 Even as a youngster, I was around in an environment where there was alcohol, there was drug use, there was teenagers drinking older than me. That was very really young, under 10. Growing up in an environment like that, the odds are against you. You learn to adapt. From a beautiful class, a little boy became this thing I didn't even know. I never really thought I was a drug addict, I just thought I liked to party. As I got older and older, I started to fall into a more sort of organised group. You get caught with a gun and you go to jail, that's just the way it is. And so there was the longest time in the last 12 years that I'd been sober for. When I got out, I was on parole. I was forced to be sober. Two years sober on Wednesday, 13th of May, life's getting better. My mum actually messaged me yesterday and she said, do you realise you're three years sober? Three years as of May 13, 2013. This video is very important to me. It's that time of the year again when I'm another year where I haven't touched any alcohol, meth or other hard drugs. So four years sober for me now. This is going to 100% be an emotional video for me. And anyone out there that can empathise with a hard journey like staying sober. I've been sober now for six years. Everyone, welcome to today's video. As you can see, there's a massive smile on my face because today is May 13th and it marks my seven years sober anniversary. Really happy this year. I'm really moving towards the 10 years sober mark. What a journey it's been. I remember getting on YouTube for my two years sober. You know, I'm a different person now. I've evolved a lot. I've come through a lot of struggles in my life. If you've been following me for a while, you probably know about my story. But what I want to talk about today is how does something like this start? Like how does drug addiction start? Why do people start taking drugs? Why did I start taking drugs? I can talk from my perspective. So for me, as a young kid, you know, I was around, you know, alcohol in the house. The family life wasn't stable. There was partying at the house at a young age. You know, there were things that happened that I saw and that caused me some childhood trauma. My parents weren't perfect. I don't think anyone's parents are. My mum was a beautiful, strong woman. She tried her best with the life that she was given. But I was exposed to some things as a youngster that probably I shouldn't have been. And this helped to shape my path, I believe. I first got drunk when I was probably about 10 years old, grabbing beers at a party. You know, and I started to get interested in, you know, escaping reality and things like that. But when I went to high school, you know, I was about 14 years old. I started hanging around with a couple of guys who were smoking weed and doing all those things and getting involved with the little street gangs and all that kind of riff-raff. And I really liked escaping reality. I liked smoking weed, escaping reality, having a bit of fun, drinking alcohol because it gave me confidence and all these things. And maybe I was masking a little bit of childhood trauma there, but I got into amphetamines at a really young age. Like I'm talking 14, 15, I was using meth and ecstasy and all of these drugs. And so that's how I sort of began. When my mind was still developing at a young age, I was getting into all the drugs and started hanging around with little street gangs and doing all those things. This is where it starts and then it progressively got worse. You see, I was more susceptible to addiction than others. I had a predisposition to it. You know, then I started to get involved with the violence and the gangs and things progressed and got worse and my mental state was unstable. And I became aggressive and violent to overcompensate for the bullying and the environment that I was in. You know, I tried to harden myself, firepull, be overly aggressive to deal with situations because I didn't want to be a victim. You know, this is how the violence starts to get worse and worse and you start getting involved in more serious acts of violence. You know, you get a reputation and you know, you do things when you're drunk and you know, smash a party up. And there was a lot of things going on in my youth. And it was just normal. It was just normal where I'm from for that stuff to happen. This was the type of environment that was shaping me and the drug use and the alcohol use was sort of supporting this crazy lifestyle and it was masking all of my traumas. A lot of people who get addicted to drugs and substances might have traumas they're trying to mask. They like themselves on drugs better or they like the way that it helps them escape reality and who they are. Drugs shape your perception. They shape your perception of yourself and when you've got negative people around you too that are using drugs, this all adds to it. The thing about addiction is when you're not drunk or when you're not on some type of substance, you have to face all of these inner demons. You have to go, wow, who am I? And you might have anxiety and you might have things you haven't dealt with and you don't want to deal with them. So you go back to the drugs and a lot of these substances are highly addictive, alcohols addictive, amphetamines are obviously addictive, things like downers like, you know, Xanax and Valumes and all of these things. They take away your anxiety almost immediately. So if you've got anxiety and depression and things like that, these substances, these, you know, uppers or downers, they help to mask those things. With the drug use, obviously I started to sell a bit of drugs to make money for more drugs and, you know, it's kind of spirals out of control. I hit rock bottom a few times in my life. Hitting rock bottom is where like, you really have sunken so deep into a hole that you don't know how to get out of it and drugs usually get you there. First the drugs work, then the drugs got working and you start to use more and more and more and you get to a point where you're smashing in so many drugs and you just, you know, you're at the bottom of this hole, depressed and there's no way out and the drugs won't even get you out of it anymore. Hitting rock bottom is where you are close to committing suicide. You think suicide's the only way out. Well, I thought suicide was one way out and, you know, you sort of come to this conclusion and you're like, well, maybe if I just killed myself, all this would go away and all my problems would be gone. What rock bottom can do is it can make you realize. So if you have enough