 A lot of people don't know this, but I'm actually supposed to have an older brother. 34 years ago, just a few days after he was born, my mom lost her first son. So, six years ago, my mom got a phone call from the hospital that I had a 10% chance of living and I was about to die. But luckily, she helped save my life. What's up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there. But this is a video dedicated to my mama, all right? And it's another beautiful day in mental health awareness month. So, please, please, please do me a favor and share this video because I'm going to be talking about how I was a hopeless drug addict waiting to die and my mom helped save my life. So, this video might actually help some families out there regain hope and not lose the person that they love to their addiction. And it might also create some empathy and awareness as to what addicts are going through, as well as how you can help them once they get sober, all right? So, yeah, anyways, six years ago, I was in the UMC hospital here in Las Vegas, and my mom gets a phone call telling her to come down because I'm probably not going to live through the night. I was 26 years old, had congestive heart failure. My heart was the size of my lung. And I was ready to die. I was like, give up on me. Just give up, let me die. But luckily, my mom didn't. And she decided to take me back to beautiful Fresno, California. But what she didn't know was when she went to go get that rental car, I had my drug dealer come down to the hospital and deliver me some drugs. That's right. I was in the cardiac critical care unit, hooked up to all these heart monitors and IVs and things like that. And I had my drug dealer pretend to be a visitor and he brought me a bunch of morphine pills. And I snuck those out to California because if you're a drug addict like I used to be, you can't go on vacation without a supply, right? But luckily, my mom found a few days into that because I probably would be dead right now. One morning I woke up and my mom told me that she found the pills and threw them away and she gave me an ultimatum. She said, you're either going to sober living or you're going back to Las Vegas. And if I would have come back to Las Vegas, I would have been homeless on the streets in 115 degree weather. So as scary as it was to get clean, that was a lot scarier, right? But I begged and I pleaded with her. I didn't want to go into sober living. I wanted to stay clean my own way and I begged. I begged, I begged. And something I share about is that I hope nobody out there struggling with addiction has to go through what I did. I saw the look in my mom's eyes that she was ready to let me die. And that's crazy. That's crazy. That's something that nobody should ever see in their own mother's eyes. And it troubled me for a long time knowing that my mom already lost a son and I was putting her through this again. My mom had been worried for years that she was going to lose me too. But one of the ways I make that up to her is by staying clean today. On my 27th birthday, my mom told me, helping you get clean is the best birthday present I can give you. And she has tears in her eyes. And I'm looking at her like, why don't you go f*** yourself, right? And the reason I share that, the reason I always share that as part of my story is if anybody out there, if you're early in recovery and you don't want to do this, if you don't want to stay clean and sober, welcome. Welcome to the club. Because I'm living proof that even if you don't want to stay clean, something might happen. Something might happen. I don't know when, but something might happen where this switch flips and you get hope that you can live an incredible life and that's what happened to me. All right? I had no intentions on staying clean. Okay? But here's some of the ways that my mom helped encourage me to stay sober and give me hope and motivation and all these things. So one of the issues that I struggled with that a lot of people struggle with, especially in early recovery, is that I always thought that I was the smartest guy on earth. At any given moment, no matter what room I'm in, I am probably the smartest person, right? But let's take a step back real quick. So in reality, I went to college for a semester. Okay? I went to college for a semester before dropping out. And I didn't want to go to meetings or do what anybody told me to because who are you? Who are you to think that you know better than I do? I'm really, really smart. But I had to look at it. I had to look at it because at this time, my mom had seven years sober. And now I'm sitting there analyzing my mom. I'm like, okay. So this woman has a PhD in psychology, right? A PhD, the highest degree that you can get in psychology and she specializes in addiction. But she was able to humble herself by going to a 12-step program and asking somebody to sponsor her and teach her how to stay sober. So if somebody as smart as my mom can humble themselves and ask for help and take suggestions, who the hell am I to think that I'm too smart for this thing? There's a saying out there where they say, nobody is too stupid to stay clean and sober but there's a lot of people too smart, right? I see a lot of people who are way too smart to think that this thing can work for them or to take any suggestions. So when I kind of realized that and had that aha moment, I'm like, I need to humble myself and start taking suggestions, okay? The next thing was, my mom showed me what it was like to have fun in sobriety, which was crazy too because like my mom, you know, she's like 20 or 30 years old of me. Sorry mom, I don't know your exact age but anyways, my mom would drag me to different 12-step events. She would encourage me to hang out with my friends and stay up with them all night playing board games and stuff like that because my mom was trying to show me that you can't have fun sober and that's really important because I never wanted to get sober because I have this crazy brain that tells me you can't have fun without drugs and alcohol even though in reality my idea of fun was sitting in a dark apartment crushing and snorting pills off my desk watching Netflix by myself. That was a blast to me, right? But through her help, she was able to show me that you can have a ton of fun in sobriety. Now the next thing was I'm a pain pill addict, okay? I could stub my toe and I need to snort some oxys, right? But during that summer when I first got clean, my mom was chasing my little squirrely nephew around the water park and she tore a bunch of ligaments in her knee. And man, I don't