#95 – Craig Pothier
Craig’s Story
Raised in a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada, Craig Pothier loved playing sports. Excelling at hockey and baseball gave him the confidence he needed to fit in as a child. When he transitioned from elementary school to high school, he realized that people cared more about partying than sports. He quickly discovered that alcohol gave him the self-esteem boost he needed.
At the age of 27, after moving from Canada to New York City, a town of millions, he found himself frequenting bars to make friends. When he was on the cusp of losing his job and his sanity, at the age of 36, he finally checked into a rehab facility and began a recovery journey that took time, perseverance, and courage. Craig now resides in Austin, TX and has dedicated his life to helping others as a Sober Life Coach at Mind Uncaged where he helps people clear a path to an alcohol free life without limits.
Episode Resources
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Connect with Craig Pothier
- Craig’s Website | minduncaged.com
- Craig’s Instagram | @mind.uncaged
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- Podcast Email | podcast@lionrock.life
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Episode Transcript
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change, a Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. Today, we’re going to talk to Craig Pothier. All of the above. Craig was raised in a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada. And he loved playing sports. He excelled at hockey and baseball, which gave him the confidence he needed to fit in as a child. But when he transitioned from elementary school to high school, he realized that people cared more about partying than sports. He quickly discovered that alcohol gave him the self-esteem boost he needed. At the age of 27, after moving from a town in Canada with a population of 1,000 to New York City, a population of eight million, he found himself frequenting bars to make friends.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
When he was on the cusp of losing his job, his sanity and his marriage at the age of 36, he finally checked into a rehab facility and began a recovery journey that took time, perseverance and my favorite, courage. Craig now resides in Austin, Texas. And has dedicated his life to helping others as a sober life coach at Mind Uncaged, where he helps people clear a path to an alcohol free life without limits. Oh my boy, Craig, we had such a good time on this podcast. On this episode, we had such a good time. It was really fun. Craig’s story is really classic alcoholism. Really it hits all the highlights of what happens, what it was like and how alcohol turns on you. We talk a lot about the insanity of alcoholism, the great parts of what it’s like before it gets crazy and bad, all the feelings. I mean, this was just… He just had a very… Just like a really classic walkthrough to how this stuff happens.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think a lot of times people see someone like Craig, who is successful in every other right in his life. And they’re like, how do you get… How did he get here? How… What did that look like? Why does that happen? How does one wake up in detox one day at 36? And it’s just talking through his recovery journey and his substance abuse journey as well. You hear about kind of the same thread that happens and what happens. Also, he… AA wasn’t for him. He tried it a bunch. And that he’s been able to find recovery in other ways. So I think that it’s really cool that we get to talk to Craig and walk through this journey with him. Just such a really pure case of alcoholism if that’s the case. And I just… I had a great time. We laughed a lot. So there’s that. This is going to be episode 95. All right, people let’s do this.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to The Courage to Change, a Recovery Podcast. We’re a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week, we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
On Ashley’s podcast. And it was just a really funny way to start with… This is the picture that I was sent.
Craig Pothier:
Yep. That’s it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s it. Okay. And then that was what I was… So this picture too, how old were you in this picture?
Craig Pothier:
Oh, I think mom said I was in the ninth grade for that picture.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. And…
Craig Pothier:
So I was like, teenager,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You were like teenager. Okay. And, and tell me about this haircut.
Craig Pothier:
That is something that we used to… Growing up, I used to… It’s actually very similar to what I have now but we used to shave close to the head. And that is like the bowl haircut. And I just had that for the longest time. My mother said, “You’ve had the same haircut for the longest time”. But for some reason, this school picture, the way it was combed and the way the hair dried just looked absolutely ridiculous. That’s what she picked out for me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You know, it looks very nineties to me. Was it nineties?
Craig Pothier:
It was.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, and it looks very nineties. It doesn’t look… It’s not like a horrible… It’s, I mean, we’ve seen way worse. But I definitely… But I was just reading to Ashley that side parts are how you show that you’re old now and center parts are now back in style. So side parts are for olds. Everyday Gen Z-ers find a new way to let their elders know their millennial is showing. Perhaps the quickest way to spot an aging millennial these days is to look at how their hair is parted. That onslaught of center parts, we were previously warned about? It’s here along with Gen Z discourse, built on shaming, millennials for their side parts. So you had a center part when you were… When otherwise you would have been a side part and now that’s totally… and it means that apparently we’re not old.
Craig Pothier:
That’s amazing. I love that because I’ve been through like the side parts, the center parts, the three quarter parts [crosstalk 00:05:51] every which part.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. And now you’re [crosstalk 00:05:55] finally relevant, like this…
Craig Pothier:
Kind of, yeah. I’m kind of off to the side. [crosstalk 00:05:59].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So you’re a little off center.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. That’s bad.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. So that could… I mean, [crosstalk 00:06:06] you want to think through that.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Tomorrow morning when I wake up, I’m going to part it differently.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. You got to will.. To be like, [inaudible 00:06:15]. Oh my gosh. Okay. So what is… When did you start? When did you get sober?
Craig Pothier:
I’m a little over three years now.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Awesome. So in that picture, were you drinking and using?
Craig Pothier:
If it was ninth grade? I probably… I started drinking at ninth grade. [crosstalk 00:06:37] That would have been the beginning, the very beginning of me drinking. Which is crazy to think about and I… Looking at that picture, how young I was, wow, like the baby.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The baby. Yeah. When I look back at pictures of me, I don’t know if you have this same feeling, but how mature and old, you felt at the time, and then you look at the photo and you see like the baby face and the braces. You’re like, Oh yeah, yeah. Like I was holding a 40 looking like that. That’s I don’t even know how to feel about that. So tell me a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up? What was your family life like?
Craig Pothier:
I grew up in a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada. So…
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
When you say small though, I feel like a lot of people say small town, they mean 300,000 people. And that kind of thing.
Craig Pothier:
A thousand.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
A thousand people.
Craig Pothier:
Not that small in your book?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s real small.
Craig Pothier:
Okay, all right. So yeah, that’s… It was a small town. Everybody knows everybody. The main industry there was lobster fishing. So the town I lived in was the suburbs of a town of 5,000. That’s how you can look at it. So it’s very small.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Very small.
Craig Pothier:
I grew up. There was still… I still had plenty of friends. There was still a good community of kids. We had a local elementary school with which went from kindergarten to eighth grade.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Wait, how many people were in each class? Just out of curiosity.
Craig Pothier:
20.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Oh yeah. That’s normal.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. A fair amount. Maybe somewhere like plus or minus a few. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:08:16]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. That’s a normal size.
Craig Pothier:
And yeah, we just… It’s, for me, it was like a normal… Growing up, like we’d play street hockey or we’d play baseball or we’d play hide and go seek. It was a lot of outdoor stuff. I guess Nintendo and stuff came later in life. So we weren’t much of the gamers, but more as we came along probably more towards my teenage years came Nintendos and stuff. And people started being introduced to gaming. But for me, I was always into sports and playing outdoors and running around, riding my bike at friends’ houses and doing that kind of stuff. I came home one day and my father had hired this… I don’t know what kind of backhoe or truck you call it. But he got someone to dig a pond in our backyard so that I or the community could have a place to play hockey and skate. And he’s strong, like lights across the ice surface. So it’s like every night was like hockey at Craig’s house. And that was…
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s awesome.
Craig Pothier:
Absolutely amazing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Wait, hold on every night, you mean every how… Tell us about the weather in Nova Scotia.
Craig Pothier:
It’s Canada so not every night during the summer, but in the winter, there’s ice on that pond.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. That was a pretty [crosstalk 00:09:32] like predictable. Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
Pretty predictable. Very few days without ice on that pond in the winter. So every night, we had lights and we’d have a game of hockey at night.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s so cool.
Craig Pothier:
Friends would come over. Yeah. There was a lot of fun. And in the summer we’d play baseball with kids. And I became getting serious with sports, like playing hockey every night. I was… It became not something for fun. It became something more or less, I want to be good at this. I’m really going to try my hardest. I want to make these teams that are out there playing, playing really high level hockey. And then I ended up making those teams and I ended up making the teams that I wanted to play with for baseball. So in the summer, instead of playing hockey, my father and I would go out after dinner and play catch. And he would be the catcher and I would practice my pitching and he would coach me on how to be a better pitcher.
Craig Pothier:
Now I… He was never a great pitcher but he was going to coach me and I…
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
There you go.
Craig Pothier:
And I became good at it. And that growing up, probably in my teenage years, I started playing AAA hockey and A baseball, A level baseball. And I, it was just… That was something I was a really good and serious then. And that led eventually to where I went from elementary school. And then I went to high school. So I would say that’s probably where a lot of my dysfunction came from. Just as a human going from elementary school to high school.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Before we get there, what did your parents do? And what were they like?
Craig Pothier:
They… My father was an auto body mechanic. He worked on cars all day. He had his own business. He worked a lot. He work all day. And after dinner and after practicing baseball or hockey, he would still go back to his shop and continue working. So he’d probably be gone all day till seven or eight o’clock at night. Sometimes he would be, if he didn’t have work at the shop, he’d be out in our shop, in the back of our house, working on like woodworking projects, just for around the house. He would… He just was a handyman. So he liked to make furniture or whatever he thought we needed. He would make it. Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Having married someone who tried to fix our dishwasher with a hammer, literally hit it with a hammer to fix it, I feel so much like attraction and respect for men who… This like handyman fix it. If you can build me a chair, I am over the moon. I don’t care what you know about the stock market. I just want someone to fix the lights. You know what I mean?