clarity when you hit that rock bottom, it can make you realize, wow, this is what rock bottom feels like. Do I really want to be back here? Do I really want to be back here? Now the effect my drug use and alcohol use had on my family and my mum and especially my mum was horrible. It was horrible. Like, I turned into this really aggressive monster and, you know, was paranoid and afraid all the time. I was constantly getting in violent altercations coming at home and I'd, you know, blood or split up head or, you know, I'd have a weapon on me or something like that. And my mum would look at me and even close friends would look at my face and they couldn't even recognize me. You know, they seen just a gaunt, you know, just a ghost of who I was. And I remember coming home once and my dad and my mum were sitting at the table and I was really paranoid. I was thinking, oh, my phone's bugged and people are following me. And I remember my mum just looking at me and just started crying. And my dad didn't really say anything. He was just, you know, sitting there in his wisdom. But my mum was crying because she couldn't even look at me. And I had really close friends of mine for years that couldn't even face me when I was at that stage. It broke their hearts so much to see me just a shell of who I was. And this is what drug addiction does to you. It takes away your personality. It takes away, you know, your own perception of yourself. You don't see it when you're on the inside of this world. You don't see it when you're on the inside of this addiction. But all your friends and family can see it. Really hard the toll it takes not just on the individual, not just on me, but on the people around me, which was really not what I wanted to do. I wanted to help my family and help the people around me and be a good friend. But the drugs weren't allowing me to do that. So what does it take to change? What does it take to get out of, you know, this mess, this hole that you're in? Now, one of the fundamental things for me was going to prison and staying sober in prison. So when I went to house arrest, I was still on all the drugs. I could still get access to drugs and alcohol when I was still in the gangs and I was still around all the same people when I was still partying hard. And but when I went to prison to serve my sentence, there was less access to drugs. You could still get them, but you don't want to be seen as the drug user in the prison. You want to be seen as someone who trains and keeps his head down, especially in the gang world. I wanted to keep my head together. I wanted to be able to know what's going on in the prison. I didn't want to become a victim in the prison either. I wanted to stay switched on. So I stayed off of the drugs and I exercised. The fundamental thing, though, was changing the environment I was in. I had less access to drugs. So if you're in an environment where you can access drugs very easily, say, I know that not everyone has a ticket out of their neighborhood. This is really hard for some people who aren't in privileged positions where they can just, you know, leave their neighborhood and go where they want. But I would seriously start thinking about that. Even if you have to leave your neighborhood and go on welfare somewhere else and just get like a government housing, if you have to. This is a really important view to stay away from the people who can give you access to the drugs and the social setting. But for me, what took me out of the environment was the prison. The prison took me out of my environment on the streets and it put me in four walls where I just had a TV and, you know, ground to do push-ups on and a bit of food here and there. And I stayed sober for the whole time of my prison sentence for the six months that I was in there. And when I was released, I was released on parole. I'd never saw things more clearly than this six months that I'd been in prison without drugs for the last 12 years of my life. I'd always been on some type of substance. So this was huge for me. This was a massive transformation for me. And when I got out on parole, the gangs were still operating. There was things going on everywhere. And, you know, I couldn't breach my parole. The parole gave me another barrier. And by the time my parole was up, I hadn't touched any drugs or alcohol for that whole time. So we're talking 13 months here. So I was already one year sober. I was already well on my way. You know, once you get through that first year, you're well on your way. The first year is the hardest. It's not just being sober. When you've gone through 12 years of craziness and violence and gangs and you've got childhood trauma and addiction and you were suicidal and doing all these crazy things and self-harming and all of this, you're going to suffer some PTSD from that. You can't go through a decade of that craziness and seeing extreme levels of violence, extreme levels of violence, suffering and, you know, taking so many drugs that you're paranoid and you're seeing this suffering and committing violence. And it's like you're in a war zone. Although physical health, I was eating vegan. I was eating lots of raw fruits and vegetables. I was getting sunshine. I was exercising. I was staying by myself and I'd ride my bike around. I was really extremely anxious because I'd left the gangs and I didn't have access to weapons that I wanted or I did have access to weapons. I just refused to carry them because I didn't want to go back to prison. These things all helped, but I was still having crazy nightmares. I still had very bad paranoia of enemies and opposing gangs and all of these things. I still had deep trauma. What I had to really do, and this only happened a couple of years ago, was I started doing PTSD therapy. My therapy really took me from, you know, just being sober and dealing with all my traumas to actually attacking the trauma from its roots and releasing it. I would highly recommend anyone who's gone through long-term drug addiction, who's been involved with gangs or even some type of traumatic scenarios, get PTSD therapy. Now the thing that I was diagnosed with was complex PTSD. So I had multiple instances of trauma all meshed together. Just imagine one instance of trauma like a car accident or something like that. You see a shooting. There's one instance of trauma. It's easier for the therapist to attack, but when you've got multiple instances of trauma, childhood trauma, things happening all throughout your teenage years, up into your adulthood, that's a much more complicated thing to treat. So it's going