The Boy Who Cried Silent Tears, and His Story of Hope - A Guide to Recovery

By Bradley Sullivan

The book is the autobiographical journey of boy who struggles his way into adulthood. The boy who cried silent tears springs from Sullivan’s deep reverence and respect for the wisdom and therapeutic value of Twelve Steps and having the courage to change. Using Sullivan’s own journey through addiction and alcoholism as a guide, he focuses on spiritual principles that lead to recovery and lifelong growth and fulfillment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312314108

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The Boy Who Cried Silent Tears, and His Story of Hope - A Guide to Recovery

The Boy Who Cried Silent Tears, and His Story of Hope -

A Guide to Recovery

A spiritual guide for living and recovery

BY: BRADLEY SULLIVAN

Copyright © 2014, Bradley Sullivan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-312-31410-8

Introduction

In life there are teachers who will appear while on a journey. If lucky enough, they will be seen when they come. My name is Bradley Sullivan, and I have been on a decade long journey of healing and transformation. I have lived in both the dark and the light of life. Thus far, I have spent about equal time in both. Each carries its own set of rules and road signs. I believe today that I couldn’t truly know one, without knowing the other. Hard to honestly appreciate a laugh having never really cried.

Transformation is much better when involving other people. Along my way, many men and women have had a profound impact on me growing and recovering. I could never repay these people for touching and lifting up my heart.

Today I am all about friendship. Sometimes it warms my heart so much. I fall short all the time when it comes to being a good friend. I vow never to stop trying. One out-patient counselor I had in my past planted friendship at my core. He talked about it all the time. I was struggling to be sober at the time, and he showed me love and friendship, never giving up on me. Every time he saw me no matter what I had done, he would announce as if to the world, buddy!!!!!!! always followed by huge hugs, both of which I do to this very day. What a beautiful thing friendship is, to love someone without fear.

Another teacher from my journey was man who fought for me to get into a treatment center. I was having trouble finding a place, and this man wouldn’t rest until I did. A complete and total stranger. He had been recovered for years, and really showed me a great example of the power of God. I was close to death, and needed to get off drugs; they were stealing my life. One day this man found a place almost two hours away from where I lived. It was in the middle of nowhere, and not only did he find it for me, but he came and visited me while I was there. When I was getting out, he and I were talking. He asked me to make a promise to him. He said if I ever got sober that I needed to help people like he had helped me. It hit me hard because this man didn’t get paid to help, he did it because he wanted to. He also added, you will have to give the people you help your two greatest gifts. I shook my head and promised.

Those two gifts are my time and my hope. With those things, I can help anyone. So, remember, next time you’re called to help, arm yourself with the best weapons you have, your time, because it’s the only thing that can never be replaced, and your hope, which is earned and sacrificed for.

This book is dedicated to all the people who have given me chance. A chance at love, a chance at friendship, a chance to just be important. So many suffer from all sorts of things. I have totally suffered from my fair share. People showing me love, letting the light shine through them, has saved my life. There have also been many people who have said no, rejected or have put me down. To these people I thank you all. I thank you because if a single one of you had said yes, it is very possible I wouldn’t be where I am today. Today I am home. Thank you, Love life, stay positive!

Getting Started

When I got sober, the first prayer I learned was the Serenity Prayer. This prayer is so short and sweet. Do not be fooled though, because it is very powerful in meaning and message. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  It's powerful enough to take a closer look.

God - With the saying of this word you admit the existence and the power of something greater than yourself.

Grant - By saying this next word, you are giving this power greater than yourself the authority to give you strength.

Me - Here you are asking something for yourself. It is ok to ask for the enrichment of self, for the increase of your character will empower those around you and make them happier.

Serenity - Since you have free will, that is a gift given to us all, calmness and composure will help you think straight and make the proper governing thoughts.

To Accept - This will put you in a position to allow an understanding of the conditions as they are right now.

The Things I Cannot Change - Before you can do anything about a current condition in your life, you must know exactly where you are. Once you know that, and accept that, and do not accept grudgingly, clarity can flow in and point you in the direction of peace.

Courage - This is the practice of asking for conditions to be different.

The Things I Can - This is you asking for help. You are asking to make the right decisions. Trust that everything will never be perfect in your life. Facing reality, you are continually working towards growth and healing.

Wisdom - Here you are asking for the higher ability to form sound judgments, free from prejudices, in all areas of mind, body and spirit.