Craig Pothier:
That’s hilarious. Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I love it.
Craig Pothier:
He was definitely a Jack of all trades in that aspect. He fixed… I mean, he was… He didn’t build our home but he definitely helped build our home with other people in the community, like other tradesman. But he worked on our cars… For our cars, we… He would go to a junkyard for a car that was totaled and fix it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s awesome.
Craig Pothier:
So he didn’t worry about going to the dealership and wasting all that money on… I shouldn’t say wasting but spending all that money on car payments. He just literally bought the parts that car needed and fixed it. And those were the cars that we drove growing up.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Were there… Did he fix up any awesome ones that you remember?
Craig Pothier:
Nope.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Nope? No, just Dodge neon…
Craig Pothier:
Just 1988 Ford Taurus that we drove forever.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, I remember the Ford Taurus. I remember when my girlfriend got one of those and she thought it was really cool. No one had the heart to tell her, you know?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:13:19] We drove that thing forever. I used to… Like it… Over probably 15 years we had that car. I was so embarrassed to drive it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Fixing it. Right?
Craig Pothier:
Fixing it. And eventually my mom had enough and she was like, “Wait, we’re getting a new car”. Then he got a… I think it was, what was it? A Dodge? I don’t know what it was… some… A Dodge other crappy car. Not a neon, but
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Dodge other crappy car. Insert, insert. What did they use to call it?
Craig Pothier:
A cool car.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
A hoop D. A hoop D. That’s what they would call it.
Craig Pothier:
Actually, my first car, I bought it from that… It was a fairly decent car. At least it was a Subaru four wheel drive Legacy. I was… Okay, leather seats. I can deal with it. But that was the first car that I owned.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s I mean, that’s [crosstalk 00:14:17] head and shoulders above Ford Taurus. Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
Oh yeah. Or Dodge crap car.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Dodge crap car. Yep. That’s the technical term.
Craig Pothier:
Yep. That’s it. Yeah. And my mother… So that’s what my father did. He was Jack of all trades but auto body mechanic. My mother was a… She worked for a lobster buyer. So they bought and sold lobsters. And she was a bookkeeper for that company.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did you, I have to ask, did you eat a lot of amazing lobster all the time?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. When it was in season.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Or were you over it? Were you like, I don’t, if I have to see one more lobster…
Craig Pothier:
No, it wasn’t like that. So lobsters… The season for lobster where I grew up was the end of November to the end of May. When that season began, lobsters were plentiful. Fishermen… All the local fishermen would have lobsters and gifts for their friends and family and stuff like that. So we did have our fair share like around November and Christmas time. After that, there wasn’t as many floating around because it’s the middle of winter is lob… The middle of winter and lobsters don’t crawl so much in the cold water so the catch is down. So people don’t catch as many lobsters during that time. And then probably more towards April and May, we’ll start seeing more lobsters again. So it wasn’t like I had them all the time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Okay.
Craig Pothier:
But I did had my fair share.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I was picturing like… Every day lobster felt like I got to move to Nova Scotia. What am I doing here?
Craig Pothier:
It wasn’t like every day… You can find them but for cheap, like $5 a pound or $6 a pound. But yeah, they’re not just… They’re not hanging off the trees.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So did your mom work in the off season?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. So this lobster buyer, the company that she worked for, he was a lobster buyer during the season. And in the summertime he owned another fish processing plant, which that’s where I worked, which was so fun. And I smelled amazing when I left.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Can we… So fun?
Craig Pothier:
I’m kidding.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, okay. I was like, [crosstalk 00:16:15] well, okay. So your parents… And there’s no… There is… From how you’re describing, I’m picturing relatively normal functional parents psych if there’s such a thing there. And do you have siblings?
Craig Pothier:
I have one sister.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
One sis… Older or younger?
Craig Pothier:
She’s older.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Older. Okay. And, okay, so then the transition to high school is where the shit hit the fan, or maybe not hit the fan but it started to crawl into the blades.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. So I think for me, I had a comfort zone in elementary school. I felt like I fit in. I was… I felt like one of the cool kids. I was good at sports and I had friends. I wasn’t picked on. So on. Now what happened was when I got to high school, I lost that comfort…
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The same kids didn’t go to your sch… You had…
Craig Pothier:
Well, they did. But we were now the young kids in that school. And people were… The cool things to do were not necessarily all sports. There were new things that made people cool. And that was… Well at least from my perspective, the way I perceived people, what I was surrounded with was drinking and partying. And on the bus, going to school, people were talking about the party from the weekend. Who got so messed up and who was out of whack and how cool it was.
Craig Pothier:
And it wasn’t the talk about like, “Oh my God, did you see that guy score that goal in hockey?” It was not that at all. It was drinking. And if you’re not drinking, you’re not cool. At least that’s how I felt. And that’s where I think it took me probably a month. So I was like, okay, well, I’m not dealing with not being cool. I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know how to deal with myself. I don’t feel like I fit in. I feel very uncomfortable as a human being and I figured out, okay, well I found someone on the bus. I want to get drunk. I want to drink. I want to party. I want to be cool.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Tell me about how to do this. You know what’s interesting is it… And correct me if I’m wrong here, but it doesn’t… I felt like I was born, in my, with my skin on too tight. I was born just feeling uncomfortable without all the cliches. Right? I felt like that. It doesn’t sound like that’s how you felt though. It sounds like that didn’t happen until high school.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. I think for me, it’s, I think… I don’t know if I required external validation. And I got it until eighth grade or what exactly happened. But what I see when I got to high school and from there on is I require external validation. It took me a very long time to be okay with just who I am. If I’m not being validated externally, it’s… It became hard for me. And it’s still to this day, sometimes it’s okay. I have to be aware of that. Oh wow, this is just me being insecure and uncomfortable because I’m not getting external validation. But I am a human. And I deserve blah blah blah blah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yada yada yada. Self esteem. Yada yada yada.
Craig Pothier:
That fun stuff.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I mean, I think it’s… In your defense, I think it’s really nor… I think all creatures, all mammals need external validation to some degree, even when with their mother, with their… I mean, we all need… It’s… I think it’s the degree at which the external validation that you… If you need someone to think you’re good at something, or else you want to kill yourself, right? It’s like that. How extreme on the spectrum.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I think when you get to high school, in the situation you’re describing where you’ve always had it for these other… You always had external validation for these other things. You show up to high school, now those other things, no one even cares about. No one’s paying attention to. And so you’ve never had the experience. Now you have this void that you didn’t even know existed. Right? And so you show up and everybody’s drinking and… “Why, okay, they’re not dying from it”. Right? You look at your friend and you’re like, “Okay, well, count me in”. Right? I mean, count me in and it’s did you guys talk about alcohol or drinking or any of that stuff growing up? No. So, so you’re just like, “Okay, they’re drinking stuff and having a good time. Explain to me the downside”.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Pretty much. I think that growing up, you learn the drug. Don’t do drugs. They’re bad for you. Alcohol is part of that but you should only drink when you’re… [crosstalk 00:21:00] Yeah. And then it’s… I was… I had some friends when I was in eighth grade and I… they went to ninth grade. They went to the high school and I started seeing them. Even from eighth grade, watching them from afar is like, “Oh, you’re kind of changing”. And I can see, I heard like, “Oh my neighbor’s like, he’s drinking”. And it’s to me, that was like, “Oh, what’s going on?”. And it was kind of a little shocking. And I felt very uncomfortable with it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did your sister go to that high school?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And did she drink? I mean, not to put her on blast but…
Craig Pothier:
No. She totally drank. I’m going to put her on blast.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. I don’t want it. Thanks for putting me on blast. So you were from… You… Did you have any thoughts about that? Did you see that before you noticed this change with other people?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. I think I knew that she was drinking and getting in trouble with my parents. Her bedroom was next to mine. So when she was getting yelled at, I knew.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Okay. So you had an idea you’re going to get in trouble if you do this.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But it was never… My parents never explicitly had a conversation with me, like do not do this. It was an unspoken rule, I think.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right, right.
Craig Pothier:
A lot of unspoken rules in my house.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Well, I mean, is that the culture?
Craig Pothier:
I think so. Yeah. I think it was very much the culture is… I grew up in a very private culture where it’s… I think the way your family looks to the outside is important. And I think there’s a lot of cultures like that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. [crosstalk 00:22:34] Totally. Totally. I think that’s… I think it’s very… I… My father is Jewish New Yorker, so there wasn’t a lot that was left unsaid. Just… You know what I mean? So when people are like, “These unspoken rules”. I’m like, “What’s that like?”. So, okay… So tell me about the first time you drank or the first cup. Like how did… How does this start? Because we… you get to a point where this is in complete shit show.
Craig Pothier:
Uh-huh (affirmative). So my first time drinking, I bought a pint of vodka and I only wanted to have fun. I didn’t know how much I should drink first. So I was told, “Well, start with the half pint and see how you feel and go from there”.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Half pint of what?
