Life After Flunking Out Of College, Multiple Inpatient Psych Stays, And The Murder of My Best Friend

Matt (00:00:03):
I am Matt Handy, and you're listening to My Last Relapse. Okay. Andy Hartman, ladies and gentlemen. So tell me a little bit about yourself.

Andy (00:00:14):
Yeah, I grew up here in Houston, pretty much lived here all my life with the exception of four years when I was living in San Antonio going to college.

Matt (00:00:25):
What'd you go to college for?

Andy (00:00:27):
Funny story. I went pre-dental initially, so I ended up at UTSA in San Antonio. They were really big into that, realized I couldn't make the grades, and so I decided to go pre nursing. I ended up being a biology major while at UTSA. Unfortunately, I flunked out. I joke around and say I majored more in drinking and not having any accurate coping skills, but I ended up at Sam Houston State and I got a degree in health education.

Matt (00:01:05):
Where is Sam Houston State?

Andy (00:01:06):
Huntsville.

Matt (00:01:07):
Oh, okay.

Andy (00:01:08):
Yeah, so by the time I had moved home from San Antonio, my disease was full-blown and I

Matt (00:01:18):
College will do that to you.

Andy (00:01:20):
Yeah, well that was a confusing thing back then, right? I wasn't sure if it was just a college thing or if it was a me thing, and so I carried it on for a couple more years until I figured it out that it was a me thing.

Matt (00:01:38):
Yeah, yeah. How'd you figure that out?

Andy (00:01:43):
Trial and error. I think my gut always knew that it was a me thing, but lots of trying to manipulate my schedule to work around my drinking and trying to stick to beer. Only having one or two glasses of wine. I call it manipulation. Right out of college, I was working for Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center helping blood cancer patients find a bone marrow stem cell transplant, and I didn't have any coping skills, and so when I lost a couple patients, my drinking increased. And to back it up a little bit, I think that I figured out that it was a me problem through powerlessness because the more I tried to quit, the harder it became and the more I got out of control. I started going to see a psychiatrist because I was sure that it was a mental health problem. And then I had never been on medication before. So once I entered the medication realm with the drinking, of course the drinking got worse, cuz I'm mixing. So then I was like, well, then that's not the solution. Always looking for the solution, but never the right one.

Matt (00:03:14):
Yeah, there's plenty of solutions out there. We hardly ever get the right one. Right.

Andy (00:03:20):
Well, today I know it's like I need 10 solutions

Matt (00:03:25):
For sure,

Andy (00:03:25):
Not just one that looks different for everybody.

Matt (00:03:29):
Absolutely. And we're going to talk about that for sure today. First of all, have you ever relapsed?

Andy (00:03:34):
I have. In 2012, and I'll preface by saying this, I consider a relapse once I got some knowledge of recovery. So there were many years and many times that I would stop for an extended period of time. I never counted those times as anything because I had no knowledge of actual recovery. And so in January of 2013, I ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous for the first time.

Matt (00:04:10):
January of 2013.

Andy (00:04:12):
Yeah.

Matt (00:04:13):
Okay.

Andy (00:04:15):
In 2012, I had a couple outside factors happen. I went to Michigan and me and my cousins were pretty intoxicated, so I was kind of looking at the family dynamic of the disease of alcoholism and things like that. And also my grandfather had killed himself in 1998. And so that really had a profound effect on me when we were up there because it reminded me of how suicidal I was getting. So that was one outside factor. The other outside factor was that I was getting married. I had gotten engaged, and he had told me, I'm not going to marry you if you continue to drink like this. So those two things got me into AA in January of 2013, and I went in, I stayed for a month and I was cured.

Matt (00:05:13):
Of course.

Andy (00:05:14):
So when I got there, I had never had a seizure from alcohol withdrawal. I had never totaled a car and almost killed somebody. I had never cheated on my husband. I had never done a lot of the things. And so when I talk to people, I talk a lot about ego and how that almost got me killed because the moment I walked in Alcoholics Anonymous, I didn't have those things. And so I sat there at the table comparing myself to everybody. I also say comparison, kill the cat. Don't do that to yourself. It's so fatal. It was for me. So yeah, I had that month, and then that's pretty much when I continuously relapsed. And I had a month that time, I think I relapsed for about four months, went back to AA. I think I picked up three weeks. There was just multiple desire chips after desire chips. In January, no, sorry, March of 2014 that was my first time that I went into a facility. I went into a psych facility. Again, I was never a plan for suicide, but it was more of, it would just be easier if I wasn't here. And so I ended up at a psychiatric facility.

Matt (00:06:53):
Which one?

Andy (00:06:54):
Cypress Creek, off of Cali Drive and 1960. And I went in there, I was sure I was done. And when I got out, I got three months after, I didn't do as much AA as I should have. The only thing that I did that time is followed up with my psychiatrist. I did get put on a new regimen of medication, and that was the only thing. We started off the podcast by saying that there's 10 solutions to everybody in recovery, and that was the only one that I took the suggestion on. So I did stay on the medication. I got three months that time. I decided that what was not part of the solution was that I was going to still continue to hang out in bars. I loved to sing karaoke and I wasn't going to give that up. So I would go to bars and I would drink O'douls.

Matt (00:07:54):
Oh, wow.

Andy (00:07:56):
I would never touch a non-alcoholic drink today. A non-alcoholic beer.

Matt (00:08:03):
Yeah. What about mocktails?

Andy (00:08:06):
They don't do it for me, but to my core, I was a heavy beer drinker. I would get a 24 pack and kill it by myself. So I was a big beer drinker.

Matt (00:08:20):
Do you have a truck?

Andy (00:08:23):
Is this a Texas question?

Matt (00:08:24):
I mean,

Andy (00:08:25):
No. I've always driven a car. My first vehicle was a truck. It was a green Dodge Ram, but it was actually my sister's ex-boyfriend's that my dad had helped purchase. And so I did inherit that truck. So it was my first vehicle. But no,

Matt (00:08:44):
I just picture you by yourself in a field with a 24 pack in the back of a pickup truck.

Andy (00:08:49):
So the field is very accurate. I'm from North Houston, so I went to Klein Oak High School, and we did that a lot, but it was a keg. We would just drink straight off of the keg.

Matt (00:09:05):
That's crazy.

Andy (00:09:06):
So yeah, lots of kegs, lots of fields, lots of passing out in fields. Yeah.

Matt (00:09:14):
So you relapsed a lot.

Andy (00:09:16):
Over and over again. The blessing in that was that I did learn something new each time. And so I say, yeah, relapse is a part of my story. It doesn't have to be a part of everybody's story.

Matt (00:09:31):
But it's a part of almost everybody's.

Andy (00:09:33):
Yeah.

Matt (00:09:34):
It's like the statistics are staggering on how many people actually relapse. Have you seen the statistics about the people who relapse the day they get out of treatment?

Andy (00:09:43):
No.

Matt (00:09:44):
So I don't remember the exact statistic, but there's a huge percentage of people that relapse the day they get out of treatment. And if you are relapsing the day you get out of treatment, it's typically within an hour of leaving treatment, they beelined straight back to wherever they came from.

Andy (00:10:03):
Oh my gosh.

Matt (00:10:04):
It's crazy.

Andy (00:10:05):
That is crazy. So after I got out of Cypress Creek, the first time I got those three months, like I said, relapsed. And then at some point I had gone back two more times. The second time I got a month out of there, and then the last time I got a day. And so I'm sure that statistic lines up with a lot of people's statistics. I think when you go to treatment for the first time ever, you are like the self will and is just really, really high. And that's what got me those three months. It was like the, let me stick it to everybody else. Let me show my ex-husband that I'm not going to do this. It was a big show.

Matt (00:10:57):
So there's a statistic that I like to quote. It says, one out of 10 people stay clean for a year. Out of that 10%, one out of 10 will stay clean for 10 years, but they have to go to treatment seven times first. So the actual number is, it's like 0.015% of people stay clean for 10 years, but they got to go to treatment seven times first.

Andy (00:11:17):
Man.

Matt (00:11:17):
So it's

Andy (00:11:18):
I'm outside of that statistic though.

Matt (00:11:21):
Yeah.

Andy (00:11:21):
I'm 10 and a half years. Well, actually this month will be 11 years of sobriety for me.

Matt (00:11:26):
Well, also within the same block of statistics. So this came from some military studies, right?

Andy (00:11:31):
Yeah.

Matt (00:11:32):
Also within that packet of statistics is the five-year Air Force statistic. You've heard that one, right?

Andy (00:11:40):
Yeah.

Matt (00:11:40):
So yeah, I mean, there is kind of a common understanding, at least in the industry where if you can make it to five years, you're 85% more likely to stay clean for 10 years or the rest of your life. Who Dr. Shah is. Right.

Andy (00:11:57):
Love him.

Matt (00:11:58):
I love him too. He's our medical director. And when he talks about the Why do you think people talk about the five years, it's like, okay, this makes sense. Especially from a biological standpoint, when you really put all of what he talks about in place, all of a sudden it's like, okay, this makes a lot more sense. But to kind of go back to what you were talking about is I tell people all the time that we have one shot for the people who are coming in for the first time. We have one shot to sell it to 'em or else this is going to be a lifestyle. The relapsing doesn't have to be a part of your story, but if they don't buy into it like that first time, there's a high likelihood. I mean, the statistics tell us, right, that there's a high likelihood that they're going to go to treatment a bunch of times if they don't stay clean this first time. And so you're an alcoholic. I think everybody that I've talked to so far is a drug addict though. And so it's a little different for drug addicts. You go to treatment for 30 days, you lower your tolerance. How many times have you heard the story where it's like it's on the news constantly. Somebody smoked weed and overdosed on fentanyl.

Andy (00:13:07):
Heard it hundred times.

Matt (00:13:09):
It's happening all the time. So we send this kid to treatment. The hypothetical I've been giving people is we send a 19-year-old to treatment. The parents forced this 19-year-old fentanyl addict to go to treatment. How do you inform the family that you're probably going to kill your kid? How do you ethically do that? How do you morally accept this kid into treatment knowing that he's going to relapse? We all know he's going to relapse. There's a very, very, it's a fact that once this kid's going to relapse, he doesn't want to be there. The only reason why he is there is because of the consequences on the backend. And I know for myself, I'm a heroin addict, and I only went to treatment one time knowing that I'd never use again. Only once. And I've been to treatment like eight times. I think every single time I went to treatment, I knew I was going to get out and use.

(00:14:00):
I didn't know when, but I knew it was just a matter of time. And so that's a hard fact and truth that we're trying to face right now, especially in the industry, right? It's like the introduction of fentanyl to the drug supply. And I hammer, I talk about this every single time, but the introduction of fentanyl to the drug supply has created a situation in the addiction landscape that's more dangerous than it's ever been, and it gets more dangerous every day that it goes by. And now they've got these, have you heard of this other drug that they've invented? There's another like

Andy (00:14:33):
The Trank?

Matt (00:14:34):
No, not trank. It's different than that. Now there's something else that's happening. I don't know anymore what it is. I'm not actually in the streets. I'm just reading stuff. But there's another one that's like a thousand.

Andy (00:14:44):
We've got to get Dr. Shah to debrief us.

Matt (00:14:46):
Yeah,

Andy (00:14:47):
He probably knows.

Matt (00:14:47):
He probably does. We're about to do a podcast on kratom. Yeah.

Andy (00:14:57):
I want to touch on two things.

Matt (00:14:59):
Yeah,

Andy (00:14:59):
You good with that?

Matt (00:15:00):
Yeah, go ahead.

Andy (00:15:01):
So yeah, if I'm looking at my five-year plan or my future of what I want to do, when I started off in the industry, I was running a family support group.

Matt (00:15:15):
How much clean time did you have or sobriety did you before you came into this industry?

Andy (00:15:20):
Five years.

Matt (00:15:21):
Okay.

Andy (00:15:21):
Yeah. I was in education before that. Like I said, I have a degree in health education. So when I first got into the industry, I was given a family component piece. And basically what I was set to do was I called everybody on the census list in an inpatient facility and just talked to the families. And it was all education based. It was not clinical based. I don't have a clinical license. And I did exactly what you just said. I had the hard conversations. And did some people want to hear it? No. Did some people later on appreciate it? I can tell you that out of that group, I still talk to about 25 of those people.

Matt (00:16:15):
How long did you do that for?

Andy (00:16:17):
A year and a half, almost two years. And I ran that support group. And even once their loved one left treatment people stayed in the group to help other family members. So they not only got their education, they became of service to other families.

Matt (00:16:34):
So the family component of all this, it's one of the hardest pieces because having to look at yourself and say, I've contributed to my child's problem, is something that it goes against all your basic instincts.

Andy (00:16:47):
Absolutely.

Matt (00:16:50):
So I talk about codependency and enabling, it's like the hardest thing to accept that you've participated in this, but it's one of the easiest things for the addict to get them to participate in because they want to love, want to love their loved one that's suffering. Right. And so I'm a C-P-F-S specialist, right? It's a peer and family specialist. Typically, it's just a peer recovery services. I have a family component in there too. And the reason why I chose to do that is because, so I'm the oldest of 10 kids.

(00:17:24):
I didn't talk to my family for 10 years, and I got kicked out at 16 and kind of was half in, half out with them for years. I went to prison for the first time at 18, basically 19. I was arrested at 18, hit prison at 19, and got out towards the end of 21. And that was actually the first time that I realized was an addict to also, I'd been sliming heroin since I was 17. So 17 to 21 had no clue. But I got circumstances said that I had to tell my dad that I was using heroin because somebody was going to beat me to it, and I couldn't let that happen. So I got on a phone call with him. It's like three o'clock in the morning, and I'm like, dad, I got to tell you something. Mom cannot hear this. I just need to talk to you, dah, dah, dah. So he gets out of bed, goes and hides in his closet. And for anybody that knows my dad, this is very uncharacteristic of him. He's a very high powered attorney, owns a capital investment firm.

