What if addiction isn’t the beginning of someone’s story, but somewhere in the middle?
This week I’m starting a series I’ve wanted to make for a long time, and I’m starting it with a friend. Vincent Castellanos is a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach and addiction counselor with 32 years of sobriety. Before that, he was a working Hollywood actor. You’ve seen him in Anaconda, The Crow: City of Angels, and Mulholland Drive. And before that, he was a nine-year-old boy leaving Cuba in a taxi, watching his grandfather cry in the rearview.
Vincent believes something that stopped me in my tracks when he first said it to me on the phone: addiction is not the problem. The substance is. Addiction, he says, is the drive underneath, the fire, and the same fire that burns your house down can cook your food and light a city. This episode is us defining that difference properly: what addiction actually is, what chronic alcoholism was originally meant to describe, why he says “you’re not an alcoholic” is a sentence that can set someone free, and what treatment, detox, and 12-step recovery can and cannot do.
He also tells the story of the first drink his father handed him at age 10, and why he calls it, without flinching, the thing that saved his life. Stay for that one. It makes sense by the end, and it might change how you look at someone you love.
If this conversation stirs something about your own patterns, my free HURRT Assessment (Healing Unresolved Roots of Trauma) maps how experiences before 18 may still be shaping you now:
Take it here: https://www.flipyourmindset.com/hurrt
Prefer to watch? The full video version is on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCAQUNLlaDa262nD-iNvGHg
Find Vincent at https://www.vincentcastellanos.com
In this conversation:
1:54 Why this series, and who Vincent is to me
4:49 What people get wrong about the word addiction
7:03 Catatonic for 23 hours: his rock bottom
9:17 “No bad parts”: addiction as protection
10:27 Fire and addiction are the same thing
14:30 A first drink at age 10
19:51 Detox, treatment, and what they can actually do
24:52 Born in Cuba: the childhood story underneath
32:42 The driver behind the driver
36:54 A Hollywood career, nine months sober
43:28 The addictions we praise
49:25 “You’re not an alcoholic”
54:40 Genes, ACEs, and what gets inherited
57:15 His message to clinicians
1:00:27 What we learned, and what’s next in the series
Next in the series: how addiction impacts the family and everyone in the constellation around the person carrying it.
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