Bill Payne joins us from Shamrock Plumbing to share his story of addiction and recovery. He talks about culture, religion vs. faith, and having a spouse that has stuck be his side through thick and thin.
The Illuminate Recovery Podcast is about Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Addiction Recovery. Shining light on ways to cope, manage, and inspire. Beyond the self care we discuss, you may need the help of a licensed professional. Curt Neider and Shelley Mangum are a part of Illuminate Billing Advocates (illuminatebilling.com). They are committed to helping better the industry and adding value to the lives of listeners by sharing tools, insights, and success stories of those who are working on their mental health.
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welcome to the illuminate recovery podcast we shed light on mental health issues mental illness and addiction recovery ways to cope manage and inspire beyond the self-care we will discuss you may need the help of a licensed professional my name is kurt neider i'm a husband father entrepreneur a handyman and a student of life i avoid conflict i deflect with humor and i'm fascinated by the human experience and i'm shelley mangum i am a clinical mental health counselor and my favorite role of all times is grandma i am a seeker of truth and i feel like life should be approached with tremendous curiosity i ask the dumb questions i fill in the gaps the illuminate recovery podcast is brought to you by illuminate billing advocates make billing and collection simple with leader in substance abuse and mental health billing services verification and analysis of benefits pre-authorizations utilization management accurate claim submission and management denial and appeal management and leading reporting improve your practices cash flow and your ability to help your clients with eliminate billing advocates today it is my pleasure to be able to meet with bill payne bill bill and i met at the alema harrington golf uh golf fundraising event um this last well this summer actually and i was super impressed with this story uh bill is with shamrock plumbing and he is an advocate for recovery bill i just want to thank you for being willing to come on the podcast today well thank you for having me i i hope that i can do it justice well i think for me stories are the most powerful at least wise for me i think everybody has a little bit different learning style but stories really resonate with me and i seem to connect with them and remember them and learn from them probably more powerfully than almost anything else so um i love it when people are willing to share their recovery stories and their journey and um and with that you might you know maybe um you want to give us a little bit of history and give the listeners a little bit of history as to how you ended up where you are today sure i hope i uh don't for anybody to sleep but my i grew up in i was born in california grew up mostly in utah my mother was married three times divorced twice my real father was an alcoholic he left us when i was free and i realistically didn't make peace with that until actually last year but we'll get to that part of it she married again to an abusive alcoholic musician who physically and mentally uh abused us when me and my two brothers and two sisters when he was under the influence and then he moved to california with every intention of dragging us along with him at a later date when he hit a big because he was going to be a drummer in a band somewhere in los angeles and my mother divorced him and we basically hid from him for a couple of years and when i was 12 11. i when i was 11 my mother started dating the man that she was married to until her death five years ago and uh he took on the responsibility of my kids and uh my mom and and it wasn't an easy go for him because i equated uh men to causing pain in our family so i wasn't good to him at all i threw rocks at his car when he'd drive away and he would chase me but he couldn't catch me but we wound up being very close over the years and and uh he's obviously not an alcoholic but he still enjoys his drink um and you know we we're still we're still close um so to backtrack a little bit into into my childhood um my real father's name is ron uh my first step dad was named matt so ron i didn't have a lot of connection with for a long time obviously um but mack the abusive uh alcoholic uh used to get us out of bed uh two o'clock 2 30 in the morning whenever the gig ended at whatever bar he was playing at and uh we get knocked around and you know i just when you're a kid you're growing up in that you just kind of start to assume that that's normal that's how things are um but you know obviously in growth in my life um that's one of the things i found that wasn't that normal i think when i was nine years old i stayed overnight at a friend of mine down the street and this is in the if you're familiar with salt lake area this is in the nibbly park area i went to nibbly park elementary and uh the friend's name was ronnie starr and i stayed overnight at his house and i was in the top bunk and he was in the bottom bunk for the bunk bed about two o'clock in the morning i was just conditioned to kind of wake up and wait for uh all hell to break loose and uh i'm literally sitting on the edge of the bed and my friend wakes up he goes what are you doing i'm waiting for your dad to come down my dad's not coming down and you know it was it was like wow maybe my life is different everybody else is normal you know it was it was uh it's just something that stands out my childhood um and and uh you know dealing with with a lot of that pain that was inflicted during that time in my life you know because when we're kids when i was a kid i can't speak for anybody else but i'm pretty sure everyone's the same way when i was a kid i was seeking out love and affection from the male presence in my house my mom always was really good about love and affection but i was seeking that out from the male figure in the house and and what we typically got was was