00:00:00
Speaker 1: Like at best, it's insane, right, it's ridiculous, right, at best, at worsus death. So what we're working with as a human in under the influence of our addict is ridiculous to death. That's not much, not much going on, and how highly destructive.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: I'm Osha Ginsberg. Welcome to Better Than Yesterday.
00:00:23
Speaker 3: That is my guest, Tom Carroll, who you are about to hear, described not only how desperate life can be when you are trapped by addiction, but what recovery can look like and how a life beyond what you can imagine is possible. It's part of a longer conversation you can scroll back and discover. If I actual to picture someone who's struggling with methmphetamine addiction, you might picture someone on the absolute margins of society.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: A highly doubt you would picture a.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: Two time world surfing champion who scored back to back perfect tense at Pipeline, one of the deadliest waves on the planet.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: Yet that's Tom Carroll and he found himself.
00:00:58
Speaker 3: Caught in active methem fetamine addiction while raising three daughters. Addiction doesn't care about your bank account, your career, your trophy cabinet, and In this conversation, Tom is going to break down the exact practical tools that pulled him back from the edge, Because even if you're not an addict, most people will run from emotional pain because staying with.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: It just feels overwhelming.
00:01:23
Speaker 3: But when you use something to escape that pain or to dull that pain drinking, drugs, sex, your phone, the underlying trauma that causes that pain just gets more powerful. And Tom Carroll spent years trying to escape the grief of losing his.
00:01:39
Speaker 2: Mother as a child.
00:01:40
Speaker 3: Now being with that kind of loss is a gargantuan ask for anyone. But what actually happens when you stop running and choose to turn and face that pain directly? What would you say about what it feels like? What do you think might happen when you turn to face it? And what actually happens.
00:01:59
Speaker 1: What it turns out in the end is that what we've been looking for all the long is love. It's the one healing element in the universe that actually allows us to move toward it for the first time in our life. And that it's that endless, whole sense of being supported into the trauma, moving toward it, having the support, the sense that there's love involved with that support that you know that comes along, and that it tends to hold you in that space where you can actually sort of be with it. It tends to dissolve on its own accord. It's not it was so long ago. This thing that happened no longer, and the system itself wants to get rid of it. Our nature wants to discard what's irrelevant our nature. It's just we are nature, and nature is just going to discard whatever's irrelevant.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Right.
00:03:14
Speaker 1: The tree lose its flowers and they fall on the ground. They're irrelevant to the tree. They become more relevant to the earth, and then they do the cycle back through and reach the earth, and so this is what happens. Then the trauma becomes informing at a very very enriched earthy space once it's sort of does that make sense? And so it sort of comes back, and now what looks like you've been dragged into the worst position in your whole life turns around. It becomes the most informative and most bright informative part of your life. Like it actually starts to become vibrant in its form once again. So you come out of this, you think the whole world's coming around. You're going to lose your best friend, and like the thing that's been supporting, even though it's been fully.
00:04:14
Speaker 3: It's part of part of certainly you know what can sometimes drive you even you know the.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: Toll. You know, a great spiritual teacher talks about that our greatest moments can inform our greatest you know, the bottom the bottom of the which it did for me. It informed that because he goes to me, oh, I can't do that, I can't do that. All I'm going to go down. I'm going to head head south as fast as I could, and then that gets cracked. And then you come back out and start to move in the direction hopefully now hopefully it's not a smooth right. So it's not a smooth right and not for the faint hard so. But I think the one good, the great thing about such a valuable resource is both the places like South Pacific and the Toil Step Fellowship. If you can avail yourself to sitting with people that's the whole thing for an hour and just listening. Yeah, extraordinary things happen.
00:05:26
Speaker 2: My man who guys me, extraordinary bloke called David.
00:05:30
Speaker 3: He's fantastic one of the steps is a fifth one, and you sit down in a very quiet places to you and you talk about some stuff that the otherwise would never say anyone ever in the world, and he says, it's okay, man, Like this means you don't forget it, Like all this stuff is still there's but now I know about it, so it's now off your hands. But now you get to remember this and just keep living your life in the other direction.
00:05:54
Speaker 1: Like it's never going to leave you.
00:05:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you get to live your life here rest lines like are were good news? You get to live the rest of your life not being that guy anymore. And like you're right, it doesn't leave.
