Learning to heal – addiction

Gillian has an honest and insightful conversation with Nick Thorley. 
Nick is co-founder and co-host of Nomad Podcast. He lives in Nottingham where he spent most of his 20’s working as a Youth Minister for a group of Methodist churches. Since then he’s been involved in fundraising for various international development charities. Nick loves to hang out with his kids, run very long distances, drink good coffee and meet up with friends.

Themes and thoughts explored:

• Nick shares about who he is,
• including his experience of becoming blind from childhood until his late 20s.
• Retinitis pigmentosa (RP)
• The challenge of going through such a huge life experience in teenage years.
• The controlling and coping mechanisms Nick turned to or used including addictive behaviours of using pornography and gambling.
• Nick’s sister intervening and suggesting therapy specific to addictive behaviour.
• Gillian and Nick discuss trauma and shame. 
• The embodied healing of running for recovery.
• Honest anger when things are hard is  healing. 
• Nick shares his experience of God now. 
• Shalom.

Links:

Nomad podcast www.nomadpodcast.co.uk
GoHealth community https://gohealth.org.uk

I am Gillian Straine, welcome to the GoHealth podcast.

In this episode, I am chatting with Nick Thorley, one of the founders and co-hosts of the legendary Nomad podcast. So he is a super experienced broadcaster and podcaster. And I will admit to you, I was a wee bit nervous, but as you will hear, he is a totally lovely guy. I was really struck by his openness and his willingness to share some really tough aspects of his life.

Nick lost his sight as a teenager and went on to struggle with addiction. And as he chat in this podcast, we cover some really deep topics. We look at shame, we talk about recovery, about life lived in openness and honesty, and how powerful, how healing, how powerful that can be and actually that’s a word that has stuck with me. Powerful, it is a powerful story of loss, of struggle and of what happens when we live honestly with how things really are, rather than how we would like them to be or how others want us to be and to live. So in this episode, we are talking about several kinds of addiction, including addiction to pornography. Like with all episodes of the GoHealth podcast we are not shying away from honest discussions about what’s really going on for people. But I’m just mentioning this here in the introduction to let you know that some of the details of this podcast are of a sensitive nature. All that said, here is my honest and helpful conversation with Nick Thorley on Learning to Heal, on with the episode.

[MUSIC]

Nick, thank you so much for coming on the GoHealth podcast. How are you today? 

Nick: Yeah, I’m very well, thanks, Gillian. Yeah, no problem at all. 

Gillian: Our kind of standard question has been over the last few months, how is your pandemic being so what things to be like, where you are and how is it impacted on your life and your work? 

Nick: Yes, I think I’ve been very fortunate, really, I would have to say. I actually changed jobs just as the first lockdown started. So having worked as a Christian Aid for eight and a half years, I closed one laptop one afternoon on my kitchen table and a few days later opened a different laptop for the peace building charity CORD for whom I work now, so I’ve been able to continue to work and working from home, it’s been okay. There’s been a few ups and downs during that time. Definitely like a lot of people suffered a little bit with the kind of lack of social interaction at certain times. I was actually very pleased during the first lockdown, just because of my circumstances, I’m divorced and have my children, who are now nine and eleven a couple of days in the week and half the weekends and we kind of juggled it around during lockdown. So I was very pleased actually to at least be able to walk from my house to their house like my every other day or something like that, and have somewhere else to go and be in a different four walls. And sometimes have a cup of tea with their mum before we did the transition. So that was good. And because my children are adopted, they actually really enjoyed first, being off school for a long period of time and then being in school, but being in very small classes as they were children of key workers.

So it was em, so in that sense, kind of feel really fortunate, you know, compared to so many people that my lockdown wasn’t too bad but I’m definitely enjoying things getting a bit more back to normal. 

Gillian: Yes, it’s the funny things. I keep thinking, you know, we’re recording this in February 2022. I keep thinking this time last year. This time last year I was…I’ve got two young kids as well, Nick and I was homeschooling and I have to say just about ended me. It was really tough. I keep thinking it’s so much better this year. But it’s still strange, isn’t it? You know, things are beginning to open up and we’re having to remember how to do normal life again. A lot of people are saying they’re finding it quite tiring and it’s quite strange getting back to the normal.

Nick: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And it’s funny, isn’t it, because you have those…I’ve been experiencing that thing where some situations feel totally normal and I others are still quite restricted. So that sort of difference in experience is quite interesting as well. But yeah, in general, I’m just really enjoying being able to meet people again and go out for drinks and meals and not having to think too hard about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Gillian: And it’s renegotiating all the social interactions. This time last year we were all doing the same thing. Whereas now I feel that some people are really…they’re hugging, they’re in busy pubs and yet others…I’m meeting with a guy last week and we had to be outside and he wasn’t prepared to accept the risk in doors. So people are renegotiating again. It makes it more complicated, doesn’t it? 

Nick: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I was, I spoke at church last week in my work for CORD and they are still in the midst of sort of transitioning back to meeting in person, but some of them are meeting in person and some of them aren’t, and some feel uncomfortable about getting back together and so they’re kind of in this hybrid situation like a lot of churches are. Yeah. And I guess you just have to appreciate that different people for all kinds of reasons are in different places on this. 

