Turning Pain into Purpose with Chris Salem (Part 1)

World-renowned author Chris Salem joins us on Rise from the Ashes to share his extraordinary story of resilience and transformation. Imagine living a life fueled by anger, addiction, and the relentless pursuit of validation only to discover the path to fulfillment lies within.

Chris opens up about his struggles with unresolved emotional wounds, spiritual emptiness, and physical health challenges, offering listeners profound insights into the power of personal responsibility. Through pivotal moments, daily disciplines like meditation and journaling, and a commitment to accountability, Chris not only rebuilt his life but now empowers high-achieving leaders worldwide to do the same.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How unresolved anger and addiction fuel burnout
• The pivotal moment that led Chris to embrace accountability
• Practical daily disciplines for emotional recovery and resilience
• Insights into common struggles faced by high-performing individuals
• The power of reframing negative experiences into growth opportunities
• Why sharing personal stories is vital for healing and inspiration

Memorable Moments & Timestamps:

• 00:01 – Chris Salem’s introduction and welcome
• 00:29 – Early struggles with anger, addiction, and validation
• 05:22 – The emotional turning point: reconciling with his father’s legacy
• 08:46 – Path to recovery: Meditation, journaling, and intentional living
• 14:15 – Common traits of high-functioning professionals under stress
• 17:21 – Reframing addiction and unlocking breakthroughs in AA
• 24:09 – Conclusion: Reflecting on the power of storytelling

💡 Key Takeaway: Growth begins with taking responsibility. Chris’s story reminds us that intentional discipline, self-reflection, and emotional intelligence are the keys to living a life of purpose and fulfillment.

🎧 Don’t miss this inspiring episode! Listen now, share it with someone who needs hope, and subscribe for more transformational stories.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Emotional Journey Towards Healing
• 8:08 Transformation Through Personal Responsibility
• 21:02 Reframing Addiction for Emotional Healing
• 26:18 Breaking the Taboo

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Rise from the Ashes podcast. It's season five and it's episode two, and I'm privileged today to be in front of an absolute legend. He's an international bestseller, his name is Chris Salem and he inspires business owners to go to that next level for emotional intelligence. Chris, welcome, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today. I've got a question for you. What was burnout for you, and how did you actually experience it emotionally before you realized what it was?

Speaker 2: 0:41

First of all, thank you for having me on your show. It is such a pleasure to be here and really aligned with, uh, someone, that where we share similar journeys and paths. Yeah, for me I had a series of these leading up, but this goes back about over 26 years ago. Back at that time this was right before my I was 31 years old and I had I to give you a little kind of scope how this led up. When I was growing up.

Speaker 2: 1:09

I grew up in an era where children were to be seen and not heard, so to speak, and as a young boy I was always striving for the attention of my father, for my father to be at my ball games, be at certain things, and my dad wasn't. My dad was busy traveling, he was working, and when he was home he would be emotionally checked out and to me it just didn't seem he was interested in what I was doing. So a lot of times because I was seeking his attention not knowing this at the time, consciously it was all subconscious I began to evolve into things that were getting, maybe get, his attention, not in a good way, but in a bad way. I began to become a very angry young man at the age of 14. I began to act out. I began to break into homes, start destroying things. I was lucky I didn't get caught. But my accomplice, the guy I was with, did get caught and thank God he didn't rat me out. But that didn't end there. A lot of the things I had so much anger and I didn't know what to do with it. And by the time I was 14, I'd already been experimenting with, obviously, marijuana then eventually became cocaine not mescaline At the time. Mescaline was very big back in the early 80s when I was growing up, and with the result of it it evolved into cocaine. So I developed a cocaine addiction during my college years.

