Motivating My Life Recovery: Never Fear, Never Hesitate, Never Quit

By Andre Souliere

Andre Souliere grew up in Biddeford Maine in an old farm house that his grandfather had built. After High School Andre enlisted in the United States Air Force where he met his first wife and together they had two daughters along with a step-daughter. They were stationed at different assignments in the United States as well as in Germany. Andre has remarried to the love of his life and they have been blessed with a son, where they now live in Steep Falls Maine enjoying the country life and outdoor activities. Andre also feels blessed to have five grandchildren who are the joy of everyones life. Andre enjoys presenting motivational talks and keynotes on safety, life recovery and life success. After his divorce, Andre fell into deep depression and alcoholism. During these dark times, Andre lost the will to go deal with the pain. His book covers his survival from divorce, separation from his children, depression, alcoholism, and suicide, death of a family member and the murder of his first grandson. The book also covers his motivation to survive, his love of God and the love story that he developed with his wife Joyce. The story starts with his entering a rehabilitation center and covers the periods up until he re-marries. This book is meant to illustrate Andres rise from the darkness of hell to where he is today. Andre would like this book to be a motivational tool for everyone for their life journey and success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477110263

Andre Souliere

Andre Souliere grew up in Biddeford Maine in an old farm house that his grandfather had built. After High School Andre enlisted in the United States Air Force where he met his first wife and together they had two daughters along with a step-daughter. They were stationed at different assignments in the United States as well as in Germany. Andre has remarried to the love of his life and they have been blessed with a son, where they now live in Steep Falls Maine enjoying the country life and outdoor activities. Andre also feels blessed to have five grandchildren who are the joy of everyone’s life. Andre enjoys presenting motivational talks and keynotes on safety, life recovery and life success. After his divorce, Andre fell into deep depression and alcoholism. During these dark times, Andre lost the will to go deal with the pain. His book covers his survival from divorce, separation from his children, depression, alcoholism, and suicide, death of a family member and the murder of his first grandson. The book also covers his motivation to survive, his love of God and the love story that he developed with his wife Joyce. The story starts with his entering a rehabilitation center and covers the periods up until he re-marries. This book is meant to illustrate Andre’s rise from the darkness of hell to where he is today. Andre would like this book to be a motivational tool for everyone for their life journey and success.

Book preview

1

Why would anyone write about life recovery?

If you are not a Christian, please don’t be turned off from reading my journey because of my religious beliefs. My story is not about trying to tell anyone in recovery that they have to be a Christian for their recovery to work, but only that my higher power is God and that finding God will allow you to have a better understanding of the love he has for all of us. Remember, we do not walk this world alone.

If you are a Christian, you will understand my faith and how through total surrender I have found my journey to be stronger.

What is life recovery? To me, life recovery is like building a house. My house is my recovery; I start with hope as my foundation. Without hope, you cannot believe that you have a chance to arise from the ashes of turmoil you have been living in.

Hope that after you have raised yourself from the ashes, you can have the smallest belief that recovery from the darkness of your hell will allow you to once again find a place among this world.

Hope is our base that strengthens our dreams and desires and gives us a foundation to work from.

My walls are built with support, from family, friends, and caregivers who understand where I have been and know my desire for a better future. We strengthen our support with honesty to everyone, especially our doctors and counselors, for only then can we withstand the hurricane winds and intruders to our mental health.

To this day I speak of placing your cards on the table—face up so that there are no hidden agendas and everyone can see that you are honest from your heart. Mistakes will be made not from self-medicating with drugs and alcohol but from simple misunderstandings and lack of preparation and knowledge.

Once my walls are in place, I add empowerment as brick to strengthen and for further protection, acting as a shield to my house.

In my view, most of the world live by the rules of demons of the basic seven deadliest sins, where there goals in life do not care that I am in recovery.

When you watch most of the top-rated shows on TV or the newest hit movies, you will see that somewhere along the story lines, there is a common theme—good against evil.

What are some of the key factors that come from the evil in these scripts? The seven deadly sins are in the bible.

Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, which interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise.

Pride is also known as vanity.

Envy is a desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than what one requires.

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts, instead, fury. It is also known as wrath.

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called avarice or covetousness.

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

Money is the most common evil and root for all these stories, and within these story lines, you will find one or more of these sins in different forms such as drugs, alcohol, and immorality.

It is so easy for any of us out there who are fighting addictions to try our best to not succumb to these types of lifestyles. They may seem to be glamorous, but in reality, they are just people living in this world, tossing morality and core values into the wind.