Gillian: So tell us, so this is the next round of questions: tell us about your ministry and your mission…but, you know, just tell us about who you are and and the things you’ve been through by you know, I know why you’re on the podcast. Why why do you think you’re on the podcast? 

[Laughter]

Nick:  Yeah, that’s quite a leading question, isn’t it? Hopefully what I think I’m on the podcast for is the same as you…

Mmmm…mission and ministry, that’s quite an interesting idea. I am…So I am, so I’m a dad,  I’m a runner, I’m blind, I work as a fundraising manager for a cool little charity and I have had a very interesting faith journey over the last six or seven years. And I’m also a part podcast called Nomad and shared a lot of my own experiences on that podcast in different ways.

I lost my sight and it was kind of a gradual deterioration. And maybe we chat about that a little bit more. And yeah, I lost my sight and developed addictive behaviour, and eventually I never really came to terms with either. I didn’t accept that I was living with addiction. I didn’t really come to terms with being blind.

And although, yeah, so I kind of I guess I was in denial really. Thought I was coping really well, but all this stuff was going on eventually led to the breakdown of my marriage. And then I started a road to recovery, which was profound and life changing and I guess changed my perception of so much about myself and about life and about faith and God and everything.

And so it’s been a challenging road and a road with lots of ups and downs, and I’m still on it. It’s still kind of unfolding journey, and unraveling story but it’s been a journey of incredible healing and wholeness and peace. 

Gillian: Tell me, I mean, you said there that you weren’t born blind, but you went blind. How old were you? Were you a teenager? 

Nick: Yes. So I was well, I was so as partially sighted when I was born, although they didn’t, no one knew about it until I was about six, five or six when I stopped making progress with my reading at school. So when I was at school in the eighties, you had these Peter and Jane books and, you know, the first book said Peter on the first page.

And the next page said Jane, 

Gillian: Oh, yeah

Nick: And there was something about a dog and a ball. It was quite a slow moving story. Anyway as series went on, the text got smaller and I just stopped being able to read and famously, in our sort of family folklore, the head teacher of the little tiny primary school I went to North Staffordshire, got my mum into school at the end of the day, she came to pick me up and she said, said ‘Mrs. Thorley, your son’s thick’ and my mum said, ‘No, he’s not’.

Gillian: Gasp!

Nick: But yeah, they just thought that I wasn’t, couldn’t read very well, wasn’t very clever. I have this vivid memory of sitting with them. I guess these days you’d call her a teaching assistant, but this lady used to come in to help us read. And I remember sitting there and telling her that I couldn’t read this page and she said, Oh, you can…And I remember saying ‘no I can’t’. And she said, Oh, you can. I remember tears forming in my eyes because it’s really confusing when you’re very small and an adult’s telling you that you can do something and you’re pretty sure you can’t.

Anyway, so we went to the hospital and they did some tests and they said that I’ve got scars on my retina, that it wasn’t degenerative that it was something that had occurred during my mum’s pregnancy. So they said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us you had German measles when you were pregnant?’ And my mum said, ‘Because I didn’t’. And they said, ‘Ah, you must have come into contact with someone who did’. So it was a bit odd really. 

And that put loads of stuff on my mum.  My mum carried a lot of guilt around for many years because of that. But we always, we always understood it to be stable,  had this little mantra when I was a kid, I can remember like at school or whenever I met different people and told them that I was partially sighted, I remember always saying, it’ll never get better, it’ll never get better, but it won’t get any worse. And it really kind of clung to that. That was like a reassuring, bit of a security. 

So when I was 15, my side deteriorated in my right eye like over the course of a weekend. So my right eye used to be the stronger of the two, and sometimes to see more clearly, I would close my left eye and I’d see with more clarity. But over the course of a weekend, I remember being a football match in the afternoon and standing behind the goal, and I thought that my lens on my right, my right lens and my glasses was scratched and I kept wiping it. And then it went to a to go into a church thing on the Saturday night, and the same thing happens. And then on the Sunday morning I was taking part in a drama at church, and I remember looking at the piece of paper with the script on it. It just looked like a blank piece of paper whereas like two days before I’ve been able to read it. So. So yeah, we went to the hospital and the consultant who’d seen me before had retired. I saw this new person and he said, ‘Oh, this was always a possibility.’

And we were really surprised and said, ‘Oh, we didn’t think it was.’ So yeah, that was the first iteration. And then it was very gradual. Then probably in my late teens, early twenties when I was 24, so I could only see on my left side by now when I was 24, I just noticed…I was a youth worker with a group of Methodist church at the time…when I just started to notice that my sight was getting more cloudy and it was only, I guess each Sunday I would, part of my thing was to do the kids talk on a Sunday morning, and it just over the months began to find it harder and harder to orientate myself to the congregations to make sure I was standing in the right place and occasionally the minister would come and just kind of like just turn me because I was like facing to the side or something like that. I just find it really hard. And so we kind of worked out this routine where they put a white piece of paper on the dark carpet so I could stand on it. And it was weird because it was only over a period of time that I realised it was getting worse.