00:06:06
Speaker 1: You, but it informs you to then become.
00:06:10
Speaker 3: A version of yourself that you didn't even believe existed, and you.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: Can even imagine it.
00:06:16
Speaker 2: Trauma.
00:06:17
Speaker 3: Trauma is one of those things that keeps us from creating a life that we are convinced only exists for other people.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: But the moment that you stop isolating with it is.
00:06:26
Speaker 3: The moment that you can begin building that life for you and your family. Of course, you don't do it alone, and just sitting with another person and speaking that truth, it starts to change the wiring around our reactions and our responses to the world. But to get the time to do that work, you first might have to get away from the environment that is feeding unhealthy patterns. What happens when you're home, well, maybe your work contains some of those patterns that keep your unhealthy habits alive. Because family and work dynamics, daily routines the wrong kind of mates, they can become like attract the bame, pulling you back into old and unhealthy behaviors. Breaking that cycle. It is a misconception that it takes willpower to break that cycle for real recovery to take hold. Sometimes it means spending time away from those environments, so when you re engage, you're equipped to deal.
00:07:19
Speaker 2: With those things in a healthier way.
00:07:20
Speaker 3: When people it was like, I'm going to go in I'm going to go into rehab, residential rehab to get away, put some distance between yourself and it.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Why is that important? Why is that important?
00:07:33
Speaker 1: Well, our lives, you know, in our family, it could be in the because it's a whole dynamic that you're living within. It can be overwhelming and consuming, and we've actually moved away from making a decision about for ourselves around anything. In fact, adding the addict will put the decision on everyone else. So you've put decisions off, like to do something about something that's inside it, you're going, well, just someone else's fault. You know, they can sort of you know, I'll wait till this happens. Well, maybe I'll wait till tomorrow and I'll do it then, you know, and then you know whether it's like you know, anytime you try and do a news resolution and it's like you know, Boxing day or maybe the day after Boxing day, and you're just really hurting and you just go, Okay, news resolution, I'm planning this out. You give a little gap between that and the day, and all your demons come out to play. And that happens at all these little different levels. So to the point where you're in this family dynamic or you're in the way of living that you're in that the demons are constantly coming up, well, if you like to call demons, but it's just the disease of this condition and the people who've been living there, and it's kind of their fault. And then and then on top of that, there could be enabling you and it could be all sorts of least dynamic going on, so we need to get respite. We need to actually either you make a full on decision and it makes really clear sense and you end up in the in the toild set fellowship, which is fantastic, and some of people do they get clean doing that and clean and sober. But you know the way things are. If we can get to facility where you can fall apart in support, in really sound, evidence based support from surrounded by professionals, people that can actually you can start the sort of working group which we really need to because a lot of us have been isolating, you know, I mean fact it is just an isolation using a loan made.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: Yeah the party it was me by myself.
00:10:02
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and so we weren't relating to relating to anyone. So usually you know, the South Pacific ones for three weeks now, but they've got a sort of a step down program which I remember doing. I ended up being in there twice that for six weeks because my I think, if you can stay from an extra week, tom, I'd advise it and I've gone okay. I was actually enjoying it being in there at the end because I've been through a lot of stuff a lot of stuff had lift off. Now I felt light, even though I was crazy, just go away, right. But now that early day, early days, and I was getting getting some time and distance away from using, I didn't know what's going to do?
00:10:51
Speaker 3: You know.
00:10:51
Speaker 1: I had a lot of stories about people using the day they got out of it, man, and that was that could have been on for me. And I thought, I'll do. I'm starting to feel good now. And the fact that I had that distance, I kind of sense that now I really wanted to There was a moment in there where the penny dropped, I guess if you like. And I started doing some practices of meditation in the morning every morning on my own and just becoming more engaged and hearing the feedback from other clients and so on in there, and making friends in there and sort of connecting and naturally and some vibrance was coming back in me. And I wanted to go back home like I want to go back home like me again. And that's how I felt. And after a very very dessicated time for probably the previous twelve months, getting increasingly more dislocated and disconnected, dislocated, and so the step down program, I went I'm on for that. That was three sessions. It was like twelve weeks of it. So it's three sessions for three weeks, two sessions for two for three weeks, and I think a couple of sessions a week for another three and then yeah, one for the and step down. Then I stayed with that and just kept on doing. You know, my friends in narcotics anonymous, I just allowed myself to get towed in by them.