beat up and then uh you know and then pampered the next day when i was nine there used to be a little shopping center on the corner of a little grocery store on the corner of 7th east and 27th south which is about a block away from where i live matt had come home and he wanted a sandwich and there was no mustard so he had me run to the store to get mustard and i mistakenly grabbed french's horseradish instead of mustard they're the same bottles nine-year-old in a hurry trying to please someone who he couldn't please i grabbed the wrong bottle i ran home gave it to him he looked at it said mrs horserad he stumbled up his wrist hit me across the side of the head and knocked me across the room and then proceeded to have me eat the entire bottle of horseradish so to this day obviously i don't have horseradish on anything uh but you know if it's all part of what got me to where i was before i found sobriety you know these pains and these these these triggers and so we moved on from mac and my mom married mark mantella who was everything a father could be you know with little or no education and and you know working for just above minimum wage he worked two or three jobs to make sure we had everything we needed whether it was to play little league or football or whatever he worked his ass off to make sure that that we were taken care of and and i like to think that everything i learned about working hard and achieving um was taught to me by him and uh he's a good man he's he's coming to the end of of his road you know his health is is in bad shape and and i probably don't do enough for him but uh he's a good man um i in growing up in i we moved from the area in salt lake and moved out to west valley where uh marv and mom bought a house uh continued to grow up there our house was the house that was targeted by the lds faithful at the time because you know there was drinking and stuff that went on in my house my mom and dad were lying with us sitting down and having to drink with them once we were 14 or 15 years old as long as we didn't leave the house so for me that just created an opportunity to begin my spiral and and i didn't even know it uh and so you know kids like to hang out our house but parents didn't like their kids hanging out in our house and and when i was uh 18 17 17 years old i was at a american legion game and i saw a really cute log sitting across from me and the other bleachers and i went to the dugout and i asked everybody on the team if they knew who that girl was and a friend of mine knew who she was or had a friend who knew who she was and so i showed up at her house and started dating her and and she still currently my wife of 43 years which is amazing considering what i put her through but during my courtship with her i was baptized by her father into the lds church and i did that for the wrong reasons um and it didn't it didn't take that well it and we were together off and on for for four years and then during one of our bomb stretches when she was up at college at utah state she got pregnant we got married and we got married in july had a baby in january on january 3rd and we moved to southern california on february 15th so we had kind of a whirlwind of things come together there it was not the wedding or the mate that her parents had hoped for her but it was what it was at that point my life i don't know that i would recognize myself as an alcoholic or an addict i had drank a little i had smoked some weed i had taken some hallucinogens you know but nothing that drew me back time and time again into that addiction when we moved to california to san diego i went to work for my uncle who owned a plumbing company this was in 1979 that's how old i am it was in 1979 and i went to work with him we uh i got to meet a lot of people who i thought were pretty cool who helped me a lot in my young career a few of them introduced me to cocaine the very first time i did cocaine i was it was the best feeling i've ever experienced in my entire life and i spent the next three or four years chasing that experience again and i never found it obviously which is a constant with us attics we have that initial high that is never there and after a period of time we find ourselves chasing cocaine just to get to whatever normal is and not so much for the high but just to be normal uh any of us that have been in any rooms where they teach us about addiction have seen that graph where that initial high is like 100 and average is 50 and every time you do it both of those go down and uh yeah i changed it for a while and then i i was really really smart um and i decided that math would be better for me than cocaine and so i chased meth for another three years the entire time having complete disregard for my family for my health at that time two daughters uh during that period i was a couple of things i think of note that are important to my story i had a growth on my pancreas and i was scheduled for surgery and my wife had arranged for one of the ward members to come down and and give me a blessing and an lds blessing prior to the surgery that night and that night he came in and him and uh one of the other people i didn't know from the ward and he gave me a blessing and he uh my mom was sitting there because of pretty extensive surgery i still have a scar from my breast plate down to my belly button where they went in and they weren't as efficient than as they are these days at those surgeries but he gave me a blessing in the blessing he called me by name which is consistent with those blessings and then he spoke to me personally as if he was speaking from the lord and he told me that the lord was aware of the challenges i was facing and that and and the choices i was making and that if those choices didn't change that i would surely die and this wasn't a blessing and at the time i was i was uh deeply offended you know i didn't i didn't have enough clarity in my head or my heart to understand that meaning and uh i went in for you know he left and my mom was kind of pissed about it she's she's you know devout catholic to as devout as