How I Got 5 Years Sober ft. Kier Gaines

The Vic Mensa Show

Vic Mensa celebrates five years of sobriety on his podcast, inviting licensed therapist Kier Gaines to explore the roots of addiction, heali

Key takeaways

• Addiction often stems from escapism rooted in deep emotional pain and early-life experiences.
• Sobriety is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing practice of confronting difficult emotions.

Main topics

• Five years of sobriety
• Addiction origins in childhood

Notable quotes

"I replaced an addiction to escaping them with an addiction to facing them."

"You know what I mean? And it's like proof to me that I've deeply rooted myself in an entirely new way of being."

Conclusion

Vic Mensa and Kier Gaines emphasize that true healing requires continuous

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Bro, I don't know how much of this you plan on releasing to people, but I'll probably just do the whole thing, bro. Yeah, bro. I feel like you could set a lot of shit free, bro. Because none of this is anything that I've never heard before. But people only tell you. Only me. Nobody else is around. I am five years sober today. I often have trouble celebrating my victories, but I'm taking this one. Because drugs and alcohol was whooping me. Speaker 1 (0:37) Now, I'm beating their ass. I started getting high when I was 10. Soon I was geeked up off the molly, snorting Adderall, lean, Percocets, pretty much anything you'd find in between future's couch cushions. I'd be off the molly and my jaw used to be like Bubba from Forrest Gump. Like my chin was trying to escape my neck. I'd try to put sunglasses on and say, I'm not high. That crazy shit y'all saw me doing, I was on cocaine. Speaker 1 (1:04) Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Eventually I landed in the 12-step program in 2019 and what it made me realize was that all that addictive behavior that had become my identity, the motivation for all of it was escapism. To escape my feelings of everlasting sadness. After getting in a terrible car crash drunk off the molly, it's difficult to drive like that with sunglasses on, I went to a silent meditation retreat and I cut everything. Cold turkey. Melanie was doing Sober September and I joined her. And I just never stopped. I directly credit her with saving my life. Now I feel like I've become almost addicted to facing difficult feelings. I replaced an addiction to escaping them with an addiction to facing them. I go to the gym every day at 5 a.m. And I'm not a morning person. I meditate. Speaker 1 (1:49) daily. I force myself to sit with the voice in my head. I have to do my Wim Hof breathing in the steam room. I'm addicted to that shit. This week on the Vic Mensa Show, I'm talking to Keir Gaines about how we heal. He's a licensed therapist who has become one of the clearest public voices on black men, fatherhood, masculinity, and mental health. And I'm kind of like unpacking the anatomy of addiction. Speaker 1 (2:39) My brother, Kier Gaines, thank you for joining me, man. Appreciate you for having me, my boy. With the delicious OJ. It's straight from the tree. Big ass oranges. Football size. What's in the soil over here? What you got going on? Fertilizer. That Wakandan fertilizer? Wakandan fertilizer, man. African gold. Thanks for having me, dog. No, thank you for coming through, man. I'm so excited to speak to you because today marks five years sobriety for me. Congratulations, bro. Thank you, man. That's huge, man. My therapist brain nerding out for a second. Is it, to you, is it like, do you feel it? Do you feel this being a huge milestone or is it like just another notch in the belt? Like just another thing to accomplish? It honestly feels like a milestone. And I think I do have a lot of trouble in general celebrating myself at times. Let me change the framing of that. Speaker 1 (3:48) I'm working on celebrating myself more in general. But the five years sober, it feels like a large milestone because I know where I came from. You know what I mean? And it's like proof to me that I've deeply rooted myself in an entirely new way of being. And I see the fruits of that growing. You know what I mean? So many times in my life, I would like... build wonderful things only to topple them. You know what I'm saying? Like through self-destructive, self-sabotaging behavior. You know what I mean? And like, you know, even as I kind of dissect. the five years sober, I look through the seeds of the addiction, you know what I mean? Which was something I honestly wanted to talk to you about being that we're both fathers and I think about this a lot in... Speaker 1 (4:52) context of having a son, you know, is like where did that journey start for me? How did it end up where it did? And let me understand it