00:12:29
Speaker 3: You know, perspective is an interesting thing. A bit of distance can make you see things very, very differently, and once the immediate noise dies down, daily practices like mording, meditation, connection with others who are on the same journey, they can fill that space where the substance or the behavior used to inhabit.
00:12:50
Speaker 2: And that's all well and good till you return to your life.
00:12:53
Speaker 3: Which is why a huge part of staying clean and staying sober is knowing what to do in an emergency. When he was just six months clean, Tom pulled up at a roundabout and found himself to i with his former drug dealer. In less than ten seconds, his brain decided to relapse. What he did next literally saved his life.
00:13:14
Speaker 2: What about the you know, you.
00:13:16
Speaker 3: Get out and then hey, I heard you're out, mate, We're down to the you know, we're in the Newport arms.
00:13:23
Speaker 2: Come on.
00:13:23
Speaker 1: Really, you know, my whole home environment was very uncomfortable. Everything was super uncomfortable. But the meetings and my support, I were saying, okay, because I had to learn how to sit with discomfort. That was the big one too. That's really it isn't it. It's learning how to sit. That's the big thing about meetings is you're sitting in the room. You're being You're literally being supported just by sitting there to sit there and listen, like I couldn't hear a thing, but at first, but hearing and hearing, really hearing you was to come much later. But the fact that I was sitting through meetings and not wanting to run was a revelation to me.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: And yeah, there's guys. There's guys I called mates.
00:14:20
Speaker 3: I never texted or called after the day, and you know what time they texted or called me.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: I was like, all right, our entire relationship was not based on friendship. Okay, it's incredibly how's that revealed? Amazing? I Yeah, I ran into my dealer about six months in and just on a roundabout and I was driving all happy in recovery. I've got this other working in a position and office of all things and with Quicksilver, and I was like, they've given me a kind of a job for a bit, you know, just get my kind of actor that I really support.
00:15:00
Speaker 2: And I was just done.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: I've done a little work at Mona Vale and I was coming round the backway of Warriorwood in this and I hadn't seen my dealer right for and I thought I kind of forgot about him. Well, I actually had a good solid distance from him, actually six months, and it was just me on the road. I'm happily driving along. It's like eleven a m. Beautiful day, and I'm going back to Belgala who the office was, and I'm driving along and down. It's a tea in a section, but it's a roundabout. He's come flying down from the left in his little yellow sort of little hot up car thing, buzzing along. He coming down here, like go, oh my god, that's my dealer. And we come in and enter the roundabout. He's coming turning right and I'm going straight through from his right, and we meet as he's coming to enter and to go straight out of the exit and I'm coming to enter into the roundabout and we stop and he's hanging out in the car and goes down. I'm going, hey, how you going? And you know what happens when you see someone you haven't seen for a long time, and it doesn't matter who they are, you go straight back to what you were the last conversation you had with them. All of a sudden, the memory in your body comes through and you talk exactly the time. This way, You've got an old friend from school you haven't seen for years, and all of a sudden, Wow, it's just like we yeah, yeah, And all of a sudden, I'm in this conversation like I've just done. I just I'm going to do the deal with him, and I'm like looking at him and going he goes, He goes, yeah, we're on for this afternoon, you know, And I said, yeah, okay, I'm in watch your number because I threw it away, so I put his new number in my phone. It's one of those nockier things, you know. And the next minute I goes, yeah, I see it this afternoon. I've made the deal. Boom, it's going to six months in right, and I pull out, go straight through the intersection, and I'm like, I'm sweating. I'm gonna look at the phone. And I got his number and I either save it or I delete it, and something in me didn't allow it to happen, and I deleted it straight away. Looked in the rear vision mirror that I had it trying to save itself. Looked at his car, got round, the kind of flying in the rear vision mirror. He's gone. And do I turn around?
00:17:23
Speaker 2: Right?
