Undercover Angel Podcast

The experience in Japan was one of the single most terrifying I have ever lived through. This was when all of it got more real than I ever imagined it could. I cannot explain how I survived the situation; I only know that I did.

I take a sip in the morning and there is no turning back.

I leave Colorado in the midst of dysfunction and addiction.

I leave Colorado in the midst of alcoholic chaos.

Once the needle goes in is there any redemption possible?

What happens when a person gets drunk? Are they kidnapped? Where does one go in a blackout?

The forces of dark and light continue to dance back and forth as I begin a teaching career but have also been lost in the alcohol and drugs for years. The end of it all is a few years away,

There were forces of darkness and light going back and forth with one another as I crashed my snowboard on a dreary cold day. I traumatise a child and then get addicted to pills as a result. I was deserving of all of it.

Colorado was in so many ways a magical place to live in the 90s. I am still friends with so many of them from back then.

More heartbreak as Sunshine ends the relationship and harder drugs come onto the scene.

The night in the woods would lay the groundwork for what eventually became my relationship with what I choose to call God.

Sarah Sunshine was a hippy girl with dreads who was the one who I loved after Lilah. She fit the template of trauma-bonding like all of the rest up until now.

I fell in love in my first semester with a girl who was a couple of years older than me. Sadly, she decided that we wouldn't work and I experienced many years of heartbreak as a result. This was, you guessed it, more trauma bonding and a complete soul abandonment.

I managed to recreate the dysfunctional party crowd that had become toxic by the end of high school. There were kids going camping and doing great things. I was drunk in a dorm with cheap vodka.

The consumption of Robitussin was a regular thing amongst my friend group toward the end of high school. I found it disturbing and disgusting. Those who "Robo-tripped" insisted it turned them into vampires. I couldn't get down with it.

The Grateful Dead are still in my opinion the greatest band to ever exist. The experience I had at Soldier Field in the Summer of 1992 changed my life forever.

What is teenage rebellion? More often than not, it is rooted in the dysfunction of the family system. The rebel kid realizes things aren't right on the home front and then lashes out at society.

My friends and I bonded as a result of our collective and individual woundedness, similar to trauma bonding but distinct phenomenologically. As I say in the book, "It's like our wounds became friends."

LSD is a potent and powerful substance that we, as kids, had no business messing with. But we did. The fact that most of us survived is still beyond me.

There is essentially what amounts to a psychic change that happens in the life of a person who gets addicted to drugs. There was very little that could be done to hide it. My entire aura shifted as I basically turned into a stoner.

The first time I got stoned it was in so many ways just a continuation of that which had begun long before. Before the intoxication on the part of illegal substances, there was the emotional intoxication produced by the chemicals in my child and adolescent brain. In so many ways it seemed destined from the very beginning.

I loved to laugh. I was in so many ways always laughing. It was another way to feel. I loved choir and all of the different personalities that choir class was made up of. So much of life was always so hilarious.

There is no way to escape the presence of drugs. I was a very small kid when I started high school and this among so many other things wore on me in ways I didn't realize at the time. Drugs were becoming something inevitable as the high school years progressed.

Skateboarding went in an instant from being an amazing way to express myself into a dangerous pursuit on many fronts This often happens when one is truly passionate, the need to fight for it.

Skateboarding was an important sub-cultural phenomenon and back in the 1980s in the suburbs of Chicago, it truly was a subculture unto itself and existed as the last bastion of innocence before drugs made their way onto the scenes of adolescence.

I was in love with the character known as Elizabeth. There was pressure to make out and I was terrified. Jared had become more and more of a bully and as a result, I finally made the big move!

Soon thereafter, Elizabeth began abusing me, and our trauma bond was solidified. All of this built up inside me.

I was maybe four-foot-four in junior high. It was in the first few days of my experience here that I witnessed my first act of violence which deeply impacted my soul in ways I could not anticipate. I had nowhere to turn with all these new feelings and had no one to talk to regarding the fear I now had. This could be what is described by Pink Floyd as "Another Brick in the Wall."

There is no way to explain to a child the extent tho which their life will immediately change upon boarding and then exiting the bus on the first day of junior high. I'd been bullied before, particularly by my friends Jared and Jeremiah, and it certainly continued as soon as I entered the foyer at Hadley Junior High.

This chapter deals with the Character Jeremiah and how he got sick. This was a time in my life when I began noticing my empathic nature but had no one to process it with. Children feel so much more than they realize and in a perfect world, the adults around them would guide them effectively through their complex emotional landscapes. There is no one to blame here, especially considering how things were back then in the 80s.

A talk on the chapter 'One on One' deals with the nature of sidekicks and how they can be turned on immediately and become victims.

I became trauma-bonded with a couple of my friends on my eleventh birthday after I had gotten my first real skateboard in fifth grade.

My sensitivity was both a blessing and a curse and still is. I felt into the life of the squirrel whose life I saw taken that day alongside my friends who experienced the same thing.

Growing up in the 1980s was a magical experience in so many ways, but the darkness had ways of creeping into my existence. There was a component of 'aloneness' to all of it that became more and more prevalent as I grew as a child in a very privileged town known as Glen Ellyn.

This episode deals with my love of water which prevailed despite my defeats on the swim team.

https://www.youtube.com/@samvaknin

A bit on snapshotting, introjecting, my blanket, and the safe world I created inside of myself. Also, a bit on the Kevin and Jim chapter.

A talk about the introjects I created and then interacted with on my insides. There is a bit of schizoid/borderline personality disorder that is somewhat hinted at here.

Addiction is a generational phenomenon. This episode gets at the origin of it all.

This episode gets to the origins of the emotional intoxication I began experiencing at a very early age. I've included a link to a video my a prominent professor and psychotherapist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1t4CZMUqak&t=1411s

This episode addresses the partially answerable but also somewhat unanswerable questions regarding addiction.