Episode 16: A Path With Purpose
Robbie:
This is Champagne Problems, where we come together to explore the gray areas of drinking. This is a judgment-free zone where we can all take a look at how we make decisions about our relationship with alcohol.
Welcome back, everybody. We are in the studio today with a super special guest. I say that every episode, but I think today it might be a super duper special guest. Our beloved co-host, Patrick Balsley, as I like to call P-Balls, is going to be sharing his story today. Holy cow. Holy cow. I've heard bits and pieces. I know the gory details, but I don't know the back-end of things. I don't know how he got it together, transitioned out, created a purpose in life. I literally cannot wait to hear this.
Patrick is a new brother of mine. We're fairly new friends, but he is my right-hand man in this venture that we're calling a podcast. He is my voice of reason. He's the Buddha to my Tasmanian Devil. I'm everywhere and he's grounded. It's an absolute pleasure to have him be a part of this whole project and to dig into his life experience and how he got to where he is now, which is just an absolutely inspirational and respectable man. It's going to be fascinating and motivating and inspiring and touching and all the above. Our other beloved co-host, Sam Hampson, is going to be doing the interview and I am equally as excited about that. Anybody want to chime in on what you're excited about?
Sam Hampson:
I'm nervous. I feel like I have a huge task ahead of me here to try to pull back the curtain on all the things. Like if you know Patrick and you interact with him regularly, you feel his recovery. You feel the depth of the work that he's done to become the man he is today, but my job today is to try to figure out how to expose that information.
How do I get him to share that with you, guys, and what it actually looked like, and how to do it yourself? So I got my work cut out for me today.
Patrick Balsley:
Yeah, I hope I don't disappoint.
Robbie:
You will not. If I know you like I think I do, you're a straight shooter and you're authentic and you're as genuine as they come, so I imagine that will come out in every word you say, as it normally does.
Sam Hampson:
So as co-host, this was one of the things that we decided to include moving forward, was taking a little bit of a deeper dive into each of our stories and even into some of the guest stories that we bring on. The reason behind that is when we're really wanting to create a world where people are open and willing to share about their experience with alcohol, with any other substance or other numbers and medicators, one of the things we have to be willing to do is model that and demonstrate it if that's really never been something that is part of our community, part of our family system, part of something that we've seen.
So, today, as we dive into Patrick's story, my hope is really that anyone who has shared any type of similar struggle or any type of similar experience in recovery, in sobriety, in mindfulness, that this will help add in some language, maybe give you some perspective, and really see the power of being able to heal through others' stories and not always having to do all of the work yourself. I think there's something really powerful about being able to heal in connection and feel connected to parts of someone's story and parts of someone's hope that you may not have ever experienced and you may not have to benefit from it.
Make sure you've got your support around you, just a small trigger warning there for anyone that has experienced addiction or has had substance use in their life.
Robbie:
Here we go. Patrick Balsley, everybody.
Sam Hampson:
So I want to start off by just exploring a little bit of your background; your family system, culture, heritage, what was substance use like in your world early on. I know that you have told your story many times, so I will let you take the reins on where you want to start us off here.
Patrick Balsley:
Most families started out like this, but alcoholism and addictions have been around for a very long time. I don't want to sit here and say that alcoholism and addiction is rampant on both sides of my family, but it's definitely there. I don't want to dig too much into that other than the fact that I know that I was genetically predisposed to having a high probability of a substance use disorder.
Sam Hampson:
And you know that because it was shared with you?
Patrick Balsley:
Yeah, it's been shared with me since I've been in recovery. It wasn't something that was talked about a lot growing up. That just wasn't really the kind of conversations that we had around alcohol. But my mom's side of the family, Irish Catholic, hardworking, some alcoholism down the line. Same with my dad's family. It wasn't as prevalent. It's not like I remember as a kid seeing a lot of alcohol use in my extended family to the point where I was like, "This is an issue." It wasn't anything that I saw as a problem or scary. It was like, yeah, it's to have a good time and like to have fun and drink, and I never saw any violence or anything like that.
But when it comes to my immediate family, like my dad and his two brothers... plug real quick for Arthur's Restaurant and Wine Shop, Southpark. My dad and his two brothers started a restaurant and wine shop back in 1972, here in Charlotte called Arthur's and next year they'll be celebrating their 50th year in business. The wine shop was a big part of the deal, and alcohol was part of our family culture. It was always around, always at family dinners. It was something that my dad's, that our family business was ingrained in. It was normalized. It wasn't normalized in a way that "alcoholism" was normalized; it was just like we work hard and we drink and it doesn't really pose much of a problem.