a barbate can be but she was a devout catholic and she was i thought that was supposed to be good stuff yeah me too you know and i was really pissed off about it but we went into surgery the next morning they did the surgery to remove the growth on my pancreas and there was nothing there it was scar tissue it had been clearly identified for four or five months and a lot of different testing and the doctor it was you know it's kind of the unexplainable you know you have to have a lot of faith to believe that the lord had a hand in someone as meek and as troubled as as as me but at this point in my life i certainly accept that uh moving on from there i still wasn't done still took another couple years i had gone on a three-day down to ensenada mexico rosarita beach that area i came home from that trip to a u-haul truck in front of my condo with ward members and my wife's parents moving everything out of the house with the exception of my clothes and i just i drove by and i drove to the corner liquor store because most days we didn't all have cell phones and uh we had home phones and and liquor stores were on every corner in southern california so i went up got on the pay phone and called and says hey i get it i suck i've been a terrible husband i've been a terrible father i get it i you're leaving i get i says but i'd really really like to see my two daughters before you guys go i said so if you can clear everybody out of there for about 15 minutes and just let me see them i i would appreciate it and she agreed to do that and uh i got there and everybody was gone with the exception of her parents who were sitting out in front in their car um my at the time uh six-year-old daughter jenny who's a incredibly talented and gifted and renowned therapist at this point in her life go figure she ran to me and walked around me and just crying saying i'm not leaving my dad i'm not leaving my dad and that went on for a good oh five to ten minutes and my wife kathy expressed that she wasn't sure that she was doing the right thing and so she called she called her bishop and he came and gave her a blessing and in the blessing he didn't tell her what to do much to his credit because the right thing to do would have probably been to leave my ass but he told her whatever decision she would make would be the right one and she would have to see it through and she chose to stay and her mother and father started the car up and drove all the way back salt lake i don't think they stopped for gas or to go to the bathroom or anything they were really pissed off about it um thought she was making a terrible mistake and you know i think if we'd have lived here in utah and she'd have had the support system in place that she would have had here with friends and church and different things that she probably probably wouldn't have stayed together but i think being that far away and having to grow and rely on each other so much and not family that you know her decision to stay helped us grow and within about four or five months see there was a stressor where i knew i was i knew i was an addict i knew i was screwing up i knew i was not doing good things and making poor choices uh i within about four or five months we found a therapist a family therapist who specialized in addiction and we visited with him a couple of times and he talked me into going to an inpatient treatment center um in san diego at the san diego and physicians hospital in uh right on the border of in canto in san diego which is a really tough area um and uh up on the eighth floor is where it is where uh uh new beginnings drug and alcohol rehabilitation center was so i checked in there and i spent the first 24 hours crying my eyes out like a little kid swearing to everybody who would listen that i didn't belong there with those with those people um and i spent the next 24 hours trying to ready myself to move forward to do what i needed to do to be better um i called my mom the second night i wasn't supposed to have phone privileges but i was pretty smooth talker and and uh talked one of the nurses into giving me a phone privilege and i called my mom and i told her where i was and what i was doing and this is such a typical mom response and she goes what did i do wrong and uh that was painful and and uh i i says you know you didn't do anything you know nobody nobody held my hands nobody held my arms nobody forced stuff into my nose or down my throat or into a pipe nobody did those things i did those things and uh you know it was it was tough that the irony of that too is that my sobriety date which is february 3rd is is her birthday so i i literally checked myself into the hospital on her birthday so there's a lot of a lot of really weird things there but in the hospital i everything they asked me to do i did everything they told me i needed to do i did i didn't ask any questions i didn't question their knowledge i didn't i just did what they told me to do because they told me in those rooms that if i followed this footprint that i could find clarity and i could find sobriety and and i believed them and one of the a couple of the things that happened during my stay there you know i i had always carried with me a burden of of being baptized and not really being baptized for the right reasons and and making really poor choices beyond that um into the lds church and uh you know hellfire and damnation and all that stuff plays a lot into a lot of uh recovery stories you know that's why the big book teaches us that you know it doesn't have to be a god it doesn't have to be a christ it doesn't have to be any of those things just need to believe in something greater than ourselves is in control of the plan right but i remember sitting in one of those rooms and i was 29 years old and a sweet little lady who came in for in-service and would just talk to us was talking to us about christ and and god and their place in their lives and that's like yeah i raised my hand and says i don't know if i can get there and she looked at me just in a way that a grandmother or a mother or someone very close that