Hey, it's Alexis Haynes and this is my podcast recovering from reality.

I am so honored that anybody really wants to listen to my story. I mean like I don't know. I guess I just see it as an incredible thing that over the last eight years,

those who have been with me watching my experience kind of unfold have stayed along watching this whole time and I'm so grateful for all of the new people who have come along who are curious about recovery and how we live life recovered from all sorts of crazy shit like addiction and trauma and PTSD and anxiety.

And depression and postpartum depression and sexual abuse you know it's like how do we recover from all this stuff and and so if you're here if you're listening to recovering from reality I'm assuming that that you guys want to hear more about that and I'm super excited to have this platform and have this space to be able to talk about these really important topics.

Today I really wanted to focus on my story. I think it's important to talk about where I've been so that way there's some perspective on where I'm at today. So much of it involves trauma.

It involves a lot of trauma. Trauma is kind of the focal point of my early childhood and into my teen years and what eventually launched me into recovery and into getting better.

So I grew up in Southern California. I'm a so calm native. I still live here today and I grew up with parents who worked in the entertainment industry. My father was an alcoholic.

My mom was kind of a free-spirited pot smoking, hippie chick. They got married and had me and then had my little sister and by the time I was three they divorced. My dad had had an affair.

But I don't ever really remember like living in a household with my mom and my dad. That and itself I'm sure was quite traumatic although I don't remember.

I do remember feeling really unstable. My mom was often very emotionally unstable and my father was not someone that I could rely on because of his alcoholism and addiction issues.

At the age of four I started to be sexually abused by a family member. He was 10 years older than me. This went on for several years so he was about 14 to 17 and I was 4 to 7 years old.

It was a horrendously traumatic experience that affected pretty much every aspect of my life. I did shut it down for a long time. I had memories of bits and pieces of things that happened.

But it wasn't until I got sober where I was kind of flooded with very vivid memories that were like full stories start to finish.

So that sexual abuse began really early on for me and it affected every aspect of my life. I was saying my schooling and my ability to make friends, my relationship with men, the trust that I had for them and boys in general, the way that I viewed my body and it really crushed me.

I kept that secret from my family until I was about 18 years old. So I had a lot of trauma and instability at home plus the sexual abuse.

I can remember from a really early age wanting to escape whether it was in a video game or TV or food specifically sugar.

I remember going to my friends houses and eating entire boxes of gushers just to feel that like sugar or high. And so it started there and then fast forward a few years, middle school years. I began experimenting with more drugs.

The first time I used a substance was around the age of 11 or 12. I remember sneaking warm beers out of a friend's parents garage.

And it was absolutely disgusting, but I loved the feeling of that. And by the time I was in middle school, I was smoking pot and I was drinking.

I had a boyfriend who was much older than I was. So we would go to high school parties when I was still in middle school.

And then around the age of 14, I ended up having surgery and I tried opiates for the first time and that was the best feeling I have ever experienced.

And I knew that I needed to do that for the rest of my life. That's honestly what I thought. It wasn't until I was 15 that I was able to get my hands on opiates on a regular basis.

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