Miracle Story #16 (Part 4 of 5)

“When I was on the third floor I remembered a conversation that my sponsor had with me one time. My family had tried to do an intervention with me and had brought him over. He was reluctant to come because he knows how I am when I drink. My family and him had woken me up one day, and we were all arguing.

They were telling me I needed treatment and I was like, “I’m not going to treatment.”

My sponsor pulled me outside and he was like, “Matt, your family has a right to feel the way they feel. They care about you.”

That kind of put it into perspective a little bit, but it wasn’t until I came out of that coma.

My mom…I saw the posts on Facebook and I saw the outpouring. What my mom had to have gone through, thinking that I might not come out of that coma…

It was the first time in my life that I realized what I was doing to my family.

You know what I mean?

And that scared the shit out of me. Bad.

Fear is a big issue of mine. And fear is what’s kept me. I was scared to death of dying, but I was drinking myself toward it. You know what I mean?

What I was saying earlier about binge drinking and about methamphetamines…when I was drinking and my body couldn’t take it anymore and I’d go to sleep or pass out and then come to…

I was fine as long as the alcohol was in my system, but as it would come out of my system, this creeping dread would just come over me. And I would just start thinking that I was dead…and that everybody else in the world was demons…and that any minute they were all going to expose themselves to me. My mom…everybody.

And that happened to me frequently when I would binge drink and come down off of it. And it was all alcohol-induced.

He’s good. He’s very good at his craft.

Alcohol was the only thing I ever had that took away the pain, but it brought the most pain in my life.

You know, in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous, in the literature, there’s a part in there where it describes alcoholism as cunning, baffling, and powerful.

Those aren’t descriptions that you can give to a substance, or a liquid, or a bottle, or a baggie.

You give that description to something that is thinking.

And intelligent. And alive.

So, I figured that part out too.

And everybody has their own beliefs. I do believe in the light and the dark. I do believe that hell is right here on earth. And I’ve been through it. And I believe that it’s a taste.

But I also believe that if God is over everything, he’s over everything. Including the darkness, and that he can use that darkness to steer people in the right direction. And I think that’s what happened in my life.

I believe that everything in my life happened to get me to that point.

But soon after all that happened, I went back to drinking.

Because of my fear.

When I knew what my family had just gone through and that I was responsible for it. Even though I didn’t put those drugs in my system, I had put myself in the position to be in a place that that could happen to me.

And drinking was yet again causing another issue in my life and I started to see it for what it was my whole life. And it scared the bejeezus out of me, so I ended up running from it, like I knew how to do.

So I had been sober for two weeks out of the hospital. And then I went back to drinking.

And guess who I drank with the first time…Jessica. Same girl.

My family saw that as betrayal. By all means they should have.

And I went through some more drama with her. And one night I got to the point where I refused to give her money for pills.

We were out on her front porch at the same house, in Caryville, and she went inside to refill a drink. I was out there drinking on mine and it had been like twenty minutes.

So I went to go inside, to make myself another drink, and the door was locked. And the lights were off in the house. And the next thing I knew, the cops were pulling up.

They got out and were like, “Hey, we have reports of a prowler in the neighborhood.”

And I was like, “Well, he’s not here.”

And they were like, “Well you’re him.” (laughs)

And I was like, “Um, no. I live here.”

“The person who lives here is who called us.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Luckily her aunt lived down the street, like three houses down, and I knew her aunt. And I was like, “You can verify with her aunt that I live here and I pay bills here.”

So they went down there and verified that. And that just made me realize, ‘Who am I with? What am I doing?’

That was July 3rd of 2012.

And I called my mom and said, “Mom, please come get me. I need to get away from here right now.”

She came and picked me up. And she wasn’t willing to take me back to her house, but she took me to her office. And in her office, she has a couch. And I slept on that couch and detoxed for the next three days.

During that time, my brother had gotten out of prison and right into an Oxford House in Wichita. And he told me about Oxford House.

He wanted me to come interview at one and I was like, “No. I’ve been through halfway houses, treatment centers, prisons, jails. I’m not going to another place where people are telling me what to do again, ever, unless I’m forcibly made to.”

He was like, “Man, just humor me. Come sit in on the interview and see what you think.”

So I decided to humor him. And I went to the interview.

And on July 9th, 2012 the beginning of the changing of my life started.

I saw what these guys do.

There’s nobody that runs an Oxford House. They all are equal inside there.

And they sat there, and it was a family home, and these guys….It was something I had never had before.

It was a bunch of sober people that were working as a unit together and loved each other. And I saw it immediately and I was attracted to it immediately. And I wanted it immediately.

And I got voted into the house.

Now I had only had a few days clean, mind you, and at that time you were supposed to have thirty days clean before you could get in to an Oxford House. But they made an exception for me to get into the house.

I got really involved with Oxford House.

I fell in love with it right away.