To Know - This is you understanding the truths and facts, not speculation or hearsay.

The Difference - This is all about seeing things differently, free from distractions. This requires love over selfishness.

This prayer is a few simple lines, but it carries so much depth and weight. It points you in the direction that you will want for your spiritual journey of transformation. I start the book with this passage to help you and to serve as a guide. If you incorporate this into your life, you are on your way. The next chapter is a picture of the life of a person who was in need of transformation, desperate need to get sober and enrich his spiritual life. It is presented in the hope that you can relate, find hope, or at least see the mighty power of living a spiritual life. Love life, stay positive. 

Chapter 1: A Soul In Need

Where do I start?  For a person to know where they are going, they must do their best to sort through the trash of their past to get clarity.  I’ve been told that I’m an old soul, usually because of the music I tend to indulge in, but I think there is more behind this statement.  As I round the years, I approach my thirties; not old by any means, but I’ve lived a lot of life.  I have seen and experienced a lot of things that people should never have to. 

I reside now in North Texas.  Looking back, I often wonder exactly how I ended up here.  What I do know is that it wasn’t until the unbearable Texas summer heat hit me that a vision for my life became clear.  Before that, my life was a failed attempt to achieve happiness in one form or another.  As I ignorantly attempted to be the man I envisioned in my head, my life was too often guided by the idea that there was a woman, drug, or possession out there that would give me the self-worth I needed to be happy and whole.  I've come to know better.  But it has been a journey, so let me start at the beginning. 

I grew up in Buffalo, New York and am the product of a blue collar environment that felt so absolutely normal. Looking back on those days now, it seems to me that my hometown was, and perhaps in many ways today is still, a town that doesn't move forward easily from the past.  Holding onto the better times of days past was the mentality of most of the citizens of this town.  Everyone had the good old days stories.  Buffalo was the kind of city that most people could never get out of. There were always grand illusions of the possibility, but it never seemed to happen.  I call these people townies.  Townies are born and raised in the same town that they now live in as adults.  They frequent the same sport bars and tell the same ten stories about the good old days to anyone who will listen.  It seems that the only clear outlook they have on life is toward the past, never the future. 

With all that said, Buffalo is still home and I love a lot about it.  I grew up in the south side of Buffalo and was fortunate to be around family and a lot of love.  Great food was always around, which led to my first memories of pain.  At the age of nine, I was a chunker.  I loved sweets of all kinds and pizza with buffalo wings.  Being a fat kid is hard, especially because kids can be very mean.  I didn’t have any friends at this age. 

I was a loner that followed my older brother and his friends around.  This practice I do not believe is a healthy thing for children to do.  My brother is four years older than I am.  The difference between a 9 year old and a 13 year old is light years when it comes to maturity.  This is where my first problem started.  By the time one is 13 to14, hormones are kicking in and attraction to the opposite sex has begun.  At nine, one’s body and mind are not ready to walk that line.  Since I had no friends and the most important thing for me was to fit in and be accepted, I followed my brother and his friends and did everything they did.  One weekend in particular stands out in my memory as a prime example of how unhealthy this situation was for me.

It was the early nineties and grunge was in full swing.  It was the weekend and I knew that something big was in the works because of all the secretive conversations between my brother and his friends.  We had met these neighborhood girls who became the focus of our attention that summer.  This particular night the girls' parents had vacationed for the weekend, which gave us free reign on their house.  During the two block grand entrance to this party, I was so excited that my mom made my brother take me with him.  All I had to do was throw a hissy fit.  He couldn’t argue because of the party he wanted to attend and if he did I would have totally blown the whistle on him, so little brother was now added to the guest list.  As we rounded the corner, I started to recognize the song which would start the night off.  It was Pearl Jam's Jeremy which was strategically placed on a mixed tape just for the event. 

We arrived to the residence to find out that we would be partying in the garage for the night.  During the summer in Buffalo neighborhoods, many people convert their garages into party palaces, equipped with couches, fridges, dart boards, Bills posters, and in this case, a keg.  This was also an important point in my life because I had my first glass of the spirits which would later engulf my own.  As the night started, the girls stood in one circle, with the guys in another circle at the furthest possible point in the garage.  As Nirvana Rape Me looped through the mixed tape, I sang along, which made me feel cool because I knew the words.  People stood around nursing their beers.  My brother’s friend dared me to go stand in the girls' circle.  He said that not only did I have to go over there, but I had to try to touch their boobs.  I was so scared, but I didn’t want to let anyone down, so I took the longest ten foot walk ever.  As I approached the circle, the girls said hi and greeted me with smiles.  The girl who I had a crush on said she saw me singing a few minutes ago and said I was cool.  Cool!  That was the first compliment I ever got from a girl and it felt good. The compliment made my heart feel calm and warm. In that moment, I made the decision that I wanted that to happen again. Before I could make the request to cop a feel, the girls handed me a beer and said it would be cool if I chugged it.  I did the best I could and hated the taste, but I wanted their approval, that feeling in my heart again.  After three beers my brother finally saw what was happening and put a stop to it. 

