Addiction & the Search for Safety

For so long I felt unlovable. Growing up, I learned that the way I could get attention from my family was with negative behavior. My ex and I start by doing cocaine. Cocaine quickly led right back to meth. I don’t blame my kids for being upset with me, but I knew that the only way that I could make that right is to find the true way that I can show up as the best version of myself.  And so I went on a healing journey. Welcome to season two of Behind the Armor. This season will look a little different. We’re gonna go on a journey together and we’re gonna take this into series. And so the first series we’re gonna start is at addiction.  It’s important to start there because I can’t get to my healing. I can’t get to the power of connection until I understood addiction. And by understanding addiction, it’s really understanding the pain. And the pain is the shame. It’s the loneliness. And when you’re on this journey with me, although you may not have addiction in your story, you may not have lost your kids, you may not have been in jail, you may not have done the drugs that I’ve done, but I think that you’ll relate to it because underneath all of that is a tiny bit of our brokenness, a tiny bit of our own struggle. And knowing that underneath all of shame and loneliness and the things we wanna keep silent and hidden from anyone else is where the true power lies. Beneath that is our story. And when we own that story, we’re able to move ahead, find the healing in our lives. What I think that you’ll relate to and what may resonate with you is not the addiction, but why the pain? Because in all of our stories, underneath that lies the secrets, the things we wanna keep hidden, the things we don’t want anyone to know about us. But once we break free from that, when we step out from beneath that shame, when we own that story, that’s where the real power lies.  I think that it’s so important to me and really important in this time particularly that we begin to unravel our messiness, to own the messiness. And so I’m gonna start with my own. My addiction story didn’t start with drugs. It started with safety. I was addicted to finding a safe place. And so while you may hear wild stories throughout the next several episodes, stories that almost are unfathomable, underneath that is still the story of the pain. And the different types of addictions that we can find ourselves in, like myself, I’ve had seasons of addictions, drugs, success, money, sex, validation. But for me, it started with safety.  When I couldn’t find safety, I found escape. I had to find a way to numb the pain. To find comfort in my own skin. And I tried that through my family, naturally like all of us from our parents. Once I couldn’t find it in my own home, I found it in drugs. I found it in substances. And I didn’t care what they were. In fact, when I was a teenager, you could give me something to sniff or something to swallow. And I was a type of kid who would take it and then ask what I just did.  

It was that much that I needed to find the escape hatch. And I first found that in drugs. In high school, I was living with my stepbrother, my half-brother, my biological brother. And so there were four of us. And… It was an untethered house. My father, a famous boxing promoter, Gary Shaw, represented people like Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, Shane Mosley, and I think that he was always looking for a good fight. And we found that even in our own home. Being that that was not a place of safety, when I was enrolling for college, there was no chance that I was going to stay in a university or a place in New Jersey.  I wanted to get away as far as I could. And I found that when I landed in Tempe, Arizona, at Arizona State University. I dove into academics. In fact, my next addiction was validation.  I ran for student president. I was nominated to and ultimately elected as president of my dormitory. I, of course, ran for the president of my fraternity class. And all of these things really just meant more validation for me. The more important I felt, the more lovable I felt. I had for so long felt unlovable, broken, disconnected. And so I was starting to find that in the validation that others would give me. But I met Rick and Rick came to our dorm and he was the kind of guy who knew everybody. And he had this gregarious personality. And I was just absolutely enamored with how he interacted with people and how people looked up to him. And I wanted to be Rick. But Rick also had something that I had no knowledge of and didn’t know anything about. And that was crystal meth. I used it at first. And I remember the first time I used it, I had to be high for two days. I didn’t feel any pain. I didn’t think about home. I didn’t think about the childhood trauma that I had been through.  I didn’t think about anything. It felt at that point like the ultimate escape. And so I wanted more of it. And I wanted more of Rick. I wanted to be just like him. And as I hung out with him, I found that the power of relationships, he also started to connect with me more. So he introduced me to this mom and pop operation that he was getting his meth from. Ultimately, I befriended those people who introduced me to their supplier. And from that point on, I realized that I wasn’t a student on campus anymore. I wasn’t a guy who was selling some side meth just to cover my own expense because of course I didn’t have a job. I was a freshman in college. And so I thought this was a way that I could supply myself until I realized that the people now I was with, I wasn’t supplying myself for anymore. I was supplying to a whole city.  That year I came home for the Christmas break. And I think my parents saw signs that something was up. I had lost weight. Um, I was cutting my hair shorter. I was acting different. I think I was at that time, probably started to have more mood swings because now I’m, I’m home and I’m not using the drug. And I had a very eagerness to get back to Arizona. And when I went back there, I now dropped out of the fraternity.  