you love very much would look at you and she said to me and this has stuck with me forever is she said to me that if christ is not in your life who's moved and i thought about that for a minute and i thought yeah dead straight i'm the one that's gotta find my way back he hasn't left me you know and and so for me that was a turning point for me to start understanding there was a path for me not only in addiction or sobriety but also spiritually and uh that was that was an important milestone for me this to open my heart to be able to grow spiritually uh over the next 30 days um i grew more and more comfortable in those walls as any of us who have experienced in-house treatment uh grow to do and then you know the end of 30 days you know it's it's time to go and i was more afraid to leave than i was actually afraid when i got there uh because i was gonna have to wake myself up and i was gonna have to make my own decisions and i was going to have to work to my family's timetable not mine um but you know that's that was 35 and a half years ago and knock on wood i haven't had to i haven't had to go back i haven't slept i haven't fallen but i did everything that they told me to do i went to a meeting a day for 30 days i went to you know and i gradually built it down but in the first year of 365 days i probably attended 300 meetings you know because i needed to be around people like me who were the same but different i mean all of us have unique stories to our own sobrieties but we're all the same and that we we chased that higher we chased that drink here and uh i needed to be around those people to feel comfortable for a long time and then as i grew uh health-wise mental health and spiritually i was able to move away from those rooms into other rooms where they talk about you know eternal paths and and god and christ and and those kind of relationships that are a big part of my life but they don't have to be a part of a recovering person's life um but they're a big part of my life you know the the i've grown to believe and this is something that i've thought of that spirituality is is so key to recovery and when i say spirituality i want to make sure that everyone listening understands that i feel like there's a huge difference between spirituality and religion you know i think that the religious person has a scripture for every experience right and but i think that the spiritual person has an experience for every scripture and i've applied that in my life i you know i i sit in church rooms and i feel really dumb sometimes um but i've spoken in church rooms where i've felt the spirit so strong that i can't deny it i hope that makes sense it makes sense to me in my head but i'm you know i'm an old plumber so um you know those things are uh but spirituality i think is you know i'm 35 and a half years in and spirituality is is i would say is um you know one of the two or three biggest reasons i'm able to be 35 and a half years in um you know from from there i was i just always made took the opportunity to surround myself you know that stupid saying that they say in aaa rooms or in in house where they say playgrounds and playmates where that has to change right you can't you can't have that mighty change of heart that dr bob talks about or bill w talks about without moving on from the things that took you down you just can't i i have a little brother who's been in and out of uh the jail prison systems here in utah and he's gone stretches of you know a year two years where he doesn't drink or he doesn't do drugs and but he's the same person he's the exact same person before during and after and it's because of what he surrounds himself with you knowif you're not going to be about that life anymore you just you gotta play grounds for playmates you gotta change um i i just i think that as we make choices in our relationships and our friendships even where we even go to work sometimes right you want to choose i had to choose i can't again i catch myself speaking for other people i had to choose places where i didn't feel challenged and i didn't feel and i felt comfortable and i felt like a lot of the values and a lot of the a lot of the spirituality that i was seeking out for myself was available to me um rather in in friends and and uh you know when i i was fortunate enough that and this is this is going to get this is going to probably piss some people off and maybe not but i came back into the lds church in southern california the acceptance level for someone like me in california and southern california was incredible they welcomed me with open arms they loved me for who i was loved me for my past and loved me for my future i feel like sometimes in our culture here in utah that that acceptance isn't there in and that there's a fair amount of judgment to be spread around um and that's painful for me to watch i i've watched my children experience it i've experienced it you know and i mean it's it's really nothing there's nothing that you can't get past but it's it's real if but i can i think i can honestly say in all clarity that had i tried to come back into the church of the lds church here in utah and been faced with some of the same challenges that i see people faced with i probably wouldn't have made it i'd have made me made some other choices and it's an ongoing it's an ongoing thing for me i challenge that uh periodically and with the people that i go to church with you know and and uh sometimes it's okay sometimes it's not that good but it's you know i i can't sit on my emotions and my feelings um of truth and clarity in my own life anymore i did that for a long time you know and part of the trigger is why i suppressed a lot of them oh of what what had gone on in my life um you know the the abuse the the uh physical abuse the things that had gone on in my young life that i tried to suppress and tried to forgive by by uh drinking and drugging um let me ask you a question bill if if i'm if i'm listening correctly and you correct me if i'm wrong but i heard you talk about as a child obviously the abuse which was really