Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast! Today, I’m excited to welcome back my friend and previous guest, William Cope Moyers!
William returns to discuss life and recovery since the release of his groundbreaking book Broken in 2006. His ongoing journey is now beautifully captured in his latest book, Broken Open. Moyers opens up about his unexpected return to opiate use following a dental procedure, illustrating the unpredictable and non-linear nature of addiction.
He explores the complexities of recovery, not just as an individual struggle but as a family process, addressing the often-overlooked role of codependency. Moyers delves into the importance of medication in his healing, and the ongoing need to stay teachable and open to change. Whether you’re in recovery, supporting someone on their journey, or just seeking insight into the human experience of addiction, this conversation offers valuable lessons in resilience, hope, and the power of self-compassion.
Bumper 00:01
You’re listening to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast, a place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.
Margaret 00:26
Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today, I am pleased to welcome back my friend and previous guest William Cope Moyers. William returns to talk about life and recovery since publishing Broken in 2006. William’s ongoing journey as captured in his new book Broken Open is a testament to the power of resilience and the possibility of recovery. Our stories offer hope to others and I’m thrilled William is continuing to share his story with us today.
Bumper 01:13
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast.
Margaret 01:29
Good day, everybody. It is so great today. It’s a special day from my perspective, because I have a friend to my own career and a friend to this podcast back with me again. I have William Cope Moyers, who is here to share with us today about his new book, and I’m eager to see how this conversation unfolds and what we offer you as family members who are listening. So, William, welcome back.
William Cope Moyers 01:52
Oh Margaret, thanks for having me. It’s good to connect again. I miss you from the old days, but I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing, and what you’re doing is so important for families, you can’t say it enough.
Margaret 02:04
Thank you. Thank you. So why we got back together, which we can do anytime either of us wants. I would love that. But what we are specifically wanting to touch on is your new book. And so, when we last talked, you were very Broken and your own recovery, tell us a little bit about what prompted you to write your new book, Broken Open.
02:30
William Cope Moyers: Well, thanks again. Margaret, you know I was a journalist at heart, growing up before I ever went to treatment at Hazelden 1989. In fact, that was 35 years ago this month, I began my journey at Hazelden, August of 1989. So, I like to write. I’m a pretty good writer and a pretty good communicator. I wrote Broken in 2005 and 6. That book was very popular, still in print. It was a New York Times bestseller, and essentially, you know, it was ‘Broken my Story of Addiction and Redemption, or as I like to say, the V shaped recovery, addiction going down and then redemption going back up, right and then happily living ever after.
Ha, because, as I’ve learned, life on life’s terms, takes lots of twists and turns, and for me, Broken was a true story. It was an authentic story, but it’s frozen in time. Everything about my life and everything about my journey stops when I when I finished the book at the end of 2005 and I’ve had lived a lot of life since then, I’ve had the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And interestingly enough, and appropriate for this audience, I’ve also seen my own children grow up. They were little kids in Broken and now they’re growing up adults in Broken Open. Their stories are as integral to mine as anything else in the book. So, I wrote Broken Open with which has a subtitle of What Painkillers Taught Me About Life and Recovery, because about a decade ago, Margaret, I had a recurrence of use with prescribed opiate pain meds for a very complicated dental procedure that developed into neurology in my jaw. And even though I knew the cunning, baffling and powerful nature of addiction, when I was to discover it’s also very patient it waits, even though I had a lot of recovery capital, and even though I was well ensconced in my recovery, and even though I loved being in recovery, and I didn’t want to go back to the use of crack cocaine or alcohol. I could not get off of those pain meds of my own free will, and I couldn’t get off of them, and even in the way that I had gotten off of those other substances decades earlier.
So, this new book is really about the fact that addiction is a cunning, baffling, powerful and patient illness, but also that recovery is not linear. It’s not V shaped,
Margaret: Right?
William Cope Moyers: And that’s true for the addict and the alcoholic, and that’s also true for the. Family,
Margaret: Absolutely,
William Cope Moyers: You get that. So, I’ve written this new book and a component of the book that I think is relevant, that we can talk about is the fact that my children did grow up and what happened to them along the way as well. The book will be out on September the third, and it took me six years to write it.
Margaret: Wow.
William Cope Moyers: and that’s in part because my perspective continued to evolve. You know, which is, I think, true as we go through life, and certainly true as we go through recovery. So, this book reflects what all of my experiences have taught me about recovery, but also about life.
