How to Get to the Root of Hidden Addiction and Break Free – Episode 378

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Episode Summary:

Today’s episode is a powerful one. We’re joined by Jonathan M. Seidl—author, speaker, and previous Editor-in-Chief of the widely followed nonprofit I Am Second—as he courageously shares his personal journey detailed in his latest book, Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic. It’s a raw, honest, and redemptive conversation about how a man of faith found himself battling addiction, the shame that came with it, and what it took to break free.

If you—or someone you love—have ever struggled with hidden pain, addiction, or the pressure to keep up appearances, this conversation is for you. Jon’s story is a testimony to the power of grace, truth, and the freedom found in Christ.

The Christian community loves stories of salvation but often struggles with stories of sanctification—especially messy sanctification. Today’s guest, Jonathon Seidl, is breaking the stigma with a radically vulnerable work that’s not only for those struggling with secret sins, but also for every person on a journey to overcome nagging issues (which is really everyone). In this episode of Your Hope-Filled Perspective, we’re going to delve into one man’s story about the raw and messy details of his secret battle with addiction, and how to break free from hidden addictions.

Quotables from the episode:

  • I’m a tattoo guy. I love my tattoos. And the next one I’m going to get is Roman numerals. And it’s going to be 12:7-10. I’m not sure if you can have a life verse for your whole life, but in this season, my favorite verse is 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 and that’s where Paul talks about the thorn in his flesh and how the power of God is made perfect in his weakness. That’s what I’ve come to learn and understand is that these trials, which by the way, news flash: I went through a tough period, then I went through what I would say was the toughest period in my life, and now I’m coming out of even in light of recovery, even in light of finding sobriety, even in light of crawling back to Jesus.
  • Alcohol was the solution to my problems, a bad solution, but an easy one, a quick one so now you took away my solution, and now I had to deal with everything that I was using alcohol to numb or escape from.
  • Now I feel like my wife and I are just getting out of what I would now say is the hardest period of our life to date and yet God has been faithful.
  • That’s such an important message when we can get to the point that we can look back on trials and recognize, they were hard and in our own strength, we couldn’t have gotten through them. But God was faithful. And now he’s using the horrible times in your life for good.
  • I did have a rock-bottom moment and there’s a lot of people that do-and I know in your work I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of those stories-I’ve had my own, but what I want to encourage people that you don’t have to have a rock bottom moment in order to reevaluate your relationship with alcohol or food or gambling or work or exercise.
  • For so long, part of what kept me in the state I was in, is that I played the comparison game: “Well, I’m not doing that…I don’t look like that…I’m not leaving home and not coming back. I wasn’t a lone drinker. I wasn’t a go out and party drinker.” I just wanted to be home. Give me a football, a Saturday, and a case of beer and I’d be great.
  • Anything that is mis-ordered is disordered.
  • So, it’s not it’s not about quantity of alcohol necessarily that can be a factor, but anything that you put on the throne of your life (your kids, your husband, your wife, your job, etc) anything that occupies a place in your life that is mis-ordered is disordered.
  • The enemy took that and just started feeding lies to me based on traumas that went back 30 years about not being enough, about not being seen, about being abandoned, about what it looks like to be safe. The devil’s crafty.
  • I knew the truth. I knew what I should do. I had the skills. I had the knowledge and yet like you said, “the devil’s crafty.” I had always had a up and down relationship with alcohol. I grew up in Wisconsin, which is just like beer trailers at church picnics, which is not an exaggeration. I grew up in a culture of drinking, and I had gone through bouts of heavy drinking at times. But when all of this hit, I just turned to easy solution. It’s hard to go on a three-mile run when your mental health is suffering. It’s hard to commit to weekly therapy sessions. It’s more expensive. It’s cheaper to go get a $19 bottle of mid-level bourbon and sit in front of the TV and watch something fun or funny or a game and just kind of get lost.
  • I justified my behavior thinking, “I’m not going out. I’m not cheating on my wife. I’m not drinking and driving.” Slowly from the fall of 2021 until the spring of 2023, one bourbon a night turned into two, turned into four, turned into five. And then the pumpkin beers came out in fall. And then I started drinking those. Before you know it, you’re cutting back on family activities, your wife wants to go to the movies, but you’re already three bourbons deep on a Saturday afternoon because you started watching the game at 11. So, you make up excuses because you know you can’t drive drunk.
  • That became my life until May 2023. My wife and I were on an anniversary trip. We decided months earlier we were going to go to Miami. I convinced myself that my drinking wasn’t a problem: I rationalized I would just treat myself. There was one night in particular when my wife just wanted a night in. She just wanted to relax on the balcony and read. I decided to go down to the hotel bar, have some appetizers, and a couple beers. My wife begged me, “Don’t get drunk. Promise me you won’t get drunk.” I said, “I’m not going to get drunk. It’s fine.”
  • I had every intention not to get drunk. I can say that, honestly. I went down to the bar and pretty quickly one gin martini turns into many. By midnight or one in the morning, I paid a triple digit bar tab. I realized I was drunk and couldn’t back up to the hotel room. The only thing that can sober you up is time. I decided to walk down to the beach and wait until I was more sober before going back to the room. There were a lot more people down there than you’d think, doing a lot more things than you would think. I went into the ocean, with all my clothes on, I didn’t have trunks on: I was fully dressed. I waded into the ocean, neck deep in water, and I started going to the bathroom in the ocean. It was then that I had this moment of clarity of what my life had become.