Anyway so I went for some tests and they said that it might be to do with cataracts and they could do in an operation, but they didn’t have any guarantees, and so they did the operation, but it didn’t improve it. And at that time that’s when they started talking about me having retinitis pigmentosa, which is a degenerative condition, which they’d never talked about. I don’t know why, no idea why it was misdiagnosed, but the understanding now is I always had retinitis pigmentosa, which is degenerative which had nothing to do with German measles. It’s a genetic condition. So all kinds of weird stuff said early on that.

…Yeah, and retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, as it’s called, for short – there are various kinds. So it can be to do with your blood, it can be hereditary. But in my case, I think it’s just a genetic mutation that happens when I was conceived because and no history of sight loss in my family and and yes when I was 28 and that was about that time and I lost any sight. I could see light and dark for a bit, but by my early thirties I couldn’t see whether it was light or dark world so yeah that was it.

Gillian:  And gosh being a teenager as well as such an important developmental time, we’re working out who we are. Do you think the age that you had a sudden deterioration -do you think that had an impact on, you know, coming to terms is what you had to live with? 

Nick: I think it did, as I think back now. But at the time and up until six or seven years ago, I would have said not. So the, the thing is that I was, I suppose, my way of coping, I suppose as long as I think back on it now, there are probably two ways of coping. One was my faith and one was addictive behavior. And in terms of my faith, I had a very strong faith and relationship with Jesus as I understood it. And so I would talk a lot about how I’d been, I’d never been healed physically, but I’d been healed of any emotional pain. And I wasn’t to do it wasn’t to do with self-pity. I guess the whole thing was kind of a mega mega-sized positivity. That sort of quite an aggressive, positive attitude. I always used to tell the story of when I came back from that hospital trip, when, when I was 15, when my right eye deteriorated, and I remember coming home and praying in my bedroom and listening to the U2 song called Ultraviolet Light. 

Like when, when, when this song kicks in it says at the start of the song, sorry at the start it says, ‘Sometimes I feel like I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like checking out. I want to get it right. Can’t always be wrong and loving won’t be long. And then it kicks in and this is really driving bassline in a throbbing rhythm and it says Oh Sugar, don’t you cry. Oh child wipe the tears from your eye? You know, I need you to be strong and the days is as dark as the night is long. Feel Iike trash, you make me feel clean. I’m in the black, can’t see or be seen. Baby, baby, baby, light my way.’

 And for so many years, of my life I talked about listening to that song and feeling this like sort of, I don’t know, like positive anger, like this, this kind of aggressive, ‘This isn’t going to get me down and I’m going to keep going.’ And I can either, at this point, roll over and die, or I can live and I suppose in some ways that worked. Like, people say things work until they don’t work, but somehow, in some way, that was my attitude.

So you see, you say now about my teens, that makes perfect sense that like that would have a massive impact – but the way I thought about it consciously I didn’t think like that, I thought I’m not going to get down about this. I guess I felt that if I, if I let myself dwell in self-pity that would overcome me, and and so I needed to stay positive and am. Yeah, that was all wrapped up…my parents were very positive as well from an early age. So the doctors had said from an early age that I shouldn’t ride a bike, for example, they said I’d never be able to drive. And they said, said I shouldn’t ride a bike, but my dad was a keen cyclist and he said I should ride a bike. I went to mainstream school. I didn’t go to like special school or anything like that. And I suppose one of the things I always took pride in was when people said, ‘oh, you don’t you don’t act like a blind person’. It was almost like,  like being like a sighted person was sort of the biggest compliment anybody could pay me.

Yeah. Yeah. So as I look back now it all feels a bit mixed up and a bit unhealthy, but at the time, it’s sort of half semi work. 

Gillian: Yeah, it’s how we cope with things at the time. I think it’s interesting you’re talking about positive anger and wanting to look not like what you’re going through and at times in my experience of cancer and trying to not look like a cancer patient. And so the language, I wonder, I mean, often in cancer illness there’s a big argument over what kind of language you should use. 

Nick: Right. Yeah. 

Gillian: A lot of times, you know, the war language, the war metaphor isn’t helpful. You fight, so you got to fight against this. And a lot of people with cancer don’t like that metaphor. But you’re right, there is a lot of positivity. There’s a lot to be said for taking a positive approach to solving problems. And because the Bible’s also full of that isn’t that, you know, people rise up to the challenge of what they’ve got to go through and battling it on. But it sounds like me you’re you’re describing this is just a surface way of coping. And there’s other deeper stuff going on for you that the positive approach to positive anger, as you call it, wasn’t quite meeting.

Nick: Yeah. I mean that like again at the time I would have said it was because I always felt, like I did well at school. I had really good friends and had a good life. I enjoyed my childhood, was really involved in church. I was kind of, you know, used to from quite a young age as a teenager, I started to preach and talk and, you know, do talks and help to lead a youth group. And then I learned to play the drums and then I was in a band and then I got a job as a youth worker. And all of that. You know, on the surface, it was all kind of…and if anybody said again, it kind of I guess a coping mechanism was people saying, oh, wow, you know, you do all this stuff isn’t it amazing? You, you know, there’s so much going on. But even now, it kind of look back and I think – actually a lot of thought was, especially with the kind of preaching and teaching type stuff, it’s very controlled. It’s like you’re at the front and you can speak and no one’s going to interrupt you and there’s no sort of interaction and I kind of look back to that now and think that actually rather than not being a great sign of confidence, it was sort of quite, protected sort of thing. So a lot of people who aren’t into public speaking, always think that people who are good at public speaking are like uber confident. But that’s not the case. Yeah. So I’m socially and this is why the last six or seven years have been so interesting and at times traumatic, but ultimately very healing because it’s it’s sort of pulled away my whole understanding of my self and things that I thought were signs of confidence and coping. I sort of now realise where perhaps like not, not that with ways of controlling and dealing with what was going on, my coping in a way that wasn’t so healthy. Yeah. 