I started reading the manual, and the chapter manual, and the State Association manual, and the World Council manuals, and the rules and guidelines. And I got involved and got positions.

And I got made President of the house.

For five months and twenty-seven days I was living in an Oxford House.

And I was going to the meetings that I was required to, but there was women there. And I was still doing my old thing with women, which was running through them.

And to me, I wasn’t using dope or alcohol so there was no problem that. And nobody called me out on that in the house either. They didn’t see it as a big deal either.

But five months and twenty-seven days later, I got drunk. Because some of that stuff came back to bite me in the butt.

My high school sweetheart ended up living across the street from this Oxford House that I happened to go to in Wichita. And the last time we were together was when we moved to Kansas City together, after we got out of high school, so she could start going to school in Lawrence. But drinking broke us up.

And we both tumbled down opposite sides of the same mountain with alcohol.

She had had two years in recovery when I got into Dunsworth Oxford House, living across the street.

And it was crazy.

So we thought it was a God thing. Right?

We got together, got engaged. We had a wedding set.

But I was still talking to other women. I was still seeing other women. I was still intimate with other women.

And the guys in the house knew it but nobody called me on it. It was nobody’s fault but my own, but that was my behavior. That was what I knew how to do.

And she had done stuff to me like that in our previous relationship, so I felt like, ‘Okay, I can do that in this one.’ Payback, whatever.

Long story short, I ended up drinking over it. It caused me too much turmoil. And even in that moment I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I thought alcohol got the better of me and I decided to go drink.

Alcohol never had stopped getting the better of me.

I didn’t do anything to recover in that five months and twenty-seven days, other than be in that Oxford House.

Which was great, and you can stay sober in an Oxford House.

Oxford House was formed in 1975 by a group of guys in a federal halfway house, but the funding got cut. And they went to their local AA meeting and said, “What do we do?”

“Do it yourselves.”

And so they did. They did it themselves.

But they knew that they couldn’t do it without the recovery through a 12-step fellowship.

So I got kicked out of there for drinking.

I was staying in a hotel. She still wanted the marriage to go on. And so I ended up moving in with her, which was just a nightmare. Because I wasn’t feeling it. Obviously I wasn’t feeling it. At this point it felt more like an obligation instead of an actual real relationship.

And after New Year’s I ended up drinking again. And we were done.

Then I ended up getting into another Oxford House. Got into another relationship.

And even though I started working steps in that house, I was only there for ninety days. And that emotional entanglement that I was in was so strong and potent and powerful at first, that I knew that if anything ever went wrong I would drink over it. I just knew it.

I found in her phone that she was talking to other guys and so I drank. And I was out from then until December 13, 2013.

December 12th I was smoking crack in a house on Broadway in Wichita with a bunch of people. It was a house that I had been in before that used to have a bunch of nice furniture, a big TV on the wall, very nice house. But this time when I was in this house there was nothing left, no furniture.

There were a bunch of people smoking crack on the floor.

And I told you this before but I’m a black-out drinker. I was drunk when I got to that house and crack makes me come to. Cocaine. Because it’s an upper, I come to. So it’s like waking up.

And when I woke up, I was in the middle of a mess.

I guess when I got there, I had gotten there shortly after two guys had kicked in the door and kidnapped a lady at gunpoint out of there. So after I got there, I was ten feet tall and bullet proof and there were guys there that wanted to retaliate and go get this girl. And they had guns. And I was all, “Yeah let’s do it!” All gung-ho I guess.

Well when I came to, I realized I didn’t know what I was in the middle of. And I said I was going to go pee outside and so I went outside, but then I left.

I went to my brother’s house in Goddard.

So I went back there. I had been staying there with him and his girlfriend, in their basement. Drinking my life away. And ended up at that crack house somehow, through one of my ventures.

And I had been on the interview board for Dunsworth for the past five weeks.

One of the guys that I was close to in there, Josh, I kept calling him, crying my eyes out and saying that I needed help. That I needed help or I was gonna die.

And he kept putting me on the interview board but I was too chicken shit to show up, or I was too drunk.

In an Oxford House they have a big whiteboard. People call that want to get into the house. We have certain times that we do interviews and so we put the names up on the board. Sometimes we’ll have four people up on the interview board that we interview to get in to the house. And we do it on Sunday’s.

So I was supposed to interview to get back into the house. To save my butt.

But five times, I didn’t show up.

And then finally I did.

A quick reference to how God works in my life….

While I was still out there drinking, a girlfriend of mine and her friend talked me in to going to a Cocaine Anonymous meeting that I had frequented on a regular basis when I was sober. Well I was under the influence when they talked me into it but I went down there, and there were three guys in that meeting that were the same three guys who had told my ex-fiance about me running around with other women.

But I still was like, “You punks shouldn’t have been saying that stuff.”

And after the meeting was over, I put hands on all three of them. At the one place where they’re supposed to be safe at.

