The Big Trap: Just One Last High! Is an autobiographical self-help guide about the author T. Rose’s journey into and then out of drug addiction and dependency. You can purchase the book on Amazon, and find out a little more about the author by checking out this Interview I did with her a few weeks ago.
When T. Rose first came to me to review this I wasn’t sure, not because of the content specifically, we don’t discrimination or censor things here at Off the Record, but instead because it’s more difficult to review something that’s semi or fully autobiographical, because you don’t want to rate someone’s actual life experiences. But I felt after looking through it that T. Rose had something important to say, and this book isn’t just about her personal experience, it’s a guiding influence from someone who’s actually been there and done it. It helps to sign post all the steps that lead you down the path of dependency and addiction, and because it does that it gives you the guide to avoiding it.
I have a lot to say about this book but a lot of it is specifics which I don’t want to share because you really should experience it yourself. I do want to add before I get going that I’ve had people in my family who’ve suffered from dependency issues, so this story resonated deeply with me. She managed to hit right at the core of addiction and what it can make you do and how an addict can rationalise it.
What caught me most is that it’s not just hard hitting and it doesn’t just delve deeply into the darkness and profound quagmire that is drug addiction, but it’s also engaging and well written. I mean, when I do these reviews I do my best to read and connect with the submission, because I need to understand the book to review it but when it’s a book like this It’s not something I need to do actively instead I just kind of got swept into T. Rose’s life and the narrative of The Big Trap: Just One Last High!
Now some of this isn’t universal, It probably wouldn’t be interesting if all of it could be related to someone else but those unique elements make it so engaging, but their are parts that any addict can understand and connect with and that can be best summed up in the title, which references the mantra of many addicts, and how they think that you can ration out addictions, how you can just have one more. It’s never that easy. I mean people struggle to give up chocolate for New Years, so imagine how much more difficult and uncooperative the addiction monkey is going to be if you’ve been taking pills or snorting coke. But T. Rose paints such a vivid picture of her life and the factors which led to her spiraling into drug abuse and it isn’t just all sadness, she shows the lighter side, and also the determination and hopefulness that you can escape the vicious cycle of chasing that last high.
So that’s what I thought of The Big Trap: Just One Last High! by T. Rose and you can check that out on Amazon. I think it more than earned a 4/5 for its honesty, vulnerability and because it’s hopeful about helping you through it yourself if your also struggling through addiction.
First off, tell me about yourself? I am a mom of two; my daughter has two boys and one girl. My son has two girls and they all are the light that warms my heart daily even when I am unable to see them. I love gardening around the house I bought 4 years ago, a gift to myself on my twelve-year Sobriety anniversary. I also enjoy sitting at my favorite restaurant Oceanside and staring out over the expanse of the ocean to the horizon reflecting on how grateful I am for the life I have today. I am blessed with over sixteen years in recovery, after a twenty-five-year addiction to cocaine. I am a Recovery Advocate and Life Coach helping those still struggling to find their way through the waters of recovery and the entire stigma that comes along with being an addict. Writing has become a meaningful and deeply satisfying way to meet others and fulfill a strong conviction to help other souls on their life journey.
What made you want to become a writer? I began writing my personal story to explore and understand my life events and make sense of the how and why things happened as they did, and the how and why I became addicted to cocaine. A simple daily journal I had begun writing early in my recovery as a self-therapy tool, ultimately became the framework for The Big trap. From what appeared at first a random array of unconnected personal life events and impulsive choices, steadily emerged recognition of interconnectedness and cause and effect of my addiction and the life I had chosen to maintain it. Writing out the steps and then later reading professional psychology and addiction literature revealed commonalities between myself and others I had known in and out of recovery and I began to strongly believe I could offer something of timely value and benefit to those in need. The question of why I believed I could and should write a recovery book was answered by the majority of people I had shared some part of my story with over the years who lamented, “You should write a book. Thousands need help.” They were right and I knew there was no turning back and a writer was born.