to take a lot more work. This is where my true healing took place. This is where I really started to heal the wounds. Now I'm not completely okay, but I'm 80% better from where I was, just from doing a year straight of PTSD therapy. And meditation was key in that just really focusing on healing was really key. So I would highly recommend for someone who wants to stay sober and they don't want to go back to their addictions is to deal with their traumas, that they might be using their addictions to mask. That they're 100%, it truly saved me doing my therapy. I can't thank my therapist enough. It was really hard for me to open up to someone this deeply, but especially because I've been so used to masking all of my things and covering them up. That was my way of coping with it, but that's not the best way to heal. That just tucks it away and you're going to get nightmares. You're going to get triggered and react to your environment in a certain way. So 100% please, with your sobriety, change your environment. Get out of that environment where you have easy access to drugs. Some you have to try to find a way to change your environment. It will save your life. Exercise and eat healthy, plant-based foods, getting sunshine, meditation, and get into therapy. You have to learn to trust your therapist. If you don't like your therapist, find one that you can trust and you have to open up. If you have to do group sessions with people and just really get that stuff out of you, it's no good inside of you. This is like a cancer inside of you or to eat you apart. Time doesn't heal trauma. No amount of time is going to heal the trauma. It will stay with you until you target it and release it. I really wanted to spend this video giving you advice on how you can make the steps to become sober too. A lot of my following probably is already sober. You might have a friend or family member or a brother or something who's going down the wrong track or has gone down the wrong track and needs a little bit further advice on how they can stay on track. One of the most important things for me was living a life of purpose and finding out about what happens to animals and finding these victims that I could speak up for. So I was no longer the victim. I was no longer a victim of my circumstance and I pour me and look what happened to me and look at how my circumstances led me down this track and all the bad things I've done. It was the animals that were the victim and they needed my voice. So I had to shape up and speak up for those animals. It was really this driving purpose that gave me meaning, gave my life meaning and gave me something to stay sober for as well. So I highly recommend whatever it is for you. Like you might want to go and help other people or children or something outside of yourself. There's many things that you can do to live a life of purpose. It might be family for you. That might be you want to be the best father or mother or brother or sister. You want to help the elderly. Whatever it is, it should be something other than yourself to focus on. So you're not constantly in your own victimhood. You're actually using your experience and what you've been through to be there for other people and that's a huge thing that's going to help you. Helping others is helping yourself. I just want to say thank you for everyone who supported me along the way. Thank you so much to my family. They dealt with a lot with me and I'm so glad that I haven't pushed them so far away. They never want to talk to me again. But my family and friends have seen my transformation and I hope I've redeemed myself. Now it's seven years. I remember making my first Facebook post six months sober and people were just, yeah, whatever Joey, you're talking shit. You're not going to stay sober. This is just a short-term thing. But here we are seven years down the track and I'm still on, still going. Still haven't touched a drop of alcohol. Alcohol was the demon for me. It really was. It was a devil. And you know, these drugs, they don't help you mate. They just make things worse. Nothing ever good has come out of me using these hardcore substances like amphetamines and alcohol. Nothing good has ever come out of me hiding my emotions and how I feel about things with drugs and suppressing how I feel. And this all just aggravates things and you might, you might tuck it away for the moment but mate, that thing's going to grow and you're going to create a monster inside yourself that you won't be able to fix. Live a life of purpose. Change your environment and your social setting and the people that you're hanging around with. You know, think about yourself and once you've dealt with your own life then you can go out to help others and this is an amazing way to live your life. So I've chosen animals because animals can't speak for themselves. They need someone to defend them. I've used my experience in, you know, dealing with aggression and violence. I've used that to be a strong voice for the animals and take on any criticism that comes my way. But whatever your purpose is, you know, please live it. You only get one life. You don't want to live it completely messed out of your mind and living through hell. I know some people's circumstances won't allow them to leave. That's really sad. But there's always a way, okay? Where there's a will, there's a way. So I hope this video inspires you or your family member or whoever it is to stay on track. If I can stay sober and I can, you know, build my life back up, anyone can. All right, guys, thanks for watching. I love you all. See you all in the next video. Here's to another seven years sober. Peace. You know, everything that you do in this universe, it ripples throughout. So you're affecting more than just yourself. And I think when you're just drunk and pissed all the time or whatever, you're just ignorant to the fact that you're hurting people around you that love you. Making the same mistakes over and over again and not learning from them. So never ending circle. It's a roundabout that you need to put your indicator on and turn off of it. I love myself, but I love my family too. And I don't want to put them through that sort of hell again. And I think that, you know, that's more important than temporary satisfaction from a few beers or... You want to take action in your life and, you know, affect others around you positively. And that's a gift you can sort of give back. It's never too late to change your ways. It's never too late. So whatever hole you're in, you can pull yourself out of that man because anything is possible.