So I didn't see alcohol use as an issue growing up on either side of my family. It looked like fun to me. So I grew up here in Charlotte and my dad's business was successful. When I was born, they were doing really well financially and the business was rocking. I think they had 13 stores at one point. My mom worked part-time, and then more responsibility came with me. I was an only child. She became a stay-at-home mom and my dad worked a lot. Being an only child and growing up in the '80s, like I spent a lot of time outside exploring with neighborhood kids. A lot of them were older than me. So I got exposed to a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn't have at that age, but I always felt this, I don't want to say sadness and I'm sure that if you're an only child and you're listening to this, you can probably relate; I felt alone a lot of the times.
I didn't know that until I've dug in with my recovery stuff and therapy that there was a sense of loneliness and sadness; that probably drove a lot of my use early on. But I remember, and I'll tell you the first time and I always tell this story when I share because I think it's really, really important. I was probably seven or eight years old and I was swimming at the swimming pool right by our house. I don't want to get too graphic, but I was in the pool and I was probably seven, and I realized that if I stayed in front of the jets in the pool for long enough, it would do something to me that felt really good, and essentially I had my first orgasm at seven years old. That was the first time in my life that I realized that there was something that I could do that could immediately change the way that I felt. That became quite the summer. I was in the pool a lot.
The crazy thing is, nobody really knew what was going on. Like, I was keeping this to myself and there wasn't any shame involved in it, at least that I can remember. But it was like, "Wow, this is awesome." Like, I can do this and it takes like a couple minutes and it makes me feel really good. What I didn't know at the time was that behavior was priming my brain for what was to come, and it was probably opening the door genetically, and I don't really know how to describe it, but at seven years old, having that kind of dopamine hit whenever I wanted wasn't good and I had no idea.
What that did was it opened the door for me to explore and find other ways to change the way that I felt. Again, it was like clockwork. Now, looking back at it, all the stuff that happened after that, I think like two years later, I was obsessed with basketball. That was like my thing. I was the, I think, second youngest person in my class and the second shortest, I don't remember. I was younger than everybody else. Everybody at the school that I went to felt like they had more money than I did. There was an inferiority there that I was starting to feel and really didn't know what it was, but I had to compensate for it and I did that on the basketball court, or tried to.
I was a gym rat, played 24/7. My dad would drop me off at school an hour before school started and I would play basketball, and then after school, same thing until they turn the lights off in the gym.
So I got obsessed with basketball and there was a little drug store by our house, and my dad and I were in there one day and I saw they had basketball courts behind the counter. It was 1990, '89, '90. It was David Robinson, I think, his rookie year, and Michael Jordan was in his prime. I knew that the packs cost a dollar and the David Robinson or Michael Jordan cards may have been worth 5 or 10 bucks. I asked my dad to buy me a couple packs. I opened them up. There's no Michael Jordan, David Robinson. All right, I need two more. I need another one. I need another one. I need another one. Until I finally opened one of those packs and I saw one of those cards and it's like, boom, there goes the dopamine again.
What I didn't understand at the time is that I’m being introduced to scratch off tickets at nine years old. It's like I can buy this thing for a dollar, I can crack it open, and there's a chance that there's $10 in this thing.
So again, I don't know what's going on, my family don't know what's going on, but here's my brain getting primed again and the genetics are unlocking underneath everything. So for a summer, that just becomes a total obsession and I get locked in on this thing. I ganged up with another little friend of mine, who also had the same issue and we came up with this plan. We started autographing these basketball cards because there was a price guide that would have player's autographs in them and we would copy them and write them on the card and we would take them to this local card shop and we would trade these fake autographed cards for boxes of unopened basketball cards.
So we would sit in this card shop all day on Saturdays and just rip these things open. I amassed this massive basketball card collection through fraudulent autographs. Like, I can still do Michael Jordan's autograph. For those of you out there listening that have autographed Michael Jordan cards in your safety deposit boxes that you bought at Allstars at Cotswold Mall, there's a pretty big chance that I signed it when I was 10 years old and that thing is worth nothing.
So this thing got out of hand to the point where I ended up being on the cover of the Charlotte Observer's business page when I was like 11 years old as this young entrepreneur and they did this little article on me and my basketball court collection. Two years of that and now I'm primed, then I go into middle school, in sixth and seventh grade. Seventh grade, there were about five or six of us that would go to this one house on the weekends. Parents had a fridge full of beer and didn't know what was going on. They had a huge house and my friends were drinking. I wasn't the one that started it. I was actually, I think, the last one that decided to partake and felt the peer pressure. Next thing you know, I'm drinking hot Icehouse and it was disgusting. But I remembered, I could drink a couple of them and we were having a blast. We did that on the weekends and started smoking cigarettes and here's another way that I know how to change the way that I feel.