Craig Pothier:
Vodka.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, vodka, right? Yeah. I mean start with half pint of vodka. That’s great advice.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Yeah. Just start there and go… Yeah. Test the water. See how you feel.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Test the water. Yeah. Okay. All right. So that half pint of vodka.
Craig Pothier:
Yep. So… And I knew my parents were not going to like that I was going to a party. So the place where I was going to drink this vodka was at a party that was going to go down a high school party. I knew my parents would say no so I didn’t tell them I was going to go. So I started out, I told my parents, “Hey, I’m just going to my friends”. Classic. So I went to my friends. They were having a pre- party gathering at their house where we… I didn’t drink but some people.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Craig Pothier:
Their house, where we, I didn’t drink, but some people were already starting to drink. And then, I don’t know if it was six or seven o’clock, then we drove to the house where I was about to go on, try something new and try drinking. And I was really nervous about it. And sure enough, I was, okay guys, I have this bottle, and how do I do this? So I really had no idea what I was doing. I had to ask like, how much do I mix? What do I do here? If I drink, I can’t drink all of this. I don’t know what I’m doing. So I had someone mix me a drink and they’re, here’s how you do it. Dummy. And I had my first drink. And after my first drink, I was like, oh, I get it.
Craig Pothier:
This is, here it is. This is it. I’m comfortable in my skin. I didn’t feel like I was …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Uncomfortable.
Craig Pothier:
Out of control.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
I felt like, oh, this isn’t so bad. Nothing bad’s going to happen, but nothing bad is happening. I’m actually having conversations with people that I didn’t dare to have conversations with. My social anxiety seems cured. What’s so bad about this? I didn’t get it. And then after that, it was, all right, game on. And it was, the first drunk had me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What did you go on to …? Did you stick with that pint of vodka? Was that kind of your move?
Craig Pothier:
That pint of vodka was what I drank with for a little bit. It didn’t take too long before I moved up to a pint, but yeah, for the longest time it was like, okay, yeah, have pint. I could control it. Like after half pint, I’d be, okay, I’m cool, I’m done, good to go. Because we’d go to dances and I’d drink a half pint before the dance. And you can’t drink in the dance. It kind of killed any anxiety I had, and everything was cool at the dance.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What kind of drunk were you? Were you nice drunk, angry drunk? What was the vibe? The Craig vibe, after that pint of vodka?
Craig Pothier:
There were different types of Craig.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, okay.
Craig Pothier:
Different types of Craig.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Was it based on how much you had, or based on the type of liquor? Because some people it’s like, oh, if I drink Cuervo, I’m you know this person and if I drink Jack, I’m this person.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. So, vodka seemed to treat me okay. But then I moved on to rum. For some reason I was, I got on the rum thing. Yeah. It didn’t suit me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I know where this going. It didn’t suit you. What does that mean?
Craig Pothier:
It didn’t suit me. I suddenly became a …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Rum didn’t look good on you?
Craig Pothier:
No, no, it didn’t, it didn’t make me look good.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah..
Craig Pothier:
In a respectable way. I’m getting very mouthy.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, okay.
Craig Pothier:
I would voice my opinions a lot.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh.
Craig Pothier:
And any slight trigger that I would have, where I would feel like someone is sliding me, or I don’t know what it was, I would go off and just start chewing them out.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. You became like seven feet tall and …
Craig Pothier:
I became huge, a muscle man, like Hulk Hogan. [inaudible 00:27:20] dating myself, but …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
He’s making, Marvel’s brought him back. So you’re good.
Craig Pothier:
Oh good, okay. Good. So yeah, I thought I was, no, I’m untouchable. And just like … Thankfully, no one hit me, or like …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No one hit you?
Craig Pothier:
No one hit me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Wow. I can’t even say that.
Craig Pothier:
Right? I was a complete dick, asshole.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And no one hit you.
Craig Pothier:
No one hit me. People were like …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They’re Canadian. It’s the Canadian thing.
Craig Pothier:
Maybe.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You guys are nice. It’s the really … You know what? That makes me happy to hear. The Canadians are so nice that when your friend drinks rum and he’s a dick, we still don’t hit him.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I like that, I like that.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. But I still don’t get it because it’s not like there weren’t any fights.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Craig Pothier:
There were people who got in fist fights, but for some reason, no one, I think no one took me seriously.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Okay.
Craig Pothier:
This tall and lanky dude who can’t crush a peanut in his hand. He’s not going to do anything. You can’t take this guy seriously. He’s just wasted and …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right.
Craig Pothier:
He needs help.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
He needs help. People starting calling therapists for you instead. You know it’s bad when they’re, he needs help.
Craig Pothier:
[inaudible 00:28:33]. I don’t know. Yes.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We can’t punch him. He just needs help.
Craig Pothier:
Yes. You can’t be angry at this guy, he’s just lost it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
He just needs help. How old were you when it started to really spiral out of control?
Craig Pothier:
I would say probably 16 or 17, started getting angry. Between 11th grade and 12th grade, I became angry. And the cops got involved at a New Year’s Eve party, because I was just a blatant idiot and yelling at people. We were at this New Year’s Eve party, and it was at a hotel. And everybody got pretty rowdy and the party was technically, it was out of control. There were holes in the walls and shit was getting smashed. And so the hotel put a kibosh to that. They hired security.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:29:25].
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. So, they hired security and the securities came up in the halls and just started telling people to go to their rooms. And everybody else was pretty smart and just went to their rooms, and I said that I was just not having it. And any kind of authority, I was not having it.
Craig Pothier:
And so the security guards were like, hey dude, you can mouth off. But you have a choice. You can go to your room and go to bed, and it’ll be over. Or you can stay in the halls and we’ll call the cops and they’ll deal with you. And my response was like F you. Bring the whole force, were my words for the security officers. And 10 minutes later, the cops showed up, and I was in handcuffs and in the back of a car.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, drunk tank you went.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, drunk tank I went. They called my … Well, I was still under, the legal drinking age was 19. So I was 18. So they called my parents to come get me at the police station. The next day, my mom was, all right, now you have a drinking under the age fine. They didn’t fine me with anything else.
Craig Pothier:
But she was like, what’s going on, Craig? You’re out of control. You’re drinking every weekend. You’re throwing up when you get home. And now I’m getting calls from the police officers. Something’s wrong. And she had tears in her eyes while she was telling me, and I was, yeah, this is not good. I do not like this. I don’t like to see my mom with tears in her eyes, especially when she’s looking at me and I’m the cause of it. So I think that was like, wow, okay. Took a step back there. It didn’t stop me. But I took a step back, and made some changes.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Like the type of alcohol?
Craig Pothier:
Yep.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. I was going to … It’s not in my notes, but I know the change well where it’s, you know what the problem is? It’s this damn rum. If I only drink Jack Daniels, I’ll be fine.
Craig Pothier:
Very true. I was like … Well, at first I wanted to try drinking beer.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, yes. Take it down a notch.
Craig Pothier:
But I’d spoiled my appetite … Yeah, take it down a notch. But I had spoiled my appetite for beer when I was 15.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And you threw up?
Craig Pothier:
And I threw up all night and the next day.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Ah, it’s the worst.
Craig Pothier:
And then I was stuck with an aftertaste of beer the next day. And I couldn’t get rid of it. And it took me 15 years to be able to drink another beer after that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Port wine. I drank a bottle of the dessert port … Who the f does that? Anyway, I drank a bottle of port wine with my younger sister and we vomited it everywhere. And I can’t get, I’m sober 15 years and I didn’t drink that, after that. That was probably, you know, 13, but I don’t, I can’t … Port and I, we have a longstanding disagreement about, you can’t even smell that. Oh, it’s so bad.
Craig Pothier:
Right.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And that’ll do it. It’ll just, that one experience.
Craig Pothier:
That was it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And that’s why I switched from vodka to Jack Daniels, was vodka just turned on me one day and I …
Craig Pothier:
[inaudible 00:32:34] For some reason, vodka didn’t turn on me. So, after rum, I was, okay, rum makes me angry. I can’t drink that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
That’s out of the question. I tried drinking beer. I couldn’t drink two of them without wanting to vomit. So, that was out of the question.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. And for someone who’s worked at a fish processing plant, that’s saying a lot.
Craig Pothier:
That’s saying a lot, yeah. I still eat fish.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. That’s okay. There you go. There you go. Case in point. Couldn’t drink a beer after this one night, but still eats fish. Okay. All right. Okay. So what’d you do? Oh yeah, you went back to vodka?
Craig Pothier:
Back to vodka. But I still had a few bouts of anger, probably two in 10 years.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:33:21].
Craig Pothier:
To me, I was, that’s pretty damn good. I mean, I’ve had more bouts of anger while I was sober.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. Two in 10 is pretty good.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So did you go off to college, or what’d you do after you aged out of home?
Craig Pothier:
I sort of aged out of home. So I was one with never much of a plan for myself. I was living a rock and roll lifestyle. I just wanted to like live. I always grew up loving rock and roll guitars and following Guns and Roses and all these crazy party bands.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
And that was the life I wanted to live. I loved music. I played guitar. And that was the one thing on my brain, was music. And so when it came time to leave the nest, my mom was, what are you doing with your life? And I was, I’m going to work at the fish plant. And she was like, no [inaudible 00:34:19]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Try again honey.