I shaved my head. I sold my Jeep and bought a motorcycle. I ultimately dropped out of college. And when I dropped out of college, my parents were notified. And I remember my father, who for so long had this control over me, had abused me and had taught me what his view of masculinity looked like. And I hated it. And I hated him. And I remember when he called me and charged at me on the phone with this attitude, like who was I to drop out of college? And I remembered, and he said to me, then I’m going to come and you’re not going to just hang around Arizona. You’re coming home.  And I told them right on the phone that if you come out here, I’ll shoot you in the face and kill you. Innately, all humans are wired the same for belonging. And it was in the most ironic way that now I’m hanging around the Hells Angels and the Outlaws, a biker gang that controlled the meth trade at the time. They were either making the product in smaller amounts in the Phoenix and Tucson area, or they were getting it from the Mexican drug cartel. Now I was caught between the two most dangerous organizations in the world. The bikers took me in. I would hang out at the clubhouse occasionally. I was never offered patch. I wasn’t seen as a biker, but I was seen as part of their organization. And while these were people who in a blink of an eye could make you disappear and not think twice about it, it was the first time I had a sense of belonging. This group accepted me, and this group could do harm to a lot of people, particularly in my mind, the people who have done such harm to me. And so I felt like a level of protection.  And that protection created an artificial bubble. You know, when I was younger, around 10 or 11 years old, I used to dress in army clothes. And I was living in New Orleans, Louisiana at the time, and I would go into the woods and sometimes in Audubon Park by the zoo or in my backyard. And I would hide under like trees and in bushes. No one was even looking, but I felt that no one could see me. And I felt that the invisibility of that, the ability to camouflage and hide, even amongst people who are just walking right past me, it felt safe. And so now I’m with a group invisible to the world, but within that own organization, I felt safe for time. As I moved up and built more trust with the bikers, I went on a trip through Tucson. I remember I went and saw my cousin, Jonathan, who was attending University of Arizona. At the same time, I was at Arizona State. And I met him at a fast food restaurant, and I sat down and grabbed a quick burger before I was heading into Nogales, Mexico. Jonathan quickly noticed that the next table over is a group of guys that didn’t look like they belong there. And I told Jonathan they were there for my protection. I think he was really scared. And I didn’t realize at the time that that was a valid fear. Then I went into Mexico, and I’m standing in the middle of a meth lab.  

This is not a trailer of a mobile home or something that you may see on Breaking Bad. This was a manufacturing operation. It’s done with military precision. You do not speak unless you have to. There are people who have specific jobs while packaging the drugs, manufacturing it and making it. It is run like a corporate manufacturing company.  The only difference is it’s armed to the teeth. And when I’m standing in there, I remember that there was this Mexican, a burly guy, big. And he had a long goatee that he would, had little rubber bands around it. And he was sort of like the chief of the security of that operation. And standing there, he stared at me. And in that look, I couldn’t make of it because it was just so cold. It was as if there was no soul behind it, that he just gave me that look. And at that moment, now I felt like I was being judged among these people. Now I felt like he was testing whether I’m even belonging there. And I got really concerned because in my mind, do I know too much now and my liability, what’s going to happen? I got out of that, came through Nogales and went back into Arizona. And there was a moment where I meet a group of people out in the outskirts of Phoenix to do a trafficking deal. And now involved in this group is the Aryan Brotherhood, another biker group. When I was much younger, I had a Star of David tattoo, a Jewish star. Put on my hip. And when we showed up there, everybody had to turn over their guns before you went into this run down shack of a home where they’re repackaging the drug to be moved from one group to another. And when they’re pulling down people’s waistbands and lifting up shirts to make sure that nobody was wired or had anything else on them. I thought to myself, what if they see this Jewish star?  What would they do to me? And I felt my heart coming out of my chest. And I just thought to myself, I hope I would die quickly and not be tortured. That’s when it got really real. I’m caught between the addiction of the drug and the substance and no longer feeling safe. And all of those moments of that little boy inside just wanted to run to the woods, be camouflaged and hide. And so I called my family. I told them I was way in too deep. I got myself too involved. I need help.  And so a plan came up between my family and my cousin who was back in Tucson and that’s where I went. I drove from Tempe. I saw him. I slept at his fraternity house that night. I went to a movie I was packing and he took me to the airport and I remember right outside the airport giving him my gun and the keys to my car, which was loaded with more weapons. I gave him a hug and I got on a plane and I went to fly to West Palm Beach to enter rehab at the age of 22. I was the youngest one there. And I remember landing. And for the first time in a moment, feeling safe again, when I was in rehab, actually what happened before I was released was that I began to have hallucinations very early on from the immediate withdrawal of crystal meth to which when they came to find me for a group, 

