk.
As a matter of fact, they believe in me so much
that in that moment, I start to believe in myself.
The clock clicks over to start the workout.
I reach down to grab my barbell,
a seemingly unmovable weight.
But I grab it, and I pull,
I pull with all the technique, strength, and courage
that I draw from the people around me.
And for a moment, it becomes weightless
and it lands on my shoulders.
The bar oscillates from the weight
and I jerk it overheard,
stand it up proudly, and let it crash to the floor.
I get an acknowledging smile from my new friends,
and a fist bump from my new workout partner.
And in that moment, I find supportive community.
And in that community,
I find hope.
(Applause)
(Cheers)
Thanks.
(Applause)
(Cheers)