(00:18:33):
This isn't his realm. So I tell him dad, I'm using heroin, and I had never stopped. I used through prison I was using basically, right. I actually overdosed. I think the week I got out of prison. I was living in a sober living. I found a sober living where I could give them dirty tests and they wouldn't care. They had people sleeping in tents in the yard. And I'll never forget it, he said, I tell him, dad, I'm using heroin. He said, what? Dude? What? You're doing so good. What happened? Are you some kind of addict or something? And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm a drug addict. It was like, but this moment of clarity where it's like, oh my gosh, everybody around me had probably already known, obviously, except for my dad. But yeah, so the family component, that was very important to me. I have nine little brothers and sisters. When I was 16 and I was kicked out, I had a 3-year-old, a five-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 9-year-old, a bunch of little kids. That's why I got kicked out. They were like, you can't be doing this shit here. But I never had that where I could call them for 20 bucks or call them and be like, it's raining. Can I come inside? Was just not, that wasn't an option. But I knew this guy.

Andy (00:19:58):
But who taught them that?

Matt (00:20:02):
Well, my mom and I have still to this day, don't get along. So I think it was, I have another brother who was also an addict for a while, and she babied him, well, I shouldn't say babied him, but always allowed him to not fully experience the suffering. But when it came to me, it was totally different. And so it wasn't like this hard line for all addicts. It was just this is how they dealt with me. So I don't know if it was something that they were taught, if it was just how my mom felt about me kind of thing, actually just what it was. They dealt with my brother totally differently. But then you've got all of these other examples of people, I'm sure probably a lot more than I do, but that you can point to and say, you are completely responsible for whatever's going on in your child's life now. Right? Because I believe that if you take responsibility for somebody, you take responsibility from them, and now it's on you. But for a family to have to look at that and say, if I didn't let him come inside that one time, he might've came inside for good. It's hard to connect those dots, but it's super important. The awareness, Dr. Shah awareness is the majority of the problem.

(00:21:29):
So bringing that awareness to families and having these conversations, I think it's something that is neglected as a whole for the majority of the industry where it's like, well, we offer this. They could come, they can come to family day. They might not, whatever. And then it's like you're sending sick people, you're sending a healing person out into a sick situation, and it's like, yeah, of course they're going to relapse. Right?

Andy (00:21:51):
In Al-Anon, we talk about three a's awareness, acceptance, and action. And honestly can be applied in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous too. But when it comes to families, awareness is the first step. If I'm not aware that I'm condescending, how can I fix it?

Matt (00:22:10):
For sure.

Andy (00:22:11):
And I'm just making an example there, and bringing awareness to the families is huge. But acceptance and action behind that, it's like, okay, sure. I am the enabler and I continue to do these things. I joined Al-Anon in 2018. Why? Because my son, I'm sorry, 2020, I went the first time in 2018 for my uncle who just passed away from cirrhosis of the liver.

(00:22:44):
In 2020 though, my son's dad relapsed and I had a very hard moment. I left my son on the floor of his playroom. I had some people outside working on the fence. So his godmother was outside, but I left him on the floor. I drove up to the gas station, and because I wasn't sure what he was doing, I was sure I was going to catch him selling meth or doing the deal, and I had to catch him. And that's what happens to family members is their loved one's addiction literally drives them insane. And that was my insanity moment. That was my awareness moment. That was, I cannot live like this anymore because I just put literally that in front of my morals and principles.

Matt (00:23:52):
So in that situation, how willing are you to talk about it?

Andy (00:23:57):
I am.

Matt (00:23:58):
Okay. So in that situation, was there a lead up to all this? Or was it a relapse and then immediately fell apart?

Andy (00:24:05):
No. So there was a lot of lead up. When you're in survival mode like that. I don't think I was counting the lead up. I wasn't checking the score. I wasn't journaling. I wasn't doing any of that to bring awareness. And I definitely wasn't talking to anybody about it. He had had me pretty isolated at that point. And so the day my son was born, I asked him to pick up my prescription from the pharmacy, and it was pain medication for, I had had a C-section. And he said, I'll pick it up if I can have some. And I said, I need my medication, so do what you need to do. So there were a lot of things, and I'm just skipping that as one example. But his father died and he basically said, you still have your dad. You don't know what it's like. And I said, you're right. I don't know what it's like. And he literally asked me if he could get some Xanax. So there it's not, it was just this,

Matt (00:25:21):
Was he an addict already? Was he in recovery?

Andy (00:25:26):
Since he was13. I'm never going to share if

Matt (00:25:30):
Okay, for sure.

Andy (00:25:32):
No, if he's in recovery or not, because it's not my place. I believed him to be in recovery. So that's from my standpoint.

Matt (00:25:45):
So it's messy, right?

Andy (00:25:47):
Very.

Matt (00:25:47):
It's a messy situation. Then, so you have this big lead up. How long did the lead up last to going into Al-Anon?

Andy (00:25:58):
About a year.

Matt (00:25:59):
Okay.

Andy (00:26:00):
Yeah.

Matt (00:26:00):
Okay. And so somebody in recovery yourself, right? It's still hard to recognize some of these things, especially when you're in it, the shit, it's really hard to recognize. And it's like, man, he'd probably done some of the things to you that you'd done to other people and not even realized it.

Andy (00:26:20):
I said that God is so funny because there was a lot of closure that I needed from my ex-husband. These are two different people that were talking about here. I needed a lot of closure from my ex-husband that he was never willing to give, and that's his prerogative. I owed my amends, I did my thing. But for me, this was God's awareness for me to see what I did to other people. And whether that stung or not, it was all meant by His design. And it brought me all of the places that I should be. And I say all that to say, you asked me how long it was. It was a year. I ended up kicking him out at the end of that year, which was 2020.

(00:27:14):
And as somebody in recovery and as a treatment professional, it was then introduced that I would be working with families. Don't tell me that's not God. I was told I would be accepting an alumni coordinator position. I would be doing education. I would be bringing groups into a treatment center and I, things like that. I building rapport with clients and doing events with them after they leave, keeping them engaged, easy, simple for me. I'm in recovery. All of this was happening, and boom, here I get, and it's like, I didn't want to go to Al-Anon, but here's my God push.

Matt (00:28:00):
Yeah.

Andy (00:28:02):
Yeah.

Matt (00:28:04):
So, okay. The family component's always really fucked up. It's like you have family dynamics. There are family structures that are in play. We don't actually get to intricately know what your position is in a family. We can all assume that the person that's in rehab is the black sheep or the person that everybody can point to. But then it's like this person gets clean, and now everybody's just pissed off at him. And it's like, okay, well, all you asked me to do for the last five years is to quit and get clean or whatever. And now all you want to do is hold it over my head.

(00:28:39):
And now you're just mad at me, and now you don't want to talk to me. Or now you're judging me. Or now my admissions director talks about this story where he was like, he had a bunch of years clean, and he visited his dad, and he's sitting there talking about this dad, and his dad's doing this to him. And he was like, what's up? And he is like, are you high? He was like, dude, that moment was so painful. And it's like he was already in a position where it hurt, but he could talk. He could get his dad to talk about it and be like, dude, that's fucked up. Why would you do that? And it's like, but that was already, I think it was five years sober already.

Andy (00:29:19):
The same thing happened to me, not exactly, but my sister was, we had a large fallout. I've just recently, she's allowed me to make amends after 10 years. That's how broken that relationship was. And a couple Thanksgivings ago, you can kind of see the tears in my eyes because meant so much to me this year. But it was a Thanksgiving, and we were looking through family pictures or whatever, and she pointed to a picture and she said, that's the day that you told me what a shitty ass mom I was. And I was just like, I've been sober for six years at that point. And I just said, I'm sorry that you're still there. I'm not.

Matt (00:30:09):
Yeah. So as the people in recovery, I feel like we have a much better handle on emotional stability and the ability to heal emotionally. And it's like families are never forced to look at all the shit that they've fucked up and then have to grow from that. It's like for successful people, they'll never have to do successful people in a traditional way where they're not an addict and they can do whatever they want and they go to school and they get the job and they're providing for their family, or they're raising their kids. It's like they're just focused on, this is what I say. I say that we are coming from the problem to the solution. They never left the solution. They just stay there.

Andy (00:30:52):
I agree.

Matt (00:30:52):
So our perspective is a hundred percent different, but it also gives us this wide spectrum of things that we can experience and not react negatively to, or at least well, also, we can look back on things that hurt us and move forward from it. And so the bottom line that I always get too for families is if you are not helping, you are hurting. But the way that we define things, especially for people in recovery, there are things that I just completely had to cut out of my vocabulary, like triggers or cravings, because craving drugs is not craving food. It's somewhat similar, but I think that's the closest thing that they could point to and say, this is kind of what happens.

Andy (00:31:39):
And it happens at a subconscious level. So a lot of people don't even know what's happening. So why are we talking about cravings?

Matt (00:31:46):
And then triggers for me is I have anything that I've ever pointed to and said it was a trigger, was literally just an excuse. And when I talk to people about redefining things, help is one of those words that you have to redefine in recovery and for families because they think they're helping when they let him come inside. And it's like, no, you are not helping. You are hurting if you are not helping. You are hurting

Andy (00:32:15):
And redefining what a crisis is.

Matt (00:32:17):
For sure. For sure. So that's another thing, right? It's like we can always, I'll give this example. I know this guy, he's been to every treatment center in Dallas. He says he's been to every treatment center in Austin.

Andy (00:32:35):
He knows how to run groups.

Matt (00:32:36):
He was a behavioral tech for a while too, and he's done the whole thing. He's literally ran every scam. But this dude relapses and relapses and relapses, family's wealthy, and he's like a trust fund kid. And

Andy (00:32:55):
That's my son's dad.

Matt (00:32:57):
Really?

Andy (00:32:57):
Same story.

Matt (00:33:01):
Huh?

Andy (00:33:02):
It's not him.

Matt (00:33:03):
Okay. But he understands how to use a good crisis or make one up. And it's like Dr. Shah says it, there's no such thing as a addiction medicine emergency. It's like, oh, okay. That makes sense actually. Right? But yeah, the family part, the family part of the addiction is easy. Everybody understands that part. It's like everybody just wants to help this person. It's a lot harder to do it in an effective way to help, but they all think they're helping. They all think they know what's going on. This person's using it isn't the same person that I raised or whatever, but it's like now the healing side. Well, I mean, nobody knows how to heal at all, right? We live in a really fucked up situation today. I mean, look at what's going on in the political climate alone. And it's like we can point to all kinds of shit that says we are in a really, really crazy situation today. But the family dynamics, that's something that people don't talk about enough.

Andy (00:34:16):
I think that it's so important to do the education piece with families, but to really lead them into either therapy or Al-Anon, preferably both. And this is what I tell people, if given the off chance that your loved one is out of the statistics of making it the first time in treatment, let's just say they do, okay? They go in, they get the healing. They're there for 90 days. They're working on all the things that they, and they come home a little bit better, and you're still sick. You're going to see that you're the problem. So while they're away, do the work.

Matt (00:35:01):
And that whole hypothetical you just gave is literally the best case scenario because

Andy (00:35:06):
Exactly.

Matt (00:35:06):
The average treatment stay stays 28 days.

Andy (00:35:09):
And I give all the scenarios. I've given all the scenarios to every single family that I've ever worked with. Because if I'm just comparing me and my son's dad, we'll say, right? My son's dad's been to treatment 30 times. He is unconstitutionally incapable of being honest, right?

Matt (00:35:30):
Okay

Andy (00:35:30):
With me, he is not sober today. With me, it was like this two year relapse. I was consistently learning from what I was doing. I'm not perfect. I just surrendered a little bit different. And so to be honest, I didn't do 30, 45, 90 days. I, I sat down in AA. I shut up, took the cotton out of my ears, did all the things, and I survived, and I lived and I thrived. I was in multiple meetings a day. I did it different. I stayed on the medication. I didn't do all the things that I had done in those two years of relapse. And God's Grace has me here, but that's not everybody's story

Matt (00:36:23):
For sure.

Andy (00:36:24):
And there's no one cookie cutter for anybody. I mean, you can go to treatment 30 times and then finally get it. You can do it on seven or eight tries.

Matt (00:36:35):
I mean, I know a kid, he was 16 years old. He was 16 years old, got drunk for the first time. This was in San Diego. He got beat up by some Marines and got hospitalized or whatever, and in the hospital realized that he was an alcoholic and went to AA and never drank again. And he's like 32 or something now. And just completely realized that that meant, and that is not a typical story. That is the

Andy (00:37:01):
Not at all

Matt (00:37:01):
Very, very extreme example of somebody who got it the first time.

Andy (00:37:06):
The first two times I got arrested, the next time that anybody, the cops were anywhere. I just ran. That was the lesson that I learned from that. So it's like I should have looked at that as like, Hey, that's not really normal behavior. That is definitely alcoholic behavior, but it was their fault. Even when I got arrested the following time after that for DW, I mean, I wasn't even 18 years old. It was still their fault. They shouldn't have pulled me over at a yellow light. It was still,

Matt (00:37:38):
I just found out that's illegal here. You can get pulled over for being in this intersection on a yellow light. You can get pulled over for that. Did you know that?

Andy (00:37:48):
No, I don't think so.

Matt (00:37:50):
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy (00:37:50):
But I sure got arrested in 2005 for it.

Matt (00:37:52):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a testament right there to it. But like I said, I've never talked to an alcoholic on the podcast before. And I don't know if I would tell an alcoholic that. Well, I don't tell anybody that anyway. I always tell everybody, whatever works for you, keep doing that. And if you're running into friction points and this shit isn't working for you, let's find something different. There's a large contingency, specifically drug addicts. There's people out there that are dying today because they've been rejected in the rooms. Suboxone saved my life. I tell people that every day. And I went into those rooms and they told me that I wasn't sober, that I'll never get cleaned, that I'll forever relapse, all this stuff. And none of that was true. I had to find a bunch of other information somewhere else that really got me to, here's the problem. I rejected recovery because I rejected the rooms.