Tell me about your book The Big Trap: Just One Last High?The Big Trap is a metaphor of addiction maintenance. Addicts telling themselves and wanting to believe it as well, the immediate act of getting high right now is this last one, the last high, and then no more, we stop. The story recounts my life events from earliest childhood memories and facts I could accurately verify as the path, the stepping-stones more or less, to my ultimate addiction. It reveals early traumatic events, the horrors of abuse I suffered within an extended alcoholic family, and being a child rape victim. It illuminates the subtlety of neglect, isolation, and the harsh environments to create lifelong conflicts and anxieties that untreated or ignored undermine normal healthy development and often result in efforts to self-medicate that are far too often the origins of destructive addiction. I engaged that path as a teenager with alcohol and followed with marijuana, largely at first because it reduced the mental anguish and softened the effects of physical injuries. Ultimately, my judgement being too poorly developed to be wary of the seemingly perfect man I later married and trusted to protect me, introduced me to cocaine after a self-imposed abstinence from alcohol and weed had steadily improved my life quality. He said; “Just once, just try it please… if you love me you will just once.” I was hooked without any idea of how powerful and life-altering the shiny little lines of white was. Up to that point my earnest efforts to be a good wife while being the successful career woman at the forefront of the emerging personal computer revolution were extremely productive and financially rewarding and the book illuminates the good and bad choices so many of us make and why. I had worked my way through college while holding down a full time job by night to become the sole woman Electrician and Electronic Technician in a male-dominated field. Within the picture-perfect family life and career of two professional go-getters moving up that everyone on the outside looking in saw, two functioning addicts were hiding the big secret. Casual occasional recreational coke use had steadily become addiction chaos and all the success tumbles down line by line within a year of that first fiery nose burning line. The monster of more and more drugs took over landing me on the streets for ten years chasing… more! It takes the reader through the days and nights of those living our here, dealing drugs, using drugs and all the violence it holds. After multiple overdoses and seizures almost daily in the end, it was that last trip to jail that I realised I needed to stop. I requested the in-house jail rehab program for my housing stay during that one-year sentence and began what is today my complete recovery.
How do you feel it was received? The reviews I have received from those who have read my book are great, I’m grateful that I was able to touch them with a story that gives a clear picture of the destruction addiction causes and the hope that can be found in recovery.
Now that it’s published would you do anything different or change anything? I have changed some of the verbiage in the current edition that is available. In the first edition, the scenes where the rapes occur were much more violent and they have been toned down to allow placement in Juvenile Detention Centers, Adult jail facilities, Rehab Centers, and Sober Living Houses as aids and facilitation tools, as well as useful guidance in an easy good reading format
.I believe you self-published; tell me about that and more about why you went down the self-publishing route? Yes, I did publish my own book, though I didn’t use the traditional self-publishing route. I created my own publishing business, Tiffy Rose LLC-Publishing, for the current title and those in process and those planned. I chose this route after I tried the traditional way of publishing my work without success. I did like so many others send out hundreds of query letters to Literary agents but I received either no response or agents telling me these types of stories are rarely picked up by the mainstream publishing houses. At 56 years old I determined I didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for unknown people or entities to decide my book was worth their time and investment, so I invested in myself and away I went self-taught into the book publishing arena. I bought the required legal copyright and distribution marking criteria, the publishing software and here I am. As a Publisher and owner it allows me access to placement anywhere worldwide, and owning the copyrights I don’t have to worry about who else gets a say in where it goes from here.
Have you written anything else and if so where can people find it?I am now in the final stages of finishing up my second book as a sequel to Trapped. The Big Trap is more about how I got there and the second book is about, how I and others make it back. It is focused essentially on the steps of recovery and sobriety and how to get there and stay. I illuminate the variety of myths and pitfalls of outdated perceptions of addiction and how harmful they can be if taken as gospel when current research and subject trails define newer methods of treatment that are more often effective short term and long. My sixteen years in recovery I utilize to define how to search out well hidden or ignored cause/effect relationships that often underlie the addiction cycle and how to navigate the problems every addict trying to recover likely will encounter. I explore how to deal with many types of stigma and discrimination usually encountered and the tools I have learned along the way to share with others trying to find the right recovery path and its steps and conquer the obstacles. A third book, a true life mystery has been outlined and I will publish it in early 2020.
