Tag: life after addiction

Tiffany Jenkins, Blogger & Viral Video Star, Talks Addiction, Recovery

“It was so quick. It was like, five seconds ago I was in a halfway house, and now I’m a married mom of three,” Jenkins said.

Tiffany Jenkins, well-known for her blogging and viral videos, continues to be candid about her struggles with substance use disorder.

On Thursday, July 13, she visited with Today and discussed finding out she was pregnant early in her relationship, while she was still living in a halfway house.

“That was not part of my plan,” Jenkins told Today. “I was like ‘I can’t do this.’ And I went and told him about it, and he was, like, stoked! And I was like, ‘I’m in a halfway house, why are you so excited? What are we going to give this baby? What are you doing?’ And he was like ‘I feel like it was fate.’”

Starting A Family

From that moment on, Jenkins life quickly changed. She married the baby’s father three months later, then their son was born. Six months after his birth, Jenkins found out she was once again pregnant, this time giving birth to a daughter. Then, two months later, she says a “bonus daughter” was added to the equation as well.

“It was so quick. It was like, five seconds ago I was in a halfway house, and now I’m a married mom of three,” Jenkins told Today. “It changed everything. Having this little person depending on me really fueled my journey.”

It was then that Jenkins began sharing her journey on social media. She says that so often, she would find herself scrolling through feeds that highlighted only the positive parts of life, rather than any struggles or negatives.

Opening Up To The World

“I couldn’t relate to any of it, so I started writing and saying the things that I wished somebody would say to me,” she said. “I started writing for it to be therapeutic, and I found that the more honest I was in my blog, that the more people resonated towards it. And so I decided to just put it all out there.”

Jenkins also began releasing videos on social media, in which she played various characters. The videos quickly gained traction.

“I was like, ‘I’m onto something. My weirdness is being accepted; what is going on?’” she told Today. “And then I couldn’t stop. It just exploded. And all of this has happened in just two years.”

Today, Jenkins has authored a best-selling book called, High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life, as well as began touring across the country.

Her goal is to communicate that there is hope even in the midst of a serious struggle with substance use disorder.

“There was a point where I didn’t want to live; I didn’t know how to live,” she told Today. “And now, I just celebrated six years clean of drugs and alcohol — which is a miracle, because I couldn’t go six minutes before.”

“An amazing life after addiction is possible,” she added.

View the original article at thefix.com

18 July 2019
Former Lawyer Dedicates Life To Helping Others Into Recovery

The man was inspired to help others after a sober mentor helped him into recovery for his addiction to meth and opioids.

Lewis Blanche’s rock bottom wasn’t the day in 2009 when he almost blew himself up cooking meth. That time, he ended up in the hospital being treated with opioids, but quickly returned to using street drugs. It wasn’t until a year later, on March 4, 2010, that Blanche vowed to get serious about sobriety.

“I was living out of my car. I was riding around making meth. It was midnight, and I had to pull over at a McDonald’s because I hadn’t slept for a month,” Blanche told The Advocate. “A Baton Rouge Sheriff’s deputy saw me, and he realized what was going on, so he made me get out of my car and take my clothes off. They were scrubbing me with a brush from a fire engine because they were worried about contamination from the meth lab. All this was happening while people were coming in and getting their coffee … it was absolutely horrible … but it was also the date I got sober.”

At that point, Blanche’s addiction to meth and opioids had taken everything he had. Despite using drugs since his teen years, Blanche went to law school and ran a successful practice for a time.

“I decided to open my own firm. Things went well at first, and it was easy to get clients with my dad being a lawyer,” he said. “But the pressure to be right, to run a law practice … that made me start dabbling with opioids again. This time it was Oxycontin. I was buying prescriptions from people who were selling them.”

In 2005 he had to give up his law license when his addiction got out of control. That, he said, sent him “off to the races.”

However, after being scrubbed down in the McDonald’s parking lot, Blanche connected with a sober mentor who was able to help him get into recovery.

“He picked me up and said, ‘I need two things from you: wake up every day and find someone to do something for, without expecting anything in return, and when anyone asks you to do anything here for the first year, your response needs to be OK.’ The idea of me saying OK put an end to the most corrosive element in my life: me trying to control everything.”

After maintaining his sobriety, Blanche didn’t start practicing law again, but decided to help others get into recovery. Today he runs three sober homes and is a partner in a detox center. He says that learning to give up control and focus on recovery has changed his life.

“I started floating down the stream of life instead of swimming upstream – and it’s changed everything,” he said.

View the original article at thefix.com

11 April 2019
Michigan Man In Recovery To Walk 280 Miles For A Good Cause

Mike Hamp wants to show people that they don’t need to rely on substances in order to live a full life.