difficult um but that that you're home as a child was targeted i think that was your word targeted by the lds church and and certainly or at least was those families in your area you know and that idea that they certainly didn't want their children hanging around somewhere where where there's a family that's openly allowing their teenagers to drink and so you saw that experience and and then you talked about being baptized when you married your wife and that in and of itself was an interesting situation and so it seems like you may it seems like maybe there was some really maybe some bad taste in your mouth towards that that religious belief system and yet you still you still kind of um lean towards that and embrace that can you talk about that piece a little bit sure i actually think it's it's relatively simple for me right what i embrace is the truthfulness that i find in that gospel what i don't embrace is the imperfect people that try and apply it in my life um hopefully that makes sense i i i feel i feel i mean if if if a person if i'm familiar with the big book and i'm familiar with like let's take the word of wisdom in the lds church right those two things parallel each other like they were written in the same vision right it's it's there's there's so many parallels and and really the at the end of the day and there's there's some things i don't want to make this about the lds church i i don't i i don't because my belief and my spirituality at this point in my life are centered in the lds church and there is so much good that comes from that from that in my life but the application that individuals take liberty with um i'll give you an example and hopefully this and and you can jump in anytime because i i can understand how i spun that to sound that way and i really didn't mean it to um my wife and i were sitting in the sunday school class and one of the board members we were talking about something i don't know about i don't even remember what the lesson was on and and one of the ward members raised their hand and they says you know i struggle with when and where to apply righteous judgment in our lives and i just start kind of squirming in my seat and my wife starts forming in her seat because we both feel the same way about this and i raised my hand and i just says you know i says righteous judgment is the most overused undereducated term in the mormon dictionary i said none of us in this room are capable of righteous judgment and i got up and i left you know my family's been impacted by righteous assessment but that's not the church making that judgment that's an individual making that judgment right i mean that's an individual saying i don't want my kid playing with your kid or i don't want my kids hanging out at your house it's interesting that we talked about that because i i spoke in a church state conference a few years ago about loving your fellow man because i think that in the end that's what all churches seek is for us to love our fellow man or fellow woman when i i spoke to that you know that the very impact that judgment has on each of us and how none of us are capable of seeing the whole thing you know i mean we see all these little memes on social media or wherever you know and it talks about be kind you never know what someone else has gone through there's 15 different plays on that um and that's just a reality you know my my therapist daughter my oldest daughter works with young people in and out of the church she's not a member who struggle with anxiety and depression right i mean those are two gateway terms to alcoholism addiction or suicide um and she's she's amazing she's amazing with them and um i've learned a lot from her and i think she's learned a lot from me about acceptance you know and you know i i just i i don't think that any of us were put on this earth who don't belong here i think i i i spent three and a half years in a church calling at the davis county jail going over once a week on on wednesdays and once every sunday morning and hanging out i mean loving these guys who had made mistakes and having them know that they had done nothing to this point in their life that they couldn't find a way back and i knew that because i've done most of those things you know i mean every pretty much every addict i i lied i cheated i stole i did all the things that addicts do i got pulled over with an eight ball of cocaine in my pocket right in front of mission bay park overlooking sea world highway patrol comes up to the car and this is it towards the end of my run and he says hey you know you're going fast i'm like yeah i don't care i mean i'm literally crying for help right and eight ball cocaine in my front pocket and he talks to me for a minute he goes back he comes back he writes me a ticket he hands me a ticket i wadded it up i threw it on the floor i said are we done here and he says yeah and i just laid rubber and took off if i did that today i'd probably be surrounded by 15 cops and you know it was just a different time then i guess but that was me crying out for help and something greater than me keeping me out of jail i guess i don't know um but i i've uh you know i've learned you know what works for me isn't necessarily what works for everybody else but the constant in it is spirituality and like i expressed i think that there's an absolute black and white difference between spirituality and religion i don't think you have to have religion to be sober but i think you absolutely have to have spirituality and um in the root of the of the gospel regardless of who believes how it got here what is a path for me i believe that i took the proper steps much like the fifth step right much like a fifth step where we reveal to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrong and make good wherever we can except when in to do so would create more harm than good well i did that but i chose to do it with a with an lds bishop and i can i can tell you that i came away from there more spiritually aware of myself than i was before i walked in uh so if if earlier in this i made made you think and