even know how long it was. It was like, it was months. It was months until she was able to get surgery. And my mom is hobbling around. I'm like, mom, get some pain meds, some Percocets, some Vicodin, some something, right? Like I said, I'll use over any reason and now my mom has a legitimate reason. Like this is your excuse to use. But my mom, her recovery was so important to her that she decided to manage her pain in other ways. One of them was through ibuprofen, right? But even still when she finally got that surgery when they cut open her knee to repair the ligaments in her knee, they sent her off with a bottle of pain pills even though she told her doctor that she's an addict in recovery and can't take them. They still gave them to her. So what my mom did was she went over to my grandma's house. She had my grandma dispose of these pills, right? And all my mom took was ibuprofen. I'm like, oh my God, right? Because one of my reservations was about staying clean was well, if I ever get hurt, I'm definitely taking pain meds. But my mom proved to me that even if something like that happens to me, I don't have to take pain meds. So a couple years later when I got into my first ever car accident and they tried to prescribe me pain pills, I took ibuprofen instead. And look at me, I'm still alive today. So thank you mom for showing me that. The next thing that she taught me was that our recovery has to come first. So unfortunately, six months after I got sober, it was just a couple of days after Christmas, my mom's best friend passed away and he was like an uncle to me, right? But seven years prior when my mom got sober, she had to distance herself from him. She knew that if she kept hanging out with her best friend that she's known since she was a kid, if she kept hanging out with him, she was probably going to relapse and lose her life. So she separated herself and loved him from a distance. She always had her hand out there and said, look, if you want to get sober, I can help. And she tried to help, but unfortunately he didn't take that help. But that was such an important lesson to me that we have to do whatever it takes to stay sober. And sometimes that means cutting out friends and family members. I have clients all the time and they say, what, what? I can't cut out my best friend or my family member. I've known him my whole life. And I'm like, the hell you can't. And it's something that my mom taught me and it's something that I had to do too. When I got sober, my best friend, my best friend was still active in his addiction, right? And I knew, based on my mom's example that I had to cut ties with him, I had to separate myself from him. You know what I mean? And because I was able to do that, he's coming up on three years sober. Because when he made the call to me and asked for help, I dropped what I was doing the same way my mom did and I drove him to rehab and he's still clean to this day. But think about that for a second. If I didn't stay sober, I wouldn't have been able to help my friend. If my mom hadn't gotten sober 12 years ago, she would have never been able to help me, right? My son is only nine years old and something that I worry about is, is he going to develop an addiction? It pretty much runs in our family. But I know as long as I stay clean and sober, I might be able to help this kid out. The next thing is, like I want to make it clear, like my mom and my relationship, it didn't repair itself just magically overnight. Even though she helped save my life, I had a ton of resentments, a ton of resentments. Okay, she didn't get sober until I was 20 years old. So like, I had so much going on inside of me that I had to deal with. And I say this, like I'm both fortunate and unfortunate to have an alcoholic mom because since my mom had already been through this, she, she had so much empathy for what I was going through. She understood and she stuck by me through all of my ups and downs and emotional outbursts and screaming that I did it and all these things because she had been there too. And she stayed by me no matter what. And this is something that I'm very fortunate for because I know a lot of addicts and alcoholics who do not have that kind of support. They have friends and family members or parents who don't understand the disease of addiction. But my mom does and I'm very, very fortunate for that, you know? But it took time for us to heal our relationship. There were even times when I had to stop talking to my mom for weeks or even months at a time. I'm like, look mom, I love you. But there's stuff going on within me that I need to heal from. And now we have this amazing relationship. We're like best friends today. And I'm so grateful that when she's having a rough day, she can call me and talk to me and we can talk recovery. She actually works in the same industry. She works at a rehab. I work at a rehab and we can talk about our rough days. And something that I really get a kick out of is quoting the AA Big Book to her because that's stuff that she used to always do to me when I first got clean. And now I can flip it on her. She's like, er, but it's fun. It's great. And you know, like today, like one of our dreams is that, you know, someday we can actually open up some kind of treatment center together because she's still in California. I'm in Las Vegas. And you know, we wish we could do more work together long distance. But if any of you want to know where my hustle and my hard work comes from, it's my mom. My mom has set the bar for me. My mom works her butt off because she's as passionate as I am or even more passionate than I am about helping other people repair their lives and overcome their addiction and deal with mental health issues and stuff like that. So my mom actually helps motivate me because I see how hard she hustles. All right. But anyways, I hope you enjoyed this mom. I love you. Happy Mother's Day. All right. But all of the rest of you out there, if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and don't forget, please share this video, share this video to help other people understand to never lose hope, never lose hope on the addict or alcoholic in their life. There is a way that you can help. Okay. So thank you so, so much for watching and if you're new here, I'm always making videos about mental health as well as addiction and all sorts of stuff. So make sure you hit the subscribe button. If you want to check out some other videos on this channel, you can click or tap on one of those thumbnails. Okay. So thanks again for watching. Show your mom some love today and I'll see you next time.