Gillian: So when did you first become aware that your, that addiction was part of your coping? So is there a moment when you think it’s addiction don’t just come from nowhere, they build up I imagine, was there a moment when you thought this is this is an addiction and it might not be healthy?

Nick: That’s a really good question. I think that it was very, it was much later in my life. So so to kind of give it some context, I from my adolescence I, I suppose in puberty and stuff, I started to develop an addictive sexual behaviour. So I started, I guess, I guess it started we did this project on newspapers at school and we had to compare different kinds of newspapers and I came across page three for the first time and then found these phone numbers in the back of the newspaper that were like sex lines and started phoning them. And it and it became something that I just did obsessively and there were times when…so we got a massive phone bill and my mum and dad like, you know, were shocked and very angry and but it just carried on because I started doing it my, my grandmother’s house and, and then that it. Yeah. So went from there and all the way through my teens and I guess like yeah…that sort of stuff. And then occasionally buying like pornographic magazines and videos and masturbating  and it was sort of like…what it was, was a behaviour that some people think how you’d describe it, I suppose the big feature and I kind of understood this through, through the therapy that I’ve had I had a number of years ago was that it was, it was deeply shameful. And so I as a Christian, I really believed that what I was doing was really wrong. And really bad. So sex outside of marriage was bad, sex, lusting and, you know, entertaining, lustful thoughts that was all really bad, but I just I couldn’t stop doing it, so I carried on doing it. But what…so in answer to your question, when did I, I didn’t regard it as addictive behaviour, I did regard it as addiction possibly until like while even when my marriage was like crumbling because trust, you know, in later life, it kind of changed a little bit into phoning adult chat and dating hotlines and exchanging inappropriate messages like texts and emails with people. And it was all kind of same on like on a screen. So although I would swap texts with people and emails, I didn’t, I didn’t really ever want to meet up with anyone because I wasn’t really interested in that necessarily. It was more just kind of pushing the boundaries in a fantasy world. And and because of the shame and the guilt, if it is on a screen you can control it. And then when opportunities arose to meet someone, I’d sort of back out of it. But even, even when my marriage was looking like it was going to end, I still had this idea that it was to do with being I don’t know…like, I remember in conversations with people, you know, talking about being highly sexed or, yeah, it was it was kind of very much thinking about this you develop this behaviour, it’s it’s immoral, it’s wrong, need to stop doing it, it’s out of bounds. Towards the end of my marriage I started doing some online gambling as well. And that’s probably the time when I was doing that, that’s probably the time when I thought I was involved in something that was addictive, because I really couldn’t stop doing that. I mean, I couldn’t stop doing the other thing, but I don’t know. There was something about the gambling sounds it felt more immediately addictive. And so it wasn’t until I started doing therapy, I had had various bits of therapy in counselling throughout my marriage, but when my marriage came to an end, and I was kind of forced into a situation where I just could not like… I had to like I had to do something and or I say I had to do something I was seeing a counsellor that I had seen previously, and I was still talking to people as if that was helping and it wasn’t. And it was my sister actually said, I need to get some professional help. And an organisation is specialised in that sort of addiction. And I even protested like when she suggested that, kind of, people talk about cognitive dissonance.

That’s how far I was gone really, I was saying, no, no, I’m in this counselling and it’s helping. And then this was just after I had to leave our family home because my wife had found out that stuff was still going on that I’d said on numerous occasions wasn’t and, and, and I was saying to my sister, ‘no no I’m seeing this counselor, it’s still working’. And she’s said ‘well it’s not though, is it?’ It’s so odd to kind of think about it now, how, how wrong you can think about things and how totally messed up in your thoughts you can be. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t until that point when I started that journey with that therapist, he, he in a series of questions at the beginning of that therapy asked various things. And one of them was, have you ever experienced trauma in your life? And I said, no. It was, you know, when people go through a long list of questions, we say, have you done this? Have you done that? I’ve taken drugs, have it. And I was like, no, no, no, no. And he was like, Have you experienced trauma? And I was like, No. And he just stopped and was like, Are you sure? And as I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I was thinking in my head, I was thinking about I don’t know my parents died when I was a kid or…and he said, yeah, he said, Do you think that losing your side was a traumatic experience?

‘I said, no, not really.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I think a lot of people would’. And he left this really long pause, and I didn’t really want to get into an argument. So I said, ‘Oh, maybe, yeah, maybe. I don’t know’. But I honestly, I didn’t really think it was. But then as we, as we started this kind of therapeutic journey, it all kind of started to make loads of sense. So yeah, it was very late on in my life, relatively late when I came to that conclusion, or was I didn’t even come to it, you know, where someone helps me to understand.

