Show Notes
Mike Morgan spent 30 years in law enforcement — a decade of it working the most violent part of one of the most violent cities in America. On his very first shift, he saw two homicides in five hours. He describes a career of natural deaths, suicides, fatal car accidents, and children he couldn't save — and the armor he'd started building as a kid, growing up with a hypercritical, verbally abusive father, only got thicker with every scene.
That armor had a cost. Mike traces his addiction back to the pills he was prescribed as a teenager and the painkillers that made him feel, for the first time, like everything was okay. Over the years tramadol became the thing that held him together — until it was pulling him apart. At his worst he was taking as many as 55 pills a day and suffered nine seizures, including one in a GameStop and one that slammed his face into a countertop, before he finally looked at his ex-wife and said the words he'd avoided for years: I need help.
He got sober in 2012 — reportedly one of the first people his insurance company had ever sent to rehab for tramadol. But sobriety was only half the story. After being medically retired, the anger and grief he'd channeled into the job for three decades had nowhere to go, and a nervous breakdown forced him to finally face the PTSD he'd carried for years. This episode goes into the healing work that followed, including his experience with plant-based medicine.
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