KMET1490AM – Los Angeles
Host: “You see why I had to schedule him. He was amazing. His testimony was real. It was deep. There were no excuses. What an amazing story. He was meant to live. He was meant to live to tell this story and to do that book.”
Partial transcript from this powerful interview:
Charles: I guess my first dabbling with drugs was with marijuana. But when I really fell into trouble was when I tried to dabble in cocaine. And that was back in the early Eighties when it first got introduced into North America. And ironically I grew up in a family where we did not touch anything so I was always very careful about doing anything. And at the time we thought it (cocaine) was a safe drug, only for the affluent to enjoy. And lo and behold, it wasn’t safe. And it exposed underlying issues that I had, and it developed into a full-blown addiction that I almost died from.
Aaron: Wow. So…was it like a life-and-death type situation where you were spared that?
Charles: I will tell you, when I finally stopped, which was almost 28 years ago – I am 6′ 1″ and at the time I weighed 127 pounds.
Mia: Whoa.
Charles: So I looked like a prisoner of the concentration camps. I came near death on several occasions. And I was very lucky to survive. And even at the end when I was going through the recovery process, I was quite aware that I might not make it, no matter my best efforts. And a significant change happened, which made me look at life very differently. A lot of lessons were learned and gave rise to the book eventually.
Aaron: Wow. See, this is what I always talk about, right Mia? Whenever we talk about those that have been addicted. And the reality is that anybody can change…I always say that they can change, but the question is…some people don’t want to change. And it gets to a point where they HAVE to change.
Mia: Okay, how long were you using this?
Charles: About 8 years.
Mia: Whoa. About 8 years. How did it affect your surroundings – your family, people you came in contact with?
Charles: Well, you know, when I first started out I was at the height of my success. I was a businessman at the time. I had a corporation that was one of the fastest growing in the country, in Canada. And I was doing well on every score. I was making a lot of money. I came from very humble beginnings but I became very successful. I had lots of friends, I had lots of people that respected me, I was well-recognized in the industry, I was married, happily, I had a beautiful child. I had everything to look forward to. And this was just a means of having fun. And lo and behold, it started to become difficult to stop, and when I wanted to stop to be able to do events such as open houses and so on, I found myself incapable. And I had no idea what I was dealing with. I had never seen addiction before. And through a series of trying every possible way to control it, I just kept on going deeper and deeper and in the process I systematically lost everything in my life, including relationships, including my ability to function. And even my sanity, in the end, out of complete exasperation and not being able to do anything about it.
Aaron: Now here’s a question I have. When it came to the ending and recovery from that, what did you do to help diminish that addiction?
Charles: Well the thing about addiction – and what I talk about in the book, and what it taught me – is that there is an underlying cause for it, and it’s something that I refer to as a Perception Disorder. It is something we develop very young, in the way we look at life. We look at life from our perspective, so if a child for example is hurt, they might feel very insecure and afraid. And if they’re not nurtured properly, they might grow up feeling alone and exposed and become afraid and try to control things and push away certain things and so on. And it kind of multiplies through life. And people that have that extreme condition grow up in life wanting to have extreme control of everything in their life. And if something happens that affects that, they kind of fall apart. And that’s what I did. I had never seen it until I was in my twenties – when this happened to me. I was suffering from something – an abandonment issue that happened to me as a child – that I was not even aware of. So when you’re in the stage of having the active phase of addiction, your mind plays tricks with you. At the addiction stage, it’s now an extreme form of perception distortion where it’s almost nature’s way of getting rid of the disease – to isolate you and kill you. To get rid of you.