A Michigan man plans to walk 280 miles this August as a way of bringing attention to mental health and substance use disorder.

Fox 17 reports that Mike Hamp, the founder of nonprofit Values Not Feelings Organization, is dubbing the journey “A Walk For Thought” and plans to walk roughly 25 miles daily. He will begin in his hometown, Hastings, Michigan, and finish in St. Ignace, Michigan.

Hamp has personal experience with substance use disorder, as he struggled with it in high school after numerous surgeries on his shoulder.

“Addiction for me started back in high school, I was 16 years old when I had four shoulder surgeries and got hooked on opioids,” Hamp said, according to Wood TV 8. “It wasn’t easy you know, overdoses, almost losing my life and losing marriages and my kids. I realized what I was doing was probably going to take my life.”

Hamp says that over the next 16 years, dialing in on nutrition and exercise helped him overcome his struggles. And when an injury kept him from being able to go to the gym, he turned to walking.

“The funk, the darkness, the depression, it hit like tenfold and got so intense that I really didn’t know what to really do,” he said, according to Fox 17. “I just started walking; I had to get outside of the house.”

“I feel more clear here, I feel like I can think, like it’s not chaos as much when I’m out here doing this,” he added.

Hamp started his nonprofit in hopes of using his own experiences to show others that it is possible to overcome obstacles.

“Treating our bodies with respect mentally and physically plays a crucial role in the overall function of our being,” Hamp writes on his website. “Exercise, proper nutrition, proper life and thinking habits, positive thoughts and positive self talk… This is when we begin to find ‘Our Path.’”

As he prepares for the walk in August, Hamp says his intention is to show people that they don’t need to rely on substances in order to live a full life.

“I’m going to show the people that are really battling that you can really do this without turning to that stuff without literally killing yourself as you’re trying to live,” Hamp said.

More information on A Walk For Thought, as well as sponsorship opportunities, can be found at www.valuesnotfeelings.org.

View the original article at thefix.com

5 April 2019
Former Police Lieutenant Details How Past Addiction Changed Everything

The former police lieutenant hopes that by sharing his story he can help other cops have courage to get treatment before addiction derails their lives.

Dan Gosnell was a star with the Aberdeen, Maryland police department. At 35, Gosnell became a lieutenant in charge of the criminal investigation division, one of the youngest officers in a leadership position with the department. By that time, however, his opioid addiction had already started to take hold.

“It started initially as taking the pills as prescribed, one to two pills every two to four hours as needed for pain. Being a large person as I am and building up a tolerance rather quickly, that progressed to three pills at a time rather than two, and then eventually four pills at a time,” Gosnell said in a video for The Baltimore Sun. “And then, rather than every two to four hours, it was every hour, or every two hours at the most. I would take three to four pills and that just progressed until eventually I was taking five, six, eight at a time, depending.”

Eventually, Gosnell was taking up to 24 pills a day, according to a story in The Baltimore Sun.

At first he began using leftover pills in his own home or leftover pills from family and friends.

“Eventually it got to the point where that was no longer feasible,” he said. “I couldn’t go getting drugs off of friends and family that I knew happened to have them sitting around.”

That’s when Gosnell turned to the prescription drug drop box that the station maintained.

“I made the unfortunate decision to actually seek the drugs out of that location and supplement my addiction that way,” he said.

However, soon even the pills from the drop box were not enough to stave off withdrawals.

“It escalated just like many other addicts; their addiction from opiates escalates. Pills become harder and harder to find . . . That was what brought me to the evidence room, and then I started taking actual drug evidence from the Aberdeen Police Department,” Gosnell said.

By the time his deputy chief confronted him, Gosnell tested positive for cocaine, marijuana and opioids. However, he said after years of concealing his addiction, getting caught was a relief.

“Of course you have that panic moment of, ‘Oh my God, my career and my life is completely over because they’ve got me; they’ve caught me,’ but that wasn’t the overpowering sensation that I felt. What was more overpowering was the sense of absolute and utter relief,” he said.

Gosnell received a 10-year suspended sentence and had to go through drug treatment. Today his law enforcement career is over and he works in the treatment industry. However, he hopes that by sharing his story he can help other cops have courage to get treatment before addiction derails their lives.

“The message would be to not sacrifice your integrity in order to save your career or your life,” he said. “It is not worth flushing your integrity and life down and going the road that I went. . . . I walked that road for you so you don’t have to.”

Gosnell said that if he had gotten help sooner, he may have been able to continue his police career.

“There is a life after law enforcement and police work,” he said. “But if you get this caught early enough and you actually ask for the help that I was afraid to, that you might not get to the point where you’re doing the things that I was doing.”

View the original article at thefix.com

19 December 2018