How the Mind and Body Kept Playing Even When the Game Was Over

When I completed a ten week stay in rehab at age twenty-three, I believed the hardest part of my life was over. I had hope and excitement about living. I felt I had experienced a psychic shift. I was intentionally chemically sober for the first time since early adolescence. I had survived, I had stopped flirting with death and no longer felt the daily obsession and compulsion to drink and drug. I was in “recovery.”  

What I didn’t understand was that the term sobriety, or being in recovery, typically just defines a removal of the substance. It does not always address the underlying structure that makes the substance feel necessary. I left rehab with a willingness for sobriety but not with the understanding of what was driving my addictions. What followed was not chemical relapse, but something quieter and harder to see. My nervous system was still organized around danger, intensity and escape. I was chemically sober but I was still impulsively running from the unresolved issues that had led me to drink and drug in the first place.

The Life That Looked Fine

I was living a chemical-free adult life but this sober state was actually one of chaos. I was, to be blunt, a “dry drunk.” As one compulsion fell away, another took its place. Running at full speed felt normal. Slowing down felt like drowning.

Outwardly I was doing well, better than well. I went to meetings, returned to college and excelled, built a successful career in finance, married and became a father. On the surface my life looked storybook; on the inside, however, the same engine was running, just less visibly destructive.

I pushed limits constantly. I participated in extreme endurance sports, I earned and spent compulsively and created financial instability. I engaged in thrill-seeking behaviors that put me and those around me, including my family, at risk.

I realize now that my “sober” life was driven by nervous system dysregulation and distorted thinking. I did not understand that willpower and good intentions could not heal the many unhealthy childhood patterns that I had dragged into adulthood. What made it hard for me to grasp the destructiveness of my chaotic, intense behavior was that I did all of it well. I was an expert people-pleaser. I kept up appearances. I deceived others and myself about the true nature of my actions. I was successful, helpful and cheerful. I was the guy who had it together.

The Unraveling

Not much of course was really fine in my life. Fine was a fake and it was unraveling.

When my children were still in elementary school, I abruptly moved my family from Colorado to Montana. I framed the move as a necessity and an opportunity. That geographical fix failed to “fix” anything.

My marriage came under increasing strain. I lived in what many relationship frameworks describe as a kind of “silent divorce.” When my children were in high school, I moved “temporarily” with them but without my wife to Utah to combine their specialized sporting interests with their schooling. My relationship with my increasingly unstable mother was deteriorating. My brother’s alcohol and substance abuse, rooted in his terrible childhood trauma, escalated. I sensed a need to establish boundaries that I did not know how to set and I could no longer manage long-standing anger issues by “going to meetings” and doing therapy.

I made the decision to end my marriage. This action was not impulsive. I had been working up to it, participating in individual and couple’s therapy for a number of years. The decision, however, destabilized me. Within forty-eight hours I was involved for the first time in an extramarital sexual relationship.

For a number of reasons my involvement with this woman, whom I knew very little about, was insane. I was immediately certain that this was the love of my life. Nothing could have been further from the truth. My thinking was as delusional as it had been when I was abusing drugs and alcohol. I still confused sex with love and intimacy. I lived inside this new relationship with shame, confusion, idealization and fear. I was no longer the man with “years of recovery” and supposed insight. I was the kid who thought that being “special” meant having no boundaries.

The Pivot

Remarkably, four months later when the new relationship ended, the breakup did not completely destroy me; instead, it became the trigger that caused the beginning of the end of a life run by childhood survival tactics. I knew I needed to find a deeper understanding of myself and much more help and guidance. I felt I was struggling for my life. I renewed my commitment to therapy focused on depth psychology, attachment and family systems, sought out different and trauma-oriented 12-step work and immersed myself in self-study.

I had been working as a financial consultant in the addiction treatment industry. I believed I needed clinical credibility for projects I was working on, so I began studying for a master’s degree in counseling.

I soon realized counseling and interventions, not consulting, was where I wanted to focus my work. True to my wiring, however, and still clutching old patterns I approached my career pivot with intensity. The same drive that had shaped my past was now directed toward the study of trauma, recovery and treatment. I immersed myself fully and willingly but was still driven subconsciously by hypervigilance and unhealthy perfectionism.