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Do I make the turnaround, try and chase him down? Number's gone? And oh my god, I'm freaking out now, Oh my god, I'm breathing so different, everything's different. And then I just hit the number of my sponsor. That's the way. And he was a brick it was like a brick layer guy, and he was mixing some mud, you know, claiming he's on the phone. Hey, I'm mixing some mud. Just pray like fuck, oh god, what I'd like? Prayers like just so distant to me at that point. And so I rang another person in and he answered the phone and he was available, and so that connection I got to talk to him all the way to bil Balgala about that and then I went to a meeting that night and shared it and that sort of offloaded a whole lot of stuff. But that was was that close, so I wouldn't be here with you right.
00:18:20
Speaker 2: Now when I think about it.
00:18:21
Speaker 3: Next to every pool, spa, or body of water larger than a bath tub in Australia, there is a poster describing exactly what to do in an emergency. If you're in recovery from addiction, you get to make your own poster. And Tom just then described something which I've had on my post. If a rout of sixteen years now, before you pick up a drink, pick up the phone, it'll save your life just as much as an ECPR. Tom talked about two other things today that have helped him and millions like him build a life and a recovery that's bigger than they could have imagined, including facing emotional discomfort in the presence of support instead of suppressing it, and the importance of building distance from enabling environments, having structure around, grounding yourself in new daily routines so you could be fortified against those things when they happen again. Tom Carroll is a lighthouse of a man, an oracle of wisdom when it comes to this sort of thing, and I couldn't be more grateful that he came here to my home to share his knowledge with me. The full episode it is epic. You can scroll back in the feed to find it. And if there was something that you heard today which resonated something was a little too close to home. There were links to more of Tom's work, recovery support services and helplines all waiting for you right now in the notes to this And if you found this episode helpful, please subscribe to it, follow it, like it, upvote at heart, rate it. However you're watching or listening or whatever all of that, please do those things. It really helps us here, and most of all, share this with a person in your life. Do you think could use a little bit of what we talked about today? If you need me, I'm pretty easy to find. You can find links to the newsletter in the notes, as well as my book's a free audiobook for you, and tickets for the live show that I do here in Sydney. Thank you so much for being a part of it. Check out some other episodes, follow along.
00:20:05
Speaker 2: If you like. I'll see you Wednesday
Speaker 1: Like at best, it's insane, right, it's ridiculous, right, at best, at worsus death. So what we're working with as a human in under the influence of our addict is ridiculous to death. That's not much, not much going on, and how highly destructive.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: I'm Osha Ginsberg. Welcome to Better Than Yesterday.
00:00:23
Speaker 3: That is my guest, Tom Carroll, who you are about to hear, described not only how desperate life can be when you are trapped by addiction, but what recovery can look like and how a life beyond what you can imagine is possible. It's part of a longer conversation you can scroll back and discover. If I actual to picture someone who's struggling with methmphetamine addiction, you might picture someone on the absolute margins of society.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: A highly doubt you would picture a.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: Two time world surfing champion who scored back to back perfect tense at Pipeline, one of the deadliest waves on the planet.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: Yet that's Tom Carroll and he found himself.
00:00:58
Speaker 3: Caught in active methem fetamine addiction while raising three daughters. Addiction doesn't care about your bank account, your career, your trophy cabinet, and In this conversation, Tom is going to break down the exact practical tools that pulled him back from the edge, Because even if you're not an addict, most people will run from emotional pain because staying with.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: It just feels overwhelming.
00:01:23
Speaker 3: But when you use something to escape that pain or to dull that pain drinking, drugs, sex, your phone, the underlying trauma that causes that pain just gets more powerful. And Tom Carroll spent years trying to escape the grief of losing his.
00:01:39
Speaker 2: Mother as a child.
00:01:40
Speaker 3: Now being with that kind of loss is a gargantuan ask for anyone. But what actually happens when you stop running and choose to turn and face that pain directly? What would you say about what it feels like? What do you think might happen when you turn to face it? And what actually happens.
00:01:59
Speaker 1: What it turns out in the end is that what we've been looking for all the long is love. It's the one healing element in the universe that actually allows us to move toward it for the first time in our life. And that it's that endless, whole sense of being supported into the trauma, moving toward it, having the support, the sense that there's love involved with that support that you know that comes along, and that it tends to hold you in that space where you can actually sort of be with it. It tends to dissolve on its own accord. It's not it was so long ago. This thing that happened no longer, and the system itself wants to get rid of it. Our nature wants to discard what's irrelevant our nature. It's just we are nature, and nature is just going to discard whatever's irrelevant.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Right.