Speaker 2: 2:33

But this unresolved anger, this lack of validation that I didn't have, I was seeking this validation in other people, and we know very well what happens with other people. They're going to disappoint you. So it just further escalated. This validation that I could not find and my self-esteem and confidence were very low, even though I projected otherwise and even though I was able to be a functional addict, meaning I was able to get through school, get a job, make money. I was emotionally, mentally, spiritually bankrupt and I just got through that just through escaping through drugs, alcohol, pornography even, and I couldn't be faithful to any one woman Like I. Even though I loved my fiance, I couldn't be faithful. I was having multiple. Not that I had affairs with women on an emotional level, but I was promiscuous, having one night stands and visiting massage parlors and prostitutes and escorts, and it was like a drug to me. That's how bad. And and just when you and I had a discussion offline beforehand.

Speaker 2: 3:45

Every time I did these things, thinking it would make me feel better, it made me feel worse, like I felt this is it. I can't do this again. I feel like scum, I'm like a piece of crap on the side of the road. And yet two days later, I'd be doing the same thing again. The urge was too great. I couldn't resist it because of the emptiness that I couldn't fill. I couldn't find where to fill it.

Speaker 2: 4:12

See, I was always seeking this fulfillment of this validation. Everything I sought for was outside of me. I was never looking within because I didn't like what was within. I didn't like myself. I was never looking within because I didn't like what was within. I didn't like myself. And as a result of this, because of this ongoing, just day-to-day how I was doing this, I started to develop more and more anxiety and then, when I developed this anxiety, I would have panic attacks or anxiety attacks that took me to the hospital at least once a quarter, feeling like I was having a heart attack. Now, with that being said, all of these things that I was doing to myself emotionally were affecting me physically. I had back problems. I developed a fibroid tumor on my back that wasn't cancerous, but it was growing like a malignant tumor that I became a textbook case in Sloan Kettering Hospital, which is one of the top cancer hospitals in the world in New York City. All of this was a byproduct of my emotional state. That anger was killing me. It was slowly killing me and if I kept going it was going to kill me and take me out. I had an eye opening event that happened to me.

Speaker 2: 5:28

My dad, in the last two years of his life, made an attempt to make up for what he had missed out on when I was growing up. He wasn't there for me and my brother because of that lack of connection and my father constantly putting him down led him down a road of drugs, alcohol, and he became a heroin addict. He was not functionable like me and to this day still has to be taken care of because he's mentally ill and the drugs probably also played a part in that for years of hardcore drug use. As a result of that, my dad made that attempt and I started to feel like a connection again, like on some level. And then my dad was diagnosed with cancer and he had stage three B and it escalated to four very quickly and he was given a year and a half to live. My dad only lived four months. So my dad grew up poor, didn't like his father. My grandfather was treated horribly and my dad's goal in life was to be rich, to be successful, because he didn't have that growing.

Speaker 2: 6:39

See, I didn't realize it at the time. I felt like my dad was abandoning me, my brother, my mother, because he wasn't interested in our lives. But I had an eye-opening experience with him the day before he died. He looked over at me. He couldn't talk, he was on morphine, they were just winding his body down to die peacefully and he looked over at me. His eyes were half shut, he wasn't talking, but he was communicating in a different way.

Speaker 2: 7:06

I still can't explain it to this day, but I heard what he was saying, and I remember him saying that I just want to let you know as I leave this world, I love you and I've always loved you and at first, like you would have thought, I would have gotten emotional, which I often still to this day still get emotion but at the time I didn't get emotional. I was just like like in this surreal moment, like what is going on here, but yet I was at peace and I loved your brother. I even loved your mother, even though my parents had now been divorced up to that point, because he was also unfaithful and did things that he shouldn't have done. And I just want to let you know I tried to be the best father I could for what I knew. And then I started hearing how he despised his dad, how he was treated and he didn't know how to be the father I wanted him to be. And he says I want to apologize for that. And I sit there and I said, oh my God, it's not that he did this on purpose, he just didn't know any better.