Feel free to share links to your social media?#engagethesolution
In honor of Recovery Month, we asked you to send us your stories about the impact community, nutrition or environment has had on your life since you put down substances and picked up life. Winners are not only receiving copies of our book, The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery, but are also being published here on the site.
This week we have T. Rose.
I was 15 years into my recovery and my second year writing my first book. I had tapped the best minds and learned all there was about writing and started looking for a literary agent to make my dreams come true. To have a big publishing company pick up my story and carry it to the world so I could be among those making a difference in the world of addiction and recovery. Sadly, it was not the warm reception I had envisioned.
That old addictive instant gratification, lack of patience thing emerged. So I just did it myself—built my business to be able to publish under it, bought all the things that big publisher was going to do in order to own my work and away I went. However along this path, I would need to market and sell my work and that is where social media entered my life. I began to build a following on Facebook, mostly to gauge the areas of demand and how I would target it. I found that the urgency for someone to lead others was far greater then I had ever imagined. I thought to myself as I read story after story of people crying out for help and direction. I was lost just like that!
I began posting things that related to my life, which included a cool picture with a quote. I built my own website to inspire others to believe in themselves and choose recovery. The response was overwhelming, I was helping people and they were thanking me for my words of wisdom. These people could now find a new perspective for their own lives. I have used the knowledge gained by years of repeated rehabs and therapy, and those two stays in the mental ward. The courage it took me to overcome a 25-year addiction, childhood abuse and toxic relationships, all of which addiction feeds from. Helping others grow was also helping me.
Both my book and advocacy work was busy furthering my reach. My following now a year later has grown daily, my book bought globally and my life’s tragedies have been able to give others hope when they were lost in despair. Every day I’m inspired to post something about recovery or how addiction will continue to tear your world apart—that finding a way out is the best thing, no matter what you may face as you climb your way back to the world of responsibility and accountability.
The people I touch with my very honest and direct approach thank me for not sugar coating it, because, as I tell them often, after my second time through rehab I had all the knowledge I needed to stay clean; it was the follow through I lacked. This disease now labeled by the medical community to pay for treatment still comes down to the same thing.
Addiction is patient and cunning, waiting for us to be vulnerable, hurting or tired of the fight. These time’s are when we must be on guard to protect our recovery, these are the times when r meetings, sponsor, and new recovery frnds r most important. These are the times when asking for help is critical to maintain the path of growth we r on. Asking for help for most of us is hard, we’ve learned to be self sufficient but there’s no place for pride when it comes to life and ur recovery. Stay strong and keep moving forward today. 😃💜🌹🦋💞❣ Rose
The lie’s of my addiction held me back for many years, almost 25yrs, lie’s that led to self doubt n fear, lie’s that said I was just going to die like this cuz I didn’t have in me the fight it was going to take to live in society again, to believe in myself again and.. Have recovery. I fought this battle for almost 12yrs of 2 mental hospital stays, many more rehab trys and halfway houses…. Time in jail that 41 arrests and 3 felonies brought me.
And it was only after I finally recognized the LIE’S was I able to hear the Truth.❣
Recovery is possible and something we all can achieve, the serenity inside we tried forever to get through using.
So reclaim ur life, fight ur battle’s and have happiness and peace in ur ♥. Life n recovery is there for all of us, we just have to go after it 🌟
Blessings to you today 💞🌹❤❣ Rose
16yrs now in recovery and it was a great journey to get here 💞
I wake each day with a thankful heart that today is another chance to make a difference in my life as well as the lives of others, family, friends and maybe even someone new. It’s a opportunity to smile brightly and trust in the serenity that surrounds me.
Letting go of the self-defeating noises from the past was hard at first, because I felt I needed to continue to torture myself. Though when I finally realized that I was only hurting myself by dragging my past with me did I find the strength to end the guilt, shame and pain it held. Nothing was going to change what had already happened.
The past is history and the future just a mystery for which we can agonize over or trust it will be what it is supposed to be and live in the present .
I’d like to share that I have been asked to speak at the event on Saturday. I’m going to share on having a recovery plan and why it’s important for long term recovery.
The regional Convention is in May 18th 19th and 20th.
Ramada Inn
Gillette Wyoming
Please come out to the event n share ur story w others in recovery.
I will also be doing a Book signing event during the convention.