so I can do my best to not replicate it, you know? Nah, that's real. And you can, because those things can be replicable subconsciously. I think it's easy to think that it's the obvious things that we do that may like institute a culture. that allows these things to happen or that makes way for these things to happen. But it's not, man. It's not. It can just be things you experienced in your life that live deep in the back of your mind. Is this something a lot of people know about you? In terms of the sobriety? Low key not. Speaker 1 (5:37) Low key, I don't think it is because I'd be talking about it online like recently. People like, man, I just thought you was this unproblematic light skin. You know what I'm saying? This is something I'm seeing consistently. And I'm like, oh, all right. You know, that's a big part of your story, though. For sure. I mean, it's like, it's like just paramount to my story in a lot of ways and, and overcoming it too. It gives me a lot of context. Like the experience five years ago that led me to becoming sober was, um, I was drunk driving on Molly with a dirty pistol in the car. Okay. Totaled the car. And how many years ago was this? Just five years ago. Okay. Oh, wow. Right then I was like. Speaker 1 (6:23) You know what I mean? Because I had been praying the day before. I probably told this story on this show plenty of times. But like I had been to the mosque for the first time in life, like a week before. And it was the first time I was praying to God in earnest. You know what I'm saying? And I was like going through everything that the imam was describing. He was like, people are struggling with violence. They're struggling emotionally. They're struggling financially. I'm like, boy, I'm broke as fuck. You know what I'm saying? Like, I got niggas trying to kill me. Yeah, I was up before. And now I'm struggling with all these things. At the same time. At the same damn time. And I told God, I was like, yo, I'm going to dedicate myself. Speaker 1 (7:08) I know only you would be able to get me out of this. You know what I'm saying? You talking about something now. You got to treat me like I've never heard any of this before because I'm not sure if I knew about an addiction at all. So what were you addicted to? Throughout time, man, a lot of different shit, you know? I think it all, it started for me, 10 years old. When I was 10, I started smoking weed. I had this white homie, man, my white homie who used to cuss his mom the f*** out. You know, he was one of them like, f*** you, mom. He went there with it. Super, super rebellious, out of line white homie, Sebastian. Shout out to Sebastian Policastro. That's my boy, man. That was the first time I was smoking weed, though, you know, when I was 10. And I was with Sebastian in the back of this. Speaker 1 (8:07) empty truck, like abandoned truck. And I remember, just say no to drugs had just passed through the school. And so I'm like, man, you ain't gonna tell nobody I do this right. And Seb was like, nah, I think you more of a man for it. Oh, not the affirmation for it, though. Just go ahead and egg you on a little bit. Go ahead and do that, brother. It was funny, though, because in my... Childhood mind though, I do think that I adopted the idea that smoking and drinking and drugs and sex, these were like the hallmarks of maturity of a man. And that's kind of the way that I guess I feel like I was socialized. And so I feel like I started drinking around the same time, around 10, 11 years old. You know, there were kids in my orbit, like friends who were selling cocaine, doing cocaine, selling crack, doing crack. You know, I was like at this very interesting school. Speaker 1 (9:24) Called little Lincoln which was in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Chicago, Lincoln Park. Okay, and it was a mixture of some of the wealthiest kids in Chicago and The remnants of Cabrini greens, which is like the most notorious Yeah, I mean project building one of the most notorious project business in all of America and these two communities were like in collision, collaboration, you know what I mean? Like it was very American in that. Yeah, Lil' Lincoln, man. Hey, this place was crazy, bro. It was like... Speaker 1 (10:05) the richest kids in Chicago and some of the poorest. You know what I mean? All sharing space. All sharing space and everything that comes along with it. It's a lot of opportunity for conflict. Everything that comes along with it. And it was like, it was a lot of love, honestly, but also it was just a lot of drugs because it was like the people that were experiencing poverty were in communities where like... People were making their living selling drugs and then the white kids are like they're almost more predisposed to want to do drugs So it's