you're incredibly intelligent to catch that but if i made you think that i had a beef with the religion i i don't i have a beef with people who apply it incorrectly imperfect people and then applying imperfect uh ways of thinking well and i appreciate you kind of clarifying that but but i would imagine bill that as a as a young boy who's experienced some you know pretty traumatic um experiences with you know you with your your father figures um and it you know felt that rejection of people around you um even as an adult not even you know as a young person of course but as an adult that still today there you know you've come to some terms with that and you understand that that perhaps you know it's the people exercising their belief system you know maybe improperly but as a young boy i think it's it's harder i mean you don't have that maturity to say there's a difference between spirituality and and how people apply that and live their beliefs um and so i imagine there was some confusion for you and trying to come to amends as to how you were going to feel about you know about spirituality versus religion yeah i think that's fair i think that that's accurate i i did struggle with that and it took me some time and and when i speak of the people in in san diego who welcomed me and loved me no matter what that's the time i needed i needed people to care about me and respect my journey you know i the the talk i gave in that state conference i spoke to um one of the phrases i used is i've been to the places that you don't want your children to go and in hopes that two things in hopes that you know they allow their children the freedom to grow individually but also that they understood that their righteous judgments that they were making upon people weren't necessarily the right things you know one of the one of the epiphanies that happened to me even even later so beyond this is after i've moved back to salt lake ben felt like for probably eight years my two oldest daughters were were high school and competitive softball players and i was a softball coach i coached at davis high school for as an assistant as a head coach for about seven years um but my my second oldest daughter who's 40 now we had played in the softball tournament all weekend and we came home from the softball tournament and then the house next door was was my house as a kid right it was a house that parents didn't want their kids to go to and there's a rager going on over there and one of the girls who lived there was really good friends earlier in my daughter's childhood and we had come home from the softball tournament and the party's going on and i looked at my daughter says you know it's a good thing we pushed you in a different direction because you might be over there at that party and she looked at me stone cold without hesitation and told me that if i hadn't pushed her away maybe her friend would be with us and you know i'm old i have a lot of experience and i you know but my daughter taught me in that moment that i was wrong uh i've tried to never repeat that in my life because of those words from her it's a pretty powerful comment bill it's pretty powerful that you can you know that you can own i think i think we all make in what you say is that we we all make these mistakes right we all make these judgments that we think are our our healthy judgments our safe judgments or and we have to do that all day long but what i hear you saying is is that when it comes to a human being and a human life we have to open and accept them because we never know how that's going to impact them absolutely and i i think my my big question to you bill is how do we how do we teach that to how do we teach that to people or how do we make them more aware because i don't think people make those kind of judgments and and hurt people and exclude people i don't think they do it knowingly um because if they knew and understood they wouldn't do it so how do we help them and and create a more connected community wow that's a that's a great question i i acceptance is i think such a challenge for for all of us i know i know that it is that it has been for me i think that i think that at this point in my life if i don't roll with the punches it triggers me to start thinking that maybe there's an easier path with uh spokane or myth or drinking or something i just i have so many people that have influenced me in my life to learn how to love and how to accept my mother um our house was i mean if somebody was having a problem with their parents or somebody needed a place to stay for a week that was our house um my house became that way as my daughters grew a little older i i remember when i baptized my youngest daughter and in her confirmation blessing i expressed to her that it was important for her to have relationships from all walks of life and to be accepting and to uh be loving and uh she that's her to a t you know that's she's she's not active in the lds church i only have one active daughter in the lds church which is which brings a lot of concern to my sweet wife um but they're all such good kids with such good hearts who care so much about people that i have a hard time challenging them on on much of anything because they're they're good people and uh our our world right now is is either hate or hate right i mean it's it's so divided and so hung up on on so many issues and and there doesn't feel to be a middle ground and uh that's hard i mean this is i couldn't be 17 18 19 20. in this world today i'd i'd probably get high and commit suicide right i mean because that's that's the path that takes us when we have you know mental health takes us down that road we have no recourse but to end it as to your question of how do we i i don't know that i'm smart enough give you uh an educated answer on that i can tell you that how i do it is i just accept people they're you know i'm the one who has to have the boundaries as to what can come into my life and what can't come into my life but as far as loving people and being kind and trying to help people there's no boundaries on that