00:03:14
Speaker 1: The tree lose its flowers and they fall on the ground. They're irrelevant to the tree. They become more relevant to the earth, and then they do the cycle back through and reach the earth, and so this is what happens. Then the trauma becomes informing at a very very enriched earthy space once it's sort of does that make sense? And so it sort of comes back, and now what looks like you've been dragged into the worst position in your whole life turns around. It becomes the most informative and most bright informative part of your life. Like it actually starts to become vibrant in its form once again. So you come out of this, you think the whole world's coming around. You're going to lose your best friend, and like the thing that's been supporting, even though it's been fully.
00:04:14
Speaker 3: It's part of part of certainly you know what can sometimes drive you even you know the.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: Toll. You know, a great spiritual teacher talks about that our greatest moments can inform our greatest you know, the bottom the bottom of the which it did for me. It informed that because he goes to me, oh, I can't do that, I can't do that. All I'm going to go down. I'm going to head head south as fast as I could, and then that gets cracked. And then you come back out and start to move in the direction hopefully now hopefully it's not a smooth right. So it's not a smooth right and not for the faint hard so. But I think the one good, the great thing about such a valuable resource is both the places like South Pacific and the Toil Step Fellowship. If you can avail yourself to sitting with people that's the whole thing for an hour and just listening. Yeah, extraordinary things happen.
00:05:26
Speaker 2: My man who guys me, extraordinary bloke called David.
00:05:30
Speaker 3: He's fantastic one of the steps is a fifth one, and you sit down in a very quiet places to you and you talk about some stuff that the otherwise would never say anyone ever in the world, and he says, it's okay, man, Like this means you don't forget it, Like all this stuff is still there's but now I know about it, so it's now off your hands. But now you get to remember this and just keep living your life in the other direction.
00:05:54
Speaker 1: Like it's never going to leave you.
00:05:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you get to live your life here rest lines like are were good news? You get to live the rest of your life not being that guy anymore. And like you're right, it doesn't leave.
00:06:06
Speaker 1: You, but it informs you to then become.
00:06:10
Speaker 3: A version of yourself that you didn't even believe existed, and you.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: Can even imagine it.
00:06:16
Speaker 2: Trauma.
00:06:17
Speaker 3: Trauma is one of those things that keeps us from creating a life that we are convinced only exists for other people.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: But the moment that you stop isolating with it is.
00:06:26
Speaker 3: The moment that you can begin building that life for you and your family. Of course, you don't do it alone, and just sitting with another person and speaking that truth, it starts to change the wiring around our reactions and our responses to the world. But to get the time to do that work, you first might have to get away from the environment that is feeding unhealthy patterns. What happens when you're home, well, maybe your work contains some of those patterns that keep your unhealthy habits alive. Because family and work dynamics, daily routines the wrong kind of mates, they can become like attract the bame, pulling you back into old and unhealthy behaviors. Breaking that cycle. It is a misconception that it takes willpower to break that cycle for real recovery to take hold. Sometimes it means spending time away from those environments, so when you re engage, you're equipped to deal.
00:07:19
Speaker 2: With those things in a healthier way.
00:07:20
Speaker 3: When people it was like, I'm going to go in I'm going to go into rehab, residential rehab to get away, put some distance between yourself and it.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Why is that important? Why is that important?