So that continues to progress through middle school. We're doing it on the weekends, no major consequences, playing basketball all the time. I got this big social network, a bunch of friends. We're having a ton of fun, doing normal kid stuff, except for drinking two or three beers every night on Friday and Saturday and getting shithoused because we only weighed like 85 pounds. Then the summer after my eighth grade year, it was like a Saturday afternoon, my dad was at work. My parents were divorced by this time. Because my dad worked more than my mom, my dad's place was like the easy place to get away with that and they didn't know what was going on. They had no clue that this was happening.
So it was like let me go to the spot that has the least resistance and that'll be a place where I can do whatever I want. I spent a lot of time on the weekends over there and he would be at work and I'd sit there and my friends would come over and we'd drink beer. One day, it was like a Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting there drinking with a buddy of mine and my dad had just had knee surgery probably six months prior. There was a bottle of Percocet sitting on a window sill in the kitchen, it was never touched, and the kid that I was with grabbed the bottle and was like, "Hey, man, have you ever taken these before?"
The crazy thing is that if I didn't already have like two beers in my system and my inhibitions were down, I probably would have been like, "Hell, no, dude, I'm not touching those things. I don't know what's in them." But I didn't have that defense. He was like, "Here, dude, take a couple. You'll feel great," and I had no idea what it was. I popped two of those things in my mouth and took a swig of the Old English 40 that somebody stole from the gas station. I was laying on the couch, I had the remote control in my hand, I was flipping through the channels, and when they kicked in, I dropped the remote on my chest and the TV channels stopped on QVC and there was a guy selling Beanie Babies. I remember laying there for the next three hours watching this dude try to sling Beanie Babies, and I'll never forget this. I remember thinking to myself that I did not want to move my hands to pick up the remote control because I felt so good and I didn't want to break that feeling. So I just laid there like completely still. I remember thinking to myself, like, "I want to feel like this all the time."
This was 1996, so it was before the whole throw your pills away campaign, before the whole opioid epidemic, so everybody's medicine cabinet was filled with pills. I had never stolen anything my entire life, and I started raiding people's medicine cabinets, like ninth grade. I started buying weed and I sold some weed. I would make deals with people at school, like, "Hey," like, "if you want some weed, I'll sell you some or I'll give you some, but you gotta let me come over to your house after school and look through your medicine cabinets." I started taking these pills like every day, all day long and I had no idea what the consequences were or like a withdrawal from these things. It was great because I didn't have to drink, I didn't have to smoke, you couldn't smell them. You couldn't really tell that I was on them. They were more like performance enhancing drugs for me. It washed all the fear away. I was like this social butterfly. I could talk to anybody.
They made me fearless and at that point, you couldn't really tell that I was on them. They almost made me manic, but I felt like a million bucks constantly. I pretty much carried that habit all the way through high school. So my freshman year comes up. Again, I'm obsessed with basketball and I got cut from the JV basketball team my freshman year and it absolutely crushed me because that was like all of my identity was basketball. So my identity shifted from basketball to drugs, and I took pride in, "Oh, I can get all the drugs. I know all the people that can get all the drugs." I was trying to sell stuff and not even making any money. It was just for attention and, "Oh, Patrick's cool." All it did, it just drove my addiction. We continued to drink and smoke weed and I'm eating these pills all day long and pretty much kept it together for the most part through high school, but academics, totally out the window. I think I graduated with a 2.0 and that was probably a generous 2.0, just to make sure that I didn't have to come back for another year.
So I get cut from the basketball team and then after that it was like, "I don't care. I don't give a shit about anything. Let's just party." That's what happened. So I graduated and I somehow, with the help of a couple of guidance counselors, figured out this loophole to get into NC State because I got flat out denied and there was some way where you could go in there and take classes like as if you were an adult and you wanted to go back to school. So this is like the worst possible scenario for somebody with a drug problem. It was like, "All right, let's send you to college and you're only going to take two classes in the first semester your freshman year."
So I go up there with zero responsibility and I'm taking an English and Math class that I already took in high school. It was crazy. I'm living in this dorm, we're partying constantly. I don't have to go to class, join a fraternity. And it just continued to progress and all of my time was spent drinking and using. It was a blast. I was just avoiding responsibility at all at all costs and I did that for a couple years and skated with school until, in my freshman year, there was a kid that lived in the dorm below me that worked at Eckerd Pharmacy in Cameron Village in Raleigh. He was stealing Oxycontin's from the pharmacy, and this was the beginning. I had no idea what they were. I had a pretty high tolerance to painkillers and dependence on them because I'd been taking them for the last four years.
