“WHAT IT WAS LIKE” (Josh’s Story) - Read more at our blog

            “The first time I took a drink was at a family function when I was nine years old.
            I never felt like I fit in with any certain group in grade school or high school, and it seemed like I was easily accepted by a lot of other kids not necessarily doing the right thing. Mostly I had acquaintances. I never made any real friends. I had a difficult time trusting people. I was afraid I was going to be let down.
At thirteen years old in Phoenix, I had gotten a horse, and I was very interested in riding. So, when I got to high school, instead of focusing on team sports, I got heavily into horses. I concentrated on the high school rodeo association, and found some friends that shared common interests.
            Looking back on it after doing inventory, what I took from that experience was that I did not want to be involved in team sports because I wanted all the responsibility on me. It was very comfortable not to have to count on anybody else. The responsibility for winning and losing was on my shoulders. So anyway, I got involved in this rodeo association – and cowboys love to drink and chase girls. Eventually, I got thrown out of two different high schools for a combination of dealings drugs and too many absences. All along, I had been using alcohol, cocaine, crystal meth, and pot.
            Once I got put into an alternative center for education, I lost my privilege to compete in the high school rodeo association. That is also when I ended up in my first outpatient treatment center. I was seventeen years old.
            When I turned eighteen, I graduated high school and moved to Kentucky to further my education in thoroughbred horse racing and reproduction. The problem was that from 1990 to 1999, I had repeated emergency room visits, ended up in multiple treatment centers and sober living houses, and had already been to jail four times – all behind drugs and alcohol. Finally in 1999, I was asked to leave four different racetracks where I had been training thoroughbred racehorses. That same year, another racetrack in the Southwest asked me to give a urinalysis.
            I was caught. My national license to train racehorses in North America was revoked. That was everything to me. I had studied for a year to get my license, and finally passed the test, and my identity was totally wrapped up in my job. It was devastating. I had to remove my horses from the grounds and give them to other trainers. From 1999 until 2005, I was institutionalized for two-thirds of the time – in treatment centers, sober living houses, psych wards, detox centers, and jails.
            I hit my bottom at a time when I owned a dog grooming business. I was employing twelve people including my best friend, and I hadn’t worked in two months. I wouldn’t answer the phone. My father called and left me a voicemail message saying that he was no longer going to be taking any of my phone calls and that no one in the family was interested in talking to me. He also said that as far as the whole family was concerned – my father, my mother, and my sister – they were not going to be there for me and I was no longer welcome at the house.
            At the end of the voicemail, my father said, “I want you to know that your mother and I are preparing for you to die.” At the time I was listening to that message, my best friend was changing the locks on my own business. I had been funding my habit by pulling cash out of the business, and now my best friend had stopped taking my calls and was changing the locks. They had all the paperwork ready and transferred the business out of my name. Now my business had gone down the tubes.
            I found myself faced with the idea of suicide. The thought came into my mind because I had already made so many different attempts at sobriety. I had been in and out of treatment and sober living since I was seventeen. And at that point in time, I was thirty-five years old.
My whole life, I had been striving for my parents to be proud of me, but I felt like I was one of those guys who were not going to make it, that I was “constitutionally incapable.” I thought I was going to be a story in the newspaper. I was content with just ending it. Then I met with my best friend who had gotten sober, and he told me about a place that a friend of ours had gone. “You know,” he said, “that I was the worst possible specimen of a junkie. And if it was possible for me to get sober, it’s possible for you. You have nothing left to lose, so why not give it one more shot?”
            When he spelled it out for me, I realized he was right. I could always take my life later if this last shot didn’t work, but why not try it one more time?
            On May 5, 2005, I went into a structured sober living environment for men. I am six feet tall and at that time, I weighed one hundred thirty pounds. I had a lot of problems with my health and my teeth. When I first went into the program, I couldn’t even sit down for the first thirty days unless I sat on something heavily padded, because my back and tailbone were so bruised from having seizures and falling down.
            The guys at that place taught me a lot about community and being of service, and how important those two things are in order to help somebody feel comfortable in a new environment. When I got there, I was too weak to stand for any length of time, and couldn’t even make my bed. So, this guy made my bed for me, unpacked my clothes, and made me a sandwich. After about three weeks in that place, I ended up having an anxiety attack on top of bronchial pneumonia, and the guys took me to the hospital and sat with me. I felt “a part of” from that moment.
