Helping others
How two men are working to help others overcome addiction.
More than 20 million people are addicted to drugs and alcohol in the United States at some point in their lives. Many of them can draw parallels in their story, whether it’s how they got addicted, why they got addicted or what caused them to quit.
For two particular men, though, their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. One got kicked out of college, the other finished medical school. One was in and out of prison for years, the other spent one year at Fort Leavenworth.
Now both have the same goal: to help people overcome their addiction.
Tim Ryan, the national outreach director for Transformations Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center, recently spoke to a crowd at the Oklahoma Capitol, sharing his story of recovery and hope.
“Good afternoon, Tim Ryan, recovering alcoholic and drug addict. … I also go by R68915. That’s my old apartment at (the Department of) Corrections number,” Ryan said. “I found alcohol at a young age, I found cocaine. … I always wanted to be altered. But what I had to look at is what was my underlining issue that caused me to use drugs and alcohol as my outlet.
“I’m the guy who struggled with ADD, dyslexia, learning disabilities, was molested by a baby sitter at 12 years old. … Those were the catalysts called trauma that pushed me into what I did for 30 years.”
According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, “one in four children and adolescents in the United States experiences at least one potentially traumatic event before the age of 16.”
What those children do in response varies. For Ryan, it would be decades of going in and out of treatment and prison.
“When I went into treatment the first time, I went in with the thought pattern that I just want to quit doing drugs and figure out how to drink like a normal person,” Ryan said. “At my treatment, a guy like me came in and spoke, and he shared his message. And when he was done, he looked at all 38 of us as clients and he said, ‘One of you will be sober in a year.’ Now I put up my hand and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, there’s 38 of us?’ And he said, ‘Listen to me kid, one of you will be sober, and a third of you will be dead.’ ”
Sobriety and death eluded Ryan for years as his cycle continued of getting sober, starting businesses, getting back into drugs and alcohol, burning his businesses, moving and checking back into rehab.
“I ultimately ended back up in Chicago after burying a business at 23 years old,” Ryan said. “I had 60 people working for me, and I destroyed all their lives. And my M.O. was going back to meetings.”
Starting a family and having a career proved difficult as he continued using drugs, eventually having a $500-a-day heroin habit while drinking a daily gallon of vodka.
“I’ve overdosed eight times, I’ve been clinically dead three, I’ve had two heart attacks. Statistically, I should be back in prison or dead,” Ryan said. “I was fueled by pain. … Consequences didn’t really bother me.”
A different path
His story is somewhat similar to Dr. Kevin McCauley’s.
McCauley, a nonpracticing physician and former naval flight surgeon for the Marine Corps, has been studying addiction treatments and the relation of addiction and neuroscience, trying to understand why drugs and alcohol dominate every aspect of an addict’s life — including his own.
“People with addiction have a very troubling relationship with risk and a very hard time assessing what’s risky,” McCauley said.
This lack of risk assessment eventually would land McCauley a yearlong ticket to Fort Leavenworth.
After having a surgery that was necessary for him to continue being a flight surgeon, McCauley quickly became addicted to opioids. McCauley realized this wasn’t a problem that only he was facing, though. Initially meeting with 12 other doctors, who all had eerily similar stories to his, they recommended he check in to the Betty Ford Center, an addiction treatment facility, for monitoring and rehabilitation. But McCauley didn’t see that as a viable option with his work so he continued business as usual, trying to fix the problem himself.
“I tried to stay sober, I went to meetings and then I’d steal some (opioids),” McCauley said. “Eventually, I got caught, and the Navy sent me to their Betty Ford Center that’s called Leavenworth.”
It was at Leavenworth that McCauley first started looking at addiction through the lens of neuroscience. That decision has resulted in McCauley being sober for over 10 years and has provided the opportunity to work in multiple treatment centers, giving lectures nationwide on the neuroscience of addiction and how to apply that in recovery.
He came to Oklahoma City in September— hosted by Oklahoma City-based inCrisisConsultants andNorthbound Treatment Services based in California — for a presentation on how an addict’s brain responds to opioids. McCauley was introduced by Susan Ford Bales, who remains affiliated with the Betty Ford Center, co-founded by her mother,the wife of former President Gerald Ford.
“Addiction is, at its heart, a disorder in the brain’s ability to perceive pleasure. It’s a broken pleasure sensor. And that is the dopamine system, and if you break the dopamine system, that ruins my ability to do two things: One is predict what’s valuable in the future and then what’s likely in the future,” McCauley explained.
“When I lose those two capacities, I lose the ability to make decisions. So addiction starts out as a disorder in the brain’s ability to perceive pleasure and then ends up as an impairment in decisionmaking. Not only is my decision-making tampered, but I can’t see it.”
He said addicts in recovery try to avoid cues that could trigger relapse. McCauley explained that the neurotransmitter dopamine puts a person’s drug of use into memory and everything associated with it — people, sights and smells of the moment, even time of day.
“And those things now can serve as drug cues. If a person is exposed to that cue, that will unlock their ability to go use drugs,” he said. “There are certain places in Orange County, to this day, that I should not go. When I was in my earlier recovery, I actually made habits to avoid the Harbor Boulevard exit. … And even to this day, after many, many years sober, I still avoid this exit.”
For McCauley, his addiction led to a change in his career and a passion for understanding how the brain contributes and processes addition.
For Ryan, the disease led him to a devastating loss that would create a catalyst for his message of hope.
On Ryan’s 21-month sobriety day, Aug. 1, 2014, his oldest son, Nick, overdosed on heroin.
“Since Nick died, I have attended 114 funerals,” Ryan said. “I’m sick of walking over dead bodies. I don’t care if it’s alcohol, cocaine, heroin … you got two choices: You get sober, or you’re going to die. If you got a heartbeat, you got hope.”