Andy (00:38:54):
And it's not the same thing.

Matt (00:38:56):
Not the same thing.

Andy (00:38:57):
Yeah. They're two different things. That's just one path.

Matt (00:38:59):
That is just one path. And it's had a lot of success and it's had a lot of failure. But me and Karen Wolf,

Andy (00:39:08):
Okay,

Matt (00:39:08):
And Jill

Andy (00:39:09):
Lover her.

Matt (00:39:09):
We're here two days ago.

Andy (00:39:10):
Yeah.

Matt (00:39:11):
Anyway, we were talking about it. It was like,

Andy (00:39:12):
Did they get on the podcast?

Matt (00:39:13):
Yeah, together.

Andy (00:39:14):
Love it.

Matt (00:39:15):
Yeah.

Andy (00:39:17):
Ready to hear that one.

Matt (00:39:18):
But we were having this conversation and we were like, yeah, Bob and Bill probably wouldn't recognize the program for what it is today. If they somehow just appeared today and they walked into just a random room, it would look totally different than the program that they left behind. I,

Andy (00:39:35):
Well, I think the program works, but not always the people.

Matt (00:39:38):
That's the thing.

Andy (00:39:39):
And the people aren't the program.

Matt (00:39:40):
That is the thing.

Andy (00:39:41):
The program is the book that Bob and Bill designed for us to follow.

Matt (00:39:45):
Right, right. And it's like the institution is not the problem. It is the people. And not every meeting is the same. There are some extremely productive, really, really healthy meetings out there. And then there's some really sick meetings too. And I tell people, one of the things that you'll hear people say is, oh, AA is culty. And I tell 'em, AA is not culty. Certain meetings are, if you want to go to AA and you're having this experience, go to different meetings. You'll find one. The whole point of it though is we don't want you to be sick anymore. We don't want you to suffer anymore. And for people like us, it's like, well, why do you do what you do?

Andy (00:40:32):
So I do what I do. I don't want to generically say because it was done for me, but I'm going to go into that.

Matt (00:40:41):
Sure. I mean, whatever it is, whatever the truth is, just that's what I want to hear.

Andy (00:40:45):
So the truth is, is that the times that I would've totaled my vehicle, the times that I had seizures, all of the times that I should have ended up dead, I'm here. And so what am I going to do with my time while I'm here? Because I don't know how long that is. There was a time in active addiction where I didn't care about that. I thought I was going to die before 30. I'm 38 today. So what am I going to do with my time? What does that look like? It looks like meaningful conversations. It looks like education. It looks like loving on people when they can't love on themselves.

(00:41:35):
All of the things that I do also were the things that I don't feel were done for me. So I do things that were done for me. And like you said earlier, this is why you have your program lined out here because of your experience. You said that it's the same for me. I do things that weren't done for me when I was going and cycling in and out of hospitals. I was going in there telling them that I had Parkinson's. I was twitching like this. My head, my eyes would roll back. I would have

Matt (00:42:08):
Is that because you thought you did?

Andy (00:42:10):
No, it's because I was so delusional that I was willing to admit that I had a neurological problem, not an alcoholism problem.

Matt (00:42:18):
Oh, yeah, for sure.

Andy (00:42:20):
And it's a part of manipulation. So I go into these hospitals never once, I can't say never, I'm sorry, because I'll share that in a little bit. One hospital out of probably 20 hospitals that I walked into, never once said, go to treatment, get therapy, go to AA. That never happened for me. So when I do what I do today, a lot of it's education base. A lot of it is planting the seed because nobody ever did that.

Matt (00:42:54):
Yeah,

Andy (00:42:54):
Nobody ever said that

Matt (00:42:57):
For sure.

Andy (00:42:59):
I don't even remember them having a conversation about my liver enzymes. I don't even know if they were looking at my blood work. I haven't had a drink in almost 11 years, and my liver enzymes are still high.

Matt (00:43:09):
Wow.

Andy (00:43:12):
It was bad. Anyways, I get into that right of my life. I didn't think that I should have been here. So now I'm going to live like I am here. But in 2018, my best friend was killed. We were living together. I was sober and she was murdered. And the truth for me during that time, and this was in my first four years of sobriety, and which I struggled very hard during those times, the truth for me was it was almost a third chance at life. I got my second chance when I got sober and then comes this third chance. How were we living in the same home and I did not die? God has me here for a reason. And I knew that. And it was proved then. It was proved to me then. And I can tell you that I had a psychic change and a psychic shift that AA never gave me. I did get one in AA. I will never discount that. But I did get a new found psychic change. I did get a higher connection to God and to Jesus Christ in that time because I was so surrendered. I was so scared to relapse. I did not. I stayed sober through that.

Matt (00:44:45):
So yeah, that's, look, my best friend died in 2022. We got clean together. So I robbed a bank in 2020 and got sent to a three-year program, and he followed me there. And then one thing kind of led to another. He didn't have to be there. And there was major politics. So it was a Synanon. Do you know what Synanon is?

Andy (00:45:13):
No.

Matt (00:45:14):
Okay, so it was a Synanon based program. This is in LA. Politics were insane in this place. That's all. It's There is No,

Andy (00:45:22):
I was going to say, is it Scientology?

Matt (00:45:24):
No, no, no, no. So there is a documentary out right now. It's called the Synanon Fix. Watch it.

Andy (00:45:32):
Which platform?

Matt (00:45:33):
I think it's on. I don't know. I don't remember anymore. Netflix, I think.

Andy (00:45:37):
Okay.

Matt (00:45:37):
Yeah. But it was the first therapeutic community, you know what TCs are?

Andy (00:45:44):
Yeah.

Matt (00:45:44):
Okay. So that was the base of therapeutic communities. This group specifically turned into a murderous cult and were killing people and doing all kinds of crazy shit. The program that I went to was based on their program in this.

Andy (00:46:01):
And the jail sent you there?

Matt (00:46:02):
Yes.

Andy (00:46:03):
The court system?

Matt (00:46:05):
Yes.

Andy (00:46:06):
Oh my gosh. They want to keep us sick.

Matt (00:46:07):
So specifically this program, it's called Delancey Street, is one of the most court ordered successful. They claim to have a 98% success rate. When you're going to fight a life sentence, they will send you there. When you're coming out of a life sentence, they send you there. It is specifically developed for, not developed for, but geared for people who are criminally minded to go there and change their minds. It's insane. If you talk about God, if you talk about the 12 steps, if you talk about recovery, if you use the word recovery, you can get in trouble, right? They're like, you will work until you love to work. The first three and a half months that I was there, we would scrub walls. We weren't allowed to talk to people. If we talked to people without being talked to first, you can get in trouble for it. It was insane. So there's all of these politics and it's like they put you in this mindset where it's like when I finally left there, I left before I was supposed to. When I left there, I had more anxiety about leaving than I had about the years that I had over my head.

Andy (00:47:22):
That's how it's a cult.

Matt (00:47:23):
For sure. It was crazy. It was crazy. So we leave the program and we go somewhere else, court ordered. I have to go to a program. So he follows me to a different program, and this was right around probably two years clean. And he was like, I don't have to be here. I'm going to go work. I'm going to go start my life. He had it really on lock. That's what everybody thought. And he relapsed and died almost immediately. And I tell people this story specifically because this kind of helped me in the direction that I'm going right now. But I tell people, if you get clean or you get sober or you put down the bottle or the needle and you don't help people, you might as well just stay using It is completely pointless for you to not drink or use anymore. If you're just going to sit at home and not do shit. It is,

Andy (00:48:20):
You take in addiction, you take from your family, whether that be financially, emotionally, psychologically, and then we get in recovery. And if we continue to take, we continue to relapse. You have to be able to give that away.

Matt (00:48:35):
So what I point to is I call it the debt of recovery. It's just a hundred percent debt that I've accumulated over all the fucked up shit that I've done to people all of the derelict years that I just completely rejected responsibility, and I have incurred a massive debt. And then I answered recovery and it piled on even more debt. I got all this shit that I don't deserve. I got all this stuff that I shouldn't have five years ago, living under a bridge. If you'd asked me, what are you going to be doing in five years, there was three obvious answers. I'm either still going to be under this bridge, I'm going to be dead, or I'm going to be in prison. And that was the logical answer to it. So if five years ago somebody would've told me, you're going to have a treatment center, you're going to be clean, you're going to have two daughters, you're going to be married, you're going to be all this stuff. I'd have been like, you're fucking crazy. I'd have been like, how? But it happens. And so you enter recovery, you incur even more debt. And as your recovery goes, it is nearly impossible.

Andy (00:49:44):
And debt without shame. Because if you allow the shame to be bigger than your mission to pay that debt, you also continue to relapse.

Matt (00:49:55):
Yeah. So yeah, it's if I fail to try to pay back that debt on a daily basis, I know I'm in danger. Because if I'm not purposefully, intentionally trying to help people, if I'm not intentionally moving in a good way, if I miss working out one day, my wife freaks out, she'll be like, what's going on? What are you okay? I'm like, yes, I'm fine. But that plays a huge part in the debt myself, where it's like the shame. So we'll talk about the shame and guilt. I have done so much shameful shit, so much stuff that it's like the majority of the world would never even approach these situations in a, I could do this way, right? It's like they might look at that shit and be repulsed, but no, not me. By the time I was 21, I had been to prison, overdosed, lost a marriage, lost a kid, lost my entire family, all of the negative consequences that individually would've pointed somebody in a better direction.

(00:51:02):
Cumulatively, I was still like, fuck that. I'm still going to put this needle in my arm. I'm still going to do whatever I want to do. So all of this debt that I've accumulated is purpose driven. Now, it gives me a purpose where I can on a daily basis, know the direction that I should be going because of my past. It's like I can look behind me and say, well, at least I know where I don't want to go. I've been there, I've done that, and I know exactly where I want to go. And they always say it. If you'd have got exactly what you wanted out of your recovery, you would've sold yourself short. I could for sure attest to that. It's like if I'd have got what I wanted in my first year of sobriety, I know exactly where I'd be at a construction job somewhere just trying to survive. But instead, I got all this and it's massive debt, massive, massive debt. And for people like me, it's like I don't subscribe to a traditional pathway for recovery. I do something very specific. And I found my tribe, and it's funny, I talk about this guy all the time too.

(00:52:15):
In recovery, parlance, it would be my sponsor, but this guy is not in a 12 step structure either, but he's got this. So he's the only Navy seal in the history of the world that then went and joined the French Foreign Legion. But in between that picked up a crazy fentanyl habit, overdosing just like the whole nine. And what he did to reset himself was he joined the French Foreign Legion. Do you know what that is? Okay. Well, so he was scrubbing in a military setting, scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush because he was a Navy seal. And they were like, oh yeah, go scrub that toilet. And he calls it his baptism and humility. But he got all of these things,

Andy (00:52:59):
Two powerful words.

Matt (00:53:00):
Yeah, baptism and humility, right?

Andy (00:53:02):
Yeah. That's powerful.

Matt (00:53:03):
So one of the stories he tells there is, I don't remember what the infraction was, but he's up in the Swiss, the French Alps. It's freezing. There's snow on the ground. He did something, whatever he probably like, oh, he marched incorrectly. That's what happened. So they were in a marching parade. He said that the commanding officer called down to them, and hey, the seal with the tattoos was marching fucked up, and they made him stack rocks in a pyramid formation as tall and as wide as he is, there's no rocks, just like on this isn't the Rocky Mountains, this is like the Swiss Alps. There's snow. So it took him days, and one of the days he was looking up into the sky and he saw this plane flying over him, and he can remember it, when he tells this story, I can just picture it. It's like beautiful setting, first of all. And he's just up there like, fuck, dude. This is where my life has, this is where I am.

(00:54:09):
This is the point that I got to. Anyway, I connected with this dude. And when I found my, so this is the important part of community. You find your community and it will completely change the trajectory of whatever it is that you're doing. If you fit into something specific, it will have massive ripple effects on you. So when people enter recovery and they go to these rooms, if they fit in, they can use that as a jumping off point to really change a lot of shit. I found it somewhere else. But the important thing is community. If you don't have community.

Andy (00:54:49):
I agree. If you grow up thinking that you're different, then you hear a lot of people talk about their first drink, right? Or their first hit. Whenever it hits their system, they feel smarter, they feel prettier, they feel a part of, they can talk to the opposite sex people describe that feeling. And so that is what you get in a community. To be honest, I've never been diagnosed as obsessive, but I'm an obsessive thinker. And so when I went into a room full of people and Alcoholics Anonymous, and people were saying things that I had thought, I thought I was insane. And so now I'm no longer feeling like I'm insane. Like, oh, maybe these thoughts are normal. And as I developed as a person, and I started talking to even people outside of recovery and how they think and how getting into people's minds, I really realized that I'm not any different than anybody else. We are all struggling, and community is so important.

Matt (00:56:09):
I mean, that's one of the three things that Dr. Shah needs from you. He says, you need to get three things. One of 'em is community. He says, I don't care how you did it. You can go to yoga, you can go to the rooms, you can go to church, you can do whatever, but you have to find your tribe. Whatever that looks like for you, fine.

Andy (00:56:28):
I wanted to find it in church.

Matt (00:56:30):
Why?

Andy (00:56:32):
I think because as early as I can remember, that was the first time I felt accepted.

Matt (00:56:37):
Oh, wow.

Andy (00:56:37):
Yeah.

Matt (00:56:39):
At church.

Andy (00:56:40):
At church.

Matt (00:56:40):
I had the complete opposite.

Andy (00:56:42):
And it was because I came from a world in gymnastics where none of those girls liked me at all.

Matt (00:56:52):
Why?

Andy (00:56:55):
I don't know.

Matt (00:56:56):
Competitive.

Andy (00:56:58):
It's competitive. It's a single sport. Maybe I had an attitude, I truly don't know. From what I was told by my family is that it was because I was better than other people. I had jumped a couple levels and anyways, and it could have been all in my head. I was invited to some of those birthday parties and I did go to them. But while I was there, I just always never felt like I fit in. And a lot of that was because they had more money than me.

