Residential Program

success stories

Brandon's Success Story

 

Second in a series of life stories of Serenity House graduates.

November/December 2003

 

"I was born an addict," Brandon G. says. Long before he tried alcohol at age 15, he was playing mind-over-matter games in which he would sit outside in the cold and try to mentally make himself feel warm. "I felt things harder than other people and I considered it a liability," he says. "I thought I had a wider perspective than other people and I saw that as a liability, too." Trying not to feel what he was feeling, he altered his reality using techniques from various world religions he had researched, any religion but the home-grown faith of the church he was raised in.

 

When, as an idealistic young man, Brandon saw some people at his church saying one thing and doing another, Brandon became disillusioned and cynical about religion. "I turned against church but not my parents' faith. They lived what they believed, didn't drink, didn't do business on Sunday, didn't lie; they were always trying to better the world. So when I shook the drug thing off, I had that upbringing underneath to help me be a person of integrity."

 

Brandon remembers a happy childhood-up to a point. "My parents spent a lot of time with us; my brother and I were clearly the most important part of their lives," he recalls, but school was bad. IQ tests showed Brandon was gifted, but he was even more lost in the gifted program. "I could stare at the teacher and my mind wouldn't even be in the room. I got straight Cs, almost failed. I was shy, quiet, very small. I thought I was a misfit so I went around trying too hard to get people to like me." He started being forlorn and isolated around 10 or 11.

 

Around that time, he started stealing things for the thrill of it, just to feel something different. "I got a thrill from the possibility of getting caught. I tried to use mind-over-matter: I tried to be remorseless."

 

When he was about 12, his grandmother moved in with the family and his parents' concern shifted to her. Free from their attention, he could pursue his own direction. He got a steady source of pot and a job at a pharmacy where he soon discovered that ritalin was kept in the drawer under his computer. "Before a boring class I'd take five or six ritalin and my eye was pinned on the teacher. I took great notes and aced the exams." By age 16, Brandon had found cocaine, acid and all manner of pharmaceuticals. He stole and sold downers to buy cocaine. His parents started noticing a problem but didn't know what was wrong. Once confronted, he was obstinate: "Yeah, I'm smoking pot but there's nothing you can do about it."

 

And there wasn't. Until he and some buddies were using at Jackson Lake. The game warden, gun drawn, arrested them for smoking pot, searched them, and found cocaine.

 

"I called my parents from jail. They realized it was serious. Got bailed out and the very next week got caught by my dad selling pills over the phone."

 

The next week his parents checked him into residential hospital treatment center. "It was two months before my 18th birthday, and I figured, when I turned 18, I'd sign myself out. I stayed about three weeks, saying what they wanted me to say, but I began to realize that what I was saying-I'm an addict, I need help-might really be true. The therapy was beginning to make sense. I realized if I went back to my home town, I'd use, all my friends were users. So Ashley, a staff member at the hospital residential who also had co-founded Serenity House, recommended my parents call Anne about a longer term treatment."

 

"Serenity House didn't push religion, so I could believe what I wanted," he says. He was against the 12 step emphasis on God. When people told him the 12 steps were non-religious, he took the Big Book and underlined all the times it said "God" or "He." He eventually got into contact with "the God of my understanding," and he says Serenity House worked "because I was really a good person underneath." An addict not a criminal.

 

Brandon's stay at Serenity House was pretty smooth. He made good friends and was open and honest from the start. He graduated from his old high school while he was at Serenity House. Brandon didn't relapse when at Serenity House, coming close only once. He worked hard in group and did experiential therapy. "I changed to self-knowing." Dr. Jaffe diagnosed him with ADD and depression and prescribed medication.

 

After Serenity House, Brandon lived in an apartment with other Serenity House clients until his brother invited him to come live with him in Greenville. "We had been growing closer through me being clean and through therapy at Serenity House." However, Brandon had not been going to meetings. "I was also changing my thinking: I decided my

problem had been adolescence and rebelliousness and that I wasn't really an addict. I started drinking socially. Then I smoked a joint. But I thought, I'm doing this just once; I'm not getting back into it. Then I did it once a week. When my brother moved to Florida, I was living by myself. I had no one connected to recovery. Because I'm an addict I will always be curving back towards using if I am not actively working on my recovery. I'm kind of grateful for the whole relapse thing because I learned about this curve. I banished the idea that I was not an addict. It's indisputable.