Craig Pothier:
No, you’re not. Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
So she’s, you’re going to college. You have good grades and you’re going to go to college.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Bye, Felicia, you’re out.
Craig Pothier:
Later. And so that’s what I did. I asked her, can we talk about it? What is it that I should study in college? I’ve have never thought about this. She was, well, Computer Science is a good subject. There’s a lot of jobs, you should do that. So I did it. I went and got my Computer Science degree, but that’s [inaudible 00:34:51] what I do.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
She’s not wrong. I mean, that’s pretty [inaudible 00:34:53].
Craig Pothier:
It was a great choice. I don’t love it. It’s not what I would, I don’t know, now, looking back if, I probably should have put more thought into it. But for someone who didn’t put a lot of thought into it, it turned out okay.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Look, there are people who put the same amount of thought into it and they get a Sociology degree and they come out and they go, oh f. So, you know.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, there’s the pros and cons … [crosstalk 00:35:18]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Computer Science. I have a degree, I have a undergraduate degree in International Relations of the Middle East. Let me tell you how f’ing useful that is. Okay. If you have a treaty you need me to look over, I’m your girl. But other than that, other than that, I can tell you a lot about … I always used to say, well, I got this degree in International Relations in the Middle East. And my conclusion after all of this education is, it’s f’ed.
Craig Pothier:
Uh, yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
There’s, nothing’s happening. So, computer science. I would say to people, if you’re going to get a degree, make that, in something that’s interesting. I highly suggest minor in something that’s useful, like accounting or some sort of trade that you can also put with it. So, I’d like me a Computer Science degree.
Craig Pothier:
There you go. It’s never too late.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I’m getting my MBA right now. I can’t even talk about it.
Craig Pothier:
Well, that’s amazing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, okay. So, you go off to college. You start to study Computer Science. Obviously you make it through college. Very impressive, alcoholic, making it through college while drinking. I just, absolutely, hats off to you. I don’t know how people do that. And then, were you in New York City at this point?
Craig Pothier:
No. So I grew up, I went to college in Nova Scotia. There’s a town called Halifax. Yeah, I was there, it was an associates degree in Computer Science. So it wasn’t as intensive, I don’t think, as a bachelor’s degree, but whatever. It was still two years. I passed, somehow. I managed to get a job afterwards.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Craig Pothier:
So, I was pretty proud of myself with that. But I mean, college wasn’t an all drinking type of deal. It was very much a still weekend binge drinker, but it extended into Thursday. Like Thursday, Friday, Saturday instead of Friday and Saturday.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Craig Pothier:
It was three days.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thursday is a bar night. It always has been.
Craig Pothier:
Right. And that’s when all the [inaudible 00:37:27]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, everybody starts Thursday.
Craig Pothier:
So, that’s where I started. I pushed the line a little bit, but it wasn’t totally out of control. And during college, I think on the other nights there was a lot of my friends smoking weed as well.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah.
Craig Pothier:
So started partaking in that, but nothing was really extremely out of control, whereas I couldn’t handle my studies. The weekends were out of control. Incredible amount of alcohol was drank. There is crazy stories of the stupid shit that we did, whether it be living on the eighth floor and throwing coffee tables out the window and wrestling matches and holes in my wall. And there was one time where this, my buddy had, these kids asked him to buy them a six pack. So my buddy comes back from going to the liquor store with these two kids.
Craig Pothier:
What are you doing? He’s, well, they wanted a six pack, so I bought them a six pack and now I’m giving them a place to drink. I’m like, ah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Your buddy [inaudible 00:38:32] bad ideas.
Craig Pothier:
Bad idea. The kids starts getting, helping themselves into our alcohol.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, for sure.
Craig Pothier:
One kid fills an entire red cup, full of vodka. Chugs it, ends up sick as a dog, passed out in the bathroom, puking. We had to call the cops and my buddy was on mushrooms at the same time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
And it was just like these crazy ordeals that shouldn’t have never happened, had we been our right mind. But except for those times during the weekend, the week was still pretty normal. Do your, go to school, go to work. I didn’t work, but do your homework. And everything was fine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I just want to jump in here and say, this is the place that I, there’s two things about this. Number one, college is very confusing for people who are alcoholic, because it very much normalizes the behavior of alcoholism. My sister went to Tulane, in New Orleans, and she’s not an alcoholic. And I went down there, and the way that she and her friends would party, I was, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. So they told me in treatment, if you blackout, that’s not normal. And if you brownout, that’s concerning. And so I was, oh, I didn’t even know people don’t blackout. And in college, all of those things are suddenly okay. And particularly, depending on the school you go to.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And what was interesting was the difference. There were the people who were just, they couldn’t do the studies and they were doing that. And then there were the people who, they were alcoholics, but like you’re describing, they managed, the way that they held it together was, I’m going to hold it together these days. And then I’m just going to uncork the bottle, let out the steam, kind of deal, on the weekends. And so they hid among this binge-drinking culture and kind of fit in. It’s when they get out of school, that that behavior suddenly shows itself. But I think it’s an interesting thing. College. Watching other people go through college, I went to college sober and I was, well, wait a minute. I was told, this is abnormal drinking. And it’s allowed, college has this whole other atmosphere.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, very much so. And for me it wasn’t even college, it was where I grew up.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm, right.
Craig Pothier:
That’s still very much the culture there.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. That too, that too. [inaudible 00:40:55]
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. They drink hard on the weekends, and that’s just the culture that it is. And for me, it was like, after college, I got a job, still in Nova Scotia, but I was able to fit within that. Still drink hard on the weekends, but during the week you’re going to work. And when I went to New York City, I got a transfer from the company I was working at. I got to transfer to their head office. And then that’s where shit got real, because people there do not have boundaries. We drink every day, but we drink whenever we want. There’s happy hours after work. We go drink on Wednesday if you want. It doesn’t really matter …
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
[crosstalk 00:41:39] Yeah, in a social way.
Craig Pothier:
In a very social way.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. And so did you notice that your drinking was different than other people’s?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, because for me, I was also new to New York City. I was now leaving a town of 1,000, where I knew everybody, and going to a town of eight million, where I know no one. So I used the happy hours as a way to meet people from work, and make friends. But after that, I don’t know, this was a challenge for me in getting sober. I don’t know how to make friends unless I’m drinking. That’s how I [inaudible 00:42:16] all my friends, even in high school, if you go back to that time period, I didn’t know how to make friends. All the friends I made in high school were on the weekends, while I was drinking. During the week, in high school, I was a mute. I was shy, scared to talk to anybody. If I didn’t know you, it was hard for me to make conversation. And that’s still, I’ve had to do a lot of work on that. And New York City was no different. And I would use alcohol as a way to meet friends.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. A lot of people do, who aren’t alcoholics. So I can understand how, I think the thing to remember, and that I like to talk about with alcoholism is, alcoholics don’t tip until they get super into their disease. They don’t have abnormal problems. They have abnormal reactions to normal problems, right? A lot of people struggle to make friends and to put themselves out there. Alcoholic reactions, we have this huge reaction, this deadly reaction to these normal things. Like bills come in the door and we’re, oh, I can’t do that. We put it away, and then we just put it in a drawer and think that if we do that, that’ll be fine. And then we drink. It’s not that that’s abnormal to get those bills or to not want to pay them or to have anxiety. It’s our reactions. And I think what you’re describing as social anxiety, a lot of normal people have social anxiety. A lot of normal people use alcohol to, liquid courage and to socialize, hence happy hours. And there’s a tipping point.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Very much a tipping point. And it’s when you start getting the effects, the side effects of alcohol. So you use alcohol to cure your anxiety. But what you don’t realize is that it also generates anxiety.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So unfair.
Craig Pothier:
And that’s the tipping point. At least for me, because I started drinking, I started frequenting a bar in New York City, and I met the regulars there and I became friends with them. Then I became friends with the owners there and I became friends with the owners’ friends. And all those people are still, one of the bartender who works there, the owner and the owner’s best friend, are still to this day, my good friends. And it’s just how I went about creating friends. And that created new habits for me. It’s, okay, now I’m in a drinking environment every day. And I’m having drinks every day. I don’t go to the bar just to socialize. I also drink.
Craig Pothier:
So I’m constantly having alcohol in my system. And what that’s doing, clearly when I’m waking up the next day going to work, I’m having panic attacks, I’m having anxiety. I start drinking more at night. Things like I start having a harder time controlling the amount of alcohol I intake. I started saying, it’s Saturday night. Okay, I’m not going to black out. I’m not going to have shots on … And I started having all these rules, and I couldn’t stop it. Countless times, I would say, okay, I’m not going to take shots. I’m not going to over drink. I’m going to have a glass of water in between drinks. But Friday and Saturday, I don’t know how I got home from the bar. I have no recollection of ever getting home.
Craig Pothier:
My friend would tell me, he was, dude, we had to wheel you out of that bar.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And everybody, we all laugh, right? They were like, ha ha, it’s funny.
Craig Pothier:
It’s funny. I lived two blocks from that bar.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank God.
Craig Pothier:
Thank God. But here’s one of the craziest things, it still gets me to this day, is the owner told the bartender at closing, you got this guy in this mess, you drive him home. I lived a block and a half. The owner didn’t trust that I would make it home. So I had to be driven for a block and a half. That’s a two-minute walk, a 30-second drive. That’s how intoxicated and how insane, and how much lack of control I had.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What did you think was going on? What were some of the conversations that were going on in your head about what was happening?
