Please welcome Adam Gunton of Recovered on Purpose to our interview today. Adam is in recovery and a role model for others who are looking to change their lives.
Please introduce yourself to those that don’t know you.
Thanks so much for having me. I love doing interviews like this and just spreading the hope out there. So that’s basically who I am. Just over three and a half years ago, I was homeless. I was addicted to heroin, meth, crack, all the bad stuff. And the thing is, is that my life started like all like an all-American boy. I was in the little league sports teams that won state every year. We won nationals one year for football. I was the home run Derby hitter of the little league world series in eighth grade, went to Columbine High School. And I was the defensive captain of our state championship football team my senior year. But I had this hidden drug habit the whole time that I didn’t recognize where it was taking me.
I had no idea. I’d never had somebody have a conversation with me about drugs and alcohol and where it leads. So that’s how I found myself eight, nine years later, homeless after being kicked out of a homeless shelter and unable to stop using drugs. Now in my recovery for my two years, clean and sober, I was able to write and publish my testimony into a book that has gotten in the hands of thousands of people. And I’ve had a lot of people from all over the world reach out to me that have either had a family member, send it to them, or they got to themselves. They found it real randomly. I even had someone hit me up when he got out of jail, and he told me that his brother sent it to him in jail.
He ended up finding Jesus, praying to Jesus in jail after reading my book, and then gave the book to someone else in his pod. By the time he left, all 36 people in his pod had read my book. My story isn’t the only one that is going to impact every single person out there. What I believe is that people that recover have to get their stories out. We have to do this to give hope. So since then,
I’ve actually been helping and coaching and training other people in recovery to write and publish their books. And that’s one of the three-step processes of my program for Recovered on Purpose. It’s Write, Speak, Serve; write your story so that you can speak your story and then serve your story in schools so that we can let the kids know where this goes, where this actually leads. Because I believe if someone would have spoken to me at 13 or 14, I believe I could have stopped myself. So that’s, that’s who I am now. That’s what everything I do now is with the end vision in mind of, of stopping the future generations from going down the path of addiction.
You can also watch my interview with Adam here:
What was going on that led you to turn to drugs?
That’s a great question because they say about 66% of addicts have experienced some really heavy childhood trauma. When I look back, I see the Columbine High School shooting was incredibly impactful for the entire community. I was in fourth grade. I remember when they started lining us up at recess, and everybody was scared. They were like shuffling us into the school and locking the school down. I was right down the street from the high school. But I don’t remember that causing me to start looking for a way out. So, I don’t think that trauma was what caused me to start using. What I believe actually was, for me was a bad influence. I had two incredibly bad influences in my life, early on at 11, 12, and 13 years old.
By the time I was 13, I was at least weekly using drugs like Percocet and cocaine and drinking every week. That’s not okay. I hid this while playing these sports, and I was the leader on these sports, right. So I had these bad influences in the background. I don’t think that it was a trauma for me. I believe it was a bad influence. And that’s part of it. I believe that we have to watch who our young people are surrounding themselves with also. As adults learn, we are the sum average of the five people we spend the most time with.
We begin to select our circle. As kids, oftentimes, we want to fit in. So I believe that it was, it was a bad influence at that time. And I can’t; I don’t blame others. I don’t blame those people because I made a choice. Even though I was young, I should have made better choices with my influence.
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So what do you think was the turning point for you? What made you come to a decision? What was your darkest point when you finally said, I can’t take this anymore?
I do want to say I thought I was being influenced. I was having fun and was partying. But then, when I was 19, I actually had a traumatic experience. I had been out partying and drinking all night. Like I did every night during my freshman year of college. I was sleeping and woke up at 4:47 am to my best friend, Chuck, who called me. I remember having the conscious choice to answer the way I always do with, Hey, what are you up to, Chuck? Or I could answer the way I was feeling with a hello. And for some reason, in my drunken state, I chose the latter.
I said hello. And he said, Hey, what’s up? I said, why are you calling me when I’m sleeping? He said I’m. I was calling to say hi. I said, “Don’t call me this late again.” So I hung up on him. Later, he shot himself. And after that, I was unable to tell anybody about that phone call for eight years.
I bottled that down deeper with drugs and alcohol. And after that trauma, the only thing I knew about to turn to was these drugs. I was partying to make myself feel better. I remember specifically seeking out drugs to cope with life, and I started to seek out drugs to cope with emotions and get that support that I felt that I needed. So there were two points. There was a bad influence. And the fact that I was using drugs because everybody goes through trauma in life.
Everybody goes through some trauma in life. We have to have the coping mechanisms to do that. When we start talking about what the turning point was, and when I actually started wanting to stop. For me, it was. It was years of wanting to stop. It was years of having a bag of heroin and throwing it down the toilet at night, going to sleep, waking up in the morning, and having to go to the dope man.
After I threw it away, you could have strapped me up with a lie detector test the night before I would never use it again ever. And the thing was, I had to use it in the morning. So during this time, I was seeking something to help. I wanted to stop so bad over and over.