This guy comes into my dorm room like two weeks into my freshman year and throws a freaking bottle on my bed, it was a sealed bottle of 40 milligram Oxycontin. There were a hundred of them. He's like, "Be careful with these things. They're really strong," and I popped one and I was like, "Oh, this is perfect." Then he got busted and got fired. Then I met a couple other people in Raleigh who were doctor shopping and getting oxys, and then they got busted and then I'm like, I have this massive tolerance to these things and I have no idea what to do, and I get like really, really sick for the first time and it freaked me out. I called this guy that I used to get high with back in Charlotte and he's like, "Yeah, you should just go to the methadone clinic and you can take methadone for like a week until the opiates get out of your system and then you'll be fine." This was when the internet barely existed. Like there was no way to research any of this stuff. I just wanted to feel better.
So I went to this methadone clinic in Raleigh and they gave me this stuff and it makes me not sick anymore and got me a little high and it lasted for like 24 hours. So I'm like, "All right, this is perfect. Now I don't have to spend any money. I can just go and take this stuff every day," and then I figured out at this particular place, and again this was 20 years ago, all I have to do is tell them that I don't feel good and they'll bump my dose up and then I also started using cocaine. One of the guys that we used to buy cocaine from had a methadone connection, and now I'm like eating these pills on top of my regular dose that's being prescribed from a doctor, and it was just a total mess. It was a total recipe for disaster.
So grades plummet, I continue to party, end up failing out of school, and I went through a really bad breakup with a girl that I was dating for a long time. At this point, I'm just a total mess. I mean, I'm using cocaine probably six out of the seven days out of the week, drinking all day long. I'm on this pretty high dose of a really heavy sedative narcotic. So I went through this breakup and I decided to come back to Charlotte and go back and work for the family business, and that did not work out well. All this shame of failing out of school, all my friends are starting to graduate. They all got their stuff together. They were getting jobs and I'm back in Charlotte with this massive drug problem that I'm just feeding into with really no hope of the possibility of it ending. It's like I had no insight or no awareness of it being a problem because I was so entrenched in my addiction that it totally consumed me.
My parents, they get wind of what's going on. Once I get back in town and they actually have eyes on me for a significant amount of time, my family starts to get concerned. What I would do is I would pay attention to how I looked physically and I would get it together for weeks at a time. Maybe tone down my use a little bit to where they'd get off my back. I had a family friend that was a long time member of AA. I'd go to a meeting with him. I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to AA." Like, "Everything's good." Then I'd ramp it back up again once they were off my back. It was totally out of control the whole time.
The winter of 2009, my family staged an intervention. At this point, I'm on this ridiculously high dose of opioids. I progressed from using cocaine to smoking crack. I'm drinking like a fish. Physically, I'm a total mess. Emotionally, I was so checked out that I wasn't even able to gauge that this was not good or it was not going to end well. I was totally in the grips. They staged an intervention and put me in a 28-day program out in Monroe that was a part of Carolina's healthcare system. I manipulated my way out after 24 days around Christmas time with every intention, walking out of that place, of never putting another substance in my body again. I mean, if I had a million bucks in my bank account, I would have bet all of that on the fact that I was never going to put another substance in my body, without question.
And I was high within two weeks. I went on another run for about a year and a half and it got really, really ugly. I was smoking black tar heroin, smoking crack all day long. It got really, really dark to the point where I was staying up for two or three days at a time. My parents had no clue what to do with me. At that point, recovery and the stigma around addiction, I didn't even know that detoxes or rehabs even existed. It wasn't a part of our culture at that point. Or, at least, I didn't know it was. I think I weighed 125 pounds when I checked into treatment the second time. I had open sores all over my body from picking at my skin. I was in a cocaine psychosis.
How I ended up in treatment the second time was that guy, the AA member that was a good family friend, just happened to show up at the right place and right time. I was sitting on my dad's couch in his condo, coming down off of coke and had been up for a couple of days. He came and knocked on the door. I remember getting up, looking through the peep hole, sitting back down on the couch, and this little voice in my head said, "Patrick, if you don't open that door, you're going to die." I probably wouldn't have lasted another two or three weeks just because my body was shutting down. I opened the door and he just looked at me and was like, "You ready to go?" and he pulled up his treatment center on his iPad and I was on a plane three days later.