00:07:33
Speaker 1: Well, our lives, you know, in our family, it could be in the because it's a whole dynamic that you're living within. It can be overwhelming and consuming, and we've actually moved away from making a decision about for ourselves around anything. In fact, adding the addict will put the decision on everyone else. So you've put decisions off, like to do something about something that's inside it, you're going, well, just someone else's fault. You know, they can sort of you know, I'll wait till this happens. Well, maybe I'll wait till tomorrow and I'll do it then, you know, and then you know whether it's like you know, anytime you try and do a news resolution and it's like you know, Boxing day or maybe the day after Boxing day, and you're just really hurting and you just go, Okay, news resolution, I'm planning this out. You give a little gap between that and the day, and all your demons come out to play. And that happens at all these little different levels. So to the point where you're in this family dynamic or you're in the way of living that you're in that the demons are constantly coming up, well, if you like to call demons, but it's just the disease of this condition and the people who've been living there, and it's kind of their fault. And then and then on top of that, there could be enabling you and it could be all sorts of least dynamic going on, so we need to get respite. We need to actually either you make a full on decision and it makes really clear sense and you end up in the in the toild set fellowship, which is fantastic, and some of people do they get clean doing that and clean and sober. But you know the way things are. If we can get to facility where you can fall apart in support, in really sound, evidence based support from surrounded by professionals, people that can actually you can start the sort of working group which we really need to because a lot of us have been isolating, you know, I mean fact it is just an isolation using a loan made.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: Yeah the party it was me by myself.
00:10:02
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and so we weren't relating to relating to anyone. So usually you know, the South Pacific ones for three weeks now, but they've got a sort of a step down program which I remember doing. I ended up being in there twice that for six weeks because my I think, if you can stay from an extra week, tom, I'd advise it and I've gone okay. I was actually enjoying it being in there at the end because I've been through a lot of stuff a lot of stuff had lift off. Now I felt light, even though I was crazy, just go away, right. But now that early day, early days, and I was getting getting some time and distance away from using, I didn't know what's going to do?
00:10:51
Speaker 3: You know.
00:10:51
Speaker 1: I had a lot of stories about people using the day they got out of it, man, and that was that could have been on for me. And I thought, I'll do. I'm starting to feel good now. And the fact that I had that distance, I kind of sense that now I really wanted to There was a moment in there where the penny dropped, I guess if you like. And I started doing some practices of meditation in the morning every morning on my own and just becoming more engaged and hearing the feedback from other clients and so on in there, and making friends in there and sort of connecting and naturally and some vibrance was coming back in me. And I wanted to go back home like I want to go back home like me again. And that's how I felt. And after a very very dessicated time for probably the previous twelve months, getting increasingly more dislocated and disconnected, dislocated, and so the step down program, I went I'm on for that. That was three sessions. It was like twelve weeks of it. So it's three sessions for three weeks, two sessions for two for three weeks, and I think a couple of sessions a week for another three and then yeah, one for the and step down. Then I stayed with that and just kept on doing. You know, my friends in narcotics anonymous, I just allowed myself to get towed in by them.
00:12:29
Speaker 3: You know, perspective is an interesting thing. A bit of distance can make you see things very, very differently, and once the immediate noise dies down, daily practices like mording, meditation, connection with others who are on the same journey, they can fill that space where the substance or the behavior used to inhabit.
00:12:50
Speaker 2: And that's all well and good till you return to your life.
00:12:53
Speaker 3: Which is why a huge part of staying clean and staying sober is knowing what to do in an emergency. When he was just six months clean, Tom pulled up at a roundabout and found himself to i with his former drug dealer. In less than ten seconds, his brain decided to relapse. What he did next literally saved his life.
00:13:14
Speaker 2: What about the you know, you.
00:13:16
Speaker 3: Get out and then hey, I heard you're out, mate, We're down to the you know, we're in the Newport arms.
00:13:23
Speaker 2: Come on.
00:13:23
Speaker 1: Really, you know, my whole home environment was very uncomfortable. Everything was super uncomfortable. But the meetings and my support, I were saying, okay, because I had to learn how to sit with discomfort. That was the big one too. That's really it isn't it. It's learning how to sit. That's the big thing about meetings is you're sitting in the room. You're being You're literally being supported just by sitting there to sit there and listen, like I couldn't hear a thing, but at first, but hearing and hearing, really hearing you was to come much later. But the fact that I was sitting through meetings and not wanting to run was a revelation to me.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: And yeah, there's guys. There's guys I called mates.
00:14:20
Speaker 3: I never texted or called after the day, and you know what time they texted or called me.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: I was like, all right, our entire relationship was not based on friendship. Okay, it's incredibly how's that revealed? Amazing? I Yeah, I ran into my dealer about six months in and just on a roundabout and I was driving all happy in recovery. I've got this other working in a position and office of all things and with Quicksilver, and I was like, they've given me a kind of a job for a bit, you know, just get my kind of actor that I really support.