Margaret 05:35
So, there’s a lot there. First and foremost, I’m truly grateful to hear that you found your path after the recurrence of use, because that’s always the victory.
William Cope Moyers: Yes,
Margaret: Right? We like to focus on the v shape, those one and dones, which we know are rare in this field. But the other piece of it is the humanity and the ability for the audience that listens to hear that even someone who’s been able to author their story and share it and been successful in the eyes of everyone else,
William Cope Moyers: Right,
Margaret: was living in a place, I would imagine, was incredibly painful for you, of the outward perspective, yet the internal struggle of not being able to get off the meds on your own
06:20
William Cope Moyers: There’s that piece of it. And then there’s also this piece earlier, which was about going through the unraveling of my marriage to the woman that was very, very dear to me. She also was in this new book, with her permission, the unraveling of that relationship the awareness that I had Margaret about my own codependency. And I know that’s a term that is misused or misunderstood a lot, but it’s a real term for somebody like me. And so there was those experiences I had after Broken but before had my recurrence of use that really were teachable moments. And then, of course, there was the experiences I had with my return to use with the opiate pain meds, and what has happened to me since then.
Margaret 07:06
So, bringing that back, because I think that’s very telling, right? Many family members think these life events, the decline of the marriage, the marriage not working, the grief of that, whatever other life challenges you went through were the reason you returned to use. You know, families always think it’s going to be some big catastrophe that takes their loved one back to use.
William Cope Moyers: Yeah,
Margaret: is that true of your story or was that a secondary issue to being introduced to the medication in a medical way.
07:42
William Cope Moyers: Great question. And, you know, I’ve done a lot of media around the book, no one’s asked me that question. So, thank you. Hindsight is, of course, 2020
Margaret: Right.
William Cope Moyers: and I’ve had the benefit of hindsight to look back and see that. You know, the pressure was building behind the dam. Long before the damn crack, there was a lot of pressure. It was all of those emotional experiences that I went through sober with the demise of my marriage, my own moral failings, the challenges of being a single dad to three busy teenagers, my propensity to not be able to say no to my job, my travel schedule, all of that stuff built up,
Margaret: Right?
William Cope Moyers: Is that what caused what happened? I don’t know, right, but, but what I do know is that when I took those opiate pain meds legitimately, the first time, I loved what they did for me, and what did they do for me? They simply took the edge off of life. It wasn’t quite subtle, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It was just a little Ah,
Margaret: Yeah.
William Cope Moyers: And I needed an ah, I think not that that was the way to find it, but I had legitimate pain, acute pain, and then chronic pain. Nobody should suffer with that, not even people in recovery. I was taking the meds as prescribed. And then one day, as I write in and Broken Open one night, it said, take two tablets every four hours, right? And I follow the directions on the bottle. But that one night, I took what I call a plus one, yeah, I took my two and then few minutes later I took a plus one. Well, no harm in that, right? Well, it gave me that greater sense of relief. But there you go in the addict’s mind when we start to play with the formula for success, when we start to play with the directions, so to speak, literally and figuratively, then we get ourselves in trouble. So, I’d like to think that it was a buildup of all those other things that happened. But I just think it was also the nature of the substance, the opiates, they were like no other drug I had ever consumed, you know. So. They were clean, they were easy, they were legit,
Margaret: Yeah.
William Cope Moyers: and again, they didn’t take me out of myself as much as they allowed me to sort of settle into myself. And that was a big moment,
Margaret 10:12
and that is very terrifying for a family member to hear.
10:16
William Cope Moyers: Well, and my family was not aware of it at the time, I continued to function. That was the irony of it. I’d always made sharp right turns. As my mentor in recovery always said, you know, William your problem is you always make sharp right turns. And that was true in the old days between ‘89 and ‘94 and I was in treatment four times over five years, including twice at Hazelden I would always make a sharp right turn and return to use, or relapse, as I used to call it, and, and I always would disappear, right? You know, I would go to the crack house or go to the bar, and I would shirk all of my responsibilities, and it was as obvious as if I was standing naked in the middle of the street. But this time with the with the opiate pain meds, I continued to show up for my job at Hazelden, I continued to be good at my job at Hazelden, I continued to go to my 12 step meetings for a while where I could not find the solution. I continued to look good on the outside and even continued to function. But yeah, it was the inside that was waiting to erode until that point came when it was obvious to everybody.