            From that point on, I realized I was in the right place. I felt safe, and I was around other guys who had hit the kinds of bottoms I had hit. I saw them staying sober, being happy, and having fun. I asked God for the willingness just to do the work and stay sober. I didn’t need a fancy life, a new girlfriend.
            What happened was that I began to become much more interested in a new way of life because I finally understood to my innermost self that all my ways, all my different crazy, whacked-out rules of life, were just not working. When I looked in the mirror, I realized I did not like what I had become. My spirit was empty, I was a wreck physically, and I had gone until the wheels had fallen off. There was nothing left.
            When I had gone into the sober living, I called my Dad. I told him I was in a place. He said he would pay the first month’s rent, but from that point forward, I was going to have to be responsible for all my bills. Even after multiple phone calls like that through the years, he still found it in himself to give me one more shot.
            I stayed there until I completed their program. After six months I graduated, and lived there for another month and a half until I could transition out into the proper setting for me.
            What happened from there was that while I was still in the sober living house, I built a relationship with a lot of people in the fellowship. I was pushed by my sponsor and the house I was living in to get commitments and become more involved in hospitals and institutions work. I became involved in a workshop and, feeling a need for a meeting on the Westside on Tuesday nights, I started a new meeting.
            I did my fourth step and have completed all amends. My relationship with my family, my girlfriend, and my son is something I never would have expected. If I would have written down my dreams, I would have sold myself short – the way my son has come back into my life, the way I am trusted by his mother (my ex-wife), and all the love I have in my life.            
I stayed heavily connected with the sober living house after graduation. After going through the sober living house and sponsoring guys, what I enjoyed the most was watching other guys like myself and seeing their lives change. When the light would go on and they would become whole people, no other feeling compared to that. They became happier, their families came back to them, and their relationships came back to them. It was the most amazing thing to be able to witness something like that. Not even my biggest win in my training career could compare with the feeling I got being of service and helping somebody else get this thing.
            I had the first flash of the idea to open my own sober living house back in 1999, when I was sober for ten months. I was in a very, very structured extended care behavior modification therapy center. I remember sitting on the porch there, thinking, “Maybe I should get into the field of sober living where I could help other guys.” I knew I would feel much more complete helping others.
            The Big Book says it’s hard for us to transmit something we haven’t got, and now I have something to transmit. I have been through so much, and that is one of the biggest things I can offer – the ability to empathize with almost every situation a man getting sober is going to encounter.
            In a perfect world, I would want this house to turn into an environment where men can learn to have empathy, compassion, and understanding for their fellow alcoholics. That is what Back2Life is built upon, the basic principle of one alcoholic helping another. Most of us come into recovery very selfish. We are really big babies, and it is always somebody else’s fault.
By living in this type of environment, it teaches us to be of service. For example, if somebody’s inside chore is to clean up the kitchen and he doesn’t do it but he is enjoying a clean bathroom because the other guy did his chore and cleaned the bathroom, it’s not going to be well-received in the house. That’s a lesson in being of service.
            As we learn to be of service in the house, we can then do it in our communities and with our families. Once we have experienced the good feeling of knowing, “I actually helped someone else and made their day easier,” we become willing to take the same risk outside the house.
This house is also being built on communication, on learning how to communicate even if you are fearful that someone might not like you because of what you have to say. Learning to look someone in the eye, and have an open, honest man to man discussion with them, and allowing other people to get to know you breaks down the barriers a lot of us come in with – the fear of not being liked, that if I say this, people are going to be mad at me and I’m going to suffer some sort of repercussion for my opinion.
             Between being of service and learning to communicate in the house, it is like a big, thick chain where every link is as important as the other, and if one link is broken it compromises the rest of the chain.
This house is all about just learning how to live in this world. And if you have a guy who has a couple of chores in the house, and he needs to get to work, get to meetings, have some fun, and balance a wife or girlfriend and maybe even a child, trying to figure out how to live can be really overwhelming when you’ve got only thirty days of sobriety.
            Ideally, this environment will help produce a whole human being.”