{"id":147,"date":"2017-07-07T07:57:40","date_gmt":"2017-07-07T07:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/?p=147"},"modified":"2017-07-07T07:57:40","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T07:57:40","slug":"guest-blog-from-stars-nashville-by-brad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/2017\/07\/07\/guest-blog-from-stars-nashville-by-brad\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Blog from STARS Nashville by Brad"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

For today\u2019s blog post we have a very special guest blogger, Brad Schmitt! Brad is a Nashville based blogger over at\u00a0Nashville Recovers<\/a>, and today he will share a glimpse of what recovery looks like and some of the road blocks older peers face when trying to help motivate young adults \u00a0to start on a new path.\u00a0This is his story.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The facilitator tried to warn us.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese kids,\u201d she said, \u201ccan be, well, uh, a little difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

STARS Nashville\u00a0<\/a>started a 12-step recovery meeting for clients ages 13-18, and the facilitator wanted real live recovering addicts in the meeting to share their experiences with these burgeoning addicts (addicts in training?).<\/p>\n

So I gathered a handful of 20-something people in recovery, folks who were just a few years away from their heavy drug-using high school days.<\/p>\n

Ya see, in my mind, the teens would totally relate to my young tattooed pierced bad-ass recovery friends.<\/p>\n

And my young recovery friends thought the same thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went in kind of like, I\u2019m not too far removed from these kids, and these kids are going to relate to me,\u201d said Nick, 24. \u201cAnd I\u2019ll relate to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese kids want to get clean and I\u2019m gonna help them. I\u2019m going to go in there and save them! Maybe that\u2019s an exaggeration, but that was kind of my mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think all of us went in there with that mindset. Hooray for us! We\u2019ll save these poor misguided youth.<\/p>\n

One small problem \u2013 we all forgot that when we were pot-smoking, pill-snorting, beer-drinking teens, we didn\u2019t give a damn about being clean.<\/p>\n

And it didn\u2019t matter if we got in trouble. In fact, if we got busted, if we were ordered \u2013 by parents, by police, by clergy, by school \u2013 to stay away from drugs, that made us want to use even more.<\/p>\n

Can you guess what happened when we had our first meetings with these kids?<\/p>\n

We recovery folks would be pouring out our guts, being really honest about how drugs took us to dark places, getting emotional.<\/p>\n

And the kids, well, they didn\u2019t really give a crap. They talked to each other, they played games on their phones, they texted each other and their friends outside the meeting, they fell asleep.<\/p>\n

They even talked back to the recovery folks who were sharing.<\/p>\n

\u201cMan, you ain\u2019t no addick,\u201d one teen spit at Nick.<\/p>\n

\u201cUh, yeah dude, I am,\u201d Nick said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t look like no addick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nick\u2019s blood boiled. And he wasn\u2019t the only one.<\/p>\n

Hey, I was 47 years old when I started going to those meetings, the grown up of the group. And I got frustrated, even angry. I actually walked out halfway through one meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cDude, where\u2019d you go??\u201d Nick texted me.<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry, I can\u2019t handle it,\u201d I texted back.<\/p>\n

\u201cWTF Brad?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sigh. WTF indeed.<\/p>\n

It became clear that these kids were there against their wills, ordered by schools, parents, courts, whomever. And that became frustrating for us.<\/p>\n

But we kept coming back.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

\u201cI talked to my sponsor about it,\u201d Nick said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe pointed out that not only would I have acted that way when I was their age, but that I did act that way. I\u2019ve been in groups like that at age 16, and I acted like an ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

But at each meeting, there was always one kid \u2013 it was a different kid each week \u2013 but there was one who actually paid attention.<\/p>\n

And then a funny thing happened after the meetings \u2013 we\u2019d go outside and smoke, and some of the kids, one on one, would approach one or two of us. And they\u2019d ask questions about recovery, about meetings, about being clean.<\/p>\n

And those kids would share, would spill out all sorts of details about their drug use, their bad family situations, their struggles and pain.<\/p>\n

It was\u2026 magic. The after-meeting meetings were places of real sharing, and there, some healing began.<\/p>\n

My friend Big Phil started reaching out to the kids individually after the meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey little homie,\u201d he would boom, \u201cwhat it do?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really sure what that means, but I do know it started conversations that had the little homies really talking to Phil.<\/p>\n

The hope is that we\u2019re planting seeds. Maybe the kids got nothing out of it.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0we<\/em>\u00a0learned about patience, tolerance, acceptance and compassion.<\/p>\n

So thanks to STARS for having those meetings. Turns out we recovering addicts are the ones who needed them.<\/p>\n

Over at\u00a0Nashville Recovers<\/a>, Brad writes everything from his real life experiences to sharing other people\u2019s stories along with providing helpful resources and tools for people who are on the path of recovery. We encourage anyone who is or has someone in their life struggling with an addiction to check out his blog!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For today\u2019s blog post we have a very special guest blogger, Brad Schmitt! Brad is a Nashville based blogger over at\u00a0Nashville Recovers, and today he will share a glimpse of what recovery looks like and some of the road blocks older peers face when trying to help motivate young adults \u00a0to start on a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}