Built to Be Tough: Ryan’s Story

On identity, injury, and finding my way back to myself.

Stories do something research can't. They reach through the screen and say: I was there too. This is Ryan's story — told in his own words, and with his hope that someone reading it will feel a little less alone. If you feel alone and need some one-on-one support, book an appointment with us.

Who I Was

People used to describe me as solid. Not flashy — just dependable. The kind of man who shows up. I grew up in Northern California, the youngest of three boys, with a dad who built custom cabinets and a mom who worked double shifts at a home health agency and still had dinner on the table by six. In our house, toughness wasn't something you talked about. It was just what you were.

I found football at eight years old and didn't let go for the next two decades. I played linebacker at a school in the Pacific Northwest on a partial scholarship — the first in my family to go to college. I wasn't the most talented guy on the field. I was the one who watched film until midnight and made every practice rep count. I was the one the coaches trusted in fourth-and-one. That's who I was. That was the whole thing for me.

I graduated with a degree in kinesiology, married Jenna — my college sweetheart, who teaches second grade — and came home to Northern California to coach. By thirty-five I had two kids, a girl and a boy, a varsity head coaching job at a high school, and a mortgage I was genuinely proud of. By every visible measure, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

What I didn't know — what I couldn't have told you then — was that underneath all of it, there was this low hum. A constant internal scoring of whether I was doing enough. Being enough. I'd had it so long I thought it was just how brains worked.

The Injury

This part still gets me: it wasn't even dramatic. I didn't get hurt in a game, didn't push myself too hard in a workout. It was a Saturday pickup basketball game with three other teachers in the school gym. I went up for a rebound, came down wrong, and felt something give in my lower back. I finished the game anyway. Of course I did.

The MRI showed two herniated discs. My orthopedic surgeon called it significant and handed me a prescription for oxycodone before I'd asked a single question. Rest, physical therapy, follow up in six weeks.

The pills worked. That was the honest and terrible thing about them. Within an hour of the first dose, the pain dropped from a nine to a two. I slept through the night for the first time in weeks.

But they did something else, something I didn't have a name for at the time. They turned down the volume on everything.

That hum underneath — the constant scoring, the quiet anxiety — went silent. I hadn't known how loud it was until it stopped. And I remember thinking, almost immediately: oh. So this is what other people feel like.

The Slide

The prescription ran out after thirty days. My doctor declined to renew it — he was cautious about long-term opioid use, and I understood that. Intellectually. But my body had already learned that relief was possible. And my brain, which had spent three decades being rewarded for pushing through pain, had now had a taste of something it didn't have to push through at all.

I started drinking more. It started as a beer after practice — my back throbbed at the end of every day on the sideline, and the beer softened it. Then two beers. Then whiskey at night because whiskey worked faster. The timeline from one drink to unwind to drinking to function was shorter than I ever would have predicted for myself. Maybe eighteen months. Honestly, I'm not sure. The months blurred in a way I still find difficult to explain.

What I know now — what my therapist helped me understand — is that this wasn't a failure of willpower. Opioids and alcohol act on the same reward circuits in the brain, flooding the system with dopamine and binding to the receptors that regulate mood, pain, and stress. The brain adapts. It stops producing those chemicals naturally because it doesn't think it needs to. When the substance goes away, the deficit is real and physical. What looked from the outside like a choice was, in my nervous system, something closer to desperation (Koob & Volkow, 2016). I wasn't weak. I was depleted in ways I had no framework for recognizing.

But I didn't know any of that yet. What I knew was that I was exhausted all the time, irritable in ways that scared me, and that the whiskey kept it manageable enough to keep showing up.

What My Family Saw

Jenna noticed before I did. She said she told herself at first it was the injury — that I was grieving the loss of my physical capability the way athletes do, that it would pass. She gave me space.