00:15:00
Speaker 2: And I was just done.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: I've done a little work at Mona Vale and I was coming round the backway of Warriorwood in this and I hadn't seen my dealer right for and I thought I kind of forgot about him. Well, I actually had a good solid distance from him, actually six months, and it was just me on the road. I'm happily driving along. It's like eleven a m. Beautiful day, and I'm going back to Belgala who the office was, and I'm driving along and down. It's a tea in a section, but it's a roundabout. He's come flying down from the left in his little yellow sort of little hot up car thing, buzzing along. He coming down here, like go, oh my god, that's my dealer. And we come in and enter the roundabout. He's coming turning right and I'm going straight through from his right, and we meet as he's coming to enter and to go straight out of the exit and I'm coming to enter into the roundabout and we stop and he's hanging out in the car and goes down. I'm going, hey, how you going? And you know what happens when you see someone you haven't seen for a long time, and it doesn't matter who they are, you go straight back to what you were the last conversation you had with them. All of a sudden, the memory in your body comes through and you talk exactly the time. This way, You've got an old friend from school you haven't seen for years, and all of a sudden, Wow, it's just like we yeah, yeah, And all of a sudden, I'm in this conversation like I've just done. I just I'm going to do the deal with him, and I'm like looking at him and going he goes, He goes, yeah, we're on for this afternoon, you know, And I said, yeah, okay, I'm in watch your number because I threw it away, so I put his new number in my phone. It's one of those nockier things, you know. And the next minute I goes, yeah, I see it this afternoon. I've made the deal. Boom, it's going to six months in right, and I pull out, go straight through the intersection, and I'm like, I'm sweating. I'm gonna look at the phone. And I got his number and I either save it or I delete it, and something in me didn't allow it to happen, and I deleted it straight away. Looked in the rear vision mirror that I had it trying to save itself. Looked at his car, got round, the kind of flying in the rear vision mirror. He's gone. And do I turn around?
00:17:23
Speaker 2: Right?
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Do I make the turnaround, try and chase him down? Number's gone? And oh my god, I'm freaking out now, Oh my god, I'm breathing so different, everything's different. And then I just hit the number of my sponsor. That's the way. And he was a brick it was like a brick layer guy, and he was mixing some mud, you know, claiming he's on the phone. Hey, I'm mixing some mud. Just pray like fuck, oh god, what I'd like? Prayers like just so distant to me at that point. And so I rang another person in and he answered the phone and he was available, and so that connection I got to talk to him all the way to bil Balgala about that and then I went to a meeting that night and shared it and that sort of offloaded a whole lot of stuff. But that was was that close, so I wouldn't be here with you right.
00:18:20
Speaker 2: Now when I think about it.
00:18:21
Speaker 3: Next to every pool, spa, or body of water larger than a bath tub in Australia, there is a poster describing exactly what to do in an emergency. If you're in recovery from addiction, you get to make your own poster. And Tom just then described something which I've had on my post. If a rout of sixteen years now, before you pick up a drink, pick up the phone, it'll save your life just as much as an ECPR. Tom talked about two other things today that have helped him and millions like him build a life and a recovery that's bigger than they could have imagined, including facing emotional discomfort in the presence of support instead of suppressing it, and the importance of building distance from enabling environments, having structure around, grounding yourself in new daily routines so you could be fortified against those things when they happen again. Tom Carroll is a lighthouse of a man, an oracle of wisdom when it comes to this sort of thing, and I couldn't be more grateful that he came here to my home to share his knowledge with me. The full episode it is epic. You can scroll back in the feed to find it. And if there was something that you heard today which resonated something was a little too close to home. There were links to more of Tom's work, recovery support services and helplines all waiting for you right now in the notes to this And if you found this episode helpful, please subscribe to it, follow it, like it, upvote at heart, rate it. However you're watching or listening or whatever all of that, please do those things. It really helps us here, and most of all, share this with a person in your life. Do you think could use a little bit of what we talked about today? If you need me, I'm pretty easy to find. You can find links to the newsletter in the notes, as well as my book's a free audiobook for you, and tickets for the live show that I do here in Sydney. Thank you so much for being a part of it. Check out some other episodes, follow along.
00:20:05
Speaker 2: If you like. I'll see you Wednesday