There are too many people and the executives running these companies in this world that follow these destructive lifestyles. These people actually seek out new ways of introducing the evils into our lives so that they may continue to make outlandishly large amounts of money to fund their lifestyles.

Without a solid protective barrier for your life of recovery, you can become weak and begin to slide back into the darkness, and then there is a great possibility that you can end up right where you started in your disease or worse.

Continued education and self-help will act as my electrical and plumbing, for without this your house is just an empty shell.

We must always remember that no matter what anyone can and will say, we need help in our recovery. No one can defeat these diseases by themselves.

To better strengthen your journey, ask for guidance and direction; research everything you can on your disease so that you can better understand your mental health and how you can succeed in recovery.

Faith will be my roof for it will be instrumental in being the overall protection from my disease and demons. Faith in God and in me is extremely important as my walk in recovery strengthens; I can only hope that my faith in humanity does so as well.

I have full trust that God will carry me in all my travels of my life journey, but I have to continue to be aware of the temptations that are going to be placed in front of me by my demons and of the world.

I have to trust myself that I will continue to strengthen my faith and belief in those trying to help me and not fall to the lust and greed of the world.

I will allow my windows to be large and clear so that anyone can look into any of my window panes of life and better understand my thoughts, dreams, actions, and decisions.

Yet I will ensure that my windows are strong enough to withstand the hurricane pressures that may challenge me on a daily basis.

Recovery is a personal and unique process to everyone with a psychiatric illness, and we need to develop our own definition of recovery.

However, certain concepts or factors are common to everyone in recovery; about that again I say, we all came to our bottom in life and now we must find our own road to a lifetime of recovery.

Writing a book about my life recovery is a dream that I’ve had for the past few years, but until now I just couldn’t put together in my mind or on paper exactly how and what I wanted to share. There are also parts of the book that bring back very strong emotional memories that seemed to slow my creative process.

Divine intervention seemed like the only way that I was going to find creativity and motivation to actually start writing, but it wasn’t until I started my own motivational speaking company that the words for this book started waking me up in the middle of the night.

I started putting my notes to paper and then onto my computer hoping that the creativity that I was now experiencing was awakening the right side of my brain so that my creativity would awaken.

My only problem with writing this book was how to balance my job and home life which consisted of my wife plus at the time of this writing our three-year-old son. Anyone who has had children understands that a three-year-old demands all your time, and we should give them all our time, energy, and love—they grow up so fast.

I should know because besides having a three-year-old, I also have two daughters who at this time are twenty-five and twenty-eight with beautiful children of their own.

After being divorced for many years, I remarried a wonderful woman who is twelve years my junior, who had yet not been blessed with children. We spoke on the subject of having children when we were dating, so this situation was not a surprise to me, and our son was a planned blessing to both of us. It is just that I don’t have the energy that I had when I was raising my daughters twenty-five plus years ago, but I try to stay focused on his wants and needs, and we have a wonderful time together. I have again learned so much about children and how satisfying it is to guide and direct them in their lives.

So to try and balance my professional job and my home life, while finding time to be creative and write, leads me to a lot of early morning and late-evening writing sessions.

I also started a new side business where I speak to groups and organizations on subjects ranging from motivating safety behavior in the work place to motivation and inspirational talks to men and women in their recovery, and I will soon start my own safety consultant company and career that I have extreme passion for.

Shortly after starting my new business, I created a web page to promote my work, but the more I focused on motivational speaking to organizations, the more my past work with men in recovery and all the positive feedback I received kept placing itself at the front of my thoughts. I tried to continue promoting my safety motivation business, but the more I focused on motivational safety, the more I found myself reflecting on my journey in recovery and how I could help others in their life journey.

To better understand my thought process and reasoning for most anything that I do in life since I started my recovery might be futile for most people unless you really know me.

I believe that there is a reason each person was put here on this earth and that our decisions affect not only our life paths but also of the people that our decisions touch.

I believe that our life paths are placed in front of us in some form or situation but not always as clear as we would like.

Are we always able to identify our journey for our lives? Not always because most of us have closed parts of our conscience to the dreams we once held open or we have given up on those dreams.

There are a lot of people who will tell you that they knew from a young age what direction they were supposed to take. Somewhere in their lives the vision for their future became so clear to what or where they were supposed to be or doing that they redirected there energy and focus in attempts of filling their vision for their life.

Some decisions, good or bad, that we have made have also affected other people and their life decisions.