But space became distance. The Ryan who used to watch film with her on the couch, who remembered the names of her students and asked about them, who narrated game tape out loud because he was excited — that Ryan got harder and harder to find. I was physically in the room and emotionally somewhere else entirely.

Our son, who was four at the time, started having nightmares. He started asking Jenna why Daddy was always tired. Our daughter — she was seven then — stopped asking me to come to her soccer games. She just quietly stopped asking. I noticed that. And the noticing hurt. And the hurting made me want another drink. And I hated the loop but I didn't know how to step out of it.

I wasn't trying to disappear from them. I was trying to survive myself. I just didn't know those two things had become the same problem.

The Morning Everything Shifted

The morning that changed things wasn't a crisis. There was no dramatic low point, no emergency. It was a Sunday in October. Jenna had taken the kids to her mom's for the afternoon. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee I'd let go cold.

The house was quiet in a way that felt unfamiliar. I reached for my phone to check the game scores and realized I couldn't account for most of Friday. Not in the way you forget a boring day — I had vague impressions, but nothing I could reconstruct with any confidence. I sat with that for a long time.

I wasn't scared of what I'd done. I was scared of what I was becoming. And more than that, I was scared by how long I'd been looking directly at it and calling it something else. Stress. Back pain. A rough season. Thirty-eight years of being taught to be tough had made me extraordinarily good at not looking at the one thing that actually needed looking at.

I called Jenna. I didn't have the words yet — I've never been built for talking about the interior stuff — but I had enough: "I need help. I don't know what that looks like, but I know I need it."

She came home.

Where I Am Now

That was eighteen months ago, and I won't tell you it's been a straight line. It hasn't. I found a therapist who specializes in men's health and trauma — someone who didn't rush me or flinch. Through that work, I learned for the first time that the hum underneath everything had been there since childhood. A household where worth was tied to performance leaves marks. The opioids didn't create that wound. They found it.

I'm still coaching. I still show up to every practice. But I coach differently now — less from the need for my players to be perfect, more from genuine curiosity about who they are off the field. They don't know what changed. They just tell me I'm easier to talk to.

My daughter asked me to come to soccer last spring. I came to every game.

My son doesn't ask why Daddy is always tired anymore. Mostly because I'm not.

The hardest part wasn't stopping. The hardest part was realizing I'd spent my whole life being strong in a way that left no room for what was actually happening inside me. You can be tough and still be hurting. Those aren't opposites. I just never had a model for that.

I do now.

Ryan's story is about opioids and alcohol. It's also about identity — about what happens when the thing you've built yourself around can no longer hold you up. It's about a brain doing exactly what brains are built to do: seeking relief from pain it didn't know how to process. That's not a character flaw. That's biology responding to unmet need.

If any part of his story sounds like yours, know this: the neuroscience is the same. The substance or behavior may be different. The family may look different. But the wiring underneath it — the way relief gets confused with recovery, the way survival strategies masquerade as choices — that part is deeply, universally human.

You're not broken. You're becoming whole.

A note from Emerging Whole

Ryan's story is one of many. Maybe yours sounds different — a different injury, a different substance, a different family around the table. But if any part of what he described felt familiar, you don't have to keep figuring it out alone.

Coaching isn't therapy, and it's not a program. It's a space to understand why you got here, work through what's been keeping you stuck, and start building the life you actually want to come home to.

If you're ready — or even just curious —Book a quick consult appointment.

No pressure. No program. Just a conversation.

Citations

Koob, G. F., & Volkow, N. D. (2016). Neurobiology of addiction: A neurocircuitry analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(8), 760–773. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(16)00104-8

National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2022). Opioids and the brain. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/drugs-brain

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2021). Key substance use and mental health indicators in the United States: Results from the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. DHHS Publication No. PEP21-07-01-003. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/

Zale, E. L., & Ditre, J. W. (2015). Pain-related fear, disability, and the fear-avoidance model of chronic pain. Current Opinion in Psychology, 5, 24–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.03.014