I stayed in treatment for 90 days, went to Sober Living for another 90 after that, and I haven't used since, I think I got out of detox June 23, 2011. I don't think I've met or seen anybody that actually surrendered to the idea of recovery as much as I did in the beginning. When I finally got like a good night's sleep like 30 days in, I did not want to have anything to do with the terror that I had just experienced the five years prior to that. I was like, "I will do anything not to go back to that."
Sam Hampson:
I always get scared when I have a client that surrenders to that degree because I know that that means the darkness has been so vast that there's just not another option.
Patrick Balsley:
They talk about in AA and 12-Step recovery and stuff that like spiritual awakening is key, and you need to do all this stuff to experience that. Like, the second I got that first night's sleep, I was wide awake. I mean, I was a whole new man at that point. I knew that the book and that chapter of my life was over and that I had an opportunity to take this clean slate. Thank God to my family for sticking by me this whole time and still loving me unconditionally and giving me everything that I needed to have a successful shot at recovery. Even the ability to pay for treatment.
Thank God I still had all that intact. So I had like this ripe, fertile ground to really have a successful springboard to jump off of. I took advantage of it. I can't take credit for that. It was all that pain that gave me the motivation and the strength to engage the way that I did, but I took everything super seriously.
I remember, when I got out of treatment, living in that halfway house, like there was a 12-Step meeting half a mile from the halfway house. At this point I was working as a valet attendant at Boca Resort, and I was working the second shift from 3:00 to 11:00. I would ride the bus from my halfway house to Boca Resort. I worked from 3:00 to 11:00. I would catch a ride home with somebody. I'd get off, I'd get home around midnight. I'd shower, I'd eat something. I'd go to bed and I'd wake up at 6:30, rollover, throw a hat on and go to this 7:00 AM 12-Step meeting every single day. It met seven days a week. I would go there. I would get together with my sponsor, maybe have breakfast. Sometimes, we'd go to 10:00 AM meetings. Sometimes we'd go to a 12:30 meeting. I'd go home, I'd take a nap, shower, and catch the bus to work. That's what I did for my first nine months in recovery. Everything that I did was recovery-related.
Patrick Balsley on Life in Recovery
Sam Hampson:
These are the pieces that are really important to cover, because I think you spelled it out perfectly when you said the first time you got sober, got out of treatment, there's the full intention of staying sober. Like there's no desire in you to use, but that's just not enough to stay sober. If it is, it can be sobriety temporarily, but it's certainly not recovery. I think those are the pieces of your story that are so powerful. Just all of the work that you did to enter a life of recovery that's different than just being able to hang on and stay sober that day. Can you talk a little bit just about some of the discoveries that you made along the way that were really important components for your life in recovery?
Patrick Balsley:
The first big realization that I had, and this happened to me in treatment. I came across this realization that I had absolutely no clue what was going on. I had no idea how to live as a functional adult in society. I had no idea how to be responsible. I haven't a clue how to do anything. What I also realized is not only did I not have a clue, I didn't know anything. Like, I had no structure psychologically to really come up with a good reason to live. I had no purpose. I had no meaning in my life. I had no values. I had no plans of what I wanted to do. I didn't know what I liked. I had no clue where I wanted to go.
Sam Hampson:
And you were how old?
Patrick Balsley:
I was 28 years old.
Except the only thing that I did know is that I did not want to go back to the way I was living. But what that did is it opened me up to learning all kinds of really cool new stuff that I didn't know existed. It opened my mind and I was very fortunate. The 12-Step thing was great in the beginning, but even Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, like there's a quote in a book called As Bill Sees It where he says that AA is spiritual kindergarten. It's just the beginning. I was very lucky that I had a couple of teachers and mentors early on in my recovery that made that a really, really solid point. It was like, "Dude, there's so much more that you haven't even come close to exploring yet and it's there for the taking."
Once I started feeling better and started to realize that there was a lot of information out there that could open my mind and my heart and helped me feel better, I just went nuts. I don't think I read a chapter in a book my entire life until I got sober. Reading wasn't a thing. I couldn't pay attention. I didn't want to engage. But once I found something that I felt was valuable in helping me get out of this hell hole, I went crazy. It got to the point, I was reading spiritual recovery related literature probably three or four hours a day. Any kind of downtime I had, my face was in a book and thank God this was before iPhones and all that crap.