Matt (00:57:31):
Oh.

Andy (00:57:31):
I grew up poor. And so a lot of that had to do to do with money. And so in eighth grade, when I go back to normal school and I get this group of friends, they also had more money than me. But we joined this church and it's for the first time I felt comfortable.

Matt (00:57:55):
So in eighth grade, you had a friend group that joined a church?

Andy (00:57:59):
Yes.

Matt (00:57:59):
That is insane. That is unheard of.

Andy (00:58:02):
Yeah.

Matt (00:58:02):
Well, I mean, it's Texas.

Andy (00:58:03):
Well, ironically enough, I took my first drink that summer and that was gone very quickly after that.

Matt (00:58:10):
Okay, so you just associated that feeling with church.

Andy (00:58:13):
Yes.

Matt (00:58:14):
So are you an active church member now?

Andy (00:58:18):
No.

Matt (00:58:18):
Okay.

Andy (00:58:20):
I say that I have belonged to the Woodlands Church for a long time. I am a member.

Matt (00:58:25):
That church is amazing.

Andy (00:58:26):
I am a member. I've done their membership classes. I've done service for them. The thing is, I'm living in Magnolia right now, and it's about an hour from the Woodlands Church. And so when you ask me if I'm an active member, do I go to church and participate in the church as I should? The answer is no. Do I belong to that church and love that church? The answer is yes.

Matt (00:58:51):
Okay. So yeah, community, that's massive. Let's talk about gymnastics.

Andy (00:58:55):
Yeah.

Matt (00:58:55):
So competed at a high level.

Andy (00:58:58):
High level.

Matt (00:58:59):
Cool. Did you ever get medals and stuff like that?

Andy (00:59:04):
I did. I mean was traveling. I went to Las Las Vegas at

Matt (00:59:09):
Oh, wow.

Andy (00:59:10):
Yeah, at one point I did lots of regionals and national nationals.

Matt (00:59:15):
Las Vegas is the nationals.

Andy (00:59:20):
I don't know what kind of invitation it was. It was an invitational. I know that I placed on the bars, but what happened, I accidentally ended up kicking the toilet in the hotel room and breaking my toe, so I couldn't even finish the competition.

Matt (00:59:38):
So I did gymnastics for a very short, I have a brother that's a very athletic kid. A lot of my family is athletic, but he did super well in tumbling in gymnastics, and we did it at the Y in San Diego, and I did, I got to the point where I was doing back handsprings, and then I missed a landing and landed on my neck. And then I've just never been able to do anything backwards anymore to this day. Never.

Andy (01:00:10):
So in gymnastics, they call that a mental block, and I feel like I was successful in gymnastics because I was never granted with the mental block until I was, and so when I was really young for all those formative years, up until seventh, eighth grade, then I developed the mental block.

Matt (01:00:33):
Around what?

Andy (01:00:35):
It's more so around watching other people that were around me. Somebody fell on their neck. There was a lot of training going on. So when I say training, when you vault, you have to vault off of the springboard. Well, we were vaulting off of a trampoline and there was a mat.

Matt (01:00:57):
So you were running to a trampoline?

Andy (01:01:00):
Yeah, essentially. But you have to do that in order to train skills. But I never felt like we were progressing with skills. We pere just staying in that.

Matt (01:01:16):
Your coaches, wherever your coaches were stomped at, that's where you guys stopped basically.

Andy (01:01:22):
Yeah. It always seemed like we weren't progressing quick enough. No, that makes sense. I never understood what was happening. And it was the same with the beam, right? A beam is four inches. Well, they had this thing over the beam to learn a skill, and it's like, why am I learning a skill on a thicker beam? And so that's when the mental block came in. I'm like, if I'm supposed to be doing a standing full on the beam and my feet are supposed to be landing on four inches, why do we have six inches on the beam? It was the level of support that was very confusing, and it was a different time. I had been with the same coaches for multiple years before that, and this was a new set of coaches, and I wasn't comfortable with them emotionally for sure, but a lot of people on their team were hurt. They had just pushed me up to another level. I was progressing quicker than everybody else. I mean, it was a perfect storm of chaos that was happening.

Matt (01:02:34):
Gymnastics is a very emotionally involved sport. You've got, you remember Dr. Nasser? Do you remember that whole saga that happened?

Andy (01:02:47):
How could I forget?

Matt (01:02:48):
Okay, so when a coach is coaching for gymnastics, there's a lot of hands-on too, right? So I was sexually abused as a kid, and that was one of the things where I was always felt really weird going to, because I mean, I play water polo, right? There is no coach hands-on. It's a very violent sport, but it's very different than that. But there's a lot of a, cuz it's dangerous sport. Gymnastics is a super dangerous sport, and it's like if you can't do this, they have to guide you. And I always felt so weird doing that, but it's a very emotionally charged sport and very individual. And I always looked at my brother. He's younger than me, well all younger than me, but he's the one right after me. This is the kid that I felt like always did it better than me. He could tap dance better than me. He could do gymnastics better than me. There was a couple things he could skate better than me. I was always jealous of this kid. He was one of my best friends though. But I would always look at him and be like, fuck, he has this straight here.

Andy (01:04:03):
That's where your comparison card came in, is what you're saying.

Matt (01:04:05):
For sure. For sure. And my mom loves this kid loves him.

Andy (01:04:10):
That's the core wound right there.

Matt (01:04:11):
Yeah. Oh yeah. For sure. I was calling somebody else mom when I was three. When he was born, I started calling somebody else mom. Right? There was always this.

Andy (01:04:20):
Wow.

Matt (01:04:21):
Yeah. So it was always difficult. I loved him. I hated the relationship that he had with my mom. I was jealous of it. And then there was all these other things that he could do that I couldn't do. And to me, I was always inadequate because of him. But the gymnastics thing, he was always really good at, I mean, I think he's 30. How old am I? I'm 36, so he's 34. I think he'll be 35 in December, and this kid can still run up trees and do back flips. It's like I couldn't run up the tree period at all. Now, at this point, I don't think, maybe

Andy (01:04:58):
I cannot. I'm severely broken at this point.

Matt (01:05:01):
Seriously, you can't do any of it now.

Andy (01:05:03):
I mean, we haven't gotten into, I'm a chronic pain patient. I have two autoimmune diseases and no spine. I have a spinal cord stimulator, and I've had 10 back procedures.

Matt (01:05:13):
Okay, let's get into that.

Andy (01:05:15):
So yeah, one the fears while I was joining that new team was that everybody was hurt. I had not been hurt at that point. And

Matt (01:05:27):
You're like 12, 13, somewhere around there?

Andy (01:05:30):
I am.

Matt (01:05:31):
Okay.

Andy (01:05:31):
Yeah. I had not been hurt at that point prior. I had broken an arm, broken a leg.

Matt (01:05:41):
In gymnastics?

Andy (01:05:42):
In gymnastics.

Matt (01:05:43):
Isn't that crazy that those are kind of adult worries? But I feel like those are uniquely to gymnastics. People think more adulty more in an adult way. You don't think about that when you're skating. You don't think about that stuff when you, and that you're definitely going to break something doing that stuff. But water polo, it was never like I could get hurt.

Andy (01:06:08):
Well, and I had said earlier that I didn't really think about those things. I think that I liked it so much that it overpowered that, and I was good at that. So it was helping my self-esteem. Right? If we go back to childhood, if I feel like I'm not seen in my household, then now I am. And so all of those things overpowered that. And at some point, the fear set in. And I also think that a lot of that too introduced me to manipulation in a sense, because I think that I manipulated everybody out of letting me quit. Whereas somebody should have said, somebody, as the adult should have said, how can we support you better? What can we, let's give you, I asked. I said, I need a break. I need a break from this. I was not given a break. They said, no. They were like, we don't take breaks. This is what I remember. I'm a child. But I remember feeling not supported. And all of the years that I was doing that, I was also restricting food.

Matt (01:07:29):
Wow.

Andy (01:07:29):
And so I had gotten to the point

Matt (01:07:32):
Intentionally, or was it more of a subconscious thing?

Andy (01:07:38):
I think it was intentional. I think it was a way that I could control something. And the way that I was feeling. I'll say this too, at that point, I had had a bladder condition. And so one of those, we go back to community. One of those things that set me apart from all of those other girls is that when I was landing, I felt like I was peeing on myself. And so I always thought, oh, well, I'm going to be this stinky kid, and I would bring extra leotards and things like that. Well, to this day, I have a condition called interstitial cystitis, and nobody knew what that was. And I didn't figure it out until I was 16. How many years post gymnastics? But back then, so there was some medical things that were going on that

Matt (01:08:32):
What exactly is that?

Andy (01:08:33):
Interstitial cystitis. It's like an inflamed bladder, basically. Also, my brain a lot of times doesn't tell me that I need to use the bathroom. And so I can use the bathroom once or twice a day.

Matt (01:08:50):
Start drinking those

Andy (01:08:50):
While drinking water, for some reason, that makes me pee. I remember in high school, one of the chaperones for prom night, she asked me, she said, why do you drink so much like beer? You drink a lot of beer for a young girl? And I said,

Matt (01:09:08):
A chaperone said this to you?

Andy (01:09:10):
Yes.

Matt (01:09:10):
Like an adult?

Andy (01:09:11):
Adult? Yeah.

Matt (01:09:12):
Okay.

Andy (01:09:13):
Isn't that wild?

Matt (01:09:13):
Yeah.

Andy (01:09:16):
But I mean, I guess they just thought, oh, this is a one time deal. It's prom. Let's let these kids drink. I don't know. And I said to her, it feels better when I pee. Rationalization and justification.

Matt (01:09:32):
That was a very young for alcohol. Fuck. Yeah. That's funny.

Andy (01:09:42):
So anyways, I digress. So yeah, my body's hurting and I'm starting to get fatigue. I think that my disordered eating has always gone in waves. And I think during that time, I was getting to the point where I was getting a little dizzy, and so I was sure if I would just drink more water.

Matt (01:10:10):
Oh no.

Andy (01:10:12):
That would go away. So lots of things all happening at the same time,

Matt (01:10:19):
Which is a terrible idea when you're restricting food. Right, cuz now, you're sodium deficient when you're drinking that much water.

Andy (01:10:25):
Yeah. Well, nobody told me that.

Matt (01:10:27):
Yeah. Well, you're also 12, so you're probably not telling anybody that you are doing that. Right,

Andy (01:10:32):
Right.

Matt (01:10:36):
And if it was today, so one of the things that blows my mind about the kids of today, you probably would've known because of TikTok or

Andy (01:10:46):
I've never thought about that.

Matt (01:10:47):
Yeah, dude, these kids nowadays, there's a whole generation, so there's generation alpha, so there's, how old are you?

Andy (01:10:55):
38.

Matt (01:10:56):
So we are millennials, and then there's Gen Z, and then after that is Gen Alpha. Those kids, a huge amount of them are committing without their, obviously, because their parents all suck because they're us. They're making commitments to sobriety and commitment to chastity. And it's like, how do you kids even know what the shit is? It's like, oh, these kids are being raised by the internet. And they see us in front of them, and they're like, we don't want to be anything like those people. It's amazing. But yeah, you probably would've known.

Andy (01:11:33):
And I didn't, wasn't talking to anybody about it, and I don't think I considered myself to have any friends during that time.

Matt (01:11:43):
So isolation has been a massive part of your story?

Andy (01:11:47):
Absolutely. All imposed by self.

Matt (01:11:51):
For sure. Most isolation is.

Andy (01:11:54):
In high school. So I have one purpose to be a gymnast, to get approval being a gymnast, and I lose that purpose. And so when I lose that purpose, I go into high school and my purpose is again, to seek community. And I feel liked by the people who are drinking mass amounts of alcohol. And so I did join the cheerleading team in high school, and I was a diver. I was captain of the diving team.

Matt (01:12:34):
That's crazy. That makes sense though.

Andy (01:12:39):
Those are kind of default sports when you're good at gymnastics. And so I could twist and flip and do all the things that I needed to do. And so I say all that to say I'm putting more pressure on my body. At this time, pretty much I get addicted to laxatives. So when I say my disordered eating goes up and down, I'm being serious. Sometimes I restrict, sometimes I don't.

Matt (01:13:12):
Do you ever do the binge eating thing?

Andy (01:13:15):
I did a little bit in high school and a little bit in college, but not really. I got to the point where I couldn't throw up anymore. Nothing would make me throw up.

Matt (01:13:27):
That doesn't sound like a little bit.

Andy (01:13:31):
Did I just minimize my?

Matt (01:13:32):
Yes.

Andy (01:13:33):
Okay.

Matt (01:13:33):
Yeah,

Andy (01:13:33):
I can do that.

Matt (01:13:34):
Thank

Andy (01:13:35):
You for calling me out. I deserve that. So yeah, I lost the ability to get it out. So if I thought I was going to eat that amount and not get rid of it, I wasn't going to do it.

Matt (01:13:48):
For sure.

Andy (01:13:49):
And that's when the laxatives come in,

Matt (01:13:50):
Right? Okay.

Andy (01:13:51):
Yeah. So a genuine dislike for my body. And I'm 90 pounds. So I am a cheerleader. I'm drinking heavily. Right around probably junior year, I started drinking a little bit before school.

Matt (01:14:18):
Why?

Andy (01:14:18):
Mostly after.

Matt (01:14:21):
Why are you drinking before now? Was it you were sick in the mornings or was it for social lubricant?

Andy (01:14:27):
Social lubricant. Yeah. It was like, I just feel better when I am. I feel normal. I feel like me. And I mean, maybe a part of it was to be cool. I'm not sure.

Matt (01:14:44):
Were you vocal about it? Did people know that you were drinking before?

Andy (01:14:46):
No.

Matt (01:14:47):
Well, I don't think it was going to be cool then.