Gillian: ‘I’m very struck. It was your sister, you know that just, one word suddenly. And that’s why I say one word can change the perception of a situation.

Nick: Yeah. And I was full… I was full of judgment. I was like, my sister is not a Christian. We’re very different, have different attitudes about all kinds of things in life. And she said, You’ve got to go into rehab. And I was just thinking, oh, my gosh, she’s just talking about just what she’s seen on TV or something. Yeah, it was her. And she found this organisation and she phoned them up and got me to phone them, and my parents paid for my first couple of months of therapy with them. Yeah. Yeah. It was absolutely down to her that, yeah, that it all started to happen. 

Gillian: I’m intrigued. A number of times you’ve you’ve used the word shame. That shamed almost a shameful word, isn’t it, to, you know, Christian circles, shame being the difference between, you know, it’s not you, you’ve done a bad thing or you’ve done a bad thing or I’ve done a bad thing, but I am a bad thing, you know, and that is sort of moving from an activity to a state of being. And and and then realisation of that has been is just so important in the human journey. 

Nick: Yeah.

Gillian: Like how shame makes it so much into church language as well. I wonder in your head, you said very early on, you, you had this traumatic… as you came later you had a traumatic experience in your childhood. You coped with it with faith to begin with but realised it was an addiction thing, addiction coping going on at the same time.

I wondering what way has your faith, did your faith come back in, in terms of your healing from the addiction…

Nick: Do you mean later through when I was having a therapy and stuff.

Gillian: Yeah so tell me about the healing journey because it involves the therapy and the rehab and so on. But you mentioned earlier running and I wonder if that had been part of it…

Nick: Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess it was I guess, at first faith was really important I mean, faith faith has always been important, but I suppose my inherited faith was a kind of quite evangelical charismatic faith. And to start with, in my recovery journey I, I kind of double down on that. So, so I prayed in tongues for an hour every day for about three months and I prayed for an hour or more on top of that and I journalled and wrote all kinds of things about who I wanted to become and yeah, all of this kind of stuff. As my, as my therapy continued and as my recovery continued, I suppose there were some questions that began to arise to do with my understanding of God as it was and how that correlated to my experience of recovery. And almost by accident, around this time I started to run and through the influence of some close friends, start to run further and further and then really got into like ultramarathon running and in the in the recovery and sort of my journey with therapy was that I started seeing a therapist every week. And then after two and a half months, he led a sort of residential weeklong group therapy thing. And then and then it continued for another year and a half after that. So less, you know, fortnightly and then monthly and during the during the residential experience, there was a mantra which was you can’t kick an addiction without changing your life and running became the life change for me. Because I think what happens and what I’d been my experience previously, if you stop doing something that has been an addiction you’ve got so much time and space in your head and so much of your energy and thought has been given to this addiction, that suddenly there’s this massive vacuum left. And if you don’t fill it with something it’s very difficult to, you know, to to to move on. And so running became this, this, this and this. Yeah. This massive tool in my recovery. So I will I always talk about therapy and recovery therapy at first helped me to develop tools to stop doing what I was doing. So we did all this kind of stuff around change, like disrupting your mind processes. So I moved desks at work, I shifted furniture around in my house, I would do all these different things. Multi-sensory approaches when you’re triggered. So smelling something, listening to something, moving. All this stuff, which in the short term really helped me to stop. But, but moving from that place to a place where you kind of experience like a more full recovery was all about getting to the depths of what lay behind this behaviour.

So that’s when we started to explore all these issues, and that’s where my understanding shame started to develop. And I started to understand that my eyesight and my fear and anxiety and lack of control and self-loathing and insecurity at that young age in my adolescence had all contributed to this behaviour that was soothing, like anaesthetising became addictive and became just hard baked into my personality. And within all of that, I was kind of left wondering what my faith, how my faith played into that. Because I’ve been I’ve been, I’ve been like I’m really like passionate about Jesus since I was like since I, you know, committed my life to him as a nine year old, helped to lead a youth group in my teens, started preaching and reading the Bible, going on mission trips, studying theology at uni, playing the drums in a Christian band, being a youth minister, leading small groups, yeah. And it was like I was left just wondering why God hadn’t done something before then? Like, why hadn’t God stepped in and saved my marriage? Why hadn’t God done things that…why hadn’t God brought an understanding that I was now beginning to get through the therapy before it was too late? Because it felt like it was a bit too late because my marriage had ended and that was sort of everything. And for a long time, I find it really difficult to think about the future with much optimism or joy because it was it was the most important thing in your, in life is over. So like what’s left? I guess the stories of the last six or seven years has been a sort of journey of like rediscovering faith, of a deepening by broadening and understanding of faith and spirituality that I’ve been forced into because the previous one didn’t really fit with my experience.

Gillian:  I was really struck that it was running. It was the addiction that replaced the other addictions, not you know, I don’t know, Tiddledywinks, because, you know, you do your blindness was caused, as you said earlier, by genetic variation in your mother’s womb. And I wonder I’m curious about, you know, when anyone has a serious medical issue and they’re a Christian, this bit in the Psalms that said I was wrought in my mother’s womb, you know, slams you against the wall in a way because you were wrought in your mother’s womb. In my mother’s womb. Why, you know, why is this being laid down for me at such an early stage? How do I hold that together? With an idea that I loved and beloved by God? You know, it’s like it’s a crucible test, isn’t it? Because, I mean, the whole of life is figuring out why bad stuff happens to good people, right? Or or it goes on. But, you know, especially a genetic thing that you were given this before you were even born, to cope with. Like my cancer was genetic before I was born. And it was sort of on the cards, as it were, it’s in your body. And then it was a bodily thing like running that helped in your recovery. How much, how much, how much is it running about reclamation of your body and your whole identity as a blind man?