Speaker 2: 8:08

And then I realized for the first time in my life I said no matter what deck of cards I've ever been dealt and I've had a tough life up to that point. I'm responsible for my emotions, I'm responsible for my attitude. I'm responsible for my behavior, my communication to myself and others and my action that I take in life. I didn't know what to do with it at the point. I didn't know what I that's all. That was just the message that I got and I said to myself in that moment my life is going to change. I'm going to take responsibility for my life. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I did.

Speaker 2: 8:44

My dad passed the next day and within three days of his passing I was in an AA group for the first time. I got into spirit. I got into Eastern meditation and got into that whole thing. I wouldn't say it was Buddhism, but got into the practice of it. And even though I had a hard time getting into it because I was born with ADHD from birth and someone with ADHD is very hard to sit and deal with your racing thoughts and to meditate. You've got to be crazy, but I did it. I didn't get into a meditative state until nine months in, but I used discipline and consistency, kept doing it even though I didn't feel anything. Finally, I got into a meditative state until nine months in because I but I used discipline and consistency, kept doing it even though I didn't feel anything. Finally I got into a meditation. I started to see the progress with this discipline that I was doing.

Speaker 2: 9:36

All of these things has changed my life. It changed my way of thinking, how I looked at myself, how I communicated. I learned, I became. I went from being a passive communicator and an aggressive behaviorist to being an assertive communicator and behaviorist. I changed my attitude from seeing things happening to me as the victim, using excuses, to now how I saw the challenges, obstacles and problems as a blessing. How it was shaping me to become better and to appreciate and be more grateful that when I did turn that challenge into an opportunity and then to a result, I'd be grateful for it.

Speaker 2: 10:18

I began to see that I didn't have to negate my negative emotions. I can see them as messages of something unresolved and knowing I can learn to respond to situations and other people, not react from those negative emotions, that impulse that I would explode with anger. I learned how to now contain that work on that on a daily basis and then how to take massive action that I had to be accountable. No one was going to keep me accountable. No one's going to do things.

Speaker 2: 10:48

I had to be accountable and from the years of doing this, over 26 years, and immersing myself in the area of emotional intelligence, not only am I a product of that I came out onto the other side, but I've been teaching people, both on a personal level through our nonprofit empowered fathers in Action, to now on the business side, where I work with business executives, ceos, sales professionals, cpas, lawyers, doctors and how they can do this to become better leaders by example, be more resourceful, that through their own control of their communication, behavior, attitude, emotions and action can inspire others to do the same, to create more interdependency in the world, not codependency and this friction, and it's just that would. That was for me, that that burnout, I know was a long-winded answer, but I wanted that burnout was over a period between my 20s up until 31, because I'm a firm believer. If I didn't have that moment with my father, I might have at best had maybe one or two years left and I would have been dead. The burnout would have killed me.

Speaker 1: 11:57

Just why this exists, because these stories matter, because that may be the shift, or the two-millimeter shift to save somebody else's pathway from going down that. And now you've turned that, the old cliche mess into a message and you're inspiring CEOs, doctors, lawyers, people of that sort of caliber. And they don't want cookie cutter people or the norm. They want people like you who have actually been through the middle of the war zones. Yes, and it's about that. What inspired you in and I know your father inspired you to take the change. But what was driving? What was the driving force behind the after the burnout and what happened? What was that process like? What was the driving force after the burnout? What happened? What was that process like? What was the realization?

Speaker 2: 12:48

I just realized that there was nowhere to go, but up at that point I had been scraping rock bottom emotionally, spiritually, not financially at that point, but that was the next step and I just knew that if I didn't change, I was not going to be alive much longer.

Speaker 2: 13:07

And I had the will to live was greater and I just white knuckled it and just worked through until it became part of my life. And I'm disciplined every day. All these things that I did 26 years ago I continue to do every day. I've never missed. I go 300, I do it seven days a week, 365 days a year. I'm consistent with my daily routine meditating, journaling to working out, to reading, to making my bed, doing a gratitude list in the evening one hour before I go to bed. All these things I don't take for granted, because I can only be the leader by example of what I do each day to fill my cup, because I was good at giving to people, but from an empty cup I wasn't really helping them. I was helping them to stay stuck and stagnant. Now I can give through my example and through my resourcefulness for them to do for themselves. That's the greatest gift, that's what my father. He made up for all those years and that that even in that one 15, 20 minute moment we had the day before he died.

