In this episode of *This Tree AND Me*, Cory J Riggs opens the door to one of the most profound and vulnerable stories of his life — the long, winding path of addiction, and all of the faces it wore before he ever touched a substance.
Addiction is never just drugs or alcohol.
Sometimes it looks like food.
Sometimes anger.
Sometimes approval.
Sometimes escaping into work or relationships.
Sometimes it’s running toward pleasure.
Sometimes it’s running from pain.
And sometimes… it’s the silence we hide inside when we don’t know where else to put our hurt.
In this episode, Cory traces addiction through every stage of his life, beginning long before anyone recognized it — and long before he understood what was happening internally.
He revisits childhood moments that shaped him, the emotional fractures that formed in silence, and the ways those early patterns grew into the behaviors that eventually brought him to treatment at nineteen. With honesty and compassion, Cory walks through the complicated years of adolescence, the rupture with his father, the fear of not belonging, and the pain that had no language yet.
But the journey didn’t end in treatment.
Cory also shares the lesser-talked-about truth: addiction can change form even after substances are gone. Through adulthood, parenting, marriage, divorce, work, chasing success, self-abandonment, and trying to find worth in external things — addiction continued to mirror the places inside him that had not yet healed.
And then, the turning.
Through grief, spiritual awakening, discipline, writing, the Tree, and the quiet inner work of the past few years, Cory discovered the deeper truth:
Addiction is not a disease.
It is a mental-health struggle rooted in trauma, fear, unmet emotional needs, and the parts of our story we were never taught to tend to.
You don’t “catch” addiction.
It forms when a part of you goes unanswered for too long.
This episode is not about shame.
It is not about judgment.
It is about honesty — and the courage to look inward with compassion.
Cory offers this story so that listeners might understand their own journey more clearly. Whether addiction has touched your life through substances or through patterns of avoidance, soothing, escaping, or over-functioning, this episode meets you exactly where you are.
And if you are struggling with anything that feels bigger than you:
Please reach out.
Ask for help.
You are not meant to carry all of this alone.
Thank you for listening to a story that took a lifetime to understand.
This is *This Tree AND Me.*
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