Andy (01:14:48):
Okay. Yeah, no. So what happened is my sophomore year, there was a group of cheerleaders who got caught drinking at school. They had brought, I think, vodka in a water bottle, and everybody had their eyes on them, but I was not a part of that group. And so I used that for a long

Matt (01:15:13):
Yeah, for sure.

Andy (01:15:14):
For a long time.

Matt (01:15:15):
I have a brother that's like, he's in business.

Andy (01:15:18):
I became the deflection queen.

Matt (01:15:20):
Yeah. My brother always says, I love it when other people get in trouble in business. He is like, I could come in and take advantage of that, basically. But yeah, for sure.

Andy (01:15:30):
I did that for sure. So I mentioned earlier on in the podcast about getting arrested multiple times. So the last time I got arrested, I was turning 18. And so they told me, we're placing you on probation for three years, and if you don't get in trouble until you're 21 years old, we will erase all this stuff off your record.

Matt (01:15:57):
So deferred adjudication is, we're going to spend all this, we're going to monitor you, and if you complete this time period, it's different for everybody, but then we'll drop all the charges.

Andy (01:16:09):
Right. And so about six months, I was not even 19 years old, I had moved to San Antonio. I'm in the living room at my aunt's house, and I start scratching a bug bite on my leg, and I noticed that my leg is numb. And I remember having an out of body of experience, and I'm just like, what is going on? Oh my God, I'm dying. Something is really wrong. And so I go to the doctor, they diagnosed me with osteoporosis and degenerated disc disease. A lot of that came from the wear and tear of my body. People see flexibility on camera, and it's like a wow. But every single day you're doing that.

Matt (01:17:17):
You're wearing bones and joints and discs

Andy (01:17:20):
And tendons and tissue and all the things

Matt (01:17:24):
In ways they're not designed to.

Andy (01:17:26):
Right. Over extension at best. And so I get diagnosed with these two things, and they're telling me your L five disc is bulging, and it's actually

Matt (01:17:38):
At 19?

Andy (01:17:38):
At 19, and it's bulging into your spine, and we need to do a laminectomy. And pretty quickly

Matt (01:17:47):
It's bulging inward.

Andy (01:17:49):
Yes. Into the spinal cord.

Matt (01:17:51):
And it didn't hurt. You hadn't experienced pain around that.

Andy (01:17:55):
I was drinking too much to, I'm a morning to night drinker by that time, by 19. And so I'm not really experiencing pain.

Matt (01:18:06):
The body mind connection's gone.

Andy (01:18:08):
Yes, correct. And so I go in and I get a laminectomy, and that was that. Well, two weeks later, I'm at a party,

Matt (01:18:25):
Of course.

Andy (01:18:26):
And the cops knock on the door and a bunch of people are doing coke and pills, and there's a keg there. We're all underage. What comes to mind is, Hey, I wouldn't have got those other charges before the DWI if I would've just ran. So I jump off of a two story building, and essentially I break my back.

Matt (01:18:50):
So right after they go in and do this surgery on your discs, you jump off a two story building.

Andy (01:18:56):
Yeah,

Matt (01:18:57):
Two weeks.

Andy (01:18:58):
Two weeks.

Matt (01:18:59):
And you were obviously under the influence.

Andy (01:19:01):
I was.

Matt (01:19:01):
And you probably wouldn't have done this if you weren't.

Andy (01:19:04):
Right. Cool. Yeah. So here we go with another consequence.

Matt (01:19:09):
Yeah.

Andy (01:19:09):
Right. Yeah. So I've already been told I have the back of an 80-year-old woman.

Matt (01:19:17):
At 19

Andy (01:19:19):
At 19. Osteoporosis and degenerated disc disease. And now I've just crushed all of my lower back.

Matt (01:19:29):
Compressed the spine or broke vertebrae.

Andy (01:19:35):
I don't know. I want to say crushed, but I

Matt (01:19:41):
Did they ever,

Andy (01:19:42):
It's very blurry for me.

Matt (01:19:43):
Oh, I bet. I bet. Because then on top of that, surgeries and the medication, right.

Andy (01:19:52):
And we can get into that medication. Actually never really liked medication.

Matt (01:19:59):
Which totally makes sense. Cuz you're an alcoholic.

Andy (01:20:02):
Yeah. I took one pain medication that first time I had that laminectomy, and it made me constipated. And in my mind, I cannot be constipated with an eating disorder because it's making me fatter.

Matt (01:20:20):
Hang on. So you had just accepted I have eating disorders by that point?

Andy (01:20:27):
I think it was no subconscious, but in my mind, I'm still processing the fact that if I take a pill

Matt (01:20:37):
And it blocks me up

Andy (01:20:38):
And it blocks me up, I'm not getting rid of something and I'm going to look heavier than what I'm already think I am.

Matt (01:20:45):
Wow. So still though, at this point, it wasn't, I am living with eating disorders. It was just

Andy (01:20:54):
No, it just, I want to be thin. That's it.

Matt (01:20:56):
That is so crazy. And this was 2006. So this was like Mary Kate Ashley.

Andy (01:21:05):
Oh, yeah. And I was obsessed when she got thin, grossly.

Matt (01:21:09):
That is so crazy.

Andy (01:21:11):
Yeah.

Matt (01:21:11):
Remember that whole time period where it was like Mary Kate and Ashley, Paris Hilton, they were all rail thin, and that was the popular thing.

Andy (01:21:20):
Yeah.

Matt (01:21:20):
That is so crazy.

Andy (01:21:21):
What's crazy is when I see Ariana Grande today, I have prayed for her. She's so sick.

Matt (01:21:28):
And she looks better than they did. She looks more healthy than they did.

Andy (01:21:33):
Yeah, for sure. I have more awareness around it now, so for sure. But yeah, so that was my journey with pain medication. I ended up selling it. I was working at PF Chang's at the time, and there was this guy that liked Norcos. Back in the day, you'd get 120, the bottle

Matt (01:21:55):
Yellow

Andy (01:21:56):
Yellows and somas.

Matt (01:21:59):
Oh, wow.

Andy (01:22:00):
And I wasn't interested in either, sold them, and that was that.

Matt (01:22:09):
So around this time, obviously surgeries and all that, you can't drink during that, but did other doctors aware of how severe your alcoholism is?

Andy (01:22:17):
No.

Matt (01:22:18):
How?

Andy (01:22:20):
Because I could quit for a couple of days and still do surgery. I was still functioning at that point.

Matt (01:22:33):
Right. Yeah. You were doing what you had to do to continue to drink.

Andy (01:22:37):
Absolutely.

Matt (01:22:38):
Okay.

Andy (01:22:38):
Yeah.

Matt (01:22:40):
That's insane. Just the lengths that we'll go to continue and the sacrifices that you'll make to continue.

Andy (01:22:50):
Yeah.

Matt (01:22:50):
So did you ever get your spine fused?

Andy (01:22:54):
I did.

Matt (01:22:55):
Okay.

Andy (01:22:55):
Yeah. Yeah. So multiple laminectomy. I'm in the doctor all the time. I'm MRI. They want to do an ablation, they want to do all of these things, I had really good insurance. And I learned how awful that can be. And so I became a medical experiment science experiment, and that dehumanized me. It really did. And I didn't process that until years later. And actually in 2018 is through Michelle, when she died, I was able to process that then four years into sobriety that never registered. And I can tell you, I got my spinal cord stimulator done in 2018.

Matt (01:23:52):
What is that?

Andy (01:23:54):
So it's actually an internal TENS unit. The leads go all the way from the bottom of your spinal all the way down to your neck. And

Matt (01:24:02):
They're wires, basically. Right?

Andy (01:24:04):
They're wires. And they go all the way down to your toes.

Matt (01:24:07):
And they do this through veins, right?

Andy (01:24:09):
Correct.

Matt (01:24:09):
Okay. And can you feel it?

Andy (01:24:13):
Yeah, you can feel it. It's like,

Matt (01:24:16):
Yeah,

Andy (01:24:16):
You've had a TENS unit on. Have you ever had one? So if let's just say your elbow hurts and you go to the doctor and they want to do a TENS unit, will they put it on the outside and it basically, it's like electrodes.

Matt (01:24:30):
I'm going to be honest with you. I don't go to the doctors still. I just refuse to. So I probably should. But I got all my blood work done and I was fine. And I was like, fuck yes.

Andy (01:24:42):
Yes.

Matt (01:24:43):
Okay. I'm good.

Andy (01:24:46):
I wish that I hadn't lived in a doctor's office since I was five, but it just became that. And it was always me trying to figure out, and I really think this played into my alcoholism. It was always the doctor trying to figure out what's wrong. First, it was the whole bladder thing. It's like, why am I peeing on myself? Or why am I not using the bathroom? Why am I drinking all this water and it's not going anywhere? And I've been put under anesthesia probably 38 times.

Matt (01:25:25):
Wow.

Andy (01:25:26):
I mean, they did an endoscopy. They did a cystoscopy where they put a camera up my bladder, and I was always just an experiment. And so I go through these and finally, at some point, I give up, I start focusing more on my drinking. This is right around the time that I lose control. And I have neuropathy at that point

Matt (01:26:01):
Where?

Andy (01:26:02):
In my feet, which is, if you think back to the first thing, I started with the ant bite. Right? I'm itching my leg, it's numb. I had it all along. And the alcoholism, you can get alcoholic neuropathy as well. And so I had it from before I started morning to night drinking, and here I am, I'm like eight years deep in morning to night drinking.

Matt (01:26:31):
Wow. That's a lot of drinking.

Andy (01:26:32):
That's a lot of drinking. And

Matt (01:26:36):
How are you supporting this habit? That's a lot of money.

Andy (01:26:41):
Well, when I lived in San Antonio, I worked for these guys that had clubs and we did a lot of bottle service. And so he would tell me, he would hand me a bottle of gr goose, tell me that I owed him $50 per bottle of Grey Goose at the end of the night. And I would walk up to people and sell it. And so I would tell 'em it's $125. And so I made a lot of money in clubs. I was also a waitress, a seasoned waitress. I drank while I waited tables, and I did everything in a restaurant. I was a hostess. I cleaned tables, I did all of the things. I flew under the radar a lot with that.

Matt (01:27:30):
Restaurants are breeding grounds for addiction.

Andy (01:27:33):
A thousand percent. I go to treatment in 2014 while I'm in a wheelchair. So at that point,

Matt (01:27:40):
Lemme ask you.

Andy (01:27:41):
I could barely walk.

Matt (01:27:41):
When you jumped off the buildings, did you have any kind of paralysis after?

Andy (01:27:47):
No.

Matt (01:27:48):
Wow.

Andy (01:27:49):
So I jumped and I remember thinking, I can't move. And so I crawled behind a trash bag and I think

Matt (01:28:02):
Behind a trash can?

Andy (01:28:04):
They were bags.

Matt (01:28:07):
Piles of bags or something.

Andy (01:28:08):
So it was an apartment complex that had a valley in, this is San Antonio, so it's hilly. Right. So I jumped off and onto grass.

Matt (01:28:20):
Oh, okay. I was picturing an alleyway with concrete or something.

Andy (01:28:24):
No. So there was not concrete. I jumped in grass, and I remember just army crawling. And so I crawled back towards the sliding glass door and behind trash bags, bags, because I was sure that if I laid there or tried to get up and run and I couldn't, I was going to get caught. And then there goes my probation. And so I just hid. And I believe that I fell asleep there. I do remember at one point getting up,

Matt (01:28:57):
Passed out.

Andy (01:28:58):
Passed out, and I remember getting up and I walked back upstairs, the party was over, so I know that I passed out. I just don't, it's very blurry.

Matt (01:29:13):
I mean, yeah, totally understand that for sure.

Andy (01:29:16):
And I took three Tylenol PMs that night, and I remember waking up 24 hours later, and it still being black. I'd never taken a Tylenol PM before, but I was in a lot of pain. And somebody said, take the Tylenol pm.

Matt (01:29:35):
Which is interesting at a party where there's drugs, they gave you Tylenol pm, but you were just so,

Andy (01:29:42):
It was another alcoholic. He wasn't doing any drugs. It was his party. He was an alcoholic, just like me. He never touched drugs. I never touched drugs. And so that was his thinking, I believe.

Matt (01:29:55):
Yeah. I mean, so were you in pain though? You don't know.

Andy (01:30:02):
I don't know.

Matt (01:30:03):
That is so crazy.

Andy (01:30:04):
Yeah.

Matt (01:30:05):
Because when it comes to pain, they try to say that pain is the sixth sense, or pain is the next human.

Andy (01:30:14):
I've always heard pain is the ultimate motivator for change.

Matt (01:30:17):
Well, that too. But there's like, oh, pain is the sixth sense. Right? It's like people are very sensitive to pain. It sounds like you're very not sensitive to pain.

Andy (01:30:27):
I am not.

Matt (01:30:28):
Okay. But pain is the ultimate motivator, right? It's like we are forged in the fire of our own suffering. And pain is always at the root of that, but So you go through all these surgeries and you're drinking through all this?

Andy (01:30:47):
I am.

Matt (01:30:48):
And so when was the last round of back issues that you had in relation to your sobriety?

Andy (01:30:57):
Well, I think that I gave up on it for a couple years towards the end, because the next time that I confront the pain was in 2015. I had a full fusion done.

Matt (01:31:17):
How many discs?

Andy (01:31:19):
Three.

Matt (01:31:20):
Lower.

Andy (01:31:21):
Lower.

Matt (01:31:22):
Okay.

Andy (01:31:22):
Yeah.

Matt (01:31:23):
So neck mobility still all there. Major mobility still all there?

Andy (01:31:28):
Absolutely.

Matt (01:31:29):
Okay.

Andy (01:31:30):
Yeah. So I get that surgery, don't touch the pain medication,

Matt (01:31:38):
Which is interesting, like

Andy (01:31:40):
In sobriety,

Matt (01:31:41):
You wanted your pain medication for the C-section though?