  • I had not set out to get drunk. But I did. And I realized this is what happens when I set out not to get drunk: I was wading in my own feces alone in the morning, neck deep in water. I got out of the water and dried off. I don’t know how long I was there. I went back to the hotel the next day, hungover. I meet my wife down by the beach. she asked me, “did you get drunk last night?” So easily I said, “no I didn’t get drunk last night.” Throughout the day she asked me two more times. I called this “my Peter moment” because three times I was asked, three times I tried to hide it. But it eat me all day so at dinner I said, “Hey, babe, I have to tell you something.” I said, “You know, I did get drunk last night.” Pretty quickly, she broke down and said, “You know, I knew you got drunk last night. I just wanted you to say it. And I just wanted to see if you’d lie to me.” She said, “You did it so easily. Do you know what that does to a woman, especially? If you can lie that well, what else are you lying about?”
  • I started making all the promises, “I’m never going to drink again. I know I need help. I’m going to get it. I don’t know why I do this.” I’ll never forget what she said next, “John, I don’t want you to never drink again. I don’t care if you ever drink again. That’s not my goal. What you need to do is get to the root of why you’re drinking. You’ve had things that happened to you. You have traumas in your past. You have issues you’ve never dealt with. You have words that have been said to you that you’ve never fleshed out. And so, if you stop drinking without getting to the root of the problem, it’s just going to be something else unless you get to the heart of the problem.” So that was the rock-bottom moment. That started just a year straight of counseling every week and therapy to get at the root of why I was drinking. The drinking was a symptom of something else going on. You must get to the root.
  • I think part of what kept me in bondage for so long is I had an idea of what the definition of alcoholic is. And I think a lot of people have that same definition because it’s a definition that’s fed to us through stereotypes and Hollywood and whatnot. And we think alcoholic is someone who can’t control their drinking to a detrimental effect. And that detrimental effect, we generally look at and say, okay, that’s the guy that, or gal, who can’t keep a job, who is underneath the bridge, who has emptied so much money, who can’t go to church without a bottle of the mini wines before going in. And certainly, those people are alcoholics. But alcoholics, like I said earlier is really when you have prioritized alcohol to the point where it is a mis-ordered aspect of your life that then becomes disordered.
  • There’s a book called the DSM the diagnostic and statistic manual and in 2013, though, they made a massive change to the section on alcoholism. And the change was kind of twofold. A, they don’t call it alcoholism anymore, it’s called alcohol use disorder. And, and two, it’s now diagnosed on a spectrum. So where before there was, hey, answer these five questions. If you get a majority, right, you’re an alcohol abuser. If you get a majority right of these questions, you’re basically, you’re an addict. What they realized though is, those questions weren’t exhaustive and there was a lot of people getting left through the cracks. There was a lot of people that could say, well, I’m not doing this. And yet alcohol was controlling their lives and ruining their lives and the lives of those around them. So, they changed the questions. And now you only have to answer two of the 11 questions to be on the spectrum.
  • And by the way, I was on the spectrum a lot earlier than I thought I was. I use the term alcoholic, but I now know that it has all the nuance of being on the spectrum, right? But two things. One, Confessions of a Christian with Alcohol Use Disorder is not a catchy title. And second is, I want to in a sense educate people.
  • Really, it’s kind of the first main chapter of the book is let’s understand what this is and now that you understand, you can stop playing the comparison game. I had someone say to me once, “well, you’re just trying to tell everyone they’re alcoholics.” And I’m like, “no, I’m not. I have no vested interest in you being an alcoholic or being on the alcohol use disorder spectrum. You have a vested interest in realizing, hey, maybe this is occupying a place in my life that isn’t great.
  • Here’s what I found. When I started writing this book, I had a lot of encouragement, especially Christians within what they call the recovery community, that said, “Hey, what you’re saying is not popular, but you need to say it because no one else is.”
  • Well, here’s what I came to found in my addiction recovery journey. I had many times, I said I had an up and down relationship with alcohol my entire adult life. What I’d come to find is, I was never able to completely give up drinking because I was always trying to give up drinking. And so, I wrote this article, “How were you able to stop drinking?” I said, “ I stopped trying to stop drinking.”
  • C .S. Lewis has got that famous line in “Mere Christianity,” that says, “Shoot for heaven and you get the earth thrown in.” So, what I finally came to understand is I had to shoot for Jesus. If I shot for Jesus, I would get sobriety thrown in a hundred percent for sure. If I shot for cultivating that relationship, if I shot for letting him into all the broken pieces of myself that I had walled off and said, “I am not going there. And if I’m not going there, you’re not going there.” What I talk about in the book is that process, what that looks like, how people can do that, how I did that.