Nick: Yeah, I think, I think it is. I think the thing about running is that it’s very it’s very embodied and it’s very much has to do with a sense of control and power and achievement and flourishing and health and I guess it, I guess it’s, for me in some ways, it’s like a meditative thing because when I run, you’ve just got a lot of time and space, especially when you’re doing long runs, you’ve got a lot of time and space.

If I’m running on my own, then I’ll run on a treadmill in my garage and I’ll listen to… sometimes listen to podcasts…but I listen to a lot of music and sometimes I can just let myself, yeah, let my mind go and just chew things over or just you know, just be just in a meditative state where you just like observing your thoughts and letting them form and all that kind of stuff. But then it’s also massively embodied, and it means that my eating becomes that much more vital when you’re eating to fuel or refuel or you’re and it changed me physically. So I, I guess I remember doing this exercise on that residential where we had to draw picture that represented us as a, as a young teenager. And, and through doing that, I realised that my perception as a, as a young teenager was that I was fat and stupid and couldn’t see very well. And it’s weird and it’s odd. And I know that’s irrational because I was quite intelligent and it wasn’t that fat, I wasn’t, I wasn’t fat, fat. I wasn’t like slim and athletic. I just I had that perception, I realise that carried that all the way through. So I know it’s a bit of an open question in some ways because as I’ve thought about this kind of stuff, so so so I feel great about myself now because I’m slim and athletic. And the way this is, is that healthy? Is that more healthy than coming to terms with being like a different shape? I don’t know, maybe I just bought into a, you know, something that isn’t there…but literally my, my confidence, my self-confidence grew as I, among other things, lost loads of weight, became really fit, was able to run like long distances and, and the sense of even though I’m run with a guide there is something about it that just feels so empowering.

When I was a teenager, my dad is a really keen cyclist, I used to ride on a tandem but never got the same feeling with…and everyone’s different. So for me, it’s running but other people hate running, and I’m not necessarily an evangelist for running but I think the difference, for example, with cycling is that even though you’re, I’m holding the other end of a strap as someone runs next to me – it’s me doing it all and it’s yeah I’m putting in that effort and I’m putting in that distance and whereas I didn’t really get that when I was kind  bolted onto the back of my dad when I was on a tandem. But yes, it’s very embodied. And it is it is interesting that it’s that experience which has brought me so much healing and peace and joy. Yeah. 

Gillian: Because we’re embodied creatures, aren’t we? Mind, body spirit, there’s plenty of quotations, when one’s out of kilter, and I’m not saying anything about weight and I could do losing a few pounds myself, it’s not about that. It’s about being comfortable in your body – it’s really part of our whole personal approach to health. And, you know, I when I had severe depression, I took up running mostly to escape my own children – don’t tell them that – this is like my new hobby, I have to go and run. But I really found it grounded me and made me feel, God, if I can do that, you know, that’s that gives me confidence in other areas of my life.

I want to come back to, you said you’ve mentioned anger a couple times. I have to say Nick, I did a bit of research before I chatted to you, I found a quotation so I could just quote something you said back at you. 

Nick: Yeah. 

Gillian: This really struck me as like, well, this is just this is it in a nutshell. I just think this is so powerful in terms of the healing ministry you’re talking about being blind and healing, you said:

‘God’s never healed me, but he’s stopped me from feeling self pity. This that used to be your testimony. My way of coping with that is tremendously positive. And you talked in this podcast about that, but this is what you said actually. ‘I would say to you now, I hate being blind, it’s awful, it’s terrible, I wish I wasn’t blind. I hate it. But in accepting that I don’t accept it in sort of being honest about how crap it is, I’m much more confident and comfortable as a blind person.’ I just thought this the most extraordinary quotation. I sort of we need- this needs to be like the strapline for the church is like we just be being radically honest about stuff when when things are too hard, they stop pretending things are easy because we’re a friend of Jesus, is in itself healing. 

Nick: Yeah. 

Gillian: Just being able to express it is healing. 

Nick: Yeah. 

Gillian: Does it go, has it gone any further for you? Are you still, do you think that anger that you talk about there is carrying you through in a positive way? 