Andy (01:31:44):
Yeah.

Matt (01:31:44):
Okay. Is it that painful?

Andy (01:31:48):
C section?

Matt (01:31:48):
Yeah.

Andy (01:31:49):
I saw stars. It was so painful.

Matt (01:31:52):
Really?

Andy (01:31:53):
So painful.

Matt (01:31:53):
My

Andy (01:31:54):
Teeth, I got my wisdom teeth out in sobriety, and I used the pain medication, and I had a C-section in sobriety, and they used the pain medication and the spinal cord stimulator. I literally have a battery in my left butt cheek, and that was the most painful part of it.

Matt (01:32:13):
So I got four wisdom teeth removed at the same time, smoked and had dry socket and all four of 'em. And relapsed because of it relapsed. That's when people found out that I was still using heroin.

Andy (01:32:28):
That's probably how I got dry socket, because I was vaping the whole time.

Matt (01:32:31):
Oh yeah. I mean, straws and smoking. Those are the two things that they tell you. You will get dry socket if you smoke or drink out of straws.

Andy (01:32:41):
I didn't drink out of straws, and I don't remember them telling me. Smoking. Yeah,

Matt (01:32:46):
Smoking. They were like, do you smoke? I was like, yeah, I vape. This is 2012. This was when the mods were still around and they were like, if you smoke, you're going to get dry socket. And I was dry, so what the fuck does that even mean? And gave me a bottle of Vicodin. And this was after I had admitted that I was using heroin. So a family member thought they were going to dispense the Vicodin, and I was like, okay, I know what to do. And immediately just went and bought dope.

Andy (01:33:22):
This dope is better than this dope.

Matt (01:33:25):
Yeah. Well, also I have no access to that anyway. They're giving me two pills a day. So I was like, this is not going to work. Okay, so you

Andy (01:33:43):
2015, I get the surgery.

Matt (01:33:45):
Yeah. You use the pain medication for these surgeries. Where I was going with that though is my wife is about to have a C-section. She's sober, and we're going through this thing right now, and we're like, okay, how are we going to address the situation? And we're talking to doctors and we're finding alternatives for pain medication. There's a pain medication that they're giving to major surgeries now. But if your doctor doesn't,

Andy (01:34:16):
Is it Trezix? Do you know what the name of it is?

Matt (01:34:20):
I don't. There's two. Maybe it's Trezix. What it does is it stops the signals. It doesn't actually address the pain. It addresses the signals. So it blocks the signals from going to your brain to say that you're in pain. But the problem is, it's such a new drug, not all doctors prescribe it. And so if your given doctor doesn't prescribe it, you're not going to get it. And so it's like, well, okay, how do we deal with this? And I guess the conclusion that we've come to at this point is, where are you at in your sobriety? Where are you at in your recovery? How do you handle it? What are you going to do? Is it going to be a situation where you should go and detox? Is it going to be a situation? And these are all a lot of deep conversations that we have that we've had to have around this. And it's like ultimate,

Andy (01:35:14):
Isn't that so healthy?

Matt (01:35:15):
Yeah. I mean,

Andy (01:35:16):
I love that

Matt (01:35:17):
It isn't normal,

Andy (01:35:19):
But it's healthy,

Matt (01:35:20):
But it's very healthy.

Andy (01:35:21):
Well, when Trezix came out, if it's the drug that I think that it is, this is what was introduced to me after my 2015 surgery.

Matt (01:35:33):
Does it work?

Andy (01:35:34):
Yeah. I mean, I liked Trezix. It took away the pain, and it also gave me energy. So my thing is with autoimmune diseases, and we haven't even got into that, but with autoimmune diseases, my level of energy, I function at three times below what you wake up as. So when I drink this, I actually become a little bit less than normal energy or normal.

Matt (01:36:05):
Okay.

Andy (01:36:05):
Does that make sense?

Matt (01:36:06):
No, it makes sense. It's hard for me to comprehend that. I see you walking around and talking to people and all that stuff, but it's like, is it a struggle then? Is it hard to function that way? Or is it, yeah. Okay. Well, how about this?

Andy (01:36:21):
If I give power to it, if I wake up and I am like, I'm in so much pain today. I can't do this today. And I'm giving power to the negative thoughts and the devil. And then it starts what I call the medical spiral where I'm like, well, maybe I should go to the chiropractor. Maybe I should go back to the doctor. Maybe if I drink X amount of caffeine, then I can do this and that. And it's like when I start my day like that, and I do, it's not going to be a good day. It's not going to be a good day.

Matt (01:37:01):
Okay. Okay. Let's do this.

Andy (01:37:03):
I'll also say last Friday I got chemo. I got Toradol and I got a steroid shot. And that is my non-narcotic combination for no pain. So today I feel like a million dollars.

Matt (01:37:25):
Chemo. For what?

Andy (01:37:26):
Autoimmune.

Matt (01:37:27):
Oh,

Andy (01:37:28):
I have progressive rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia and Crohn's.

Matt (01:37:32):
So your bones are deteriorating?

Andy (01:37:34):
No. So autoimmune is where your body is attacking itself.

Matt (01:37:38):
Right. But what about the other two?

Andy (01:37:41):
Fibro?

Matt (01:37:42):
Yeah,

Andy (01:37:43):
Fibro is where you are sensitive to touch.

Matt (01:37:48):
And then the other one is

Andy (01:37:51):
Crohn's is stomach.

Matt (01:37:52):
Oh, yeah, yeah,

Andy (01:37:53):
Yeah. That's in the gut and the lining.

Matt (01:37:57):
Okay, so all of that together, is that painful?

Andy (01:38:01):
Yes.

Matt (01:38:02):
Okay.

Andy (01:38:03):
My stomach is and will always be painful. And with autoimmune, there are times where

Matt (01:38:17):
Autoimmune,

Andy (01:38:18):
It's very painful. But again, it's just an adjustment. It goes back to my purpose. What is God's purpose for me? If I'm here, if I'm still here for a reason, there's got to be a reason for my words hold weight. And so when I'm working with clients, it's not just about, oh, I drank too much, passed out, went to jail, and that's it. It's like, no, I've walked through the death of my best friend. I live in chronic pain and all of the things that we've talked about today that I've gone through. Why? Because somebody else has gone through that too.

Matt (01:39:13):
Yeah.

Andy (01:39:16):
There's no other explanation for that because it's a part of my story, and it's a triumph that I have. I mean, up until I got pregnant, I was on 2100 milligrams of Gabapentin.

Matt (01:39:31):
A day.

Andy (01:39:36):
A day, insane amount. And so when you tell me I don't go to the doctor, I don't blame you, because here I am, this medical experiment for so many years. And when I went to treatment, when I went to detox, I went in there on zero medications and I left on nine. I'm on five psych meds, Gabapentin, I'm on a seizure medication. Zyprexa.

Matt (01:40:13):
Zyprexa, wow.

Andy (01:40:14):
Which is an antipsychotic. And I was on one more. They had me on two sleep medications. I think I left on so many milligrams of Trazodone. They entered Ambien in there, insane amount.

Matt (01:40:30):
And this was from alcohol detox?

Andy (01:40:32):
Alcohol detox.

Matt (01:40:33):
So you went to a detox center or you went to a treatment center and

Andy (01:40:36):
Psych hospital? I was in hospitals and psych hospitals. I was never in a treatment center. And of all those times, I was never directed to a treatment center either.

Matt (01:40:49):
So this was in

Andy (01:40:50):
The park was around back then. Memorial Herman. The park was around 12 years ago.

Matt (01:40:55):
Yeah. Okay. 12 years ago. So 12 years ago. The treatment industry was different though.

Andy (01:41:00):
Oh, absolutely. Very different. It was quiet.

Matt (01:41:03):
And a lot of it was cash pay parity didn't come around until later. And it was very hard to access care, like addiction, medicine care. I don't even think there were addiction medicine doctors around back then.

Andy (01:41:20):
Probably.

Matt (01:41:20):
That became a thing. But yeah, the landscape of treatment was way different.

Andy (01:41:26):
I mean, I would go and have a seizure because they weren't medicating

Matt (01:41:32):
At the hospital.

Andy (01:41:34):
Hospital. They would bag me, banana bag me, here's Librium, and see you later.

Matt (01:41:45):
That is really crazy.

Andy (01:41:46):
To go home only to drink on Librium and start the process all over again because I had no defense against the first drink.

Matt (01:41:58):
And Librium and alcohol are super dangerous together.

Andy (01:42:01):
Oh my God.

Matt (01:42:02):
Yeah.

Andy (01:42:02):
I tell people Librium is like eight drinks in one. Yeah. And that's coming from somebody who had never touched pills. I never had an experience with Xanax in the past. I was around people that did it, but I never experienced Xanax for myself. So when Librium was introduced into my system, I had no idea what it was. It was me going off the blind, faith in drunk. I'm drunk as shit. Right?

Matt (01:42:31):
Yeah.

Andy (01:42:31):
Off the blind faith that a doctor is handing me something that, and it's like, why are we sending these people home from ERs with Librium when they have no defense against the next drink? And they're wondering why they're blacking out after one drink because they have Librium in their system. And I think at that point, an anabuse was introduced, and what I would do is when I wasn't going to drink and I had control of that, I would take it. And then when I was planning a drunk, then I

Matt (01:43:04):
You cheek it or just not take it?

Andy (01:43:06):
Just not take it. No, nobody was holding me accountable. I didn't have anybody holding me accountable.

Matt (01:43:10):
And anabuse, it only takes 48 hours right before you can drink again without getting violently sick.

Andy (01:43:16):
I think I was doing 72 just to make sure.

Matt (01:43:19):
Yeah, I know a guy, he just told me this the other day. He said, when I drink, I drink so much that I can drink through the sickness. I'll just drink past the sickness.

Andy (01:43:31):
With the anabuse. I've heard that.

Matt (01:43:32):
That is crazy.

Andy (01:43:33):
Yep.

Matt (01:43:34):
That is crazy.

Andy (01:43:35):
I mean, I don't doubt that I would've got there had I continued on, but I didn't get there.

Matt (01:43:43):
Okay. Let's talk about the, so a lot of surgeries, right? And it's crazy too, because hearing your story, everything compounds, right? One thing kind of leads to another, and then it's still though, the only thread that's missing is maybe you're an alcoholic.

Andy (01:44:04):
Maybe.

Matt (01:44:05):
Right? Nobody ever said that. You never thought it maybe, were you subconsciously aware that there was a problem?

Andy (01:44:15):
I was at 19, so I remember being in my college dorm, and I had a friend, I'm not even going to say friend, the president of my class, class of 2005. And we were talking on Facebook, and he told me about his heroin addiction. And I remember thinking he was so successful in high school, and here I am comparing again. And it was such a secret. And he said that basically a drug deal went bad. He was the only person that was left to live. And it changed his perspective, and he got clean. And I remember thinking that night, I think I have a problem with alcohol, and I can't even tell you if this is before or after I jumped off and off the balcony. I remember sitting there and I remember exactly how I felt because it goes back to that community thing where I was like, oh, I'm the only one feeling like this. I'm the only one drinking this. I'm the only one. It's just so self-involved, right? And when he said that, it took away the power out of it. And that was when I was like, okay, I definitely have a problem, but the problem is location. So if I move away from San Antonio. So there was a problem, but it was always met with a delusional solution.

Matt (01:46:07):
For sure. Yeah. It's logical to a point where it's like you can put things together and you can make the causation fallacy where you're like, oh, I know what caused this. I moved to San Antonio and that's what caused this. Or I know what caused this. My friend died and then I went out of control. So I need to get over that. And it's like my mentor constantly tells people, it is nearly impossible to get well in the place that got you sick, but you will still end up wherever you go. So if the problem isn't the people, places and things, and if it's all, if this is the problem, if you don't fix this, you're fucked.

Andy (01:46:59):
I always looked at the externals at that point because I had moved away from home. I did get sexually abused that year by a boyfriend while I was sleeping twice. And he later admitted it, and it was the ultimate betrayal. And we also had moved to the same city, not the same city. He was in San Marco and I was in San Antonio, and we broke up, and it was a ultimate ghost situation where he moved home, and I didn't know that he had moved back home and we never talked again. He never answered my calls, my texts nothing. And we had been together at that point on and off for three years. And so that was all I knew. And so I'm basically moving to a town my whole life just got uprooted. I've had this very structured life up until this point, and I follow this guy, and then he sexually abuses me and all these things. And now I'm in a city where I don't know anybody except for my aunt. I am living with my aunt at the time. But at that point, I was like, I'm not going to involve her in any of this. And I became a vagabond. And so I started living on people's couches and placing myself in situations that I shouldn't have been placing myself in under the influence of alcohol.

Matt (01:48:33):
How long have you been sober?

Andy (01:48:34):
Almost 11 years.

Matt (01:48:35):
Okay. 11 years is a fucking long time.

Andy (01:48:38):
Amen.

Matt (01:48:38):
Right? But you've got a solid foundation of recovery under you. I would venture to say that you do.

Andy (01:48:46):
I do.

Matt (01:48:48):
There's a lot of people who don't, and the medical industry specifically blows my mind all the time. They've finally accepted it. I think addiction, maybe not addiction specifically, but there's DSM

Andy (01:49:02):
Five Alcohol Use Disorder. It's a disorder,

Matt (01:49:04):
Right? So they're actually diagnosing people with this stuff now, but they're still giving them medications that is fully going to set off this phenomenon. It's like, how do you guys not understand this stuff yet? Dr. Shah, I'm going to talk about Dr. Shah a lot. I always do, because with his theory and his method of predicting relapses, first of all, nobody's ever said that I can predict a relapse. So when people hear that, it's like you're crazy. But when you go over the actual information, it's like, okay, I fully believe this.

Andy (01:49:45):
It's so amazing. He has a 12 step backup, and he has data to back it up, which is super powerful. So the man is, we don't want to get his head big, but he really is medical genius.