  • I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of harm. I know there’s been a lot of harm done in the name of Jesus, especially when it comes to addiction. In fact, I write in my first book about faith and mental health, there’s a lot of people that said just pray about it, just pray your depression away, just pray your anxiety way. But here’s the error that I think so many people make is: it’s both — it’s a spiritual issue and it’s also a physical issue. I needed to uproot the issues that were at the root of my drinking. There was spiritual brokenness, there was sin that had caused trauma and there were my sinful actions. I did things that I should not have done, and I can’t just say “This is a virus inside of me and if that’s true, then there’s no hope for recovery, right?” And so, what I talk about in the book is yes, there was a physical aspect that at some point I can’t tell you when but at some point, took over that I craved the substance. My autonomic nervous system was so jacked up from the amount that I was drinking and for how long I was. So, yes, there’s a physical aspect. My body craved the substance.
  • I just don’t think people wake up one day and they say “I am addicted to food. I am addicted to heroin; I’m addicted to alcohol.” There’s that process. And the reason you turn to those things, the binging, the purging, the alcohol, the drugs, the pornography, your kids, is because you’re trying to use them as a means of escape.
  • When you know that something is bad for you, and you know that what you’re doing is unhealthy right and you still do it anyways there’s something deeper, there’s always something deeper.
  • But what happens as a child, is when those things happen, your brain literally cannot make sense of them. So, you look to escape and at six that’s tonka trucks. At 36 that’s tequila. And so, what happens is you create these patterns and these habits of escape. So, what happens at six and what happens at 12 and what happens at 14 you’re just like I just need to escape this. I can’t make sense of this. At six it’s tonka trucks, at 14 it’s masturbation, at 36 it’s alcohol. So, what you get used to and what you train yourself is when something’s stressful, when something bad happens, I need to, I just want to escape this. I just want to escape this. I don’t want to sit here and think about it. I don’t want to sit here and make sense of it. I don’t want to have to think about if I’m a failure or even just speak to those lies.
  • When I hit the hardest part of my life, I went for the easiest form of escape. And that was alcohol. That’s key. Because we are so pain averse. We don’t want to, and I don’t mean just physical pain, although there’s that too, but physical pain, emotional pain, relational pain, Spiritual pain, that we just want to do whatever we can as quickly as we can to ease that pain and for you the easiest way of escaping it was alcohol. For other people, it’s shopping. For other people it’s gambling. For other people, it’s delving into work. For other people it’s drugs.
  • Grace is available and has been given to everyone. What I say is, if you want to figure out what to do with those people, you have to look at repentance to start. Now I’m not saying that you treat people like trash. Once they fall, the Bible talks about pretty clearly that it’s our love in a sense that can call people to repentance. So, I want to be clear about that. That’s not writing people off. But I think in the end, what’s important is repentance is kind of like your indicator about where someone stands regarding what they’ve done.
  • If you are someone who has gone through addiction, there is a difference between worldly shame and godly grief. Yes. Worldly shame beats yourself up, and I beat myself up for years. And you know what I did with that worldly shame? I drank it away. Like I just kept going back to the bottle, right? But when I finally got to the point of godly grief, that very quickly led me to repentance. So that’s why I talk about how repentance is like, that’s how you know, like, is someone just sad they got caught? Or are they sad for what they’ve done to themselves, into those around them, into God? When you see them repent, that’s when you know, okay, that’s a godly grief.
  • I think we see this very clearly in the Bible with two people. You have Judas and you have Peter. Judas very quickly regrets what he did. But what does he do? He takes his own life– like it literally kills him the worldly shame. Peter denies Jesus three times. What does he do? We get this beautiful scene after Jesus comes back from the dead where he appears to Peter and Peter literally jumps out of the boat. He recognizes Jesus on the shore. He jumps out of the boat and runs to him. Peter denied Jesus three times and then Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” “Of course, I love you, Lord.” “Then feed my sheep.” And so you juxtapose those two: what did Judas do? He ran and it literally killed him. Peter ran, but he ran towards Jesus. This is so key to restoring our relationship with the Lord, and coming to understand it’s not just I’ve gotten caught, but it’s that I am, I am a nobody, and I need Jesus.
  • Repentance does not always equal restoration. It will always equal restoration with your savior. But sometimes the relationships that we have severed and broken and left our wake of destruction can’t be repaired. Luckily, they have been for me, but I know people who they haven’t, but that doesn’t determine whether you’re on a good path.
  • I think an overarching message is don’t fall under the lie that you have to do this recovery journey alone because Satan thrives in isolating us, but that could be AA, it could be celebrate recovery, it could be a therapist, it could be a church mentor, but please share it with a trusted individual. Don’t isolate because this has a tendency to make us isolate even more because of that worldly shame.
  • “There is another side.” You can get through to the other side. I think in the throes of my addiction, my perspective, even my wife’s perspective at times was very dark and it’s hard to see what life can look like without whatever that thing is.
  • Jesus calms the storm and that life on the other side is so much sweeter and so much more fulfilling than I could have ever imagined. There’s just a zest and a sweetness to life that I can tell you that only Jesus can fill, that only Jesus can bring. That’s why I tell people, can you get sober without Jesus? Absolutely. Millions of people have gotten sober without Jesus, but you’re not going to live the most flourishing and fulfilled life without Jesus and that’s what I want for you, and I’m telling you that’s available on the other side.