Margaret 11:22
So, I want to go there, but I want to back up a little you reference codependency and how it is misunderstood, misinterpreted, misaligned. What is your definition through your own evolution of your work? What does codependency mean, and how did it impact you around this whole journey.
11:42
William Cope Moyers: Yeah, great question. I had always thought that codependency was for people who are weaker, or for people who weren’t the addict and the alcoholic but just couldn’t stand up to the addict and the alcoholic. That’s what I saw as codependency.
What I was to learn from my own experience is that for me, codependency was it was an obsession that I could fix or change other people, especially people that I loved, and especially people that if they would only listen to what I had to say and do it, they would be okay.
That’s my definition of it. Is that what codependency is, I don’t know. I know it’s a real thing. I know that it is as debilitating and as the destabilizing as an addiction is. And remember at that time, I had been sober for about 12 or 13 or 14 years when my marriage unraveled and I became obsessed, frankly, with not allowing that to happen.
Margaret 12:50
I want to stop you there. What is paramount in this conversation is the look on your face of that is absolutely insane, absurd, not humanly possible, but how true it felt to your life.
William Cope Moyers: Yeah,
Margaret: In that moment.
13:05
William Cope Moyers: Totally,
Margaret: yeah,
William Cope Moyers: yeah, and, and, and, especially since the woman I was with who, you know who she is. In fact, I name her in the book,
Margaret: Right?
William Cope Moyers: Her name is Allison, and she’s very good about letting me tell that story with some modifications. She saw the manuscript ahead of time and in fact I had coffee with her just the other day to talk about it, but she was struggling very severely with mental health issues. And around the time Broken came out, and I had strayed my moral boundaries, frankly, so that those two things, they don’t go well together. They’re toxic, um, and I yet I loved her, and she loved me, and she wanted to be separated, she wanted to be divorced. And I thought, well, that’s nonsense. Come on, we can get through this. Just do what I tell you to do. And I always believed that it was hard to let go of other substances, you know. And they talk about the powerlessness over Percocet or weed or alcohol or crack. But what I discovered it’s much harder to let go of people, especially, as I said, those that you care about.
So, I fought like hell to save our marriage,
Margaret: Yeah.
William Cope Moyers: and I fought like hell to the detriment of my own sanity. I did have a breakthrough. No pun intended; I had a breakthrough. And I went to the Breakthrough Program at the Caron Foundation in Pennsylvania, in’08 now. I went there in part, hoping that it would satisfy Allison, and that if I did that, it would show that I was real serious about things. But when I came back from a Breakthrough Program, I realized I was codependent, and that my problem is substance is yes, but my bigger problem is letting go of the people that I care about. So, to me, it was as debilitating as anything I’d ever ingested into my system, and I needed to overcome it.
Margaret 15:01
And I think that is significantly validating for family members out there who have tried every single thing they could to get their loved one well, and have been as obsessed with their loved one as their loved one has been with their drug of no choice,
15:20
William Cope Moyers: their drug of no choice, yes.
Margaret 15:22
And I think as a human being with codependency, our drug of no choice is a walking, talking human, and we do everything around that human that they do around their substance. And so, it is absolutely important and imperative for family members, loved ones to allow themselves grace and support for their journey. Instead of relying so much on the external fix, which is a moving target, whether it’s a substance or a person, none of it is going to make us feel whole.
15:51
William Cope Moyers: Well, and in my case, when I finally came to that realization with lots of bumps and bruises and scars, ultimately, I gained clarity. I gained clarity around the need for me to take care of my own mind, body and spirit, despite what was happening to that person that I cared for and to the relationship, and then later on, candidly, that approach to my own wellness as it related to other people would pay great dividends when my own three children came to me, each separately, and asked for help with their own substance use or misuse and how they pursued their pathways, required me to accept that what they were going to do and how they were going to do it was going to be very different than how I had done it, and I had to allow, I had to give them permission to go their own way.
Bumper 16:51
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Margaret 16:55
Hi everyone. I am Margaret Swift Thompson of the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast, I wanted to jump on in this bumper and just share how grateful I am that each and every one of you has chosen to listen, review, share this podcast.
My intention is that anyone impacted by the family disease of addiction will get the opportunity to feel less alone and understand more about their journey and the disease with which they grapple, one day at a time.
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Take care of you!