I attended national conferences, studied emerging trauma models and sought out the leading emerging neuroscience voices in the mental health field. I was searching for something I could not yet fully name. I was moving beyond chemical sobriety into relational and process addiction recovery. What slowly began to form was a merger of my own recovery, professional experience, clinical understanding and a gradual shift from performance to healing and truth.

What I did not yet understand was that credentialing was not what I lacked. I needed a sense of worth. I needed to understand and release the self-doubt and shame that lingered in me as a survivor of unhealed childhood trauma.

Where the Recovery Work Deepened

My brother died as a result of decades of alcohol and psychotropic medication abuse. About a year and a half after his death, and newly engaged, I began a year-long clinical internship to complete my master’s degree at Gentle Path at The Meadows in Arizona. My connection to the Meadows had been forming for years and I had been influenced early in my recovery by the pioneering works of Claudia Black, John Bradshaw, Patrick Carnes and Pia Mellody.

My arrival at the Meadows was not as a man with answers, but as a man who was curious and ready to learn. My year at the Meadows, where my fiancé joined me, not only shaped my professional identity but changed the course of my life. I came to realize my childhood survival strategies were not who I was. Yes, they had protected me in childhood but they now needed to be recognized and integrated.

That year in Arizona not only marked the beginning of my clinical competence but also my own self-discovery. My own old patterns were named with precision: developmental immaturity, boundary collapse, emotional incest and shame. For the first time, however, the adaptations of my childhood were not framed as defects. They were understood as intelligent strategies formed in a childhood lacking safety. That year marked the beginning of truly meeting myself without distortion.

After my clinical internship I returned to Utah rather than staying at the Meadows as a member of staff. I began further post-degree in-depth training that provided more professional and personal insight. I participated more deeply than ever before in trauma-informed 12-step recovery work that extended beyond traditional substance-focused models. What I learned was something I had only sensed for years - that chemical and behavioral sobriety alone, while lifesaving - is not the end of the work. It is the beginning.

I formed and led small-group recovery circles in which I integrated trauma-informed work that emphasized relational healing and emotional sobriety. These were not therapy groups nor traditional “meetings,” but groups for people who already possessed a foundation in recovery and who wanted to understand the “why” of their unworkable behavior patterns.

I also started a weekly online private group for healthcare industry professionals to address their own issues.

Still Running

Part of the reason I returned to Utah was a selfish one. It was the perfect environment for me to continue my obsession with mountain bike racing. From the outside my cycling looked like discipline, vitality and excellence. In reality it was the same old survival patterning I had carried since adolescence. I still felt a need to chase the thrill of competition. I was still trying to prove my worth through performance. I was still in flight and running from connection with my grief and rage.

Shortly after returning to Utah, my fiancé and I married. My life with my wife Julie quickly organized itself around my pursuits, my training, my racing, my schedule, my identity. My old self-centered patterns did not just exist in isolation. They also lived inside my marriage. What I still called passion and commitment carried with it a level of selfishness and imbalance that neither of us could ignore. I was still the restless, irritable, inflexible and self-centered partner. The lifelong safety strategies formed in childhood still held on. Cycling, like my ski racing, was my place of mastery, identity and aliveness. My athletic endeavors allowed me to avoid and escape but at great physical, emotional, financial and relational cost.

I began to realize my obsessive behaviors had always caused partial absence from my life and the people in it. These behaviors affected how available I was, how present I could be and how little of myself I was actually bringing into the life Julie and I were trying to build. I saw my intensity was a way to regulate a nervous system that struggled with stillness, intimacy and sustained presence. In reality my high energy was a distraction - a way to avoid real connection, with my wife, my now adult children, my work, my higher power and myself. That realization marked another kind of sobriety and a giant push toward real embodied recovery.

I “retired” abruptly from competitive mountain biking. Letting go was not clean nor easy. To outside observers it may have looked like another knee-jerk reaction. It was in fact not a decision about bicycle racing. It was about a pivotal realization that I was still avoiding my life by filling it with intensity, fantasy, activity and numbing. My drug of choice for a long time had been competitive sport. Most people, including myself, admired my passionate participation. That is part of what made it so dangerous.