 

"I got progressively worse and worse, drinking heavily but not daily. I worked my way up in the restaurant business to manager. But then my father got sick and in six months he died. A numbness set in, a never-ending emptiness in me. The loss of my father was the catalyst but the curve toward disaster had started earlier. So one day three or four months after the funeral, I consciously took the step over the cliff. I went to a guy's house with $500 in my pocket and said, "What have you got?" So I bought almost all he had and gave him half back so I'd have someone to do it with.

 

From there it was a downhill freight train. In the restaurant business, we got free booze. I did ecstasy until I realized my intelligence was eroding, so I went to nothing but cocaine for almost two years before I realized that it was making me emotionally miserable and spiritually dead. My "solution" was crystal meth; I thought I found a perfect drug. With meth I could stay high as long as I took it, staying awake for seven days at a time until exhausted. At first I was incredibly productive. I had a seemingly endless supply of energy so I could manage large banquets and bartend at the same time. I was going as fast as I could for nine hours at a time. When morning came, I had to do drugs so I wouldn't need sleep later. I'd come down early Sunday and sleep till Tuesday and I'd get up and eat and go get more drugs. I did that for a year and a half telling my mother and brother that everything was fine."

 

Irritable from a lack of sleep, Brandon eventually lost that job in a fit of temper. He figured he could earn a living dealing drugs. But his profits didn't support his habit and cover his expenses. He got evicted in June 2002, lived with various acquaintances, used them up. "I didn't have money to eat, didn't sleep. Got into an argument with my ex-girlfriend and felt I'd lost my mind. No control. Got in my car and ripped my rear view mirror off. It was symbolic. I drove down 1-85 toward Atlanta, no clear plan. I ran out of gas in Anderson and pulled up to a gas station right in front of some pay phones. Probably a God thing. I'm looking into my side mirror across the parking lot and there's two Anderson city cops, and I'm thinking there's a warrant out for my arrest, an APB from all this craziness. I have a big line of meth on the console, the cops over there, and the payphone that represents my mom who could get me out of the immediate situation. So drugs here and going to jail there and Mom's help straight ahead: three choices. I'm crying, I'm tired of it. The cops leave, so now there's only two choices, the drug and Mom.

 

"I leaned over and blew the line of meth away onto the floorboard. I made a collect call to my mom. I said, I'm strung out on drugs, I've been evicted, I have nowhere to go."

 

Brandon's mother said she'd come right away. "In a way it felt good that I had taken the step. I was also overwhelmingly embarrassed. I was completely powerless. By that admission, I actually had completed the first of the 12 steps.

 

"She didn't ask me too much. She said how long has this been

going on; I said a couple of days. Later I told her I'd been using since Dad died."

 

Brandon slept all the way home and for another two days. By the time he woke up, his brother had come from St. Petersburg. His mother had called Anne, and Anne said Serenity House had a relapse prevention residence just started for older guys. "Another God thing," Brandon says. "The next day they asked me if I wanted to be in that program. I said yes. July 27, 2002."

 

At the Pioneer House, as the ARPP residence is called, Brandon felt he was prime for recovery. "I was not young and I knew this was it, I'd better make this work. I knew I'd sooner die than go back to a life of drugs, so I was really willing. I went to one meeting a day, I got real in those meetings. I made an effort to really listen to everything the people I trusted said, and to take all of my own thoughts with a grain of salt.

 

"It's good to be completely destitute and hopeless. If you don't lose very much, you have a hard time recovering. I'd lost all but my mother and my brother, and I felt estranged from them because they didn't know my big secret. I was unwilling to lose them."

 

Besides working as a Mental Health Assistant at Serenity House, Brandon is now actively working, with Serenity House's help, to become a Certified Addictions Counselor (CAC). He expects his CAC in a year. Then he hopes for a bachelor's degree and finally his MSW.

 

Now the spiritual side of Brandon is beginning to sound not all that different from his mother's.

 

Letitia Sweitzer