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Margaret 18:18
Do you think you had to give them permission as much as you had to give yourself permission to accept that that was their role. I mean, I think giving them permission is huge. It’s an honorable thing to do as a parent who’s been a very vocal person for a certain way of recovery.
William Cope Moyers: Yeah,
Margaret: But it’s also acceptance of okay, this scares me, because it’s not how I did it, right? But why is it mine to judge that it might not work for them?
18:43
William Cope Moyers: It’s a fair point, and I guess what in that way. You know my three children, they unlike my generation, where we didn’t talk about substances around the table, we talked about around the table in our household. Why was that? Well, because that’s how mom and dad met through the Hazelden experience. Our three children knew that they were the product of two alcoholic parents, which means their risk was where higher, right? They knew where dad worked at that time, Hazelden, they knew how dad recovered. I had taken them to meetings once in a while. You know, they had read. They knew my own story and Broken so, so I had to give myself permission, yes, but I also had to give them permission to find their way that was going to be different than the way that their dad had done it. You know, I was the expert, right? I could have grabbed them, steered them over there, or steered them over there. No, I had to, I had to say it this way. We talked about this, let go. I had to let go and say to them, you know what, it’s okay if you want to go that way, when I really want you to go that way. And then I had to tell myself, you know, William, it’s okay that they’re going to go that way, even though I wanted to go that way. So, it was sort of a double bonus, if you will, in terms of acceptance.
Margaret 19:56
So, your story, Broken Open that you have written that will be out in September, evolves through your journey and your family’s journey, and you said poignantly before we took that side road to codependency, which I appreciate, was that your return to use was secret because you were functioning. Until it was no longer so take us through to the point that, as you said, you were doing your job. It wasn’t that drastic, right turn, it wasn’t obvious. When did it become obvious, and who was the first to notice or point out I’m worried for you?
20:38
William Cope Moyers: Well, so one reason it was secret is anytime you know how addicts and alcoholics are, they’re filled with shame. And they’re filled with shame over any number of things, particularly there, you know, sort of behavior, or their use and relapse as it, as used to be called in my book. Relapse is a very can be a very shaming experience for people, because it suggests failure.
Margaret: Right?
William Cope Moyers: Come to learn, it’s not about failure, at least in my perspective. But you know, in 12 step recovery, you’re rewarded, you’re lauded for continuous you know, sobriety or abstinence. You get medallions for it and when you have a return to use, you got to go back and start over, or so they used to say.
So, part of my keeping it secret was because I didn’t know how to explain it. And the second part was I had a lot of shame around it, like this shouldn’t happen to me. I’ve been doing my meetings. I do all those things that have been good for me over these decades. I love my life in recovery. So, there was that as well.
There were a couple of sort of when Nell, the woman who I’m now married to came into my life and moved in, back in like 2014 or 2015 she noted a couple of times. She knew that I, you know, had had dental issues, and she could tell that I wasn’t well, but candidly, nobody really knew. And there was somebody at Hazel and Dr Marvin Seppala, who was our chief medical officer at the time, who I was very close to, and I had confided in him, but I wasn’t being completely transparent with him either.
So, no one ever really knew, because I did show up and I was successful. However, when I finally went to a pain management Clinic at the University of Minnesota, and they tried to do what they could to help me, and then they finally said, you know, you need more than what we can do. You need to learn how to manage chronic pain and need to get off those opiates, I went to an addiction doc in Minneapolis, Dr David Friends, and he prescribed Suboxone. For me, it was like a magic bullet, and I wouldn’t suggest to anybody that that’s the only solution. There are many pathways. But for me, who had all this recovery capital surrounding me with all the experience that has as a person in recovery, taking the medication was like the answer, right? It just quieted the craving brain. And then I was so fascinated by how it worked, even though we had been using it at Hazelden Betty Ford with our opiate dependent patients, I decided, and it was a wrong decision, to reveal this whole thing on the stage at the Betty Ford Center in about a month after I had started taking the Suboxone. And so I stood on the stage at the Betty Ford Center in February of 2016 thrilled that I had a new story to tell, not just the old Broken story, but a new story to tell, and that it included the use of this magical medication. FDA approved that Hazelden had been using and taking some criticism for, and I revealed it on the stage in front of the board, senior management, big donors, alums, patients, and it didn’t go over very well.
Margaret 23:52
Was your right turn?