I was hidden under my bed hearing voices. And so I was transferred to St. Mary’s mental institution. I hadn’t realized that I was no longer actually even there voluntarily. And so I couldn’t just walk out in losing that control completely of my life. It was scary.  I was in a real mental institution. When you think one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, my roommate, Luke, had taken a fork and stabbed himself in the eye when I was there, completely right through his eyeball. And he’s gushing blood and I’m screaming because I think I was in fear of whether he was going to turn the fork on me. And he later said that, you know, he was seeing something out of that eye. And so from that point on, he had to eat with his hands. It wouldn’t give him utensils.  I remember Poseidon man, who was a guy who’d walk around and anytime people would smoke in a courtyard, which was really just like a jail, all surrounded by walls. Eventually you could see a bird flying by and Poseidon man would pick up the cigarette butt when people were done with it and eat it. Still burning. And then you’d stand in line and wait for the pill and you’d have to take whatever pills they were giving you and lift your tongue and show that you swallowed it. And after a few days when the hallucinations wore off and I was detoxed, I couldn’t believe I was there. I was so angry I was there. And I had no ability to get out and nobody would listen. And I realized that this place was not a place that was trying to heal me, was trying to help me. There was no compassion.  Anybody in a white outfit was just there to do their job and keep control of us, loonies. And so I would act out because growing up, I learned that the way I could get attention from my family was with negative behavior. It worked in the past, so I wanted attention. And I would end up being thrown in the solitary room, which is a room of literally white walls, padded, 12 feet high, padded on the floor. I’m 22 years old, I’d start jumping off the walls and trying to flip and stuff and they’d come and tell me I couldn’t do that.  And I was so angry to tell them what would they do? What could you do? Next thing I know, they’re lifting pads off the certain floor and now I’m strapped down. And I would just look at the ceiling for hours. I was there for over a month and I was mad at my family because I thought they did this to me. And I hadn’t realized really all this time, I’m doing this to myself because I’m still caught up in the addiction, the various forms that it showed in my life.  So when I got released from the mental institution, I went to go live with my grandparents in Boca Raton, Florida, and they became my mentors. I ultimately moved back to New Jersey with them when the winter passed and I enrolled in William Paterson University and I found academics and the potential to be successful as my new addiction.  

I graduated with honors at college and what was showing up now was again, not only the need to be validated and heard and seen because top of my class, people were talking about it. I graduated and went to law school, got admitted to law school and in that summer before, we rented a beach house in Belmar, New Jersey with a bunch of friends and a lot of them turned out to be cops and they’re great people and great guys and at the time they were very impressed that I was going to law school. And so that felt validating and it felt powerful.  And so addiction never lost its grip on me because the entire time I’m moving from one addiction to another and not realizing that it’s not why the addiction but why the pain. At first when I went to law school, I wanted to practice criminal law. And I think looking back at that was not that I was interested in the area of law as much as I knew that there were people like me, that I’ve met through these prior seasons of my life that needed help, that had made mistakes but that they were good on the inside. I felt that about myself. I didn’t want to be the person that I was showing up as in college, I certainly didn’t want to be the person I was showing up as at St. Mary’s. I knew that wasn’t me, it was a product of my circumstances in my environment and a lack of the ability to find safety. And so I pursued criminal law at first. I came out of law school, I worked for a law clerk and a very prominent, well-known criminal defense attorney in New Jersey. And that started to take off, where now I’m working for a law firm and I’m moving up very quickly from levels of associates. The owner of the law firm really took to me, we developed a very close relationship. And so I felt important, I felt validated.  There were clients that were particularly asking for me to represent them. I was a zealous attorney, a mad dog litigator. I would run through a wall for my clients because I didn’t care about the other side, I cared about solving my client’s problem. Being important to them, a new sense of belonging. I also realized that I started to make money and could afford my own things. And if I could afford my own things, money would bring me freedom from my family. Money could buy safety. But I later learned that you can’t out hustle the trauma.  My early success was also hurting in different ways. In different relationships, for instance, I remember I came out of a law case once and an attorney had followed me to my car. And as I get in the car, he put his hand on the door and he said, you know, Judd, you don’t have to be such an asshole. You don’t have to like come in on every case you handle and burn the village, scorch the earth, kill the women and children, like your approach. I have a client too that I have to respond to. And we put our pants on one leg at a time, just the same.  