Craig Pothier:
I think I avoided those conversations in my head, to be quite honest.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But you were having them with the rules.
Craig Pothier:
The rules. Yeah. So that, that was it. It was more or less shame, what’s going on? God, I did it again.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Craig Pothier:
You moron. It was a lot of self-hatred, for not being able to stick to my rules and my being out of control. Not remembering who I spoke to the next night or any of the stories I had, I didn’t like that. But I wasn’t contemplating that I had a problem.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. That never occurred to you.
Craig Pothier:
It never occurred to me, that I had a problem. Never.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We’re just a funny bunch.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, it was absolutely, I look at it now, it’s, yeah, no shit, you had a problem. But at the time it was, no, I got everything under control. I don’t need help. I’m not [inaudible 00:47:16]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment. I want to interrupt this episode to have a short little discussion about support groups. And there’s no better person to talk to about this than my production coordinator, Ashley Jo Brewer. AJB, if you will. AJB, hi.
AJB:
Hi.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. You’re a big fan of community. You attend community support group meetings. Why? Why should people care?
AJB:
I absolutely love community, because it creates a community. And I know that sounds funny, but it truly provides a space for anyone and everyone, no matter what they are going through. Just to give you an example …
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
AJB:
… and no matter what they are going through. Just to give you an example, I invited or told a friend about Community because she was really struggling with binge eating disorder and had gone to many different groups and felt shunned or not accepted, or like it wasn’t a place for her. And at Community, she found a place because in Community meetings, we don’t care what the substance is or what the struggle is. Everyone is accepted no matter where they are in life, no matter what they are recovering from and I think that’s what’s beautiful about Community.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, I love it. And yes, I 100% agree with you that the value is that you don’t have to know what your problem is, what your struggle is, what you want to give up or not give up, or whether you’re abstinent or whether you’re stopping whatever. Whatever it is, you are welcome. You’re welcome in this place and it’s a great place to discover the answers to all the questions that you’re looking for in a community and have that support.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s free to anyone. You go to lionrock.life, and there is a tab with community meetings. There are different days, different times, different subjects. There’s even a cooking group called Community Table. There are so many different options, something out there for everyone. So I highly recommend, maybe after you listened to this, if you are looking for more community in your life, more friends, more support, please, please go check out community lionrock.life, click that community tab.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What was the catalyst for the change in the way you thought about it, that you had a problem? How did you get to, “Okay”?
Craig Pothier:
When it started affecting my… So I think in New York City, there was a time probably after three or four years of drinking pretty hard every night, I started getting anxiety the next day and that would cause panic attacks. I would be at work and I would be in the bathroom having a panic attack kind of meltdown. I don’t know, just not knowing if I was going to live, feeling like I’m going to die. It started happening more and more often then I kind of connected the two. I’m like, “It’s my drinking. My drinking is causing-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No one brought it up to you. You connected it?
Craig Pothier:
No one ever told me that I drank too much.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Wow.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s incredible.
Craig Pothier:
It is. Yeah, no one ever brought it up. I think the one comment my friend made to me when he came to visit me from Nova Scotia was like, “Wow, you haven’t slacked one bit,” talking about like how much we drank. And I was like, “Yeah, I know.” That was probably his way of maybe telling me-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And that culture of saying it, not saying it?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. For me, “Yeah, of course not. I’m f’ing living the live over here in New York City. It’s a party every night having a blast, living the life. This is the rock-and-roll lifestyle that I always dreamed about.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s the other thing. It’s like, it’s not like you grew up in New York City either. You grew up in Nova Scotia in a town of a thousand people so this is like in the movies or in the… Part of it is, you’re living this fantasy in New York City.
Craig Pothier:
Absolutely.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
At these bars, everybody knows your name. You know, “These are my people. I come in. I’m VIP at this bar.” That’s such a great… I did that in sobriety, which is a whole other story, but I went to bars. I was with… and I don’t recommend this, so good Lord don’t follow my… But I was several years sober and became a bar fly and Thursday, Friday, Saturday, not drinking, but being royalty in the bar, like everybody knows you, that’s your crew. “Hey, we’re going to see you there,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get your free drinks. The bands know you. There is this… that’s that outward validation and it’s fun.
Craig Pothier:
Got it. Yeah. [inaudible 00:51:59].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s super fun. And I feel like we don’t talk enough about where like, “Oh, alcoholism, everything about it is bad. Everything is bad. Oh, you never want to do it.” Like, there’s a reason that we did all this stuff. There were parts of it that were very enjoyable. That’s why we did it. It changed on us. That’s the piece that’s different than the people who were like, “Oh, I’m not sleeping enough. I think I’ll stay home.” They implemented a normal person reaction to a discomfort. We were like, “If it’s uncomfortable, just do it harder. So if you’re not sleeping enough, sleep less.” Just like, “Whatever.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Our responses are just asinine and that’s kind of how we get to this desperation piece. I think it’s really interesting that nobody ever told you, you have a drinking problem though.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. It is very-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Especially with the block, the owner and the one-block piece? That’s interesting no one ever said… So, sorry. So take me to, my name is Craig and I’m an alcoholic.
Craig Pothier:
Okay. So New York City. Let’s see, I started having anxiety. I figured out that… I started day drinking on the weekend. That was another thing that changed. Just started drinking on the weekend in the day, waking up and drinking. That increased, I don’t know, it increased my anxiety tenfold by the time Monday came around. Then I realized I had so much anxiety on Monday or Tuesday at work that when I went to lunch, I had a drink and-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did you normalize it by saying like, “Oh, it’s a mimosa,” or, “Oh, it’s a… ” like, did you… ? No. Okay. So you were like, “F it. Let’s have the vodka.” Okay.
Craig Pothier:
“I’m curing this anxiety.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. We’re straight to the point here.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. This is like… I’m not going to… I don’t think like I was like, “I have a problem,” but I knew that I was going to have change it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Interesting.
Craig Pothier:
I knew this wasn’t going to like last a [inaudible 00:54:01]-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You knew it wasn’t working.
Craig Pothier:
It wasn’t going to end well if I continued to just have it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Got it.
Craig Pothier:
But the habit kept going. It started on Monday, started having anxiety and having a drink for lunch, then Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and it became an everyday thing. Then it became a thing of, “Wow, I need… I can’t even make it to noon. I need to have a drink at whenever the bar opens. I got to be there and have my screwdriver.” Before you knew it, I was beating the bartenders to their job. And like my-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Why not just buy it? Why are you paying all that money?
Craig Pothier:
Well, drinking. Yeah. For me, I had this rule like drinking at home-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay, that [crosstalk 00:54:46]-
Craig Pothier:
… and then, it was like, that would be a really bad thing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Still some rules we’re following.
Craig Pothier:
Still some rules. They would quickly be broken though. Soon enough I would wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes needing a drink, having too much anxiety, waking up in the morning. I’m like, “F it. I’m having another drink.”
Craig Pothier:
I saw a therapist in New York City about my drinking and that was like, “Okay. I’m struggling to keep this under control, but a therapist is all I need, right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Obviously.
Craig Pothier:
“This will fix me. I’ll be good.” But going to the therapist, it was like, “I’m not coming… ” I was very straight with the therapist, “I’m not here to quit alcohol. I’m here to moderate. You’re going to help me moderate. I’ve never been to therapy before, but I’m sure this is the answer to my problems.”
Craig Pothier:
I don’t know, for probably a couple of months, I was able to not drink during the week and not much during the weekend. So I was like, “Okay, this is is okay.” But then came a layoff at where I was working. I was part of a layoff. I don’t know, it was like 30% of the company or something was laid off. I’m sure my performance had something to do with me being thrown into that pile that I wasn’t fired at the same time from my job. I was still managing to do the work that I was supposed to do, was paid for.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, just not optimal performance.
Craig Pothier:
Maybe not optimal. I was working from home an awful lot with a glass of alcohol or working from the bar-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Yeah, naturally.
Craig Pothier:
… not far from where I lived. But yeah, anyway, I got laid off and I got severance. That’s where shit really good out of control.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, bender money.
Craig Pothier:
Bender money. Four months of it. So I was now, I was still looking for jobs, but I would open the bar with the bartender and I would close the bar with the closing bartender, drinking every day from 11:00 AM until 4:00 AM every day. Eventually I managed to get an interview with a boss, an old boss of mine. He had moved to Austin and he told me, he was like, “Hey, I really liked the work you did. If ever you moved to Austin, let me know. I’ll hire you any day.”
Craig Pothier:
So, I was like, “Well, I’m having a hard time getting a job in New York City. So I’m just going to call this guy up.” Yeah, sure enough he got me an interview. On the interview, actually, it was like a Zoom interview like this and I had a cup with wine in it during the interview and I still got the job. They gave me more than what I asked for in terms of money.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Nice.
