Darren Scherbain’s Addiction to Awesome
Winnipeg-bred Darren Scherbain, is a personal trainer and motivational speaker. He’s testament to the power of body movement in beating both addiction and stress. Now based in Phuket, Thailand, Scherbain has found simplicity, connection to body and mind, which keeps negativity and temptation at bay. “I pretty much grew up with a hockey stick in my hand. I was always an active child and loved to spend hours out on the rink,” says Scherbain. “Summers were spent working out on the farm, at camp, or getting my bike dirty. From an early age, I always felt my happiest when I was playing outside and moving around.” By his late 20s, however, his life had spiralled into a drug- and alcohol-infused mess. He tried to hide under the umbrella of normality, but normal to him had a distorted view. “For me normal was not doing any cocaine after 5 a.m., because only real junkies use all the time. Not injecting also made me normal. Normal also meant that I would do anything possible to get my next score – manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal. I would do anything to protect my secret identity, because I didn’t want anyone to find out just how abnormal I really was.” Normal also meant drinking until he would black out and not remember anything from the night before. Depressed and desperate, in 2001 he attempted to end his life. “I sat with the razor blade and I wanted it all to end. I even got the direction of the cuts right, but my saving grace was that I didn’t cut deep enough. My thought at the time was that I was such a worthless piece of crap that I couldn’t even get this right. There is a part of me that likes to think that some mechanism of selfpreservation kicked in and I stopped dead in my tracks. I saw the light, so to speak, and came to my senses.” Scherbain says his deepest scars are now his greatest strengths. “Even after all this time, I still get goose
bumps thinking about that day. It helps me to connect with people on a deeper level of humanity. To see and feel the struggle that people go through. We all stumble, fall, and get knocked on our ass – we all have stories of how we have risen back up from our darkest moments,” he says. He turned to triathlon to kickstart his being, focusing on Ironman due to its obvious physical demands. “That’s the true meaning of running an Ironman for me – the ability to persevere with myself and, to a larger extent, with life,” he says, But despite being very proud of his Ironman achievements, part of him felt as though he had traded in one addiction for another.
“I was happy to label myself as an Ironman and it relieved some of my guilt for the shame of my past. I used this guilt to train harder and log more and more training hours, but it still never alleviated my sense of shame. I didn’t really have any sense of balance in my life. No matter how many finisher’s shirts I had in my closet, it never gave me that sense of validation that I was craving.”
The real turning point came when he confronted his misguided sense of relationship with self.
“For the majority of my life I had a misguided sense of love, how to receive love and how to give love,” he explains. “I had no idea how to love myself, which lead to some maladaptive ways of looking for love. I’d search high and low for love, thinking that it was some buried treasure hidden outside myself. I was so afraid to say no, and so desperate for people to validate me. I was always trying to stay one step ahead of the game and do whatever it took to please people. But, if I couldn’t love myself, how the heck could someone else love me?”
The need to abandon any notion of attaining perfection and the need for a label became apparent.
“I think this idea that we have to be perfect holds so many people back from pulling the trigger on the life that we deserve,” he says.
Scherbain let go of this need to be perfect and dropped the labels he gave himself – the Ironman label, the addict label. “What I learned was that I am so much more than a label – I am whatever I choose myself to be.”
Seeing life in a different light did not come easy, however, and the subtle shift in perspective didn’t happen with a “magic wave of a wand”. It took a lot of time.
“It’s only now, all these years later, that I can truly stand before you just as myself without the safety lines of any label,” he says.
For those suffering from addictions, Scherbain says, “It doesn’t have to be helpless and hopeless. There is a solution and a way out. We need to remember that addiction is a disease of isolation.” He reiterates that there will always be tough days. “There are times when I just want to curl up in a little ball and hide under the blanket, but what I have learned is that when I feel like this I immediately find one thing I’m grateful for and reach out and make a small difference in one other person’s life. It’s a sure-fire way to immediately change how you feel about yourself by giving someone a smile. It gives you a hit of serotonin, it costs only a little effort on your part, and you have immediately taken yourself out of the problem mindset and put yourself in the solution mindset.” Scherbain has recently put his efforts into creating the “raw movement,” which uses three very simple anchors to provide more sustainable energy: clean food, clean thoughts and clean movement. “Living simply by abiding by these actions helps harness health, positivity, and gratitude for the life we live.”
“I think this idea that we have to be perfect holds so many people back from pulling the trigger on the life that we deserve.”