MIAMI, Florida – “My story is not in the beginning, unlike many, many other people. I grew up in a dysfunctional home with parents that didn’t get along,” Founder of Granite Recovery Center Eric Spofford says of his upbringing.
“They were loud. I had a decent American upbringing by two parents that loved me, but they couldn’t seem to love each other, and they got divorced. I got caught in the middle of this very ugly divorce when I was 10 years old, between my mom and my dad, it finally hit the wall for them.”
Eric Spofford explained that after getting into trouble in high school, milder addictions turned to more severe ones, “Weed and alcohol led to ecstasy and coke, that led to ketamine which in turn led to oxycontin and heroin,” Eric says.
In his upcoming book, set to be released in 2023, he credits many aspects of treatment in helping him pull through his addiction. But he explains that taking accountability for yourself is the most important aspect of true self-improvement. “The center of it all is a spiritual problem, and when I say that, what I really mean is something internal. Something inside yourself needs to find re-alignment and seeing the effects of what you do is sometimes a hard part of that.”
“Addiction Speaks to You in Your Own Voice”
Eric explains that addiction’s stigma comes from a place of fundamental misunderstanding of what feeds it. “People don’t understand is the main treatment for alcoholism is in fact, alcohol.” As withdrawals overcome your body, it’s a natural response to crave a drug your body has become accustomed to, leading to dependence on the drug to keep your body going.
Addiction Recovery requires a great deal of focus on internal condition. As the effects of addiction are taking their toll constantly, eventually constitutions can be broken down to justify using/relapse. Spofford explains that one facet that makes fighting addiction more difficult is mythologizing the process.
“I started this process. I think a lot of people don’t really understand what recovery is. People correlate recovery with abstinence from drugs and alcohol. We talked about how long we’ve been sober. Recovery is the prerequisite, like getting sober is the beginning and the work is the internal transformation that needs to take place,” Spofford says. “That’s what I got busy doing.”
Spofford also explains, “Addiction speaks to you in your own voice, which can be pretty disorienting. You can make the determination to kick a drug, never do it again, and then you’re hearing yourself making rationalizations. To a certain degree, it is just flat-out self-denial. And that’s okay.” He goes onto explain that reality disrupting this hold acts as a possible motivation for recovery, “Seeing the look in your mom’s eyes and seeing that she’s disappointed in you, getting written up at work, it all smacks you in the face with reality.”
Finding Your Purpose
“Find your purpose. For me, it was easy. My life got lit on fire to help alcoholics and drug addicts. That’s what I’m here to do. Every time I’ve tried to get away from it, because I get tired, and there’s a lot of juggling all this stuff, I get dragged back to it,” Eric says with a calmness establishing that he’s been set in his perspective of his responsibilities since he took them on when he started Granite Recovery Services.
“Of course, not everyone’s gonna be here to help drug addicts and not everyone’s just gonna have one purpose. You must find your purpose or purposes and primary means a big purpose or a little purpose. Whichever, you need to have something to work toward.” Eric Spofford still speaks publicly on addiction and self-improvement, as well as providing coaching services. As Eric Spofford soldiers on, he reflects the ideals he preaches on momentum and finding purpose in recovery.