But my life just continued to get worse from there. I can’t really look at a time like there wasn’t really like a rock bottom for me either because I thought it was rock bottom when I was in this apartment. I had just lost all my friends because they found out I was a heroin addict. And so, I got ostracized from this group. So I’m trying to write a little suicide note on my iPad. I was trying to shoot up to kill myself. I thought that was rock bottom.
And then I find myself on felony probation, being found dead behind the wheel of a car by the police. Like I thought that was rock bottom. I ended up in a homeless shelter and remember looking around like, all right, I can only go up from here.
I got 86ed from the homeless shelter. So there’s like, there is no rock bottom. That’s what I tell people, wherever you’re at right now, right now is the time. It’s now. My turning point was when I gave up. I was trying different avenues and did all the different anonymous meetings. I did church Bible studies and even tried mixed martial arts to get clean.
It got to a point where I literally just asked God to let me die. I knew I couldn’t kill myself. And I knew I couldn’t keep living like this, but I was done; I quit. I gave up and thought, please take me. He whispered to me, and he said, it’s time, go.
What help did your family give? How did they cope with your addiction? Were they able to help you? How did that work for you?
I love my family. My family has always supported me through everything. It got to the point that they couldn’t. There was nothing they could do. It was almost like I ran away from them. I didn’t want to hear from them anymore. I threw a phone away so that they wouldn’t even have my phone number because I didn’t want them to watch me die. That’s how bad it got for me.
My sister literally had to write me off. My sister is my best friend now. Last night, I was just over at her house, giving my nephew his first truck for his second birthday. I got him a little Tonka thing that he can actually drive. But my family was always there. I could’ve reached out to them, but there was nothing they could do.
This is not saying they should have. They had the ability to, or they had the knowledge to at the time, but there was absolutely an intervention that could have happened in my teen years. I say that because my mom and dad would literally do anything for me. I think that there’s a lot of missing knowledge for parents about where this goes and the power that they have.
At a certain point, my parents got divorced. It went from parenting to almost friendship a little bit. I was free running. But I think there comes a time when you know. Someone’s suffering and the kids suffering. It’s there and a hammer that needs to come down. We only have a certain amount of time with kids.
Please tell us about your work with Recovered on Purpose, your book, and where can people learn more about you?
Absolutely. So with my book, I had this God moment at this conference in 2019 on September 28th that he just told me. He literally whispered to me the first night that your new company is called Recovered on Purpose. Since then, he’s been giving me seed after seed. From September 28th to November 6th, 2019, I wrote and published my book. It was about five weeks that I wrote and published my entire book. And during that time, I had to create a system. I had to come up with something that would make it so that this could be duplicatable because it really isn’t that difficult to write and publish a book. Everybody puts this huge thing on it. Every single one of us has a story. My story will absolutely impact a certain sector of people.
Some people have gone through incredible traumas that I cannot relate to and don’t necessarily relate to my story. Those kinds of stories are the ones that need to get out so that other people find hope. That’s why I started helping people to write and publish their books on recovery also. And there are three out right now that all have different stories and different backgrounds. Those books are getting out to thousands of people. I have seventeen short stories in my book. Every single one of those I can speak in vivid detail at any point at any conference, in any school, on a podcast at any time, because I’ve written it down and gotten it out. I teach and coach people on how to write their books. They’re literally becoming speakers through that process.
Once you write and publish your book, then you have this new identity. You’re no longer just a recovering addict. I refuse to be a recovering addict and having that be my identity for the rest of my life. I’m recovered, I’m on purpose, passionate, and I’m out to help and serve now.
Then you start talking about where you were at their point. There are specific stories that you start talking to the kids about. The whole point of Recovered on Purpose is I want to have a recovered addict speaking in every public school in America every year. That’s the only way we can’t leave kids behind. There’s plenty of schools, and there’s plenty of speakers doing things like this. I’m not going to speak to a hundred thousand schools. How, how am I going to do that? We need a movement, and that’s what Recovered on Purpose is. It’s a movement that’s raising an army of recovered addicts to deter future generations from going down the path of addiction in every way we can.
Adam Vibe Gunton delivers a powerful message of hope for any audience. His story of overcoming homelessness and drug addiction to becoming a 7 figure business owner, bestselling author, and coach for other recovered addicts to write and publish their stories – in only two years – motivates every audience that hears him speak to take massive decisive action in their own lives. His compassion for the difficult times in life, coupled with his passionate delivery to overcome these times to become the person you have always wanted to be, is what makes his message so powerful for the audiences he serves. With confidence in his belief that anyone, anywhere, at any time, can change their life in an instant with decision and action, he drives home practical steps for any audience to take immediately to change the course of their life forever.
To learn more about Adam, check out his website, Recovered on Purpose here, and his book, From Chains To Saved: One Man’s Journey Through The Spiritual Realm of Addiction.
Thank you for reading. I know you have many options on content. Don’t forget to sign up for my free training filled with information and inspiration. Sign up now.
And consider getting access to my online course, Regain Your Hope, an online course that gives you an action plan to help your child change. Know that your child can change. Love, Cathy