Speaker 1: 14:14

I love that. You obviously work with a lot of high end and high performing and high functioning individuals. What are the commonalities between each of them that you're seeing when they come to you?

Speaker 2: 17:12

I would say that I'm not going to say they're all the same on the same, but but they there's a common thread that there's a lot of unresolved anger and that anger sometimes can be very subtle, based upon their personalities, where they're able to suppress it, be very calm. But yet it comes out in other ways through certain behaviors that can rub people the wrong way and ways to control it and control others. And then there's some people that when you get to know them, you see a side that they normally don't display in public. And I've done this with some doctors where I had a dentist that I worked with. He was also from the UK and he lived over here and just had a horrific childhood I worked with.

Speaker 2: 17:50

He was also from the UK and he lived over here and just had a horrific childhood, growing up with his father like verbally, emotionally, physically abused and it really. And he was a tyrant with people. People hated working for him. But he was a great dentist but people hated working for him. So he had a really a tough. He had a tough time with retention and and he would explode on me.

Speaker 2: 18:12

But I knew how to neutralize the behavior, the communication, because I understood where he was. I knew it wasn't personal because I would. I was. I was him personally, whatever amount of years ago, up to that point, so I could understand it. I knew how to put up healthy boundaries but I knew how to neutralize that and finally relate to him, build that rapport and trust and then respect to where he began to see and he started making progress. He got into an AA program, he started to work on himself and people began to see the changes. His wife began to see the change because she was on the verge of divorcing him. His kids started to spend more time with him because they wanted to be as far away as possible and his staff began to more embrace him over time. But it took time because there was a lot of unresolved anger and things that he was carrying around like an anchor that he did not let go.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Yeah, I love, love that. I like the way you're framing it, because a lot of people don't know how to manage someone who comes up with or to them aggressively or in that state, and it's not about meeting them where they are in that moment, it's about how do you diffuse it, how do you get to the root of the problem, which is what you do. Very yes, I want to address the audience for a moment. When you're listening to this and you're either in anger or burnout or you have ADHD, maybe you know someone who does. How about you just share this episode with them, because it may change their life, it may change the course of where they are right now. And people with stories like Chris these are real stories. And people's stories like Chris, these are real stories. These aren't for the cookie cutter matrix of a lot of places. These are real people's experiences changing real people's lives, which is what this is all about. So share the message and also inspire someone else.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Today, chris, I want to go into reframing for a moment. I mentioned it earlier. Reframing is so critical in any consultant's line of work. Can you name or can you describe without naming people obviously a scenario where you had to reframe something in that moment, to redirect somebody into a positive, of a higher caliber situation. You don't have to name them, obviously, but can you give an example of something that you went into where you're like, oh my god, how do I deal with this? This is how we're going to do it.

Speaker 2: 20:40

Yeah, there's a lot of things I could share, both on a professional and personal level, but here's one that I think could be relate to a lot of people and I'll give you some context behind this About 20, I think it's been now almost 20 years ago I spoke at an AA event at the St Patrick's cathedral in New York city. If you're familiar with St Patrick's church, it's very world renowned but it's big and many the Kennedys have been married. There's stuff like that. So there was an AA event there and I was one of the speakers and I had spoke on a topic on what is the real addiction that many people deal with, and a lot of times people think it's the alcohol, it's drugs, it's gambling, it's sex, it's food and, very well, alcohol can chemically people are chemically dependent upon it Same with drugs. Absolutely there's no denying that, that these negative emotions that are operating behind the scenes day in, day out. And I started talking about the real addiction like sometimes how people might stop drinking but then they're still engaging in behaviors and addictions in other ways. They might be addicted to sex, they might be having multiple affairs with their spouses and to them they think they're sober because they're not drinking anymore. They just traded one addiction for the other, not even realizing. And when I was talking on this and I had already been an experienced speaker up to that point there was a guy with a very thick Russian accent that spoke out and told me to go F myself, he goes. And he looked at me and he goes you don't know what the hell. And he stormed out and everyone looked thinking that would throw me off, and I said listen, I can understand where you are, I've been there and I'd love to chat with you. Later he walked out, I went right back, didn't miss a beat in what I was talking about, and everyone's oh my God, how did he not, how did that not throw him off? And he didn't react and I finished my talk.