Craig Pothier:
So, I was like, “Okay. I still got this. This is [crosstalk 00:57:30].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah. confidence.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. But anyway, I moved to Austin. I managed to not drink during the day when I got to Austin for probably a month or two. Then I was having some serious withdrawal at that point from alcohol. I remember I went to an event with work and they had servers serving some sliders. When I went to grab one, my hand shook so bad that the top bond went flying, the tomato went flying the other way, the patty was on the ground and I was left with nothing, but the bottom bun in my hand. The server well just looked at me with her eyes wide open, like, “What the hell just happened, dude?” I was like, “[inaudible 00:58:21].” I just ran to the bar knowing I need alcohol. This is withdrawal of alcohol.
Craig Pothier:
Probably a couple months later, I woke up in the middle of the night and I went to use the bathroom, but when I was walking back to bed, I… like, I was still half asleep, three sheets to the wind but I remember like there was this dark cloud around my head that I could like visually see, it wasn’t just I was feeling it. I could see it. I don’t know what it was about it, but it scared the living shit out of me.
Craig Pothier:
The next day I woke up, I drove down and that’s when I was like, “I need help. I can’t do this anymore. I’m done.” That was my first, like that was, “I need help. I can’t do this. I’m out of control. I’m drinking 24/7. Some days I’m drinking 40 ounce of vodka for Christ’s sake. This is too much. I’m killing myself. I’m getting bruises for no apparent reason.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh yeah. Oh God, I forgot about the bruises. Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, it was like, I would be-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And you’d be like, “I must have fallen down or something.” You have no idea.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, I was like, “What happened?” I had like huge bruises on my leg, my arm, my back. At one point I was losing hair.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, I lost my hair.
Craig Pothier:
[crosstalk 00:59:42]. I had eczema or I have eczema, but any little kind of scratch, I would start bleeding uncontrollably because my blood was so thin. It took nothing to make bleed. It was just like all these things. And I would have like the depression that it caused. There were times where I would just like break down and start crying out of nowhere and I had no idea why I was crying.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It was not working anymore. You know, the alcohol, we hired it to do this job and it helped, as you describe, it helps and then it turns on you. What people often don’t think about, and why would you because you’re in the midst of it working, but alcohol has a rebound effect. A lot of drugs, a lot of prescription drugs have this as well, but there’s a rebound effect. What that means is, that it actually starts… There’s a point at which that medication or alcohol in this case starts to cause the exact same condition that it’s curing, right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Benzodiazepines do this. They actually start to create anxiety. Alcohol as a depressant, it will start to create massive anxiety in you. We hired it for this job. We hired it to help us with our anxiety and now all of a sudden it’s creating it and we’re in this vicious cycle because we need to drink it momentary relief and then continue, continue, continue. Frankly, it’s like that with nicotine too.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. It’s so much the same thing. It burned me. It was like-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah. It burned. Yeah. It was like, “What the … ?”
Craig Pothier:
It burned my ass.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, when you were like, “Okay,” at this point, what did you know about alcoholism? From what you saw in the movies, from things people told you, did you know anyone who got sober?
Craig Pothier:
I didn’t really know anybody that got sober. I knew people with alcohol problems and I knew some of them got sober. I had… Actually, no, I did know some people who quit drinking alcohol because I remember asking them about it. I’m like, “How are you getting sober? How did that work for you?” I had one friend who said, he was just like, “I don’t know, man. I just kept trying. I didn’t do anything like go to AA or anything, I just kept trying.”
Craig Pothier:
I had another friend who was a bartender in New York City that I met. He was a chef. He was like, “Yeah, I have a lot of friends who go to meetings. They find that helpful but,” he did it himself. He told me, he was just like, “Yeah, it was just not working for me so I had to give it up.” That’s all I knew about it is like, “Wow, okay. Just keep trying to not drink. It’ll just some work.”
Craig Pothier:
That’s all I knew about it. I had no idea about withdrawal. I had no idea about what the process is. Except for AA and knowing what I’ve seen from movies. That’s all I knew about like AA and how it worked. I didn’t know that there was a detox facility. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know that alcohol had severe withdrawal effects that can be dangerous.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, so let me just stop right here and say just so that anyone who’s listening, please do not stop if you have a real dependency and whatever you want to call it, on alcohol. Please, please, please do not stop drinking at home by yourself. So many people die that way. Alcohol detox can kill you. It is deadly. Alcohol and benzodiazepine detox has a higher chance of killing you, but alcohol on its own, doesn’t matter that you’re 35 healthy, whatever, you’ve done it before, seizures, it can kill you. Please, for the love, seek outside help. They will give you medication to help the process so that you don’t die. People die withdrawing themselves from alcohol all the time. Okay. PSA done.
Craig Pothier:
I appreciate that. I could have used that message. There were times where I tried to stop drinking and I was so physically ill, like the shaking and profusely sweating. Sometimes there were some slight hallucinations-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh yeah.
Craig Pothier:
Nightmares were insane and it was just like, it was dangerous. But when I broke down on that day and I was like, “I can’t do this,” so I was… I skipped over a part, but I was married during this time. And when I broke down… Yeah, that was my accomplishment. While drinking, I got married and divorced.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I mean, getting married during heavy alcoholism, definitely an accomplishment that you’re attracting people.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. I don’t know how, but it was a relationship built on alcohol. That’s how we… We went out to dinner. We drank before. Like we partied at home before we went out to [inaudible 01:04:26] dinner. I was heavily dependent on alcohol. I had a lot more… Like I had issues with alcohol. It eventually came to burn me, like I said.
Craig Pothier:
For her, not so much, but she still wanted to party and then me needing to be sober and… Well, I became boring to her. It doesn’t work out well that way when you have a relationship built on alcohol. But anyway, that day, her mom or my mother-in-law at the time was there. She had a brother who was an alcoholic and she had experience dealing with so she knew about detoxes. She knew about AA. She knew about withdrawal. She was a nurse.
Craig Pothier:
So, when I broke down that day and her being there, it was actually a huge-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank God you were married.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, it was. I don’t know what I would have done to be honest, because that day she was like, she looked at me and she was like, “Okay, do you want to get the help that you need?” And I just, like, I was crying and I was just like, “Yeah.” She was like, “Okay.” So she made some phone calls to some detoxes and that’s where I checked in to a detox and that’s where they gave me the medication to help me with withdrawal.
Craig Pothier:
I felt… I think when I woke up the next day in the detox, that was probably the most amount of shame I’ve ever felt. I was like, “How did I get here?” [inaudible 01:05:51]-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, you look around.
Craig Pothier:
And it’s just like, “Oh my God, how did I… ?” My mind just couldn’t comprehend what I had just done. But after a day, I started talking to other people and doing whatever you do in the detox. They have meetings and stuff in there. I started just getting acquainted with other people and I started understanding the other people there with me, were just, we’re all in the same boat.
Craig Pothier:
Eventually like, probably by the second day, I had a feeling that I’ve never had in a long time. It was a feeling of belonging. I was like, I felt comfort where I was like, “Wow, we’re all in this together and we have a problem. It’s okay. It doesn’t make us bad people. We’re just… ” It was like a comradery that I’ve never had in a really long time. It was like a connection that I had with people that I didn’t have to be drunk for.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Go figure.
Craig Pothier:
You know?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, I do. I do know. A lot of the things, I don’t know if you experienced this, but a lot of the things I was doing when I relapsed, I lived alone and I was hiding alcohol in my bedsheets. I would hide wine in the bed. I don’t know what. I did these weird things that were completely unnecessary. I get if you live with people, you’re hiding alcohol from people, but I wasn’t hiding alcohol from anyone. But these things that I did that I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” Then I would hear, “Oh, I did that too.” Things I didn’t even know were related to alcoholism.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, I started to understand so much more about myself and how many pieces of my behavior and my life I exhibited these symptoms. I just had no… Like I said with the blackout thing, I just didn’t know that normal people didn’t black out. I really just didn’t. Someone said to me, “Ashley, people who aren’t alcoholics don’t wonder if they have an alcohol problem.” And I mean, that blew my mind, blew my mind.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Because if you don’t have that experience, like, “I don’t have that experience. I’m likely not hanging out with the people who are drinking just a little bit or whatever.” So you don’t know what you don’t know. So when you go to these detox, when you go to treatment or you go to AA, when you go to She Recovers, when you go to Community meetings, whatever, like the recovery meetings, you realize, these people explain to you why you do the things you do and it’s such a relief because you feel a lot less weird.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, I know. Hiding… I think the one thing that blew my mind is I read one time, it was, a sign that you have a drinking problem is if you’re embarrassed by your trash.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Craig Pothier:
Right. And I thought-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Or you’re doing something weird with your trash, like you’re separating it and taking half of it or… yeah. Especially in New York City.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, I would visit my parent in Nova Scotia and I was still drinking every day, but I couldn’t leave the trash in the regular trash, because my parents would see a bottle of vodka every night. So I would have all these empty bottles in my suitcase. Then once they were gone at night, I would put them in a bag and then drive to the store put them in the [inaudible 01:09:09] there. Like, what?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. But you know what’s amazing is, I don’t know if you had this experience. I did a lot of like weird tinkery things like that. It wasn’t a conscious… Until afterwards, I didn’t really think about it. I used to put alcohol in my sheets so that I would wake up and just grab them. They were in the sheets so I slept with bottles of alcohol. That didn’t occur to me as strange. It didn’t register. Or hiding things in my closet. All this stuff. It was like, until I reflected back or heard other people’s stories, I was like, “Oh, I did do that. Oh, I… ” It’s so part of your process, of your normal drinking life, especially if you’re living alone and you don’t even think about it. Then there’s that camaraderie like, “Oh, I did that too. I guess I do have a lot of these alcoholic traits.”
