And you probably won’t
think of Matt Bell: president and co-founder of Team
Recovery – a rescue and recovery nonprofit addiction
advocacy group; the COO and co-founder of Midwest Recovery
Center – an inpatient addiction treatment center scheduled
to open in August and a former heroin addict who has
committed his life to bringing light into the darkness of
addiction and creating a place of hope and success in the
midst of hopelessness and failure.
Unfortunately Bell’s story
echoes those of many others as he describes the series of
events that led to the day he wanted to end his life
“I had so much potential,”
Bell said. “I experienced a lot of good early on in my life.
I was raised in a loving family, and went to private
schools.” He would graduate from St. Francis de Sales High
School with a 4.0 GPA, then enroll at the University of
Toledo on a full athletic baseball scholarship, where he
looked forward to earning an international business degree
and a future playing professional baseball.
“College was good. I was
being scouted by three major league teams,” said Bell. But
just two years in, he tore his rotator cuff and needed
surgery. “Ninety Percocets turned into a Percocet
addiction,” he said.
It was soon after that
Bell would drop out of college, lose his scholarship and
sell everything that he had. “That was the beginning,” he
remembered. “And then it was nine years of in and out and
doing what I had to do.
He says that it only got
worse from there as he racked up misdemeanor charges, was
arrested for some home invasions trying to support his
heroin habit.
During that time, he says
that he overdosed on heroin three times, went through rehab
28 times, and was arrested 13 times in four states and
convicted of felonies in two. He says that he even spent
five days on an ICU ventilator but still hadn’t fallen far
enough.
“It was all bad but it was
nowhere near the worst,” he said. “I remember calling my mom
multiple times and I’d say mom could you please just leave a
sandwich on the front porch? I know you’re not going to let
me in the house but please leave a sandwich out there, I
haven’t eaten in four days.”
His mother’s response was
“Matt if you come over here I’m going to call the police.”
Another time Bell
describes a phone call to his mother, “It was during the
winter. It was a blizzard and I was cold, and on the
streets,” he said. “I said mom could you please just let me
in.”
Again, his mother told
him, “Matt if you come over here I’ll call the police.’”
He says that he knew it
had been hard for his mom to get to that point. “I’m a
mama’s boy through and through,” Bell said. “In fact she
was my biggest enabler in my addiction. My mom had gained
weight and became depressed. The only time she slept well
was when I was in jail.
“I know that it tore her
apart to say ‘no you stay out in that blizzard.’ I have a
six year-old and I can’t imagine saying no to him. It’s hard
enough taking his Pokémon cards away. I found out later that
after she hung up she would just cry.
“I’m the kind of person I
love people. I like relationships. I like community. I like
friends. I like partnerships. I love collaboration. I love
life. I love my family, but I’ve never been a person that
wanted to die. And at the end it was literally to the point
where I couldn’t call anybody and have them answer the
phone. I didn’t have any friends. I was homeless in Toledo
and I wanted to die.
“My son was taken away by
that point. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t see him. I
couldn’t provide for him. It was just all negative. I looked
at all of the things that I had to overcome to get my life
back and I thought, I have no license, I have no phone and
if I did have a phone nobody would answer. I can’t get
around.
“Then there was child
support, family court, felony warrants, and I was like it’s
going to take forever. I’m not going to ever overcome this
stuff even if I do get clean I’ll just probably be so
depressed I’ll just go right back out. That’s what I thought
and I just did not see any light at the end of the tunnel.”
Bell said while his mom
was at work, he snuck into her garage to end his life. “I’d
done the last of my heroin and I thought alright now I’m
going to kill myself in peace where I’m comfortable,” he
said. “I was suicidal and I was in my mom’s garage and I
had a gun in my mouth. I wanted to die because I didn’t
think that I could stop using.”
But Bell said his love for
his mother kept him from pulling the trigger that day.
“I thought my mom’s going
to come home and open the garage door and see her son with
his brains all over the garage,” he said. “That’s the reason
I didn’t do it.”
Today Bell is clean and
sober and committed to helping others get through it. “It’s
been a process,” he said. “Sometimes the hardest part of
the process is getting out of the addict mentality.” And he
said that even during treatment he continued to identify
himself as a junkie, and a thief and a cheater and a liar
until his counselor helped him to see things differently.
“The counselor reminded me
that if I could live as man of character everything would
take care of itself,” said Bell. “It blew my mind. Wow, I
thought, if I could just do the right thing people would
start to trust me again.”
Part of the process
involved the transition back into everyday living. “I had to
learn how to get a license, and how to pay bills and open a
bank account. All of the things that seem so simple,” Bell
said.
Meanwhile Bell was also
able to incorporate the things he and his group of friends
had learned during the recovery process that not only helped
them to regain their own lives, but would also become a
foundational principle for Team Recovery.
“We were all coming off of
heroin and I don’t know why but I just wanted to leave,”
Bell said. “I felt like I wanted to go and use heroin and I
would look at somebody who had been there longer than me and
I would be like how is that person doing pushups right now
when I can’t even get out of bed?
“And I remember looking at
him and seeing that he was doing better. And I was like if
he can get there and he’s only four days clean then I know
I’ve just got to hang on another day, just another day. Then
there was another kid that was sober a day less than me who
did the same thing with me. He saw me starting to feel
better and he was like ‘you know if he can do it I can do
it.’
“That’s what we did for
each other. We were all in there at the same time and that’s
basically what we did. We loved each other until we could
love ourselves. If we would have been in separate places or
if I had just been at home or in a jail cell I wouldn’t have
made it.
“It was how do I get
through this fight with my child’s mom without going back
out and using? I had to call someone who had been through
it, and then learn how to get through. It was literally baby
steps of learning how to live and to build some
self-confidence and some self-worth.”