like, you know, we when we 10 years old 11 years old We don't smoke crack. Yeah, man, like not in 2010 nah crack is almost like the catalyst to a punchline like you ask somebody if someone's addicted to crack what do they look like they'll get the itching or looking for stuff on the ground I mean being from DC like Speaker 1 (10:59) DC was big in the crack epidemic, wasn't it? It was horrible, man. The mid-80s was so crazy. I lived in a neighborhood in DC called Simple City. And I remember my mom used to only let me go. I was like five, six years old. She only let me go about 15 feet from the front step. Because anything after that, she couldn't come grab me. The gunshots started ringing out. The money was so crazy that everybody turned violent trying to get them a piece. So yeah, I'm real familiar with what that's like. You know what's crazy too is like the ways that violence interplays to drug use and drug addiction. And I also, I really characterize violence itself as an addiction. Like if I think about my own life, you know what I mean? To think about the ways that like all of these things became a form of validation for me. Speaker 1 (11:57) That's what I heard when you were talking about like sex drugs and alcohol like is it safe to say those were Yeah, that's the big three. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah wish First thing that popped in my mind, dog, is like the question of like what? Do you feel like you were running away from something? Were you running towards something? Were you trying to escape from something? Were you trying to become something? What was all that about for you? I call it escapism, you know? I think that in many ways addiction for me has been all about escapism. It's been about seeking some kind of refuge from emotional pain. I did this ayahuasca experience about 10 years ago. Ayahuasca is the shit. Were you local or were you in South America? I was in the holy land of Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Speaker 1 (12:57) You know what I'm saying? Shout out to that shaman. It was this nigga, this white nigga, man. Oh, I was going to say shaman Jerome. No, this was shaman Chad. Oh, okay. He had an all white robe on and a fucking acoustic guitar. You know, I was skeptical as shit at first. Yeah, it sounds like you had no reason to be. But there came a point in time when like the experience really got underway. And I mean, I was getting. communication from my grandmother from the grave who never spoke english and then i was seeing uh scenes from my five-year-old eyes and it was like i used to want blue eyes that that is the root of my pain and that gave me like a deep uh sense of context that i never had that i don't remember i mean my mother's white so it actually makes sense you know in the ways that like we idolize our our mothers Speaker 1 (13:53) and to not resemble, you know, either of my parents in a direct way like that. So that's like an identity thing. For sure that. And I feel like I've traced that to be a seed of what I think I was ultimately trying to escape. And then I think you add in like the societal dimension of just the ways that black boys are criminalized by the school system. I mean, when I was in kindergarten. I was put into a developmentally challenged class because I didn't like to share like five-year-olds fucking don't. And so I'm in this class and I'm like, yo, I don't think I'm supposed to be here. You know what I mean? Everybody's in wheelchairs and like, you know, having trouble like speaking, drooling. And I knew I was like. Speaker 1 (14:42) I was deeply offended, you know what I mean? And just like, I could tell that I was being attacked by the school system in some way. And shortly after, I was actually kicked out of that school. For what? It was because I moved out of the district. It was like some benign shit that became illegal. But really it was because my teacher was a racist, though. Shout out to my teacher. Your ass was a racist. But I do forgive you, though. I got to let go of that, huh? Can you drop these names like this? Speaker 1 (15:15) She did the same thing to my girl, though. You know what's crazy? My girl was at the same school like a year after me. We never met in childhood. But she also had significant problems with the same teacher. But it's not about the teacher, honestly. And I might take the name out. The bigger point is that the school system, it, you know, it demeans the intelligence of black children, like as a systematic mode of. Miseducation. It's funny, man. So many times the individual gets the heat that the system deserves. Don't get me wrong. Individual still deserves the heat. But it's the system that empowers them to do that shit with straight impunity, man. And it happens time and time again. Especially the little black boys. I used to work in special education. Really? Oh, yeah, man. That's what I did before I started, before I became a licensed therapist. Speaker 1 (16:10) before I started doing content creation. Word, that's what my mom, my mom's whole, like, career was doing. Physical therapist for special ed children in Chicago public schools. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we call them related service providers, man. It helps, man. They teach kids how to, you know, how to write, teach kids how to speak if they're nonverbal. But you'll be surprised how many little black boys automatically, like, have IEPs or have these. Speaker 1 (16:38) special needs diagnosis and a lot of it is great because it allows them to get the help they need. But sometimes man, it's just a misunderstanding of what black boys are, what black boys need, how to build systems around them to support them, bro. That shit happens all the time. You know how many of my friends have told me they had the exact same experience and I never knew. Like Chance had a line in his album recently when he said they had me in that class. Speaker 1 (17:04) One of my director, Andre Muir, he experienced the same thing. And like, I just remember, bro, like I was so fucking like heartbroken. Like the day they kicked me out of fucking kindergarten, you know what I'm saying? Like I cried all fucking night, bro. Like it was all my best friends. Like I felt like I had had everything ripped from me, you know what I'm saying? And I didn't understand why. I just couldn't fucking contextualize why. But I was like, school did this shit. Like the teacher did this shit, you know saying so by the time I get to be 10 11 I'm like make a fuck school fuck teachers. Oh You're not supposed to smoke weed. Give me the weed. You know, I post a drink. Give me the drink. You're not supposed to fight Let's fight Because I had I had felt so under attack by the school system Speaker 1 (17:59) that as soon as I had the autonomy to like really act out, I was like, oh, I'm off to the races, bro. Like, this is all I want to do. You know, all I want to do is everything that is in opposition to your system. You know what I mean? Because your system has been my aggressor and my oppressor. That's how I felt. You know what I mean? The system becomes the enemy and everything along with it. I see that make you emotional, bro. Like, what's... What's happening? What's coming up for you when you start talking about that? Just like when I got kicked out of that school, bro. Like when I got kicked out of that school, just thinking about how I was crying all night. And, you know, when you're a child, you don't have. The language to understand what happens to you, you know You just know the feeling and you hold the feeling deeply and I think for a lot of my childhood I felt like Speaker 1 (19:04) I felt an inability to kind of like push back against those forces that were compounding upon me. And then I think I get emotional too just thinking about like some of my guys in the public school system. So that's my boy Eddie Simmons. He came home recently. You know what I mean? But I have this vivid memory of third grade when Eddie Simmons was at the end of the hallway. And he was being held back a grade, you know, third grade. And he had to stay in second grade or something like that. And the whole class was like, man. Speaker 1 (19:45) this nigga must be dumb. Like, you know what I mean? What's wrong? How you get hell back? You know what I mean? And I could see us all and the school primarily, you know what I mean? Put in this label of inferiority on him. And then after grammar school, I didn't see Eddie Simmons again until he was on the front page for like, you know, a homicide. And I was like, bro, I saw y'all do this shit to him. So then when I think about, what I felt like was done to me in school. Speaker 1 (20:18) I get emotional thinking about what happened to him. You know what I mean? Thank God he's free and he's living a different life. Look how he had to get there. But yo, the school to prison pipeline shit is what I'm getting at. It's so fucking real. It's a real thing. No, it's not fictitious. It isn't some figment of an overactive imagination. But can I tell you what I hear when you say all of this? It's so interesting, man. It's like these two... opposing things that are still interconnected. On one side, you have this motif of manliness. And on the other side, what I hear you talking about is vulnerability and helplessness. Yeah. And feeling vulnerable and feeling helpless and trying to... Speaker 1 (21:06) change your, use behaviors to change your internal experience, man. You feel like that's what you're escaping from? Yeah, word. For sure. I mean, I think like when I started, when