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Yep. It’s very much… I liked the thing that you said about not understanding that other people don’t black out. If I would have been in my drinking day, thinking about that, my thought would have been, “Oh, they’re not living.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
“If you don’t remember last night, you didn’t have a good time.” I mean, I relate to that. I really do. I really do. I mean, it’s really why I still can’t drink to be honest with you, because I’m like, “If you are not vomiting so that you can drink more, and completely f’ed up, your nose is bleeding from the blow, why even do it? Why even do it? What are you doing?”
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, you’re not living. Yeah, this is not-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
“You’re not drinking.” Totally. Totally. If you do not wake up the next day, unsure about where you are, did you even have a good time?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. [crosstalk 01:11:04].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I get it and then you-
Craig Pothier:
If it ain’t wild, it ain’t fun.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Then you meet this group of people and they’re like, “Oh yeah.” They get your crazy thinking and it’s really this relief. To find out I was an alcoholic was such a relief because I was worried it was something way worse. I was like, “I’m going to be schizophrenia.” I didn’t know that that if your own voice is talking your head, that doesn’t mean you’re schizophrenic. Because I was like, “I’ve got voices in my head.” They’re my own though so we’re in good shape. But I mean, I didn’t know what was wrong. I thought it was way, way worse, particularly mixing all these different things. I presented as all these different disorders and then you take all that stuff in. It’s like, “No, you’re an alcoholic. Drinking makes you insane.” That to me, “Oh, I’m an alcoholic. All these people are recovering. There’s a solution. These people are rad because they would have been the people I was partying with at the bar. They get me.” It’s not like, “Oh, we’re all sober and boring.” No, we went out and did…
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s not like, “Oh, we’re all sober and boring”. No. We went out and did it. Now we’re back because we had to stop. You’re still my people. You’re still my people.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Now I’m in this group, this sober group, and it’s awesome because I get to trudge the road of happy destiny with a group of people who get my crazy, my flavor of crazy.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Yeah. Flavor wild.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, Craig, honestly right now, I live in the suburbs. I have two kids. I’m married. We have a minivan and everything that comes along with that. Sometimes I’m like, I just want to shave my head. I still have the crazy wild in me. I’ve learned how to deal with it in outlets of different ways. But it is alive and well.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Many times I’m like, “This is so normal. I’m going to lose my mind. I can’t.” But I get to call my girlfriends and be like, “This is what I’m thinking what do you think?” They’d say, “Oh, yeah. I totally hear you whatever it is.” That intensity in us is great, but we have to channel it. Right?
Craig Pothier:
Absolutely. Tame it a little bit sometimes.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
But yeah. I think for me, my flavor of wild, where it starts to get dangerous is where I have this tendency where I will burn shit down. If I get upset or angry, it’s like, “Oh, well this isn’t working so let’s just burn it to the ground.” I forget what they call it. There’s a word I’m looking for but … self-sabotage.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Self-sabotage. Yeah.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. That is my flavor. That is where I know that I am crazy sometimes. I can self-sabotage.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Well, it’s an all or nothing thinking. Right?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Absolutely. Black or white.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For me, if I’m going to be a drug addict and an alcoholic, I’m going to be the best.
Craig Pothier:
But that’s that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The most f’ed up alcoholic you have ever seen. I’m going to go hard in the paint. I think that that mentality, that’s the thing that takes us over the edge because we don’t want to do anything half-assed which is great when you put it towards positive things. The problem is when you put it towards other things and you decided to burn it to the ground.
Craig Pothier:
Yep. Yeah and that’s where a lot of that crazy still lies. It’s just having the awareness around it like, “Okay, let’s channel this. I’m just not pleased with myself. It doesn’t mean I have to burn everything to the ground.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Exactly. I’m not happy with the situation. However, I do not need to burn it to the ground. I can go sit and not say anything.
Craig Pothier:
Anything. Yeah. I can go meditate and be with my feelings.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, it’s totally that and you learn that. It takes a while, but you do learn that and it feels so much better to not burn everything to the ground.
Craig Pothier:
It does. Yeah. At the moment, it may feel like you really want to, and it doesn’t feel good, but after you let these feelings pass through, “Oh, everything’s okay”.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The temporariness of feelings was something I really didn’t understand because for me, I never let a feeling go from start to finish. I had a feeling and then I drank or I used or whatever. In my head, my experience is that feelings never have an ending because the only ending they ever had was the artificial one that I inserted.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
To experience a feeling as temporary was something I had to do in recovery. I had to trust that when people said this feeling is going to end. You are not going to feel this way forever. Because of course it feels like, “Oh my God! I’m going to die. I’m going to feel this way forever.” That those feelings pass. At that time, you’re like, “I’m a caged animal. I’m a caged animal that wants to destroy. I’m going to let this feeling pass.” Then it becomes like, “Okay, this is temporary,” and you learn how to do it. Your brain starts to acknowledge that this uncomfortable state won’t be there forever. But in the beginning, what you said with the shame and detox. Right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, detox, I mean, nobody goes into detox on a winning streak, right?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. You’re not just feeling good.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. No, that’s just the name of the game. But that understanding that a feeling has a beginning, middle and an end, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. Now I can pass through feelings and let them go and then decide what I want to do. As opposed to deciding in the middle of the feeling that’s going to be there forever and then creating a whole big mess.
Craig Pothier:
Yep. I’m totally with you, understanding that feelings are not permanent.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Craig Pothier:
Nothing is permanent.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Who the f knew?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, not even happiness which sucks. But-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right and that’s a great point.
Craig Pothier:
Important to know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, that’s a great point because that’s the other thing. We also were like, “Oh, well we have to feel good all the time, too.” When I got sober too, I was like, what the f? I don’t feel good all the time. This is terrible. Who signed me up for this? Aren’t you supposed to feel good all the time? Aren’t you supposed to know? Elation, taking Ecstasy, the reason we took drugs was we wanted to stay at this high point the whole time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, we’re just chemically not made for that. It’s supposed to ebb and flow. You’re not supposed to try to keep it on high the whole time. We just keep hitting that button, trying to keep it on high. You’re right. That’s also temporary.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. Everything and it’s just you have to brace yourself. I think what I learned about that is that is where I learned about gratitude. It’s like, “Okay, well, this isn’t going to last forever so I have to be grateful for this moment.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Enjoy it.
Craig Pothier:
Enjoy it because it is not going to last.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But it’s going to come back. Right.
Craig Pothier:
It may go back.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
If I continue and now I have something to look forward to. I have this range of emotions, which in the beginning of sobriety is absolutely terrifying, but when I had my twin boys, it’s like that feeling. Then you’d take them home and you don’t sleep and you have that feeling.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s all this stuff and you get to have this full range, a full life experience. I think for me, and what I hear from you is I thought a full life experience was all of the things that would make up a after school special. A full life experience was like, “Were you in a car chase last night?” “No? Okay. You’re not living.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
My life had to be so, and it is like the stories from back in the day. They’re so absolutely asinine. Telling these stories are so ridiculous that sometimes just telling them I’m like, “How is this? How did I? Oh, my God!” But if that wasn’t happening, it was like that rock and roll thing. If I was not doing something insane and having an insane thing, then it was dead. It was lame and I was not doing anything. Having to let go of first of all, you’re not going to be 19 forever. Second of all, life isn’t just like the craziest things you could do. There’s this beauty in normalcy that I just didn’t have any … What’s the word? Regard. I didn’t have any regard for the beauty of a normal life, too.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s so much beauty to life and just now being sober and what I actually appreciate now is when I get to look back at a bad time when I’m feeling really anxious or I feel like everything’s crumbling down and I get through those feelings, but then I get to look back and I laugh. I laugh at myself because it’s like, “Man! You’re a nut, Craig. Nothing’s going all that wrong.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Nothing’s happening.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, nothing is happening.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The world is caving in.
Craig Pothier:
You’re terrible. You’re freaking out.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, god!
Craig Pothier:
Nothing’s happening.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Literally, no one’s talking to you. Nothing’s happening. The whole world’s falling apart. You’re in your room. Nothing’s changed.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah, and there’s a certain level of appreciation. That’s what life is and feeling’s like a full range of emotions. That’s part of it. Just being able to look at that and be like, “Wow! Okay. That is funny.” Being able to withstand it during the moment, knowing that, okay, this is probably going to be funny or meaningless. It is helpful to get through it too. But yeah, just seeing different parts of the world now.
Craig Pothier:
Now, I like to go hiking up mountains. Just seeing the beauty that Mother Nature provides us. Before I would have been like, “A tree? Who gives a god damn about a tree? It sits there. It stands there. There’s nothing beautiful about it. It doesn’t do anything.” But now, “Oh, wait. This thing is actually older than me.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Craig Pothier:
It’s seen more than-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s seen a lot.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. It’s just a different perception on life and everything around us in general.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
One thought I had was for people like us, it is extraordinary that we can live what others might call a boring normal life. Right? We used to live what we thought was extraordinary, but the truth is for alcoholics and drug addicts, it’s not that extraordinary for us to be drunk and high. It’s not that abnormal. It’s normal. That’s our homeostasis.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For us to live normal sober lives, that’s actually extraordinary. The normalcy of my life is extraordinary, because that doesn’t happen for people like me. It’s a very small percentage of people who stop drinking, stop using needles who end up with a life like mine. That is a very small. That’s extraordinary in its normalcy, in its minivan, in it’s all that shit that I am like, “Oh, my God! Someone help me.” That part is extraordinary. I think that’s what you’re saying is we go out and the ability to experience these things, it’s just not our natural state. We’ve had to do work to get there.