I took that very seriously, and I started studying all kinds of stuff. The 12-Step programs opened me up to this idea of self-awareness and self-exploration and redemption. I cleaned up my side of the street, figured out my assets and liabilities and how to balance those things appropriately, and then I dove into all kinds of crazy meditation stuff. I studied Buddhism and a couple of different sects of Hinduism and Taoism. Really went a lot around the Eastern philosophy route and read all kinds of cool stuff and listened to all kinds of neat teachers talk, and went on some meditation retreats. I was really lucky to have some awesome teachers in South Florida during my early recovery. We do these like shamanic journeys and lots of Native American and Central and South American stuff. Did a lot of really neat things that I was never exposed to. I didn't even know they existed. I didn't know these philosophies existed. I didn't know these ways of looking at the world existed. But it gave me a psychological structure to start working from piecing together my values and really my worldview.
Sam Hampson:
What did you start to discover about who you were and what you liked?
Patrick Balsley:
That's a tough topic to wrap words around.
Sam Hampson:
Well, because it's ongoing, right?
It's not a one-time event, but I think early in recovery, like you said, you start to get to expose to so many of these other things where, if you have no clue what you like and you have no idea who you are, it's like you get to start to create it rather than find it.
Patrick Balsley:
One of the most interesting parts about recovery is that whoever you thought you were needs to be deconstructed first.
It brought me to a point of emptiness and I had this clean slate. It was like, "Do I exist? Do I not?" I don't want to get too philosophical, but there's two levels to it, for me. There's this spiritual, philosophical idea of who I am and this idea of I'm pure consciousness. I'm experiencing itself and unfolding every moment. But then there's the individual level like, "Yeah, my name's Patrick Balsley and I live on planet earth. I'm a father and a husband and a friend and a member of the community," like that. So it's hard to discern between those two levels, and I went back and forth for a long time, and this was actually a thought of mine in early recovery, like, "Do I want to move to Tibet and live in a cave and meditate all day? Or, do I want to plant my feet flat on the ground and live in this world?" Obviously, I chose the latter and here we are. But a lot of those philosophical beliefs and experiences, it's given me a solid route of peace in my life to where no matter what's going on in this physical world that I'm living in, I can always sit back in that respite and relax. You can align that with faith, too, in a sense.
It's like I have this underlying structure of where I can sit back and just watch everything unfold, which is really powerful.
Creating a Fulfilling Life on Your Journey to Wellness
Sam Hampson:
When I hear you talk about it being an active addiction, the words emotional unavailability come to mind. Like, you're just so checked out and you're so unavailable to yourself and to others. Can you talk a little bit about what relationships became and how they started to develop once you were emotionally available?
Patrick Balsley:
Yeah, this comes back to the idea of having this clean slate. I was so alive and grateful to be alive during the beginning of my recovery that there was not a lot of wanting going on. I was so present and wide awake and paying attention to everything, and because of the environment that I was in, being in South Florida, the rehab capital of the world, there's all these people around me that are hurting and suffering. I'm swallowing this spiritual literature at a crazy rate, so I got all this stuff. Did I want to just spit out and share and give to people?" and that became my life. For the first few years of my recovery, that's all I did. It wasn't about, "Okay, what do I want to do for a career? What do I want to do for my family?" All this stuff.
The only thing I did, I played basketball sometimes, but the rest of my time was spent in meetings, working with other guys, going back to the treatment center that I went to and picking kids up and taking them to meetings and building these relationships. But it was like everywhere I looked, I could see people hurting and I could see people that needed help, and it was impossible for me at that time not to engage in that. Through that, I started building these amazing relationships with people because I was meeting them in these really vulnerable states. I was able to share with them what I had just been through, how vulnerable I was, and the bonds and the connections made through that honest and vulnerable communication, it's stronger than anything you'll ever experience. I started to see the value in it because I saw that I was giving people hope by sharing my experience with them, and I was getting better through that. I was meeting all these really awesome people that lived the same way that I lived, that were now moving into this life of discovery and recovery and building lives for themselves.
So it was just this really neat thing to be a part of and I realized at that point, I was like, "Why would I not want to do this the rest of my life?" At nine months sober, I started working in a treatment center. I don't know, I probably had 11 months sober and started working in a treatment center as a behavioral health tech. I was so eager to learn, I would sit with the therapists, I would sit in on groups like a sponge. I would have these conversations with some of the therapists about some of the philosophies or some of the things that they were presenting to the clients and I'd stay up at night thinking about, "All right, how can I make this better? How can we connect with these people that aren't buying into what you're selling?" Because that was one of the main issues that I saw early on was that there were some major barriers to people getting better, that the whole God thing and the 12-Step world was a major barrier. The whole idea that you had to admit that you were an alcoholic or an addict was a major barrier.