So that really weighed on me a lot.

These guys lived in Dunsworth.

And so, why do you think it took five weeks for me to get the courage up to go interview?

But after that gunpoint kidnapping deal, I was finally ready to go.

I tucked my tail between my legs and I went up and knocked on the door. And who should open up the door….but Jason. He was one of the guys.

And he had a huge smile on his face.

And he said, “Welcome home.” (crying)

And he hugged me.

And it was the first time that I understood what compassion really meant.

And I interviewed. And I was scared to death.

And when you’re done interviewing, it’s kind of cruel but they send you outside while they talk about you to decide whether they’re going to let you into the house or not.

Well the first tradition in Oxford House states that…Oxford House’s primary purpose is to provide rehabilitation support and housing for the addict and alcoholic who wants to stop and stay stopped. So if there is an honest desire for someone to stay sober, we need to accept them to the house.

But I had already been in that house.

And relapsed in that house.

And put hands on three guys in that house.

So I didn’t think I was going to get in. And so, when I was out back waiting for them to decide, I was thinking, ‘Okay there’s a liquor store over there. There’s a liquor store over here. As soon as they tell me I’m not in the house, I’m fucking going to one of those liquor stores and I’m drinking.’

And I just realized it right there and I stopped and said, “God please. Please let these guys see that I need to be in this house.” (crying)

And they called me in. And they accepted me in.

And it was the biggest changing point in my life.

For nine months I didn’t get involved in anything in Oxford House. I didn’t take any positions. I was offered positions but I didn’t take any.

I didn’t get into any relationships, but I still saw girls here and there. And for the first part of my recovery, for the first few months, I thought that telling the truth to a woman was doing my part.

So I told them, ‘Hey if you want to sleep together, that’s all this is going to be because typically I know that I might feel strongly for you now, but after we sleep together, I’ll lose those feelings. So if you still want to do that…”

And I thought that by me being honest and saying that stuff, that I was in the clear. That I was doing my part by being honest. Well I found out later on how wrong I was.

But it took going through the flames to figure it out.

So for nine months I worked on my steps.

And the first two steps are where you get a connection to your higher power. To give you the strength to get through facing yourself. And everything you’ve done. And making amends for it.

So steps four through nine are called the Action Steps.

Four is where you take a personal inventory.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie called The Neverending Story. But if you remember, he had these tests when he had to go meet the oracle. With the first one. he shot the laser lights at him. But the second one was the biggest test. Do you remember it? He went through the blizzard and he was looking and searching, and he finally came to it and there it was…it was a mirror.

He had to face himself.

That’s what the fourth step is.

And so I worked through that, and I got it out. And there was some stuff in there that I had never told a soul. And I was scared to death. And when my sponsor came over I was fighting ready when he walked into my room.

I was like, “I’m telling you right now, I’m about to tell you some stuff. That I don’t know if I…”

And he just said, “Matt stop. Because I’m going to tell you something.”

And he gave me part of his fourth step. And it was the same thing that mine was.

All the fourth step is, is that you’re letting go of everything you’ve been holding onto basically. You tell all the bads and the wrongs that you’ve done to yourself and God in that moment. And that’s called the fifth step.

Sixth and seventh steps are figuring out your character defects and becoming ready for God to remove them from you.

Seven is having God remove these defects of character from your life.

Eight is making a list of all persons you’ve harmed.

And nine is making amends to them.

Well like I told you, I came into this fighting drugs and alcohol. So when I moved into there on December 13, 2013 I wanted to drink every single day.

But then, for the first time in my life, I started having the pull at my chest to smoke crack.

I wanted to smoke crack. On a regular basis.

We used to go to a noon meeting in Wichita, downtown. From Dunsworth, which is up off of 13th and Ridge, we would go all the way downtown. And we would always pass this liquor store.

And every time I’d see it, I would get a pull at my chest.

And this one day, I saw a guy coming out and it was 11:45 in the morning and he had gotten a bottle. So I knew he wasn’t just a social drinker. And I knew what he was getting ready to do. And I was so envious.

And every time that happened, I had to pray to God.

And I didn’t believe it at first, but it worked every single time that I prayed and asked him to remove that want from me in that moment.

And it worked.

Every single time.

So I got into the steps.

And then I got some specific prayers that my sponsor handed to me and I was supposed to pray for these ideals that I wanted in my life. I had gotten to a point where I was ready to start. And so I started praying for these ideals in my life.

And I didn’t believe in these specific prayers. I believed in a higher power. And I had made the connection.

And the hole was starting to be filled with the light. You know what I mean? The hole was starting to be filled with good.

I had gotten bad, shaken up, and God was helping me to remove it.

And the last step in that is making the amends…”

Part 4 of 5. To be continued…January 30th.

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

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My name is Matt, and I live in Hutchinson, Kansas.

In the midst of addiction, death and recovery, I AM Miracle Story #16.