I started smoking, I started drinking. I was really like, Definitely trying to escape an eternal experience just a feeling of like pervasive sadness And I won't place that pervasive sadness on any one thing particularly to be the school or you know to be The identity crisis. I think it's probably like an amalgamation of all of them. You know I'm saying and and of course the ways that you experience Speaker 1 (21:48) America as a young black boy, you know saying that continues into you being a young it to a young and old and was once a man Like you experienced that shit all the way through but I you know, I think what's what's like beautiful about it is that in time when you when you do learn how to How to be fueled by those things or at least how to like Speaker 1 (22:15) contextualize and process. But as a kid, it was like, nah, only way I knew how to process the shit was like getting high and fighting. You know what I mean? Like that's why I really named violence as being one of my primary addictions too is because it was like I grew addicted to fighting in the same timeframe and maybe seeing so many people around me. Speaker 1 (22:47) falling into a lot of substance abuse as well. And it being like the cool thing to do. When it became the cool thing to do, then it was just like, okay, not only is this rebellious, you know, because at first, maybe sixth grade, I remember when I first, you know what I mean, was smoking a lot. My girlfriend at the time was like, man, I don't want you guys to do that. You know what I mean? Like, this is wrong. And so it was like, I also wanted her to accept me. Yeah. You know, but when you come into high school and I started to see my addictions kind of body jump, like they they were transforming and morphing. And and I developed I developed this anxiety that I hadn't experienced before. Even the weed started to affect me differently. Like I'm sure you've heard of people say some people say that. Speaker 1 (23:44) Cannabis will relax them other people it makes their nervous system go crazy. That's quite obviously Yeah, so that's what started happening to me once I had already I've been smoking for years at this point So it wasn't like that before it turned in and I turned into that like something happened in my brain that anxiety became a thing and I started to I start to have anxiety attacks and I was in my parents house and I'm just laying on the couch and I'm just like fucking shaking for no reason. Nothing had happened. I hadn't smoked nothing. I'm just having anxiety attacks. And, you know, I was put on. Speaker 1 (24:22) I was put on antidepressant medication, maybe Zoloft. Okay. You know what I mean? I started off with Zoloft. How old were you at this time? I was 15. Okay. So we're talking about five years into the beginning of everything. Yeah, five years into smoking, just a switch flipped. And I started to have anxiety attacks, maybe 14, 15. I started to experience anxiety. And, you know, at the same time. I was just like learning secrecy and shame. You know what I mean? Like I had started having sex maybe when I was 13 or 14, probably 13. And then around that time when I started to have anxiety, I started to have sexual performance anxiety. And it was like there was an older girl from the school. I was a freshman. She was like a senior. And she was like, you know, kind of like. Speaker 1 (25:14) cougar vibes to me. You know what I'm saying? It took me in a, what do you call that, like a van in a parking lot outside of Harold's Chicken. And we were going to have sex, but I couldn't get it up. And I was like, yo, what the fuck just happened? With nowhere to process it, really. Didn't know where to process it. Because I mean, I'm not going to tell my parents. I don't want to tell my homies about that. And so that like. That led to the alcohol because eventually, you know, I think I realized After like a long time like this went on for a long time. I'm just developing this this like this Sexual performance anxiety and what's a long time like all the high school. Okay, so we're talking 14 18 15 18 Yeah, I'm actually 14. Okay, I think I started having sex before high school and then once this happened like all of high school I was just like Speaker 1 (26:14) Hiding this yeah, man, and like I'm hella uncomfortable to even say this shit on camera, but thank God I control the attic I was I was just hiding this yeah all of high school, and so I was learning that um sex should be intertwined with secrecy and shame and That anxiety I felt in the sexual performance started to spread into other performances, like into live performance, music performance. The same crippling feeling that I felt, I started to experience on stage. I mean, like, I would forget all the lyrics and just feel like fucking crippled