Craig Pothier:
It took a lot of work. It works out and I’m grateful every day that I get to do that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What did your work look like?
Craig Pothier:
Software engineering?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No. Well, how have you stayed these last three years? I’ve stayed software engineering. No, these last three years, what have you done?
Craig Pothier:
I mean, I’ve done a number of things. Detox was the first thing I did. After that detox, I did a five week outpatient program.
Craig Pothier:
I think the only thing I’ve never done is inpatient that I’ve done the outpatient program. That was the first time where I remained sober for a month. However, at the end of the five weeks I was already drinking again and then probably a month later I was back to square one. My drinking so hopeless.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It happened so fast.
Craig Pothier:
It happens so fast. Then I didn’t check into another detox but I managed to go through the withdrawals. I started AA. I started attending AA regularly. I was only able to get I don’t know, maybe nine days, 10 days. Then I relapsed. Drink for a week. Start again. It was a roller coaster just trying.
Craig Pothier:
I ended up getting a sponsor and I think we got to step five. Then I was just … I couldn’t hold it and then I just relapsed. I just let myself go for a bit.
Craig Pothier:
Now what had ended up happening was, as I said, I was married at the time. My wife was gone on a trip to visit our friends in New York City. I was in Austin. I was starting to get back to the point of I may need detox.
Craig Pothier:
When she was gone, I went to a urgent care facility. I was like, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t check into a detox. My alcohol is out of control.” He prescribed me some Librium or Ativan or one of them to help with the withdrawal symptoms.
Craig Pothier:
By the time my ex or my ex-wife got back, I was good to go. I was like, my withdrawals were all gone, alcohol. I was sober. I ended up doing that for the good part of the year. Getting sober, staying sober for a week, relapsing within a month, being in really bad shape. I was really depressed. I wasn’t happy. I was really struggling to keep it together and eventually my wife left me, understandably. Yeah, that was that. I went on one last or I went on a bender and then I checked myself into the second detox.
Craig Pothier:
After that detox, I went to Canada for three weeks to visit my family. I didn’t do any other kind of treatment. When I came back to Austin, I did AA again. It’s all I really knew. That worked for four months.
Craig Pothier:
Four months after that, it was New Year’s Eve and I wasn’t planning to drink that day, but I went into a meeting thinking everything was hunky-dory and everything would be great. Some guy just started talking about relapsing. He started telling stories about the times he relapsed. Something flipped in my head. By the time the meeting was over, the decision was made that I was drinking that day.
Craig Pothier:
I went to a bar. I thought about drinking. I looked at the drink for a little bit not knowing what to do. I knew I was sober for four months. I knew if I drank, it probably wouldn’t be good, that my tendencies to burn things to the ground led me to take that drink.
Craig Pothier:
Then for that day I drank four. I went home, took a nap. Then I was like, “Well, might as well keep it going.” Went to another bar. Then I know I went to a strip club and I remember asking for cocaine and I had no recollection after that.
Craig Pothier:
Then for the next week I was drunk, puking, miserable. Then after that week, I was like, “God, no. I can’t do this. I’m not going down this road again.” I weaned myself off alcohol.
Craig Pothier:
By Monday, I was at work and January 8th was my first. It is my sober date right now, January 8th, 2018. Then I continued with AA for about four months. Then eventually, I don’t know. I didn’t really connect with AA all that much. It was a place more of where I found community of like minded-people.
Craig Pothier:
I met a lot of great people there. I don’t go to meetings so much, but I also tried, I went to individual therapy, a counselor. I did group counseling. There is a meditation for recovery group, a Buddhist place. I was in Austin. I attended that for a little bit, which was great. I think after some time after that last sobriety date, after about four or five months, I weaned. I stopped going to AA. I didn’t find it beneficial.
Craig Pothier:
But what I ended up finding was I started getting caught up into self-esteem issues. I started facing myself. I got into another relationship and I was still in that relationship but I started getting triggered. I started seeing myself and getting really uncomfortable. That led me to do all the work that I’ve been through.
Craig Pothier:
Had I not gone into another relationship, I feel like it would have been a pink cloud. I don’t know how I would have faced myself but that relationship made me face myself, all my insecurities, all my shyness, all my anxiety, all my depression, everything that goes on in my head or body came up, all my wounds came out. Yeah, it was really difficult and challenging. It really challenged myself as a man and a human being and who am I? It’s really where I learned like, “Wow! I’m not perfect. The norm is anybody.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, you’re in good company.
Craig Pothier:
These things like where I was growing up where I want it to be the best hockey player, best baseball player, the best guitar player, and the best, the best, the best. That’s a common theme in my life is thinking that if I’m not the best, then I’m not worthy. Those things came out in my sobriety. It’s like, “Oh, there’s perfectionism running under here. There’s constantly an I’m not good enough tone that’s running under my life.” That’s why I want to burn the shit down. It’s like, “Well, I’m not good enough. This is not going to work so I’m going to burn this f’ing shit to the ground.” Sorry. Excuse my language.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I love it. Don’t worry about it.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. That’s just what I learned about myself and it’s have these tendencies and that is okay that I have to have awareness around them. It doesn’t mean that I have to react the way that I want to react. I can create that space between my reactions if I’m aware of it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Space.
Craig Pothier:
Create … space is the thing that I give myself now.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. I relate so much to mediocrity is worse than anything ever. What I learned was I have to be my best. I missed that part. Not the best, my best. If I’m my best, then I’m winning and that’s an okay goal. I can try to be better than Ashley yesterday, or try to be better than Ashley five years ago or whatever it is. But it has to be my best, not a comparison, that’s very hard.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. It is hard and I still struggle with that. It’s like I have to remind myself, “This is the only life that matters here is you. You have to accept yourself.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How can anyone else, if you can’t?
Craig Pothier:
Exactly and yeah, if you don’t love yourself, you can’t love another person properly.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right and that’s the thing properly, right?
Craig Pothier:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think that people always say that, and you’re like, “Well, I’ve loved people. So screw you.” It’s no.The way it is is if you don’t love yourself, the relationship, you can love someone else, but it’s going to have those threads of dysfunction and toxicity into it because you don’t know how to properly value your own contributions.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You have a website called-
Craig Pothier:
Mind Uncaged.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mind Uncaged. I was going to say uncaged. Mind Uncaged, tell us what that is.
Craig Pothier:
After going through my struggles, I was like, I realized what I was missing. A core part of my life was that I didn’t really have purpose. My career was something that my mom told me to do. I make okay money. I have a house. I have a roof over my head. I have food, whatever, but nothing’s really meaningful to me and I’m not really giving anything back.
Craig Pothier:
I created Mind Uncaged to give people back what I was missing. I went through a really hard time with alcohol as we discussed here but also, the recovery. It was really hard for me to be okay with myself and really find myself in this world, in my sobriety. I want to help others do the same.
Craig Pothier:
I created Mind Uncaged. It started as a blog. I’m now a certified recovery coach that I work one-on-one with individuals and I do have a lot of tools in my bag now through the three years of trying numerous different modalities of recovery that I’m guaranteed that there’s a tool that will work for you or increase the quality of your life, especially in sobriety. That’s where Mind Uncaged was born and just out of the love of others and myself and wanting everyone to have a chance at a meaningful life. That’s why I was born.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I love it. I love it. That’s awesome. People can go to minduncaged.com.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Your Instagram is mine.uncaged.
Craig Pothier:
That’s correct.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You have a free ebook.
Craig Pothier:
I do. I have two of them. One of them is, well, it is my story and then the other one is some tips on how to rock your first 30 days of sobriety.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Love that.
Craig Pothier:
Yeah. There’s a number of different tips to build confidence, getting through cravings, working on your mindset, how your mind will play games on you, how you can counteract that, journaling exercises, et cetera.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Love that. Thank you so much for being here, Craig. I had such a good time.
Craig Pothier:
Well, thank you so much. I really love this podcast and it’s an absolute pleasure-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you.
Craig Pothier:
… to be part of it and to share this with you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you.
Craig Pothier:
So thank you so much for doing what you do.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much, Craig.
Craig Pothier:
You’re welcome.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a recovery community offering free online support group meetings, useful recovery information and entertainment. Visit www.lionrock.life to view the meeting schedule and find additional resources. Find the joy in recovery at lionrock.life.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:34:15]
Ashley Jo is one of the producers of The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast team. With over a decade of experience working with C-level executives and directing corporate training events, she brings extensive production experience to Lionrock. In early 2020, she made a significant career change and stepped into the realm of podcasting.
Her recovery experience includes substance abuse, codependency, grief and loss, and sexual assault and trauma. Ashley Jo enjoys supporting others in recovery by connecting with people and being a leader. She shared her story in Season 3, Episode 92 of The Courage to Change.