Published on 11, Oct 2023

Eric Spofford on the Multiple Facets of Addiction

SALEM, New Hampshire – Eric Spofford, Founder of Granite Recovery Center, has seen some of the deepest lows in overcoming addiction. 

A high school dropout and addicted to drugs for years, the only way the 37-year-old entrepreneur could reconcile with reality was to push himself through. Through recovery, Eric Spofford found a new focus in helping others “I placed myself in a position where I had no choice except to go down this rough road of growth and discovery and change. Or I knew what the outcome was, I was gonna die, or I’m gonna go to prison,” Eric says, “And so, I'm grateful for that. But the thing of having a misaligned spirit, of having internal problems, I was hiding out.”

While the journey was a daunting one, Eric came out of it on the other side, he reflects on how unaware he was of where he would end up. “What I didn't understand at the time was that my pain was turning into my purpose, that God was taking my mass and making it the message,” Eric says. “So I went to work with my dad for a year and a half or so. And I spent the rest of my free time doing outreach, spending time with them, going on God's green earth, trying to help people to find recovery.”

Later finding significant success, eventually selling Granite Recovery for an undisclosed, but significant amount, Eric Spofford still considers himself an advocate for addicted individuals seeking recovery.

The Nature of Addiction

Eric explains that addiction’s stigma comes from a place of a fundamental misunderstanding of what feeds it. “People don't understand is the main treatment for alcoholism is in fact, alcohol.” As withdrawals overcome your body, it’s a natural response to crave a drug your body has become accustomed to, leading to dependence on the drug to keep your body going.

Addiction Recovery requires a great deal of focus on internal conditions. As the effects of addiction are taking their toll constantly, eventually constitutions can be broken down to justify using/relapse. Spofford explains that one facet that makes fighting addiction more difficult is mythologizing the process.

“I started this process. I think a lot of people don't really understand what recovery is. People correlate recovery with abstinence from drugs and alcohol. We talked about how long we’d been sober. Recovery is the prerequisite, like getting sober is the beginning and the work is the internal transformation that needs to take place,” Spofford says. “That’s what I got busy doing. I knew that I was a liar, cheater, thief, and junkie. That if I just stopped using heroin and doing drugs and drinking booze, then I would just be some piece of shit liar cheater thief. The full transformation has to be more than simply quitting drugs.”

Spofford also explains, “Addiction speaks to you in your own voice, which can be pretty disorienting. You can make the determination to kick a drug, and never do it again, and then you’re hearing yourself making rationalizations. To a certain degree, it is just flat-out self-denial. And that’s okay.” He goes on to explain that reality disrupting this hold acts as a possible motivation for recovery, “Seeing the look in your mom’s eyes and seeing that she’s disappointed in you, getting written up at work, it all smacks you in the face with reality.”

Fighting the Stigma

Fighting stigma against addiction is critical in fostering the best environment for a society conducive to rehabilitation and recovery. “A great friend of mine, Zak Williams, has said a lot about this. But stigma keeps people in the dark about this stuff. And that just makes things worse,” Spofford says. “ Because without that accountability and without reality coming to remind you it's outside your door, you’ll never change.”

As he mentioned a fuller transformation going beyond drug use, Eric wanted to revisit the topic, “That’s really the biggest thing of it, because it’s not just the part of you that does drugs that’s the problem, it’s every other part of you enabling that, the parts of you that aren’t offering the protection you deserve to be guaranteeing yourself. That’s the real center of it all, is being there for yourself, for your best interest.”