 

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You don't have to hit rock bottom before asking what's controlling your life. @jonseidl shares why true freedom begins by getting to the root of hidden addiction. Listen now! Share on X Addiction isn't always the problem. Sometimes it's the symptom of something deeper. @jonseidl shares why getting to the root changes everything. Listen to this week's episode. Share on X

 

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About Jon Seidl:

 

Jon Seidl, authorJonathon M. Seidl has been telling stories his whole life. In fact, he’s written over 10,000 of them, first after helping start a successful news website and then as the editor in chief of the popular nonprofit I Am Second. He’s the author of the new book Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic, a radically vulnerable story of being the Christian who became an alcoholic and his climb out of addiction and how others can break free from life’s entanglements. He currently runs the popular daily devotional website The Veritas Daily (theveritasdaily.com), where he writes on faith, culture, and addiction while also completing his master’s in theological studies from Southwestern Seminary. Originally from Wisconsin, he lives in Frisco, Texas, with his wife, Brett, and their children, Annie and Jack.

 

Hosted By: Dr. Michelle Bengtson
Audio Technical Support: Ashton Bengtson

 

Hidden addiction rarely begins with the addiction itself. If you're ready to understand what's beneath unhealthy patterns and find hope that lasts, this faith-filled conversation will help you identify the root, replace shame with grace, and take the next step toward freedom in Christ. Learn practical, biblical encouragement that can change the way you see recovery.

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