Nick: Yeah. I don’t know if I’d say anger now. I don’t know if I’d say angry, but I still hate being blind. Yeah. And I just, I never understood that. Right, so like I said earlier, as a kid, I used to think that if I, if I fell into self-pity, died, that’s where I’d stay. So there were times, I can think of literal mornings or evenings where as a teenager or in my early twenties, where I’d experienced the real kind of grief about my eyesight, because of something that would happen. But then I’d get up the next day and I’d slam on a Soul Survivor CD and I’d sing and pray and get myself feeling happy again. And I had that real feeling that if you, you know, you can’t, you can’t let things get to you, because if you do, you know, you laugh or cry and you don’t want to be crying all the time. And so again, so whether it was like worship and prayer, whether it was doing, you know, speaking from the front of church, whether it was to telling funny stories about things that happened to me because I was blind, it was always that kind of positive way because I thought that was the only way of coping with it, that the kind of dramatic realisation is that by admitting or realising, I didn’t even realise that I hated being blind. I didn’t, I didn’t even know that was inside of me. I’d had been surprised so deeply because of everything that I talked about. I didn’t know it was there. So so again, I had this moment in a park one Saturday morning, and it was I saw, I was with, we were still married at the time, but it was it was kind of coming to an end and…so this guy in the park and he shouted across to his kid and we chatted to him briefly and I just thought there was everything about him represented sort of like, my idea of masculinity, like he was friendly, confident, tall, had a deep voice. And he shouted his kid from the other the side of the park. And I couldn’t do that,  my children were very small at the time. And whenever I went to park with them on my own, I was petrified that they would wander off and I wouldn’t be able to find them. And so we only ever went to park where hardly anywhere any one went and where there was only one gate out so I just guarded it. And  I just remember sitting there thinking, I’d give anything to be that man. I’d give anything to be him. And then I realised it was, you know how thoughts just tumble out really fast. And then it was like, oh, my gosh, I hate myself. I hate this and then it was like falling into this black hole. And then all this grief and anger and pain and and yeah. And people touched on it, there had been moments of it being touched on in the past, but it never come out. And I suppose, I suppose in the therapy and like say, that therapist saying have you experienced trauma recently and me saying no, him saying is your eyesight losing your sight a trauma, and I said, no, I don’t think so. And it was and it was, what I realise now is, it like you talk about radical honesty, if when I say I hate being blind that’s like accepting, what I said in that quote, it is accepting that I don’t accept it. It’s been transformative and it’s and it’s the honesty and I think that goes in with the faith journey as well, that my faith journey has become one of honesty and being really honest in a way that I’ve not always…I grew up in a tradition where you could be talked about questioning things, and we talked about having a robust faith, but there were lines you couldn’t cross and there were things you couldn’t say. And if you did say them, you were so, you know, going against Orthodoxy or against the accepted truth. And so that’s one of the hallmarks of my recovery, really, is about transparency and honesty and being real. And yes, it’s incredibly healing because because the truth is that I, I thought I was coping really well and I thought I was doing a good job by put in a brave face on it. I didn’t think I was, I didn’t consciously think I was put in a brave face on it but that’s kind of what it was. And all that stuff is buried deep down and if you, if you bury stuff so deeply, you don’t deal with it. And if you don’t deal with it, as someone said, it was deal with you.

Gillian: So how is your relationship? This is a really bizarre question, you said a wee while ago that, you know, you’ve begun this recovery process and iengaging with your anger about your blindness and being honest with God. But, you know, your marriage has failed and your life’s changed, and you say you know, where, where’s God now? Why now?

What’s God’s answer to you now? Like, what’s going on for you and your relationship with God now?

Nick: So, yeah, that’s great question. I don’t even know, so how to answer that question? What’s going on in my relationship with God? I went, I went running, I did I did an ultramarathon thing a few years ago, and I run with someone who was a curate at a local church. So I did this marathon to raise money for Christian Aid and I got different church leaders to run like a stage of it with me. So I’d like about ten different church leaders over a couple of days and one of the most profound moments is running with a curate, who was quite overweight and has never run more than a mile in his life. And he ran five miles with me and I told him my whole story and he was really moved. And then when we finished, he was nearly in tears because he’d never run more than a mile and quite a lot people from his church came to cheer him over the line. And it was just and it was an amazing moment and we shared and say about that kind of radical honesty as well. Sometimes people are, I mean, it’s a real joy when your reputation has been so kind of destroyed that there’s nothing left so there’s no need not to be totally honest. And what happens is that you’re that, when you’re totally honest, it people find it really surprising and refreshing and then they’re much more honest with you. So I had this amazing conversation with them is really brilliant. But one thing he said to me about running and I was telling him about like I told you about running being an important part of my recovery.

He said, Oh, that must be so good. And he was from a fairly charismatic sort of tradition. He said, Oh, it’s so when you run, do you hear God speak to you do you? And I didn’t know how to answer that question. And it was a bit like not being sure how to answer your question about what to relationship with God, because what I wanted to try to articulate at time, and I don’t know if I can do it now, but he said, When you run, do you hear God speak to you?

And what I tried to explain was that the whole thing is God. It’s not like it’s not like that when I run and when I run, I listen and then God speaks. It’s more that in the running, in the stillness that it brings to my mind, all that space, the process, in the music maybe that I’m listening to, in the visceral experience of like your muscles moving in your bones hitting the ground and your body moving, in the, in the, in the experience of your like energy being sapped and you’re kind of pouring yourself out physically and you’re pushing yourself to the limit or just enduring a kind of gentle, you know, whatever it is, like that, it’s God, it’s like the divine, it’s like transcendent. It’s, it’s peace. It’s you know, and you can talk about whatever you like, endorphins and what is this? It’s it is the whole thing.

