David A. Schu Memorial Scholarship short essay

---

Please explain how you have been impacted by or demonstrated a commitment to issues of addiction and/or sexual identity.

---

As far as I can remember addiction has always been apart of my life. The first time I seen the extent of addiction go to far was at the age of four when I lied to my mother. My mother chased me around this two bedroom apartment we were living in at the time, after a while I tired and she caught me, my mother beat me so bad she bloodied my nose and lips. She then held me up to a mirror in our apartment bathroom and said "this is what happens to liars," all I seen was a mixture of blood and snot running down my nose and blood running down from my lips and tears from my eyes. I will never forget this traumatic event. Fast forward a few years later, my mother and step father get into an argument in middle of a celebration. My mother when she drinks becomes extremely aggressive and an explosive drunk. My step father a 6,3 giant teddy bear does all that he can to quench my mother's fiery tirades without violence but to no avail. The only thing my step father could do was take himself out of the situation so he leaves in his blue bronco, but my mother was not finished. She grabbed me, put me in the back seat of her white Toyota Corolla and sped down one way streets trying to catch up to my step father to say her peace. My mother was often admitted to recovery programs and eventually she successfully completed almost a decade sober with the help of the peer to peer group Alcoholic Anonymous (AA). My mother was so clean that she even became the chairmen of one of the AA clubs.

Watching my mother in my early childhood battle her addiction, then growing up and watching my brother and other members battle with it, pushed me to be the polar opposite. The addiction I battle now is my love and vigor for working out and the other is to help others who struggle with traumatic experiences. Although this essay speaks about drug addiction what I have come to learn through my academic studies is those who are practicing substance abuse are those who feel some type of dis-ease that they are trying medicate and they seek some type of ease from internal pain.

My commitment starts by dealing with people who have experienced extreme trauma, people who experience extreme trauma or trauma in early childhood tend to be more susceptible to addiction. Becoming a clinician with AA background I vow to add some process into my practices that will assess both mental illness and addiction. As I watched my mother's evolution, the turning point was at the point she began dealing with her early traumatic experiences which were causal for her addiction later in life.With an integrated approach I may be able to help with the root cause early on and not the symptom.