Matt (01:50:01):
I think he could do with a little bit of ego inflation. I feel like he's too humble sometimes, but

Andy (01:50:07):
That's okay.

Matt (01:50:08):
It is okay, but not when you're trying to bring a solution to the world that needs you to be aggressive. Right.

Andy (01:50:15):
I agree. He is one of a kind.

Matt (01:50:20):
Very much one of a, I mean, the only addiction medicine specialist in the country that has a neurological background and who is in recovery. You meet a lot of addiction medicine specialists who are not in recovery. What's cool is that he's got his foot in the dorm with the medical industry. He's a doctor, but doctors are very egotistical. So it's like, you're going to try to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. It's like, no, he's not trying to say that. He's trying to say that there's another component. Right. But yeah, medical industry blows my mind constantly. Have you seen pain Dope Sick?

Andy (01:51:00):
Yes, I have.

Matt (01:51:01):
Dude, such an amazing show. Matthew Broderick. Do you know he's an accomplished Broadway actor?

Andy (01:51:11):
No. Wasn't he in Back to the Future?

Matt (01:51:14):
Yeah.

Andy (01:51:15):
Okay.

Matt (01:51:15):
No, no, no. Oh, FerrisBueller.

Andy (01:51:19):
Okay. Maybe that's what I'm thinking. Ferris Bueller.

Matt (01:51:22):
Ferris Bueller. Yeah. It isn't Back to the Future.

Andy (01:51:25):
Okay. It's Ferris Bueller. Yeah, you're completely right. I don't know why I was thinking back to the future, but it's definitely Ferris Bueller.

Matt (01:51:32):
Ferris Bueller is such a good show.

Andy (01:51:34):
We watched that in high school Economics.

Matt (01:51:37):
Ferris

Andy (01:51:38):
Supply and Demand was the

Matt (01:51:40):
Really?

Andy (01:51:40):
Yeah. Was the lesson. And there goes Ferris Bueller.

Matt (01:51:44):
Sounds like a good excuse to watch Ferris Bueller. That's such a good show.

Andy (01:51:48):
I would never watch, I'm not a movie watcher.

Matt (01:51:50):
Really? What about the Breakfast Club? Did you ever watch that one?

Andy (01:51:53):
No.

Matt (01:51:53):
You've never even seen it?

Andy (01:51:55):
No.

Matt (01:51:57):
Did you go to tap?

Andy (01:51:59):
Yes.

Matt (01:51:59):
Did you see the guy that is selling, he sells a treatment curriculum that's based around movies.

Andy (01:52:07):
Okay. When you walked in, was it to the left?

Matt (01:52:10):
So when you walked in, so there's the main hall. There was two doors, like two doors. If you walk into the second door and walk straight ahead, he was right there,

Andy (01:52:22):
But not on the back wall?

Matt (01:52:23):
No.

Andy (01:52:23):
No, I didn't see him.

Matt (01:52:26):
I don't even remember where I was going with this. Where were we talking about? Oh, core beliefs. This is where I learned about primitive beliefs.

Andy (01:52:34):
Core beliefs. Beliefs and memories.

Matt (01:52:35):
Yeah.

Andy (01:52:35):
That's how we got into

Matt (01:52:36):
That. So primitive beliefs, do you know what those are?

Andy (01:52:38):
No.

Matt (01:52:39):
So a primitive belief is when you're three years old, you know that your name is Matthew or Andy, right? To the point where you will correct an authority figure. If somebody called you Mandy, right? When you were three years old, you would've told them, no, I'm Andy. Right. That's a primitive belief. Well, addiction.

Andy (01:52:57):
That's why I go by Andy, because my name is Andrea.

Matt (01:53:00):
Really?

Andy (01:53:01):
And no one can say, Andrea.

Matt (01:53:03):
Why?

Andy (01:53:03):
They say Andrea or Sandra, or

Matt (01:53:08):
If it's just left up to them to pronounce it, they pronounce it wrong.

Andy (01:53:11):
Correct.

Matt (01:53:11):
Okay.

Andy (01:53:13):
So then I became Andy.

Matt (01:53:15):
Okay,

Andy (01:53:16):
Because I don't want to have to explain.

Matt (01:53:18):
So it isn't actually ANDY.

Andy (01:53:20):
It's not.

Matt (01:53:21):
Okay.

Andy (01:53:21):
It's a nickname.

Matt (01:53:25):
So I read this book, and then I started to realize that addicts have primitive belief problems that we have become so delusional in whatever it is, where it's like most people go to family members or loved ones for comfort. We go to substances and we start associating a lot of crazy shit with stuff that shouldn't be associated with each other. And so this is where I was like, I need to redefine words for myself. I needed to get rid of a couple words altogether, but completely redefine certain things. My association is just completely fucked up. So yeah. That's interesting.

Andy (01:54:06):
Yeah. That was for me, very transformative.

Matt (01:54:11):
What was?

Andy (01:54:13):
The convention that they,

Matt (01:54:15):
Oh, they actually put on their own convention?

Andy (01:54:18):
Yeah. So it's actually an eight week course. I didn't do eight week course, but they compacted it,

Matt (01:54:25):
Condensed it.

Andy (01:54:25):
They condensed it into two days. Excuse me. And I participated in the San Antonio one. They've done it in Dallas. They'll be in Austin, and then they're coming to Houston.

Matt (01:54:38):
When is Houston?

Andy (01:54:40):
I want to say it's in February, but that's a Nikki and Curtis question. But yeah, super transformative for me. I have felt an emotional block for a long time

Matt (01:54:56):
Surrounding what?

Andy (01:54:57):
Everything. I can't get to the point where I can cry or connect with anything. That's sad.

Matt (01:55:04):
You have kids, right?

Andy (01:55:05):
I do.

Matt (01:55:06):
Yeah. Okay.

Andy (01:55:07):
Cry or connect with anything that's sad. I was privy to that when my best friend was killed, and everybody around me was like, why aren't you crying? Why aren't you crying? Why aren't, aren't you grieving? What's happening? And I just never connected. And this, I've cried since then. I think a lot of that has

Matt (01:55:39):
Since the presentation?

Andy (01:55:41):
Yes.

Matt (01:55:41):
Okay.

Andy (01:55:43):
A lot.

Matt (01:55:44):
Like a lot. A lot.

Andy (01:55:46):
Yeah.

Matt (01:55:46):
Okay.

Andy (01:55:49):
My sister owed me an amends after that. I'm sorry. I was allowed to owe my sister an amends after that. I cried through that entire thing. That was a huge wound that I've been hard about for a long time. And all this political and all this, everything that's happening in the world right now, I've been crying a lot to that. My son went to kindergarten this year. That's been a struggle. I've been crying a lot to that.

Matt (01:56:23):
Really? So it was like the flood gates open?

Andy (01:56:25):
Yes.

Matt (01:56:26):
Okay.

Andy (01:56:27):
Because at one point, Matthew, I was like, I don't cry. I want to cry. I see people cry and they get it out, and it just seems

Matt (01:56:41):
Very refreshing.

Andy (01:56:44):
Refreshing.

Matt (01:56:45):
Like restorative.

Andy (01:56:45):
Freeing.

Matt (01:56:45):
Healing.

Andy (01:56:46):
Healing. And I couldn't get there.

Matt (01:56:51):
I read this thing one time, where was it? And what was it exactly? Something about, oh man, I'm going to fuck this up. But it's like your body cries. Oh, okay. This is what it was. The actual act of crying has one of the best, your body has developed evolutionarily to release pain and stress that way. And so when people cry, it literally is the best way to release all the negativity and it goes way deeper than that. And it was really cool, and I just don't remember it.

Andy (01:57:30):
I thought for many years, going back to my journey, they had me on 120 milligrams of Cymbalta. Anxiety, depression, and pain were the reasons for that. I was on busbar, I was on gabapentin, so I'm on all these drugs, and so I am the steps. I do that. I work the steps a couple times in early sobriety, I would work 'em every single year. I wanted to figure out how to work the steps with different people. And I kept myself busy all of the time, but I don't remember crying in that process. I don't remember going, a fourth and fifth step got me so free that here I am. I don't remember thinking that. I don't remember owing amends to people and ever crying. I just don't. And then I look back on my drinking, and I remember I had to get drunk to cry. And so I'm on all this medication and I'm like, it's the medication.

Matt (01:58:45):
I was about to ask you.

Andy (01:58:46):
I'm sober now. I'm sober now. And once I get all this shit out of my system, I bet you I'll cry. I still didn't cry.

Matt (01:58:57):
Let me ask you something. Okay. So it isn't a medication thing. You're saying that you're crying now, but I went through my entire life wondering why I never felt depression the way that other people feel it, or anxiety, the way that anybody else describes feeling it.

Andy (01:59:17):
I'm jealous.

Matt (01:59:18):
Well, this is what I found out about a year and a half ago, I got diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, and then I started reading about it, and I was like, oh, okay. Answered all of my questions around why am I emotionally different? And I mean, my life has gotten, I don't even 20 fold times easier to live because I know what's going on with me now.

Andy (01:59:47):
How did that come about?

Matt (01:59:50):
I got serious. So I had never admitted that I was sexually abused until about 18 months ago. And then a bunch of shit,

Andy (01:59:58):
Congratulations.

Matt (01:59:58):
Thank you. A bunch of shit hit the fan with the person that did it. It came out that he sexually abused a bunch of people, and I got confronted about it. I was left with this person as a child constantly, and my family was like, they were able to pinpoint it and be like, this has to be what happened. So they confronted me about it, and I said, yeah, yeah, that's what happened. And then I was like, well, fuck, now that I've admitted it, I have to work on this. I already know. So I went to a therapist and I was going twice a week for months, and then it went down to once a week, and then it went to once every two weeks. And now we're at once a month. And it's like I slowly just, not even slowly, 18 months is a pretty quick time. But anyway, I worked with this person, I worked with her, with her and someone else and got the diagnosis. And I just started being honest about everything and asking, well, what about this? What about this? What about this? And they've answered, it has gotten, I can't even describe how much easier it is to you to be me just knowing like, okay, now I understand me.

Andy (02:01:16):
And I asked that question because I've always wondered why my disconnect with the whole crying thing. But the other thing is I don't think I've ever truly loved someone.

Matt (02:01:29):
Yeah, that's an interesting one.

Andy (02:01:30):
And when I said, congratulations about doing, I didn't do EMDR therapy around sexual assault until last year, 10 years of sobriety.

Matt (02:01:45):
Which okay, Dr. Shah will tell people, that's probably the smarter thing to do.

Andy (02:01:52):
I would've never done some of the hard story. I don't think I could have got there emotionally and psychologically with story of self and early sobriety. But people definitely can. But for me, I started drinking when I was 13 years old. So for the first five years, I am still a teenager.

Matt (02:02:15):
Yeah.

Andy (02:02:15):
I am intellectually a teenager. Do I have a degree? I do. Am I very well spoken.

Matt (02:02:22):
And emotionally?

Andy (02:02:24):
Yeah. Am I very well spoken? I am. I smart. I am on these things. But I also picked up a drink when I was 13 years old and was a morning to night drinker for 10 years.

Matt (02:02:37):
That is crazy.

Andy (02:02:38):
Which means I was blacked out for five of those.

Matt (02:02:41):
That is so crazy.

Andy (02:02:44):
One time, my neighbor, you said, how did you fund that? Right. One time my neighbor said, do you know that you lost internet at your house yesterday and came over here to pay bills? I was paying bills blacked out.

Matt (02:02:56):
Wow.

Andy (02:02:58):
Functioning.

Matt (02:02:59):
Yeah. Man, I forgot what I was going to say.

Andy (02:03:06):
The whole, I don't know if I've ever been in love.

Matt (02:03:12):
Yeah.

Andy (02:03:12):
I think part of me loves people.

Matt (02:03:18):
Oh, yeah.

Andy (02:03:20):
I think that I've learned to be a good friend, but as far as am very closed off, and the delusion is that I don't appear that way because I'm very vulnerable and in a sense of I'm sharing. Right. Okay. I've been very vulnerable today

Matt (02:03:41):
For sure.

Andy (02:03:42):
And I get very vulnerable with clients, and I get very vulnerable with friends and whoever.

Matt (02:03:47):
Yeah.

Andy (02:03:48):
I'm an open book.

Matt (02:03:49):
How easy is that when there's no emotional connection to it?

Andy (02:03:52):
Amazing. It's easy.

Matt (02:03:53):
Right. That's what I've learned from myself too, is that like, oh, and my therapist will tell me, your sexual trauma has nothing to do with what your decisions are because you are a fuck up and you want to do it. Yeah, I know. I know. But try explaining that to normal people that I have sexual trauma, but it didn't affect me. They're going to be like, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, well, I might not, but my therapist does. But what I was going to say is, how crazy is that to meet yourself for the first time when you're an adult? I exhibited act behavior as a child. I picked up my first drug at 13 on my 13th birthday, and then drugs were a major part of my life by 16. And then my entire adult life until I'm 30 was a hundred percent a single run. I had gotten into recovery at least, was selling people because of consequences. And I had gone into the rooms multiple times because of consequences. But it was never like I was in sobriety. It was like, I am just trying to get people off my back right now.

Andy (02:05:08):
For sure.

Matt (02:05:08):
A hundred percent. And so the first time that I ever truly got to meet myself, I was 32. And that was only a couple years ago. That was four years ago. And since then though, it's like people ask all the time, and I'm sure you get this too, and it's like, you regret, do you regret all that? And it's like,

(02:05:31):
Nope.

(02:05:32):
There are times in my life where I had regret, but I was knee deep in the shit. And so of course I regretted certain things, but now I don't regret any of it because every single one of those painful lessons contributed to who I am. And I wouldn't trade any of that today for anything else. The direction that my life is going is amazing.

Andy (02:05:56):
Mind blowing. Yeah,

Matt (02:05:57):
It is. It's mind blowing. It's crazy.