And you’re making me look really bad. And I said to him, if you don’t move your hand, I’m gonna slam it in my door. I didn’t care.  I cared most about being needed, being validated by my clients. And while that wasn’t the route that I would take today, because I think I could still zealously and well-represent my clients while not trying to torch the other side, I didn’t play that way. So my new season of addiction became success and validation. And my cousin, again, Jonathan, while working at this firm, introduces me to my now ex-wife. He calls me up and he says, you gotta meet this girl. And he also told me that she’s worth like hundreds of millions of dollars. She comes from big money. And that was a hook. I thought to myself, if I could get involved in that, now how lovable would I be? That money would buy me access to everything that I wanted and needed. And so I went out with her. And in one week I moved in with her. And in seven months, we had a child together or she got pregnant. So we got married very quickly before the baby was born, our daughter. My new addiction was money.  And money came fame. And this season of time, when she met me, I wasn’t drinking at all, not even a glass of wine. I wasn’t doing any drugs. I was attending meetings, AA meetings, NA meetings, sponsoring, getting a sponsor, speaking at meetings. And I had this balance in my life where now I have a child and family. And in my head, I’ve put all of this together, but I’ve never gotten underneath it. I never addressed the pain. I never addressed the root of why I find addiction in different places. And so now here I was, sober as hell. but deeply addicted.  Over a few years, I’ve collected all the material things that I was promised would bring me happiness. All the things that I saw on the outside from my father and the boxing world and big homes and I had a yacht with a crew and exotic cars and big, big homes. With elevators and nannies and flying private jets. And I’m still…  

absolutely, lonely at night. I feel the pain.  

And I couldn’t understand why, why do I feel that pain? I have everything.  We move our kids to one of the most prestigious private clubs in the country, the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. And I have my now boat that’s in a slip in the marina there and we’re in a big home. And she introduces us to another couple. The couple was into cocaine. And so my ex and I start by doing cocaine with them and then doing cocaine on our own. And cocaine quickly led right back to meth. And now I’m living with a wife who’s participating in all the drugs with me. She’s purchasing glass pipes on Amazon for me. She is allowing me, enabling it. Her only request was that I don’t go out at night to do meth and I’d rather stay home with her and do it.  Because at some point it was like a vampire. I would leave late at night and find a sense of belonging in a meth den with a bunch of men. It was there that I found the ironic comfort that I was looking for. And I’d come home and the drugs are now leading to chaos between us and arguments. Her and I get into an argument and she calls the cops. And she makes an allegation, a false allegation. And later sends me an email to apologize and tell me that her father and his attorney told her what to say because they wanted her to divorce me. And that she’s sorry that she made it up but the damage was done.  And so what happened was in November of 2019, my ex had flown out to Ohio with my eldest daughter to go buy a horse. And she gave my daughter Xanax. And my daughter indicated that she was given Xanax when her mommy wasn’t happy with her. And they found that out because she had an adverse reaction and end up in the emergency room.  And they started exploring child abuse against my ex. And they were bringing the officials. And so she fled, got on a plane with my daughter, left against medical advice. And of course the authorities show up at our house the next day. They do a welfare check. And unbeknownst to me, that call that she had made to the police eight months before that, brought up the fact that I had a warrant for my arrest. So we moved back to Ocean Reef, but quickly the pandemic came. And when it did, it brought us together with nowhere else to go. And so now I’m in the home and I’m finding myself in the very same place I have all my life, feeling incredibly unsafe. My wife could do that to me and risk my own sanity and safety.  And allow me to lead the life I was living. I desperately needed help. I spoke to my friend and told him that the only way I thought that could happen was getting a divorce and trying to get out from beneath all of this. Still not addressing the very source of all of this pain. And so I asked for that divorce, sent my wife an email, told her we can do this for the kids and we need to put our life back together with three kids at the time.  My youngest at the time was three years old. I would read her a book every night and she would fall asleep on me. And then I’d put her to sleep. And usually go back out to those meth dens. And once I sent that email to her, she happened to be in Florida visiting her family with the kids.  