in my opinion uh loving people and caring about people is essential to having the ability to be kind i don't care who it is i don't care if it's you know somebody who's wronged you that you need to forgive i i took a journey last summer in the middle of colgan i jumped on my motorcycle and i went by myself for four days up through the cascades and into missoula montana and found my dad's my real father's headstone he had died in instant death in 1974 on christmas day he drank himself to death we didn't find out about that until four years later but i needed to go visit his headstone i needed i was at a place in my life where i needed to make peace with that and i sat there in the pouring rain and cried and i prayed and i cried and i called my sister and we cried and we prayed and i left there feeling like i had accomplished something i i let go of the shackles that had burdened me for 64 years 63 years of his leaving i understood today why he did the things he did because i've lived those things right i mean i've lived the alcoholic life i've lived the attic life i realized in his life that those things in his addictions were more important to him than i was i made those same choices so i needed to forgive him as people forgave me i've just been fortunate to have people in my life who have granted me grace and forgiveness when i couldn't find grace in my own heart for forgiveness in my own heart and have been examples to me my father-in-law who has been gone for about 16 years now maybe 17 years jack powers when i got sober and we sat down and we talked he he really gave me so much grace he forgave me he understood me he loved me and he was just an incredible example of grace in my life i think that we all tend i tend to want to find a reason for the way things happen consistently you're right there's got to be a right or wrong there can't you know stuff just can't happen for the sake of happening and i'm learning in my life to accept that you know things just happen and it's not anybody's fault and there's nobody to blame and we have to make the best of what we're left with and we just got to love people and we have to be as happy for their for anybody else's achievements as we are for our own go ahead i'm sorry and i i think those what you're describing and what you're talking about particularly with your birth father is is your ability to be able to let go has increased your capacity to love and accept others right being able to heal that part inside of you um has allowed you to increase and be able to love others and open to others even more significantly than you have than you do now and i and i think to my question that i asked you is how do we you know how do we help people get past that i think the first thing and you've talked about the way to do that is that first we recognize that every one of us is is um has made the mistake of excluding somebody for one reason or another right we all have done it we're all we're all guilty of that very thing and and so instead of pointing fingers and blaming other people we've got to turn that into ourselves and say look if i'm doing that then i need to pay more attention to what i'm doing and be better at that so that i can you know set that example for other people and help them understand when they might be being judgmental and they don't even know it and the one way that i think that your story particularly does that is that you're so willing to be vulnerable and to share your story and to express those wounds that you experienced as a kid which was enough to turn anybody bitter right enough to turn anybody um you know into somebody who is hateful and spiteful and angry and and to be able to share your journey and your willingness to understand that the most important part of your recovery was love and connection and then be able to work towards providing that to other people i think i think that's how we you know one step at a time one person at a time that's that's how we change our lives and the lives of other people is just to help them become aware um of what they're doing and i love your story i love that you're willing to share such a personal and um and powerful story of healing and recovery um and the way that your relationships i mean you talked about your wife who stayed with you even though she wasn't sure that was the right thing to do and and stud and stuck by your side and your willingness to do the right thing and to get into treatment and to to change so that you could show up for your kids and your family it's a powerful story bill and i can't um thank you enough for being willing to share it today oh thank you for having me that's uh it's always uh cathargic to to tell that story right i mean it it's it's it's ours to keep but we can't keep it unless we share it so um that's i i appreciate the opportunity to spend time with you i uh never wrote the script for me being on a podcast but but here i am so thank you very much for having me oh it's been a pleasure all uh it's been an absolute pleasure um bill if people want to get a hold of you and follow up with you and want to you know learn more and ask more about your your story and your recovery is there a way that a good way for them to do that yeah i i think for the most part email um just uh you know just my email here at shamrock bill at shamrockplumbing.net and i know that that's not very personable but it's just the best way for me yeah no i think that's absolutely appropriate way for people to con connect with you your busy guy and you got to make a living so i think that's absolutely appropriate and they can reach out and then you can get back with them when you have time so so thank you bill i'd love to um to pick your brain more and hear more of your story and so you know hopefully in the future we can reach back out and and maybe continue this and do part two yeah absolutely i'd love to thank you again for the opportunity yeah you know hopefully someone gets something out of it oh yeah i can't imagine somebody not getting something out of your story bill thank you so much all right take care