An example is of a young girl who becomes pregnant while still in her teens; she may or may not have had aspirations for her life, but now her life and dreams have been altered. Her decision to have sex may it have been from peer pressure or for some other reason, but with that decision she became pregnant, and that not only affected her life but now she has possibly redirected some of the lives and goals of those people who will now attempt to assist her and her new baby.

Mothers become grandmothers, fathers become grandfathers, and so on, so that it affects decisions and goals of those around them.

Decisions made by those with addictions and other life-altering events tend to gravitate toward destruction as time and the disease seize the part of our brain that allows us to rationalize our decisions.

For me now was the time to branch out and slowly start my own business in motivating safety to corporations and small businesses.

I have a proven tract record of success in the safety field, and my desires were to help companies to create and/or improve on their safety cultures.

Again, these were my desires and dreams and little did I understand at first that my creativity kept moving back to my prayers, where I had for years asked God for help in allowing me to grow stronger in my walk on earth and with His guidance to be able to help those people whom he already had planned for me to help. With these prayers, I was hoping that this would allow me to better provide for my family, always knowing that it can be, if it is the lord’s will.

With all my thoughts and creativity flowing, I gladly embraced what was happening in my mind. Because I knew that if I started to focus and allow the words to flow, the lord would be leading me to be where he meant me to be and that through all this, I should clear my mind and follow where I was being led.

With this, my thoughts became clearer on how I wanted to approach this book, but by not being a professional writer, I worried if my words would flow smoothly enough for anyone to follow. Again, I knew that the words here were to be for men and women in recovery and to those people who were interested in what I had to say, so that maybe they could help someone else in need.

Again, I just want my thoughts, experiences, memories, and philosophy to be the focus of my writing, in simple form.

2

Now is the time for me to share my life-recovery journey, so with that I decided that I wanted to start venturing into the motivational and inspirational presentations to men and women in recovery.

I started jotting notes down, trying to find a format that I felt would be of interest to anyone reading my book.

From there, my mind would not allow me to rest because new ideas began to form more each day. Again, while I was focusing on one area about helping men and women in recovery, my words became geared to everyone in their form of recovery.

My idea of writing a book on motivating my life recovery was now taking a front seat over my business designs with my safety behavior presentations. I still wanted to continue to help other companies that needed my services with motivating safety behavior, so I decided that Souliere Consulting now had room for more than one service.

I titled the book, Motivating My Life Recovery: Never Fear, Never Hesitate, Never Quit because for me, my journey is not only of recovery from alcohol but also a recovery from divorce, from deaths and murders of close family members, and the separation and alienation, in this part of my life, of those I love the most—my children, my family, and my friends. I believe that motivation is the key to success and feel that my journey can help others in their life recovery.

Life tragedies form a large spectrum of categories, be it surviving a life-threatening medical condition, mental or physical abuse, death, murder, loss of a job, and, of course, addictions; the list goes on but the most important factor here is that for most of us, recovery takes a lifetime of practice. I like to use the phrase recovery takes a lifetime of practice referring to how doctors are looked at as practicing medicine.

This is because doctors can only practice and not perfect the art of medicine. The art of medicine is a never-ending science into unknown depths and challenges. No operation is 100 percent and medicine is based on some theory; therefore, it can only be practiced and practiced until very good, but not perfected. Even doctors learn something new once in a while.

So for those of us in recovery, we can use the phrase practicing recovery, mostly because we will never perfect our recovery journey and can only hope that we become good enough so to not relapse.

The phrase that I use Never Fear, Never Hesitate, Never Quit, which is now trademarked, is one that evolved through life experiences mostly from sports. After coaching High School wrestling for one year upon my return to Maine, I used the Never Fear, Never Hesitate, Never Quit as a motivator for all the wrestlers, with the emphasis of this phrase toward their training and to their opponents. I tried to instill with them to never fear your opponent, never hesitate to execute a move, and to never quit trying your best no matter what was happening.

A big question for me then and now is why I didn’t use the same philosophy on myself when I first started my downward spiral into the dark depths of my version of hell on earth. Would it have helped me? I realize now that everything in recovery has to happen in a time frame that I had little control over. When a person is not ready for help, no matter what you do or say to that person, you will not be able to help them—only they can help themselves.

The time for recovery has to be their time; they have to reach their bottom and realize that if they want to recover and have the ability and tools that they need to survive. On your road to recovery, you have to seek out help and work hard if you want to have a chance at living a healthy, clean, and sober way of life.

If you know of someone who needs help, you too can use my philosophy; never fear to reach out to them, never hesitate to educate yourself on their disease, and never quit trying to help them start