I finally began to really understand how my individual patterns operated and how they existed destructively inside my relationships. I realized that the family dynamics I grew up with did not disappear when I became an adult or got “sober.” They reorganized. As an adult my addictions and dysfunctional relational attachment issues were still rooted in my childhood experiences of unresolved shame, grief, avoidance, fear and anger and an ill-fated attempt to control the uncontrollable. My adult trauma-shaped relationships involved a pairing where I was the restless, inflexible, self-centered partner and my partners were the caretakers and rescuers. These dysfunctional roles were responses triggered by open wounds. The result was distance, loneliness and resentment. My father had lived these patterns and without realizing it I had been repeating them.

Recovery Embodied

My parents died. Their deaths helped me close an internal safety-seeking loop that had been left open since my childhood. Acknowledging and processing the truth of my childhood was difficult and messy but ultimately healing. I was finally able to see my parents and my relationship to them. My father was an emotionally absent alcoholic, charming but volatile. My mother was an unpredictable and unstable alcoholic and drug addict. I was the imperfect and dependent child, not enough and too much. My father looked through me. My mother looked to me - for comfort, for stability and for the emotional partnership that was lacking in her marriage.

After their deaths I attended a trauma-based workshop seeking more of my own healing. I was there not as a beginner, but as someone with decades of recovery and clinical experience. I knew the language. I knew the models. I could have easily stayed in the role I knew best, the one who supposedly understands; however, this time I did something different. I left that identity at the workshop door. I showed up not as a clinician, but as a participant. Something shifted inside me. I stopped organizing myself around what I already knew. I slowed down and listened with a quiet mind and open heart. I wasn’t working toward healing. I was experiencing it. That shift followed me home and shifted my relationships and the smallest and most ordinary moments of my daily life.

Healing and recovery that had once felt like something I had to work toward slowly began to feel like something I could live. A steadiness, a clarity and a kind of ease in my interactions emerged. I was less reactive, more present and distinctly different. I began to notice what I felt emotionally without immediately needing to change it, outrun it or explain it. Stillness no longer felt like danger. Pain and gratitude could coexist. I no longer felt like the boy nervously chasing the next shiny object, the adult seeking performative competence nor the clinician organizing himself around expertise.

I now have a different relationship with my body, my thoughts, my history, other people and myself. I am far less interested in becoming someone. I am interested in being who has been there all along. It is a discovery of feeling content and comfortable in my own skin.

The Why

Socrates stated that only the examined life is the life worth living. I agree and believe that achieving a healthy, worthwhile life often requires one to look back to childhood to examine the why. Questions need to be asked. What happened that caused me to develop childhood survival patterns that I still cling to but in fact harm me as an adult? How free and functional do I want to be? How hard do I really want to work to understand the why of the old programs and patterns that drive me?

I believe that recovery is a process of examination involving self-knowledge and realization of the “why.” I believe the answer to why lies in seeking emotional completion and the shifting of one’s perspective into personal agency and choice. As one discovers that old childhood programs are faulty and no longer useful or necessary for survival, the path to a fully experienced and well lived life widens. Then the reality of moving beyond old patterns and childhood trauma materializes.

We can interrupt childhood trauma patterns when we ask for help and become willing to view our childhood traumas through a blameless, full and honest accounting. Reconnection with our body and our emotions heals us and only then can we take stock of who we are and move forward with an adult mindset.

Imago relationship therapy creators, Hendricks and Hunt, state that if one drags old shame and fear-based patterns into new relationships, the new relationships will be the same as the old. We meet ourselves and our partners at the level of our unresolved wounds. Unless something interrupts our old child-consciousness patterns, relationships can stall into power-struggles and tend toward these outcomes: disconnection, silent coexistence, repeated conflict or eventual rupture.

Traumatic events in childhood create trauma inside a child. Physician and author Gabor Maté, a specialist in childhood trauma, is very clear on this: Disconnection and a myriad of difficulties in adult relationships as well as struggles with addiction are likely to be largely the result of childhood trauma carried into adulthood.

The Long Return

Many of us live much of our lives numb, unconscious and organized by the past until safety allows us to remember and heal from unresolved childhood traumas. Chemical sobriety saved my life at twenty-three. Reaching emotional sobriety revealed it. Embodied recovery is allowing me to live it. My recovery journey did not erase my past. It integrated it.