The party ended a while later and we all went for a walk around the neighborhood.  Again the sexes were divided during this adventure, but this time I was right in the middle of the girls' circle.  I felt like I had become a little more mature and one of the guys.  When the walk ended, some of the party's guests had already retired to their houses as we had passed by them.  We decided it was time to call it a night.  As I was saying goodbye to these neighborhood sweethearts, it happened - the moment I have since been chasing my whole life.  The girls all got in front of me and the three remaining vixens kissed me at the same time.  As one of the girl's lips touched mine this electric pulse jolted through my body, and at that moment I forgot about all the torment and ruthless jokes that I had been the butt end of.  I felt at peace. There are poems and Hollywood movies made about this moment that happened to me. My heart took flight and was over the moon. As the girls finished, they ran the other way. I turned back to find my brother. He and his friends stood there and cheered me on like I was Jim Kelley and I had just thrown a game-winning touchdown.  I felt so much a part of things; I had arrived.  For the rest of that summer, I got a lot of respect from my brother’s friends and got invited to all the future events. 

As the summer time continued, I started to become educated on all sorts of adult education topics.  New swear words, porn, and all the vocabulary that goes along with it.  By this time, I was now ten years old and started my mission to rekindle the night that changed my young life.  I was the first kid in the fifth grade to have a girlfriend.  I actually had two that year and kissed them both, which started my reputation that I could never live up to - being a ladies' man/player.

With the end of my fifth grade year, I was excited because I was going into middle school, where I felt I would be able to find more girlfriends.  Although a girl is what I have wanted in my life, I don’t trust them and here is where the distrust started.  By this time, I was 12 and I had fallen into the fat friend role due to my weight increase, which made me undesirable to women with whom I came in contact.  Growing up, my neighbors were like extended family, which meant I spent quite a bit of time over there.  This was the type of family relationship where we could walk right in without knocking and help ourselves to the food in their fridge.  There were three boys and a girl in the neighboring family.  The boys were my brother’s age.  They were all best friends.  The girl was my age, which meant we were friends by default.  The only good thing was I got to be around her when all her friends came over.  Then the girl, let’s call her Jan, started hanging with these older guys we met at the pool hall down the street.  They were all ages 17 to 20. These guys were trouble.  During my interactions with them, we smoked cigarettes, drank, and smoked pot.   We roamed the streets of our neighborhood breaking and vandalizing anything we could find, always ending up back at Jan's house. 

At this particular point I started to notice something was not right. The more we hung out with these future convicts, the more I noticed Jan's mother Sheryl joining the parties.  Even then, my adolescent mind knew intuitively that what was happening wasn’t right. Kids are very perceptive creatures. Although their minds may not be developed enough to totally understand and comprehend what is going on, they still know something is going on. Adults need to realize that the children around them are soaking up information all around them. Adult actions and communications will be absorbed by young children and filed away into some ignorant cabinet. If adults are acting sick or negative, it will affect the way a child views himself and the world. If children are exposed to unhealthy or sick behaviors, there needs to be explanations and communication to the children to make sure there is no lasting negative effect on them.  One particular night the troubled teens, Jan, and myself were on a backyard porch drinking warm beer and telling grandiose stories designed to boost our egos and make us look like bad asses to each other, when the 40 year old housewife came out to oversee the festivities like usual, only this time she came bearing gifts.  In her left, half-wrinkled palm she held a brand-new bottle of Crown Royal and in the other hand, a top shelf box of wine.  As the older guys dug into the party gifts, the mother of four scolded me for trying to take some of the booze and sent me home to bed.  Now mind you, I was 12-ish years old; I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stay.  I was crushed.  Although part of me didn’t feel her being the MC of the party was moral, the other part of me just didn’t want to be left out.  I went home with my tail between my legs and once again I wished to the heavens that I was older.  Making this sentence of exclusion about myself and my insecurities, I watched the party from my second story bedroom window.  As I gazed upon the shindig, I watched the housewife send her 13-ish year old daughter to bed so she could have the house guests to herself.  At this time the drugs popped out.  I watched this group laugh and carry on while smoking pot and doing a little cocaine, all the while throwing around sexual jargon.  I watched with amazement and was intrigued by it all.  At 12, I wanted badly to be a part of it, but instead I had been sent to my room like I was being punished for not eating my greens