They were non-starters for a lot of people. So I became obsessed with, "All right, how do we remove these barriers so we can help people wherever they're at?" I tried to apply all this philosophical and spiritual stuff to be able to do that, and then I leveraged my ability to connect with people through my experience, and I got with some teachers and some other therapists down there. One of my mentors and I essentially revamped the essence of the step process, or we extracted the essence of the step process and took out the whole God piece and the whole you got to be an alcoholic or addict piece, and made it more about health and wellness, about, "All right, let's figure out what you want, how we're going to get there, and let's remove everything from your life that's stopping you," which is essentially what the 12-Steps does.
So I got obsessed with the process and I got encouraged to go back to school, became a counselor and got hired immediately in an outpatient program down in Florida. They gave me one client at a time and I would immediately go into supervision afterwards, and dissect my session and make sure I wasn't hurting anybody. That's how it went for like six months. I was so lucky, I was just surrounded by these really talented clinicians in a relatively new organization. They were in it for the right reasons. They wanted to create a culture and a place for people to heal, and they were in recovery. It was really cool.
Then it went on from there and I helped open another program that they opened. I didn't do much to help, but I was there and I was lucky to be a part of it and worked in primary treatment for about three and a half years, and then decided that it was time to go out on my own. I was lucky enough, Steve Scanlan, Dr. Scanlan that was on Episode Two, Champagne on the Brain, he took me under his wing and I worked on his office for a while and built my private practice as I was doing some groups for treatment centers and teaching mindfulness and teaching meditation, and built a book of practice around that, and was very, very lucky that things worked out the way that they did professionally.
Patrick Balsley on Finding A Purpose
Sam Hampson:
I was so impressed by your ability to inspire people to want something more and better, and you're able to bottle up that wide awakeness that you experienced from such deep pain. You're able to bottle it up and teach people how to access that without the pain part, without having to experience what you did. I think that piece is so beautiful when folks are stuck and that doesn't have to be an active addiction. I think it's any spectrum of people suffering or using things to make them feel different.
You're the one that always comes to mind who can really help inspire, like, "I'm not going to be here to sit here and tell you what is wrong about what you're doing, I just want to help paint the picture that there's hope of so much more for you and here's what it could look like and here's how we could do it." I'm curious for you, do you think about that consciously? Is it something that you are just able to naturally do in the way that you work with clients? Or, do you really intentionally bottle that up and speak it into how do you become wide awake and mindful in relationships, in work, in your life and how do you grow? I've just always been so curious about how that has developed for you over time, through like coming from your personal story and really shining through in your professional work.
Patrick Balsley:
I'm like a mutt. I use all these different therapeutic modalities and it comes from all these different theoretical places. But I was having a conversation with my buddy, Tripp Johnson, from Green Hill a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about this. I was like, "Dude, I don't know what I do." I was like, "People come into my office, they say some stuff, and then something comes out." It's just like, it's like this organic process for me. It's like all I do is I just try to be as wide open as possible and I try to listen to people. But, and I don't want to sound cheesy, but like I do it from my heart.
Sam Hampson:
You live it.
Patrick Balsley:
I'm not dissecting or like analyzing, and I have all this information that I've gathered over the last 10 years that I've read or experienced and then it's synthesized inside me in a way to where, when people come to me or they articulate or try to articulate what's going on with them, whatever is inside of me just responds to that somehow. I've always been a pretty optimistic guy my entire life. There's been, when it comes to the idea of inspiration, I'm a pretty big believer in the idea that everybody is suffering to some degree. If you're honest with yourself, you can admit to the fact that your life could be better than it is, and I think I talked about this with Robbie on the spirituality episode, but if you really want to be honest, you could be a better human being than you're being, you know?
I have to remind myself that every day. It's like, "Dude, there's so much, there's more to life," and when you talk about relationships, I mean, that's everything to me.
Sam Hampson:
That's the reason it feels so bottled up from your "spiritual awakening" is because you continue to live it and you continue to practice it, and that's what I think really shines through in your work, in your relationships. Even just in conversations when we have coffee, that's what it feels like you still live this, and you really still tried to practice this on a daily basis. So it's almost like you don't have to teach it because you're just modeling it, anyway. Like no matter what comes out of your mouth, you're still modeling that you think that you could be a better human and you're going to try to do that today. One of my questions for you is just like what do you want your legacy to be? I'm not going to decide that for you, but if I had to, I'd be like, "This is your legacy." Like, "You bottling it up and living it and sharing it with others is the tangible piece of my relationship with you." But for you, is there an intentional thing that you really want people to have shared about you, say about you, like the legacy that you want to leave behind?