23:53
William Cope Moyer: Maybe that was my right turn, and
Margaret 23:56
I don’t mean that disrespect at all, you know, because maybe that was, thank heavens your right turns weren’t as dangerous as they were in the past, but maybe that was your right turn?
24:07
William Cope Moyers: And I did that deliberately, and I did it, you know, again, back in the middle of the bed of recovery. But but what I did not gage very well is that my whole new story was going to be sort of earth shattering, or earth shaking to some people, particularly my colleagues in the organization, and they were going to be like, well, wait a minute, William.
So, you know, it all worked out. And the other thing Margaret is that I have one of my I have two defects of character which are apparent in this book. One of them is my perfectionism, and the other one is my impulsiveness. And I have come to terms with that as it relates to my own issues and as it relates to the issues of my own family, to accept the fact that nobody’s perfect, certainly not me and no one in my family, and that my impulsiveness is best countered by like taking a deep breath,
Margaret: Yeah.
William Cope Moyers: and sort of when in doubt, checking it out. So, you know, I’ve learned along the way. I think the best part about this book, and the reason it took six years to write it, is because I remain teachable. And that’s not easy to be teachable when you’re my age, 65 years old now, to be able to say, yeah, you know, and I’m old guy, and I’ve been around a long time, but I’m still teachable. If I didn’t stay teachable, this book would have never happened. So, yeah, the whole thing has been a big lesson.
Margaret 25:26
I’m sure, numerous of them. I remember Mrs. White back in the family days. Yes, Carolyn white?
William Cope Moyers: Oh, gosh.
Margaret: I think she was the one that taught me the term AFG. Do you remember the AFG? Another F’ing growing experience.
25:40
Yes, yeah. I love that.
Margaret 25:41
I do too, and I think that that speaks to what you’re speaking to. If we are not teachable, we will have a really hard time getting through life, because all of us will face AFGEs one way or another, and if we don’t stay humble and we don’t stay open to okay, this is my next, my next lesson. This is my next growing edge. This is my next spiritual evolution into our well-being. We’re going to struggle. Yeah,
26:12
William Cope Moyers: Yeah, I know what I know, but I also know what I don’t know, in the sense that I have to remain teachable. That has been true through my own journey. That has been true through the successful relationships I’ve had; through the unsuccessful relationships I’ve had. Through the evolution of my own children’s growing up from young teenagers into full blown adults. And if I don’t remain teachable, then I am resistant to wellness and I just want to stay healthy, and the best way I can stay healthy is to stay open to change, and open to learning, or open to the lessons that life teaches us. And the other thing that was really interesting is when I was struggling with the meds, and I would go and look in the literature, and I couldn’t find anybody else who’d written a memoir about what happens to you decades after you recover. And I’ve got it right here. This is my original big book that I was given that Hazelden when I walked in there in 1989 and he’s got a lot of good stories in the back, but most of those stories don’t really sort of extend out beyond the first year/two and so I couldn’t find anything that would help me with those lessons, whether they were lessons about my own recovery, lessons about my children, lessons about my family. I could not find them anywhere in any of the literature. So, I said I should write a book about it.
Margaret 27:40
And you have.
27:41
William Cope Moyers: And I have, and I, you know, I’m quietly confident it’s pretty good. I know some people have started to read it and, and there are going to be a lot of questions, and I’ve had to own my stuff. People have said, William, why would you want to be so transparent and, and, and why don’t just, why don’t you just leave yourself up on the pedestal? You’ve earned it. And I was like, because my advocacy at Hazelden has always been about being open about my story. The first time I ever told my story publicly was in 1997 at a rotary club in Saint Paul, Minnesota, when I was less than a year after I started working at Hazelden and I realized then that the power of our stories is exactly that. It’s the power of our stories, but when we share those stories, we tend to become beacons of hope for people or for families. And so, I needed to write this book because it’s a continuation of my story, and if I want my story to help other people, I’ve got to be open to the truth. So yeah, I think it’s going to be a good book for people who are sort of trying to understand these things.
Margaret 29:01
Recovery is clearly not linear for a person with the no fault disease of addiction or the loved ones that surround them. Come back next week, where we will continue to learn about William’s return to use with opiates and how shame was a significant struggle for him to overcome.
Outro 29:21
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story. Please find resources on my website, embracefamilyrecovery.com.
Margaret 29:35
This is Margaret Swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you.