It was 2015 when Bell said
he and his friends were headed to an NA meeting when they
happened upon an addict standing by the freeway. “We were
in detox together and we were like a month clean and we were
on our way to a meeting,” said Bell. “There were about 10 of
us in my friend’s jeep because none of us had cars or
licenses at the time, and we saw someone holding a sign
asking for money.”
Bell said he recognized
the man from a previous treatment and didn’t want that sign
to represent the face of addiction. “So we decided that we
would go down to Cherry and Summit and hold up signs saying,
Heroin is Killing Our Town- Free Hugs, and
We Do Recovery, Recovery is Possible so
that people would know that we were heroin addicts but we
were not using heroin and yes heroin is bad but we’re not
all bad people, and that there is hope for people like us.
“We took pictures and put
them on Facebook and we woke up the next day and there was
like a half a million views and 200,000 likes.”
From there Bell says they
created a phone line, an email address and a website, then
formalized the project through the Secretary of State for
$99. “We were getting all these phone calls from people
asking for help and we were like only 90 days clean,” he
said. We thought, we need to do something to take that extra
step, so we decided to turn it into a nonprofit. We found
an attorney who donated time, but we were all still living
in a half-way house and we were all still in treatment.
“But our goal was: to give
back to the community, change the stigma associated with
heroin addiction, bring more treatment into the community,
make treatment more affordable and get people to understand
that once you get clean you can still have fun in life.
Putting down drugs and alcohol seems like a death sentence
to a lot of people but it’s literally the beginning of your
journey.”
Today Team Recovery
operates under three areas of service. The awareness
component takes the nonprofit team inside of schools in
Michigan, Indiana and NW Ohio where they speak to students
ages 10-18 about life. “We don’t talk about heroin,” said
Bell. “In fact 85 percent of our talks have nothing to do
with drugs or alcohol.” He says instead they talk to the
kids about issues that are important to them such as how to
deal with drama on Facebook or how the relationships they
have can influence decisions.
The second service Team
Recovery offers is treatment referral. Bell says that he
works to make vital connections throughout the area so that
no one is turned away from treatment. “If someone calls us
then I call D.A.R.T. – the Lucas County addiction resource
unit – and if they say that there is a wait I’ll call a
different county,” said Bell. “That’s what we do, we create
connections with all Ohio counties so they can send people
to us and we can send people to them.”
The third division of Team
Recovery is FAD (families after addiction or death), a
family support group that Bell started because he’d seen the
kinds of things that his own family had experienced when he
was using drugs. Here the principles of the organization
continue.
“An addict can help
another addict and a student can help another student so a
family member can help another family member,” said Bell. He
says that groups are held in an open forum that is
supportive and consists of people who love someone
struggling with addiction.
“These are family members
who have witnessed an overdose or are enablers and are
looking for resources,” he said. “Or those who don’t know
how to trust loved ones yet and may question whether they
should give the car back.”
Also on the horizon for
Bell is the opening of Midwest Recovery Center – a 38-bed
in-patient rehabilitation center located in Maumee where
Bell said the focus will be on a totally drug-free treatment
and recovery program.
“There won’t be any opiate
medications like Suboxone or Methadone because we want to
focus on the problem and stop the dependence on all meds.”
He said he wants people to experience freedom from
the medications that keep them tied to some outpatient
facilities and he knows the challenges that exist.
After knee surgery Bell
said he chose to opt out of any pain medication. “We don’t
sugar coat anything. We’re talking about life or death not
about what places rank best in the country,” he said.
Just recently, Bell
received the Advocate of the Year Award from The Mental
Health and Recovery Services Board of Lucas County for his
efforts to provide resources and help to those who struggle
with addiction.
“It’s crazy,” Bell said
about how far he’s come since that first post on Facebook.
“We’re recovering heroin addicts and we’ve developed this
machine that works really well. I have my license back. I
have my son. I have a vehicle that has insurance. I have
bank accounts. I have businesses. I have a life. My mom who
once said ‘if you come over here I’m calling the police,’ I
now have the key to her house. I have the passwords to her
security systems and she calls me for favors like, ‘will you
go get the mail or will you let the dogs out?’”
And while he continues to
help those who struggle the way he struggled in the past,
Bell is also working to maintain his own sobriety.
“At first, it was hard for
me to be a normal person. But the only difference between me
and a normal person is that I don’t drink or do drugs – I
can’t. So I go to coffee shops instead of bars. I go to
concerts. I go to movies. If I go to a bar for food I make
sure I have a plan that I’m going in here to have some food
and then I leave.
“It’s a daily reprieve,”
he said. “It’s clearly one day at a time and it’ll be that
way for the rest of my life. Honesty and Humility are the
two things that help me stay clean. And the realization that
I can’t do it Matt’s way – I have to do it God’s way. I
don’t know exactly what God’s will is for me and I don’t
know exactly what He wants me to do but I do know what He
doesn’t want me to do, and if I can just stay out of my own
way I know that God has a plan. He brought me to it because
He was going to bring me through it.
“I do meetings and I have
a sponsor and the 12-step programs and those principles are
what help me stay sober. Honesty, humility, justice, faith,
service, brotherly love, these are the 12-step principles.”
What he wants the
community to know about addiction is compassion and
understanding.
“The community needs to
understand and learn about the disease of addiction,” said
Bell. “They need to realize that these people are sick. Yes,
it was a choice at first, but when you’ve been doing this
for a certain amount of time the structure of the brain
changes. If people understood it a little more the stigma
would change.”
For more information about Team Recovery contact them at:
419-561-LIFE
Visit their website:
www.TheTeamRecovery.org
Find them on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/NoMoreHeroin
Instagram
www.instagram.com/TeamRecovery419
Twitter:
www.twitter.com/TheTeamRecovery
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