Speaker 2: 22:55

Now, two weeks later, I'm sitting in my I forgot, I think I had a makeshift office in where I was living at the time and I'm in there and my phone rang and not my cell phone, but it was a regular, like we had still the regular phones then and so the phone rings and I recognized that accent. I'm like, wait a minute, that sounds like that Russian guy man, and it was him. And he goes. Do you know who I am? I said no, but I recognize your voice.

Speaker 2: 23:27

I think you're the guy that heckled me at the AA. He goes, yes, and I want to apologize to you. And I said that's fine, there's no apology. As a matter of fact, I'm glad you called us. I wanted to talk with you but you had left and I didn't know who you were and I just said, oh, we're never going to cross paths. We were. And I just said, oh, we're never going to cross paths, he goes. I want to. I'm calling you number one first to apologize, but I want to thank you and I said thank me for what you got me to see that I'm not sober and I've been lying to myself for nine years. I've been clean and sober for nine years from the drink and I was a hardcore alcoholic. He told me he goes. I'm also a licensed psychologist, I have a master's degree in psychology and he was a psychologist, but he was an alcoholic.

Speaker 2: 24:22

And we ended up having a two-hour conversation where he told me about he grew up up in Russia, came over to the United States. He was physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually abused by his father. He was a tortured soul and when he came here he was angry and he was. Life was out of control. He was somehow he was able to find a way to get out and he got, went to school, became, got into psychology, did all the. And then he said eventually I started slipping back into my old ways. The drink took control of my life, I'd, and eventually it sabotaged his marriage and his kids and then eventually got into AA. But he but he ended up saying is that I ended up now getting involved with other women, multiple women. I was going to prostitute, nothing. So he but that was, I was able to quit the reframing.

Speaker 2: 25:25

That was an example of, without having the one-on-one with them at first, reframing something, how we look at things. Sometimes we think everything is going well and fine, but sometimes to reframe that, we could see that sometimes we got to continuously look at where we can improve and get better. Because in this case he thought he was sober and he wasn't emotionally. He might've been physically with the drink, but not emotionally. So that was a way of reframing it and I worked with him as his coach and helping him to reframe things, to see things that he was not, even, as a psychologist, thinking that he should know this. This is what he does with other people, but he couldn't do it with himself. He realized, and to this day we've been friends and he's in a you know in far, in a far better place now and this was again several years ago now. But yeah, but that that was an example of reframing. I got many others from a business standpoint.

Speaker 1: 26:20

If you want me to share that, I know that was an awesome uh share. I think that's very poignant, especially what's going on at the moment in the world, because these things are on that like they're still taboo. They're out there but they don't like. No one like speaking about them because they this this the shame thing about it. If you're listening to this, there's no need to be in shame, because your message, your experience, is going to change someone else's life in the future if you allow the experience to unfold and learn from it. Before we close this session and part one, before we go into part two, I want to ask the audience now just to think back on what the best parts of this and what your takeaways were and share them with a friend. Spend time just writing them down. Maybe something in here will help you. I'll see you in part two, and Chris will be here too, thankfully, and you be good. And this was Rice and Meash's podcast and this is Chris. I'll see you very shortly.