The life I now live did not result from a single breakthrough. When I look back with a clarity I did not have throughout much of my life, I understand that what shaped my adult self were the experiences I could not have understood as a child. Out of those childhood experiences came the patterns and programs that would define much of my adult life: addiction, intensity-seeking, fantasy, over-performance, a constant unconscious search for validation, and both a deeply seated loneliness and a fear of connection.

What I did not know at twenty-three nor after years of “sobriety” and recovery but what I have come to understand through study and experience is that the destructive behaviors themselves were never the real problem. They were my childhood attempts to solve problems that had begun long before I would be able to make any meaningful sense of them. My healing did not come from just eliminating them but from understanding and processing how they were trying to protect me.

What I have come to see clearly is that we are all truly shaped in childhood. Some of that shaping may be inherited and some of it comes through the environments we are born into. Much of it happens in the early years when the nervous system should be learning what it means to be safe, to be loved and to be ourselves. The emergence of what we call dysfunction in adulthood is not pathology but adaptation. Patterns that once protected us, and in many cases saved us in childhood, if left unexamined, limit us as adults in ways not easily recognized. What looks like failure is often the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do in the absence of safety.

I know that real change requires something deeper than willpower. Real change requires us to feel what we learned to avoid, to question what we came to believe and to loosen our grip on control just enough to allow something new to emerge. In my recovery, professional training and clinical work I have seen that when early childhood attachment is disrupted - when something less than nurturing shapes development - the nervous system organizes around survival. Healing is the gradual restoration of feeling safe and the re-emergence of a more integrated, connected sense of self.

Finding Safety

I am a firm believer in 12-step recovery. It can provide a stable grounding and a way of living that supports authenticity, humility, accountability and secure connection over a lifetime. I have come to realize, however, that for some the 12-steps may not be the whole work, or any part, of recovery. Both personally and professionally, I feel that healing unfolds through a combination of foundations and interventions.

The phrase “more will be revealed” is deeply aligned with how healing actually works. The principles within 12-step recovery, written long before modern neuroscience came to be understood, continue to be validated by what we now understand about trauma, attachment and the nervous system.

To heal layers of childhood trauma often requires skilled therapeutic support, relational repair and experiences that allow what was once overwhelming to finally be processed and integrated. This type of focused trauma healing provides a strong opportunity for a deeper breakthrough, integration and a foundation for fully living the examined life.

I believe that a therapist who has committed to ongoing self-examination and integration can become a powerful agent of healing for others. It means the healer has, and continues to, heal himself.

One Elm

A few years ago, Julie and I relocated to northern Michigan where I grew up. The move came about for several good reasons but I believe the most important one was that it led to the purchase of an old farmstead on a hill in Horton Bay and the evolution of a place we call One Elm. Establishing One Elm was about creating a place to heal for those living inside dysfunctional patterns and systems that seemingly help them but, in reality, do not. It has become a healing center for private trauma intensive work. It is a place that provides a setting to examine one’s life and step into a life that is truly worth living.

One Elm is surrounded by old trees and abundant wildlife. Its privacy and calm facilitate the focused work of individual recovery. It is a place where recovering oneself can happen undisturbed. I am grateful for the events in my life, some very painful, that led me to One Elm.  It is a place where I can now help those ready and willing to do the healing work of reconnection to themselves.

The work at One Elm is deeply meaningful to me in part because it involves the memory of my brother and my grief that I could not reach him with the answers I possess today.Intellectually I know his death was not my fault, but grief does not move by logic. In many ways the work done at One Elm is in his honor.

Before construction was fully complete and One Elm would be ready to officially open, I received a call from a colleague. He was working with an individual he believed would benefit from a One Elm trauma intensive. My response was that we were, unfortunately, not yet operational. Before ending the call, he mentioned the person’s name. The name was the same as my brother’s. I was stunned. We had already named the building where the Intensives would take place after him. I told my colleague I would call him back after speaking with Julie. She was hesitant at first. Then I shared the name and after a moment, she said, “Okay… he’ll have to come now.” He was the first to experience One Elm.