Patrick Balsley:
This almost brings tears to my eyes because I never really think about this, but I'm just really fortunate to be invited to this mentorship group that I'm doing. It's this entire year that I'm in with some really awesome people and our last month's meeting, it was just on Monday night, and it was all about purpose and what your purpose as a human. We had to read this really cool book and I suggest it to anybody that wants to really figure that out in their life or maybe add some new directions called The On Purpose Person. I had to come up with a purpose statement, and it was out of this book. It was structured as, "I exist to serve by ..." and I had to answer that question in two words.
The best thing that I could come up with was this idea of I exist to serve by honoring connection. I think that that's what I do best is, we're all connected on the deepest level. We're all connected, like conceptually. But, for some reason, I feel that experientially on a pretty high level. I mean, I can engage with anybody and be with them for a couple minutes and feel my connection to them and vice-versa, I think. So that's probably what I would want my legacy to be is “that guy made me feel better than I did before I came into contact with him.”
But right now we have a big problem in our culture, in our society. There are kids dying at an alarming rate and the drugs on the street are extremely potent and dangerous and are everywhere, and it's really freaking scary and it's really, really sad. All of this stuff could be prevented and that's where I want to focus all my attention and my energy, and if I can do that by modeling recovery, great. But, I still beat the shit out of myself on a daily basis of like, "Dude, you could do so much more than you're doing," and a lot of it has to do with structuring my time and focusing my attention on the pieces that really matter and that are aligned with my values.
But in order to make the type of change that we need to make, I gotta do it in my family first, and then if that happens, we move out to the community, which we're doing with this podcast in a sense. We're giving people information and hopefully creating a space where they have enough courage to have some tough conversations within their family or within their relationships or community. But we are still at the infancy of this thing. We have a major substance use problem in our culture. It gets really, really bad.
It's everywhere. This is a cultural issue, and I think we have a long way to go at really articulating what we're dealing with because we pay so much attention to the substances and, "Oh, this is bad. Oh, that's bad." Well, what's really bad is the fact that we got a whole bunch of people that are trying to check out.
Get Curious on Your Journey to Wellness
Sam Hampson:
Right. I think that leads perfectly into… We ask all of the guests that we have on the podcast, to wrap up, we ask them all this one question and I'm so interested to hear your answer to it because I think you just led perfectly into it. Just, if you were to encourage our listeners to ask themselves one question about their journey and get curious, what would it be?
Patrick Balsley:
This is really tough and there's a bunch of different stuff that comes to mind. I love your legacy question. My God, I think that's a great question. I mean like, are you being the person that you want people to remember you as? I think that's a really, really solid question.
I can't really answer that one thing. I want to say, "Who are you?"
Sam Hampson:
But I think that the legacy goes with it, right? I think that's the perfect answer for you because that's what you live. That's how you live. That's how you interact with others.
Patrick Balsley:
Yeah. I mean, are you being the best version of yourself that you could be?
Sam Hampson:
Yeah. What pockets can you get curious about if the answer's no, right? That's the whole journey. Patrick, I think this has always been important to me and I can't wait to continue to do some of these deeper dives, because when people are able to share all of the intimate details about their journey and share what really works for them today and what they really keep close to their heart and what they consider on a daily basis, we really start to break open that connection, right? Like that's what helps us feel like we're connected to other humans, we share the same stories, we share the same struggles, and I'm just really excited that our listeners have gotten that peek through the window into your story, because it's something that I admire a lot about you.
Patrick Balsley:
Thank you. This has been nice. I think that connection piece is something that I always try to pay attention to, like, how much time am I spending talking to myself in my head compared to how much time am I spending engaged in life? When I say life, I'm talking about actually paying attention to what's going on because that's where the fruit is. Like we can sit up in our heads and think about all kinds of shit and ruminate and come up with all these plans and wants and desires, and then we talk ourselves out of it or we get stuck. Through that intention and attention, good stuff always comes from that because that's where that connection happens. If we can just pay attention to the things that are going on around us a little bit more, I think that's where the magic happens.
Sam Hampson:
Well, hopefully our listeners feel a little more connected to your story. And there's your takeaway for today, guys. Just get connected, get engaged, be present in the moment, and you'll pretty much always be gifted with the return. Thanks Patrick, appreciate you.
Robbie Shaw:
The information and opinions shared on this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and are not a substitute for medical advice. If you feel like you may need professional help, here are some resources: For the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration hotline, call 1-800-662-4357 or visit smsa.gov. For listeners in the Charlotte, North Carolina community, visit DilworthCenter.org or call 704-372-6969; or visit theBlanchardInstitute.com or call 704-288-1097.