Andy (02:06:01):
Yeah. No, I think the same thing in early sobriety. I would think those things, if I just hadn't done this, if I just hadn't jumped off that balcony, if I just hadn't have focused so much on my body image, I wouldn't have starved myself and possibly got this autoimmune disease.

Matt (02:06:27):
Oh, did that all lead to that?

Andy (02:06:32):
I think it was two things. So I was on a lot of antibiotics, so I'm getting weird for, for bladder infection. They kept thinking it was a bladder infection. And then even further, with interstitial cystitis, right before your period, you get a bladder infection.

Matt (02:06:57):
Really?

Andy (02:06:57):
And it's a weird thing. And so I'm on all these antibiotics, and to be honest, I'm not a pill person. And so I'm taking the antibiotics and once I get relief, I'm done with the antibiotics. I'm not taking them correctly. So that's one theory. My other theory is that I got the HPV vaccination back.

Matt (02:07:24):
What is that? When you were a teenager is when they tell you to get it right?

Andy (02:07:27):
Well, I was 22. I don't know. I went to the gynecologist. I was having a normal pap smear done. I felt slut shamed. They basically said, because at the time I was like, I have one partner. And they were like, it doesn't matter what happens if that partner goes with another, goes with somebody else, and they get HPV and then you get cervical cancer. I didn't know shit about vaccines. I now don't believe in vaccines.

Matt (02:08:02):
So you're a denier. Did you get the jab?

Andy (02:08:06):
I didn't never.

Matt (02:08:08):
Oh man.

Andy (02:08:09):
I'm an educator.

Matt (02:08:11):
I was forced to get that. I was heading to prison, and they were like, everybody's getting it, whether you like it or not, if you don't get it, we're going to isolate you for your, I was facing 33 years in prison at the time. So I was like, fuck it. I'm probably going to die in prison anyway, so might as well get it.

Andy (02:08:29):
You're like, if this takes me out quicker. So I did. That was my introduction to bullshit vaccines. And later it came out that it causes autoimmune disorders, it causes seizures, it causes all these women have come forward. There's so many, so much research on it now. And I just did it because

Matt (02:08:57):
You felt like you had to, a doctor told you to.

Andy (02:08:59):
I trusted a doctor, and I've trusted many doctors. I didn't tell you, but so I get that surgery in 2015, the fusion, and right around 2018, no, 2019, I get really sick. They diagnosed me with e coli. And so I'm in the hospital,

Matt (02:09:28):
Which can kill you. Right?

Andy (02:09:29):
It can. And then supposedly it was like a lettuce outbreak.

Matt (02:09:35):
In when?

Andy (02:09:36):
2019.

Matt (02:09:38):
Oh, okay. I don't know about that one.

Andy (02:09:40):
So I'm in the emergency room and they're doing a CT of my stomach, and he comes back and he says, the e coli is really, it's not as bad as we thought it was, but you need to call your surgeon because something is very wrong with your fusion. So I turn around and I call the doctor who did my fusion, and I go in and we do MRI. And he comes to the room, and this is over time. He comes to the room and he says, yeah, there's something really wrong with your fusion and I need to fix it as soon as possible.

Matt (02:10:22):
What is wrong?

Andy (02:10:24):
I don't know what he said, to be honest. I think the cage has moved. So they went in, they took bone marrow from me to regenerate into my disc that failed. And so they put pins and screws in a cage. That's what he called it. He called it a cage.

Matt (02:10:45):
Yeah. It structures and holds in place.

Andy (02:10:49):
And so I say, okay, well, I go in to do my pre-op for this surgery and I'm pregnant.

Matt (02:11:01):
Damn. So they couldn't do the surgery.

Andy (02:11:03):
I never got the surgery.

Matt (02:11:04):
To this day.

Andy (02:11:06):
To this day. Yeah.

Matt (02:11:08):
Why?

Andy (02:11:09):
Because

Matt (02:11:10):
Doctors?

Andy (02:11:11):
Yeah. At that point I'm like, I had switched insurances. So I was married to my ex-husband. This is not the father of my son. I was married and he worked for bp. Well, he worked for Nsco, which was a subsidy of bp, big oil rigs, and our insurance was badass, and it was really cheap back then. I did all the things. I did cryo, I did physical therapy. I did a lot. While under that insurance,

Matt (02:11:42):
Did you use stem cells?

Andy (02:11:43):
I did. Didn't

Matt (02:11:47):
Really?

Andy (02:11:48):
Didn't do anything.

Matt (02:11:50):
That's so crazy because you hear about how successful stem cells is, especially for bone generation and stuff like that.

Andy (02:11:55):
But I was also on so much medication then that I don't think that I had

Matt (02:12:00):
Are you on medication now?

Andy (02:12:02):
None.

Matt (02:12:03):
Yeah. And how do you feel?

Andy (02:12:05):
Amazing.

Matt (02:12:05):
Right? Isn't that so crazy?

Andy (02:12:07):
Yes. It was making me sicker.

Matt (02:12:08):
So crazy.

Andy (02:12:08):
And it was cutting off my connection to God. So I always say I have six years of emotional sobriety. I say I've got about six years. I haven't touched a drink in almost 11 years, but I don't think I came out of that fog until 2018.

Matt (02:12:29):
Yeah. I mean, I just made a post about this last night where it's like getting sober is half of one battle in a long series of battles that makes up the war. And when ultimately it's one of the easiest battles to fight. Getting clean ultimately in hindsight is one of the easiest parts of recovery. The rest of it is hard.

(02:12:54):
The rest of it is not easy. And if you do not stick to the plan, or if you do not stay mission focused, you will fail. It is so hard to do. And I tell people constantly because a sober coach and I coach all of my clients, and one of the things that I tell people constantly is, if you can put down the needle or put down the bottle and really put it down, there's almost nothing that you can't do. It is so hard. It is not easy. So whatever it is that you think you wanted to do that you thought was out of reach or whatever, it probably was while you were drinking. It probably was. But now, if you can do that successfully, you can do anything. Anybody who can put that stuff down can do anything.

Andy (02:13:39):
I agree. And to be honest, when Michelle was killed, in my mind, when you get sober, to me, that wasn't that hard. It was so simple. It was like, this happened. She's in heaven. I'm sad, but it's never ever worth a drink.

Matt (02:14:02):
Right? Yeah. But okay. Getting to that point though, where you start making the right associations, you put enough time between you and your last drink, and you start making the right associations, you start to disconnect from the bad associations that used to make, because pain for a lot of people is something they're trying to avoid at all costs, right? Emotionally,

Andy (02:14:28):
Physical or emotional?

Matt (02:14:29):
Both. I mean, realistically, people are running from it and addicts specifically, addicts and alcoholics are running from pain, and that solution is so immediate, you hear it, or it's like the second, you don't even have to have the drugs or the alcohol in you yet. But once the decision's made, everything subsides, and it's like, okay, the

Andy (02:14:54):
The plan creates ease and comfort. Yeah. It's coming. Yeah.

Matt (02:14:59):
Yeah. It's an amazing, it's an amazing that we've made it to where we're at it. It's a whole other thing to talk about helping other people. If we had to base what we were doing on success, it'd be like, fuck, I don't know why I'm doing this. Right. So hard to have success when you're helping other people do this. I'll give you an example, a treatment center for sale. They go off of success, success rates and stuff like that, and they say that if you have a 5% success rate, you get a five x valuation on your business, if you have a,

Andy (02:15:40):
Or fighting the disease of addiction and then trying to tie success into it. When we've looked at the statistics and we fucking know it's deadly.

Matt (02:15:49):
Well, and here's the crazy part. You get a 10 x valuation of your business if you have a 13% success rate, that's 13 out of a hundred people staying clean for a year. If you can get to 13 people out of a hundred saying clean for a year in any other industry, this is a failing business. They're looking for 65, 70, 75, 85% success rates. To get a 10 x valuation, you only need 13% in this industry to be successful. That's how hard this is. We're talking about something that is, first of all, it's individual. The treatment should be individual. The way that you address every individual needs to be catered and cut, especially for this person. But society is painting with massively broad brushes and saying, well, if this worked for this person, then it should work for everybody. But that's not how this works.

Andy (02:16:42):
Absolutely not.

Matt (02:16:42):
So you've got painting with broad brushes, that's a problem. You have trying to societally fix an individual problem, doesn't make sense, will not work

Andy (02:16:50):
Ever.

Matt (02:16:51):
And then you've got family dynamics that are just, first of all, the family unit is just completely done. It's gone. Right? When you hear what the average

Andy (02:17:02):
Societal or addiction wise or in general?

Matt (02:17:07):
Both. Okay. Both. Both. Yeah.

Andy (02:17:08):
No, I agree.

Matt (02:17:08):
So it's like the average person is now being raised in a single family situation, a single parent situation, the average. And then when you look at family dynamics as a whole, I mean, we can even go to gender roles that is being flipped upside down actively as we speak. So you have all this confusion around what is actually healthy and what's not healthy. You have people hijacking words and tying entire belief systems to definitions

(02:17:39):
That are backwards, right? It's like, so now you try to heal an addicted person in a world where everything's just fucked up and it's like there is a greater chance of failure than anything else. It's so hard. And so people that are in this, I have mass. The reason why I even got into this is because of one person. This one person set me down this road because of how effective she was with me. And it was like this person had such a big effect on my journey in recovery. I was like, it is possible for the ripple effect. I talk about the ripple effect all the time.

Andy (02:18:22):
I always said I wanted to name my podcast the ripple effect until I looked on podcasting, and there's multiple ripple effects. So I got out of that, but that is what this is. I told you, I was talking to one of my alumni from back in 2020, and she told me that she's got cirrhosis and things like that. But after that, she followed up with, you were the person who made the biggest impact on us. You were so good with us. You genuinely care about individuals.

Matt (02:18:54):
Who do you work for right now?

Andy (02:18:55):
Right now, Great Oaks.

Matt (02:18:56):
Okay.

Andy (02:18:58):
And that to me in a time right now, if I'm being vulnerable in this moment, sitting in this chair where I'm struggling to know if I'm in the right place. With that being said, this person says this, and it reminds me of that. And so yes, I have been with, I've been to funerals. I've watched people die from this disease. I've had people tell me to my face, write bad reviews about me, say things like, you're going to kill people. We've had all of that, but what good have we done? We can't save them all, but I'm damn sure going to try and that's okay.

Matt (02:19:53):
Yeah. Yeah. My executive director had a conversation with me recently in the very recent past about phone calls. And he was like, yeah, you're going to have a weekend, It'll come faster than you realize it. You'll have a weekend where you're getting three phone calls from moms whose kids are dying and you can't help them. There's nothing you can do about it. You got to learn how to cope and deal with that shit and be okay with it the next day. And I was like, God damn. When you get into this, it's like there are things that people don't tell you, and when you experience it, it's like heart wrenching, but you got to keep moving. You got to keep going on.

Andy (02:20:38):
I was sitting at the table with the owners of Magnolia City Detox. I worked there for almost three years prior. And I'm sitting there and the morgue calls, and the owner puts the phone down and says, was this? And he said the individual's name. That kid sat in my chair, and we had the longest discussion about him going home. I looked into his eyes. He discharged on a Friday and was dead on a Sunday. And I'm sitting there at the table and he says, was this individual here? And it's the morgue. I fell out of myself. And some hit me like that, and some don't. I didn't cry. It was just a couple of years ago. But it hurts. Why do some make it? And some don't? I'll never know. But that doesn't mean that I don't plant the seed in every individual that I come in contact with, because my impact does matter. It goes back to perspective and my self-esteem and my purpose. What is my impact and what am I willing to do today to bring that forward? Right?

Matt (02:22:16):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not quite there yet where it's like, this is where I come from with it is I owe this debt, and I don't know if I'm going to have effects on people. I don't know if I do have an effect on people, but I just have to do this in order to be okay with myself. And it's like all the extra stuff where it's like if someone does learn something or if I do help somebody, it's like, I'm still not doing it for that. I'm still doing it because I was such a fucked up person before. And one other thing that Scott's told me is, do not tie yourself to your success. Do not tie yourself to your failures, because there is no guarantee that you'll have success. There is no guarantee that you'll have failures. It's just we don't know. This is addiction. It's so ambiguous. It's so unknowns.

Andy (02:23:08):
We're fighting evil.

Matt (02:23:10):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andy (02:23:12):
Have you ever looked at what the dopamine hit from meth does to

Matt (02:23:16):
Oh, yes. For sure. For sure. And I've all the brain scans, and I slammed meth for years. I slammed meth. I smoked meth, eaten it. Trust me. It's that drug specifically. Who was I talking to anyway? That is the drug that will steal your soul.

Andy (02:23:38):
Absolutely.

Matt (02:23:39):
That one specifically, it will steal your soul. And when you look at meth users, you can see it in them where it's like there is,

Andy (02:23:47):
There's nobody home.

Matt (02:23:48):
Nothing going on in there anymore.

Andy (02:23:49):
Nothing.

Matt (02:23:50):
It's really sad.

Andy (02:23:53):
Congratulations for crawling your way out of that. And I want to speak to every single time that I encounter you as an individual. I don't even see it as, oh, you did all this fucked up shit. I see that your words matter and that your purpose is in the right place.

Matt (02:24:14):
Thank you.

Andy (02:24:16):
And that is very impactful because some people, the truth is some people are in this for themselves. Some people are in this for money, and some people are in this space because they don't even know. And there's a difference between the three.

Matt (02:24:36):
For sure.

Andy (02:24:36):
And people can tell. And I can tell you're different.

Matt (02:24:40):
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And thank you for coming.

Andy (02:24:43):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Matt (02:24:48):
Thanks for listening to My Last Relapse. I'm Matt Handy, the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health, Houston, Texas, where our mission is to provide compassionate evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. Find out more at harmonygrovebh.com. Follow and subscribe to My Last Relapse on YouTube, apple Podcast, Spotify, and wherever you like to stream podcasts. Got a question for us? Leave a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength and help is always available. If you or anyone needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 888 - 691 - 8295.