by it. It's a similar anxiety that later jumped into the studio. I mean, if I was in a high pressure session with a big producer or something, I would just get this Speaker 1 (27:12) fucking crippling, like, chest caving in anxiety. I was going to ask you that. Do you feel like the anxiety lives more in your mind, where it's the narrative that your mind attaches to your thoughts, or do you feel like it lives in your body? I've always experienced it as a combination of both. I find it mentally as a runaway thread of attachment to the past. So when I would be experiencing the sexual performance anxiety, it would be like, hey nigga, last time that shit didn't work and the time before that. And the time before that, which would be the same thing that would happen when I was getting performance anxiety on the stage. Be like, yo, you remember you forgot your lyrics at the last show or in the studio? I'm like, yo, you remember like... Speaker 1 (28:01) that shit you did last session, it wasn't that dope. You know what I'm saying? The self-messaging get louder and louder. Like fucking unbearable. You know what I mean? I can imagine. The physical manifestation for sure. You know what I mean? If you talk about the sexual performance anxiety, that's just like a clear physical manifestation. It's like, oh, your body just ain't working the way you want it to work. The way it want to work, you know? And like heart beating out of my fucking chest. You know, I used to like... I used to try to like weasel out of it in like these ways that were like so It's just a lot of shame surrounding it, you know, I'd be like My mama called me Like try to try to run off and I never stopped trying to have sex I was like and I was like I was already Speaker 1 (28:56) Cool kid, you know, I had the music thing going I'm talking to record labels flying to New York to be in Studio sessions. I'm going on fucking tour all this shit But from freshman year till senior year every sexual experience. I just didn't work I just had all this fucking anxiety. I can't imagine the gap that causes in somebody's life when visually from outside looking in they seem to be Seem to have everything you got social visibility. You have notoriety you have People who are attracted to you, want to be intimate with you, want to be next to you. And then privately, there are these feelings of self-doubt. There are these opposing feelings of all these masculine ideas versus things that are counterintuitive to those masculine ideas. And then there's a rebellion toward it. Do you feel like... Speaker 1 (30:04) In terms of just sex, drugs, and alcohol, do you feel like indulging in those things gave you something? At the time, it was the drugs and alcohol that felt like they saved me from my anxiety. My anxiety was crippling. I mean, it was like in between me and like just biological expression of being a young man. And when I realized that I could drink myself into a stupor and then be able to have sex or take a Viagra pill or take another kind of pill, Klonopin actually was the thing I would take a lot because I had got prescribed that. Okay. Like, as a kid, I had got prescribed that, and then I kind of, like, realized that, like, a concoction of pills plus alcohol. Speaker 1 (31:03) would enable me to break through my sexual anxiety. So you discovered the thing that worked for you? I found the thing that worked for me. And it was drugs. You know what I mean? And, like, not only did that work for the sexual anxiety, that worked for... the generalized anxiety and the depression, you know what I mean, for those moments. Like in that brief fleeting moment, the drugs and the alcohol, they conquered my fear. That was how I felt. And so, I mean, I just, I became like in fucking separable from drugs and alcohol because it was like, they were the only refuge that I felt like I had from that negative train of thoughts. Speaker 1 (31:51) that we're talking about. And when that started to kind of roll into success and when music started to take me around the world and I started to get money and I still had all of these like all of these super deep shames but now I'm on every continent you know I mean with like so many people that would like to be intimate with me. I mean, just like so many opportunities to do drugs in so many fucking like just turnt up, lit scenarios. And the crazy thing about that is nobody is standing in line to save you when you're swimming in attractive sexual partners and you Scrooge McDuckin and gold coins. Speaker 1 (32:44) For sure, no. No one's like, let me help you out of that, please, right? No, there can be no sympathy to be had. No, no, no, no. That doesn't necessarily mean that sympathy will save you anyway. You know what I'm saying? But it's like, I guess I come around to a