And what I would say is,  that my relationship, what is my relationship with God like now? While it’s sort of like it’s the whole thing, it’s like, I think that I would say that I experience the divine and experience my presence in, in so much of my life. Like, whenever, like, if we were having this conversation like eight or ten years ago and say, what’s your relationship with God? I’d say, oh, yeah, it’s great. I pray in the morning and I read my Bible and I do this and I worship like this. And there are these moments where I engage with God. Whereas now it’s almost like the whole thing. I’m kind of realising like it’s in the whole thing. It’s when I’m sitting having a cup of tea with my kids…my kid have just got into drinking tea which I’m really proud about, it’s like we have a cup of tea after our meal and it’s like, Oh, this is God. When I’m cooking some food or I’m like sitting in bed having a coffee and one of my cats is like sitting next to me bed purring loudly…or when I’m walking the kids to school or when I’m drinking a glass of wine with a friend, it’s like that’s, that’s how I would…and as well as kind of wrestling, like on Nomad when we wrestle with like, you know, massive questions to do with, you know, stuff to do with the Bible or what we think about, like the big questions that you that you tackle here. It’s that, but it’s everything. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Gillian: The …you know that line…that Nick Cave song, ‘God is in the house’

Nick: Right?

Gillian: And it’s got this line, will somebody let him out because it’s got the image of God being trapped in a white church, everything is neat and perfect in this little town, nothing bad comes, the whole song is about let God out. God is in the messy bits of the city and that’s what came into my mind when you were talking. And it’s, it’s deconstruction ism, isn’t it? But writ large in your life.  It’s going against compartmentalising God in, in just little safe that are nice and curated and pretty for everyone to see. But ultimately and I think must be… I mean we’ve never met have we Nick apart from right now. Yeah I mean really profound stories about your life and people are going to listen to it and that’s a ministry isn’t it, and that’s what people listen to, radical honesty like you’ve shown, on this podcast liberates them and hopefully they can find a bit of peace. The word shalom, peace, was coming to me as you were telling your story. 

Nick: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the greatest thing you see is that my life isn’t…and I thought, when I first…when it all fell apart and I started my kind of road to recovery, I thought about being reconciled with my wife. And then when that became not like realised that wasn’t going to happen, I thought about meeting someone new and, and then there’s all kinds of other things about, you know, like, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in church and all of that kind of stuff and and you know, I’m chatting to you now as a single divorced person, who isn’t in a relationship, who isn’t in a leadership role in traditional church as I kind of understood that. And yet, what I thought was never going to happen in terms of like experiencing in a full recovery from like stuff I was addicted to for most of my life has happened and shalom is the word, because I feel that connection the completeness, that holistic-ness. Obviously in the midst of like sometimes feeling despair and grief and pain, still. But, but it is,  it’s it’s it’s incredible to think I sometimes think I never thought I would ever feel this good without any of those things happening. And and it’s and it’s freedom. It’s freedom, because surely that’s that’s the definition of freedom, isn’t it, that you can, you can ask anything and you can feel comfortable, like you were saying earlier, in who you are physically, spiritually, emotionally. It’s, it’s liberating and it’s a journey, I’m still on it, on my, on my understanding. You know, I’ve got kind of shared with you my understanding of everything in my story as I understand it today, and that will continue to change and develop. But yeah, I think Shalom is, is it is a beautiful way of putting it.

Gillian: Nick thank you so much for sharing your journey so far and for being willing to tell us what you’ve been through. I hope God blesses you in your continued journey into peace and shalom. And also thank you for your work through the Nomad podcast. And if you’re listening to this and you haven’t listened to Nomad podcast, there will be links in the bios and you can follow Nick’s work and the rest of the team over on Nomad.

Thank you so much. 

Nick: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been great to be with you and, and share this. So yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

[MUSIC]

Gillian:  So that was my conversation with Nick. What did you think? it was again another really moving conversation, I felt. I felt like I was almost treading on holy ground, chatting with him. His honesty, his openness, left a lasting impression on me. So a huge thank you to Nick for your time and your openness in chatting with me on the GoHealth podcast. So we’d love to know what you thought of the episode. The podcast is freely available to all, but we often pick up the conversation generated by the podcast in our GoHealth community. It’s our membership bit of the Guild. If you’re not already a member, join us. It’s just £4 a month, £4 a month. And you will get free training, free and discounted events, community connection and a monthly bundle of resources, pop over to our website gohealth.org.uk and scroll down to the Go Health Community. Our tagline in the Go Health Community is this: ‘Together we flourish’ and that’s what we try to do through the resources, the events, the conversation, everything. We try to connect together, to flourish for our good, but also for the good of the communities we live in, in the name of God. 

So yes, it’s about self, it’s about us, it’s about our health and healing, but that’s not the end unto itself. We do it because we want to connect into the world, make the world a better place. It sounds really kind of cliché but it’s so true. And my gosh, does the world need people trying to help others to flourish right now? Anyway, it’s all over on the website. Check it out. Links in the blurb. Thank you to the amazing Wendy on the Isle of Mull for her production of this podcast. Again, please rate and subscribe final share it on your social media streams. We want this conversation, like all our conversations, to reach as many people as possible. That would be amazing. So in the meantime, God bless. Let’s connect and chat. Keep learning to heal because as we say in the Go Health community together, we flourish.