That next morning I drove to my office and sure enough, police lights were flashing in my rear view mirror. They were tipped off. The cops pulled me over actually in the parking lot of my own law firm. And at that point they arrested me for the warrant they had.  So now I’m in jail feeling the unsafe that I had been maybe in my life because I didn’t know what that looked like. I was scared. The uncertainty was frightening. And mostly because I was there because I was innocent. Innocent of the charge but not innocent of my life choices. And so I wanted them to close the door when I was in my cell. I was afraid of being in general population. And I was alone in this cell.  And there was a bunk bed and I went to the top bed and there was this slit of the window and I could look out this slit and every once in a while this bird would land on this dead tree. It was the entertainment that I found and I believe it was the same bird that would come back. A woman knocks on my cell door. And she says, sir, are you okay? And I thought to myself, I am so not okay. And she pushes a pamphlet through the cell door. And I was like, what am I gonna do with this? Thankfully, my friend had been tipped off that I was arrested. It was the one call I made. I mean, now with cell phones, who even remembers anybody’s phone number? But thankfully he had never changed his and I had his memorized so I was able to call it. Later that afternoon, I made bond and that case was thrown out.  The judge and the prosecutor indicated there was no evidence, they had seen the email from her. She wouldn’t cooperate, she’d lawyered up. And the judge says to me, sir, this matter I am expunging from the bench. Meaning you can now say that you were never arrested and this event never happened. And all I could think of, but it did. But it did happen. And I went home to my big empty home alone. And that’s when I seriously considered ending my life.  I no longer could find a way to get out of the pain. I no longer found any addiction that fully numbed it without getting me into some worse off situation. And most importantly, I realized I failed my kids. That my one role, my job was to create safety and protection for them. And I just handed them what I was handed to me. I recreated the same very situation that I was in as a child. I fell so short. I love my kids and never stopped loving them. They’re beautiful, they’re smart, they’re funny. I think about them every day. I think about the pain that I probably have caused them and the therapy they will need and likely the story they will have to tell. And I asked somebody one day, why couldn’t my kids be the source of that safety? Why couldn’t my kids be this thing that I would die for? That I wouldn’t leave in the middle of the night. That it would not be doing drugs at a party and at their own birthday party. And I realized it just was not capable. That my children alone couldn’t provide me the safety that I needed because they couldn’t heal my pain. Underneath all that love that I’ve always had for my children, I have amazing moments and I can think about the greatest times I’ve had with them.  

Sometimes doing the smallest things, but we put them through a lot. And I have to own that and they have to know that because I think the only way they will be able to heal from the pain that I caused would be to own their story just like I’m owning mine. to be able to share that messiness one day and not be shamed of it. It wasn’t their fault.  They loved me exactly the way they need to love me. But under that love was still the pain, underneath it all. And in fact, it created credible amounts of shame for me. Overwhelming shame. Shame that I thought perhaps maybe I just have to end my life to get free from it. And so I realized that the way to heal was to stop treating addiction and to start treating the pain.  I don’t blame my kids for being upset with me, mad at me, not wanting anything to do with me. But I knew that the only way that I could make that right is to find the true way that I can show up as the best version of their dad, the best version of myself. And so I went on a healing journey. I started looking into every kind of forms of treatment that I can do. And it was finally when I once went to a therapist who was providing me EMDR. She said to me, Judd, we have to stop treating the substances. Let’s get to the pain. And from that point on, I realized that underneath all of that was what we all share. There are parts of us that we’ve gone through things that we’re ashamed of, that we want to hide from, that we wish no one would know. But the moment that I was able to be vulnerable, particularly with other men, the moment that I was able to tell my story and own it fully, raw and real, was the moment I began to heal, the moment I would be able to show up as the person that I want to for others, for my kids, for my family.  And so I think this subject is so important that that’s where we’re starting this journey. That I hope that through all of these wild stories that in a bit of it, you hear yourself. And that we’ll be talking to people whose addictions show up differently, different drugs, loneliness, but the outcome that I have found and the journey that we will take together shows me that the way out of the darkness, the way out of that hole is through connection. And when you may feel that you’re struggling, you may be struggling right now, but know that there is another side of that pain. It’s not the end. In fact, we’re just beginning.