The next morning I overheard my parents talking to each other about what they had heard next door the previous evening.  From their perspective, the scene sounded much different than what my young mind interpreted.  They were appalled and worried about the wellbeing of Sheryl and especially about the wellbeing of her family.  My mother and Sheryl were born on the same day.  They went to high school together.  They had history.  So my mother took it upon herself to confront Sheryl and see what was going on.  Sheryl was a troubled soul who was unhappy with her life.  She brushed off my mom's concern saying that t she was just having fun and that my mom should mind her own business.  The future for Sheryl was very sad.  She started spending more and more time with these young kids, drinking more, and doing heavier drugs.  Sheryl was able to get away with this at first because her husband worked so many hours a week, most of them at night.  She fell into a hole which I would later become familiar with, being a drug addicted.  Once a person starts to smoke crack it doesn’t take long for their loved ones around them to start to notice a drastic change in behavior. Drastic financial change is almost always the first red flag to be noticed. Sheryl's case was no different.  Her husband saw the money abuser first.

By this period of Sheryl's drug use, my parents no longer allowed me to go next door to our neighbors' house.   I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about their reason at the time, but I wasn’t going to argue against my parents wishes. Sheryl spent her mornings fighting the urges and hangovers, trying to play mom. It was plain to see that her ability to play housewife wore thin as the dark side grew stronger. When confronted about the money issue and her crack head behavior, Sheryl grew defensive and fled the home and family she had helped build. She left to seek refuge with one of the troubled pool hall boys with whom she was now supposedly falling in love. Her children lay abandoned at home and her husband was frozen by sheer shock. Sheryl continued to drain the bank account and moved into the trailer park with her new love interest that was half her age.

What happened to Sheryl I do not entirely know to this very day. She moved cross-country to live off her welfare and divorce money that I assume she blew through quickly. I don’t believe she speaks to her family often, and know she was not in attendance at her children's weddings. This is a sad but frequent occurrence in the world of drug addicts. These events are significant in my mind for a few reasons. The first reason is because I saw, again, that women could not be trusted. If a loving mother and wife would just hurt and abandon her family like that, then that is something I would never want to be a part of. Second, despite my disdain for Sheryl's actions, the path I would take in the future would look no better than hers. For years when I would think about this mother leaving her family, I felt so guilty. I always felt I should have told people what I knew sooner. Told the adults around what I knew. I always felt that maybe it all could have been avoided. It was so hard for me to understand what had happened there.

These years in a young boy's life are very important. They can mold the future man which the young boy may become. In my case, those years really put me in a position to shut down and stuff or push down all my emotions. The whole existence of a drug addict I believe is created through nature and nurture. My family has its fair share of people in it who are addicted to something. I believe that there is a gene passed down through the generations that I received that influenced my personality in making me more susceptible to addictions. I don’t think that just because there are other cases of addiction in my blood line, that I was doomed from the start. I just think it was a little easier for the possibility in my life of becoming an addict to take hold and grow. The other factor in the equation, nurture, plays a larger role and I've tried running from it for years.

In the time just before my teen years began, there was an older kid in my neighborhood who was well liked. One day a friend and I were playing our GI Joe game in his garage. We loved playing that game. We had so many GI Joes that we could create a huge village in which we were able to act out awesome scenes.  Our imaginations were so wonderful at the time; this game would keep us occupied for hours. We are the last generation of kids who were forced to go outside and play and use our imaginations. During one of our awesome war battles, this older neighborhood kid showed up to observe our fight. As he watched us, he started to interrupt us with questions. He moved closer and closer while asking the questions.  We didn’t pay much attention to him. Before too long, he had made his way right into the middle of our action figure town. He waved his hands and directed us to stop the game for a second because he had something to show us.  We stopped to see what he was offering. We got closer as he directed and eagerly waited to see what he was going to show us. Our eyes were on this neighborhood friend. My friend and I filed in line and stood in front of