THE POWER OF CHANGE: From Broken Beginnings , trauma , addictions, to a Life Built by the River.

By Alex Sully | WyldeRoots | wylderoots.org

The Power of Change: How I Left My Corporate Career, Beat a 27-Year Drug Addiction and Built an Off-Grid Life in Portugal

I walked away from everything.

A corporate career. Managing millions. A ‘successful’ life by every metric the world uses to measure a person.

And I felt absolutely nothing.

Not ungrateful. Not lost.

Awake. For the first time.

This is not a story about Portugal. It’s not a story about going off-grid, growing your own food, or finding a beautiful river to live beside — although all of that happened.

This is a story about what it truly takes to change. Not the Instagram version. Not the highlight reel. The real version — where change is forged in fire, loss, addiction, grief, and the slow, painful, magnificent work of becoming who you actually are.

It’s a story about childhood trauma, a 27-year drug addiction, watching my mum die of cancer, losing the ability to walk, and eventually — finally — finding freedom on the banks of a river in central Portugal.

I’m sharing it because I know there’s someone reading this who needs to hear it. Not the polished version. The true one.

Growing Up With Childhood Trauma: When Home Isn’t Safe

I didn’t begin this journey from a place of stability.

I began it on the floor.

I grew up in a home shadowed by addiction. Someone very close to me fought a battle with alcohol that shaped every corner of my childhood — the unpredictability, the walking on eggshells, never knowing what version of home you’d come back to. There was love there, real love — but pain lived alongside it. And as a child you don’t have the language for any of it. You just absorb it. Carry it. And spend decades not realising the weight you’ve been dragging.

There was abuse. There was chaos. There were moments no child should witness.

And then came the moments that changed everything.

I watched someone I loved deeply — in the depths of their darkest pain — drive a car off a cliff.

I watched another person I loved reach such an unbearable place inside themselves that they turned their desperation inward, violently, in ways that should never have to be witnessed by anyone.

Both survived.

But I carried those images for years. Quietly. Alone. The way you do when you don’t have the words and the world expects you to just keep going.

I don’t share this for sympathy.

I share it because someone reading this grew up in a home like that too. Has witnessed things they’ve never spoken about. Has carried weight that was never theirs to carry. And they’ve never heard anyone say out loud —

That was real. That was hard. And it was not your fault.

How Childhood Trauma Shapes Your Adult Life

Research consistently shows that adverse childhood experiences — abuse, addiction in the home, witnessing violence — directly impact the nervous system, emotional regulation, and the patterns we carry into adult life. We don’t just ‘get over’ these things. They wire us. They shape how we respond to stress, how we form relationships, and crucially — how we cope when life becomes unbearable.

For me, that coping mechanism became substances. For 27 years.

Using Work and Drugs to Cope: The Hidden Truth Behind Corporate Success

 And so I did what so many of us do.

I ran.

I built a career that was impressive enough to distract everyone — including myself.

Managing huge teams. Driving millions in revenue. Always busy, always needed, always on. The corporate world rewards that kind of relentlessness. It gives you titles and targets and the beautiful illusion that if you just keep moving, you never have to feel what’s underneath.

The suits. The spreadsheets. The meetings. The promotions. The relentless forward motion of a life that looked, from the outside, like it had everything figured out.

And behind all of it — I was using.

27 Years of Drug Use: From Speed to Spiritual Medicines

For 27 years, I used substances to survive my own life.

It started with speed — the kind that makes you feel invincible, sharp, untouchable.

Exactly what a wounded person craves. Then cocaine. Then ecstasy — chasing connection, joy, the feeling of being fully alive without having to actually be present. Then weed, for a long time, blunting every sharp edge of reality. And eventually, plant medicines — which I told myself were different. Spiritual. Healing.

And some of them were. But if I’m truly honest?

For a long time, even those were just a more sophisticated hiding place.

Every substance, every stage — it was all the same thing underneath.

Don’t feel it. Don’t face it. Don’t stop.

27 years of running dressed up in different costumes.

I wasn’t weak. I was wounded. And I was doing what wounded people do — surviving by whatever means available.

But eventually, every hiding place runs out of room.

Weed Withdrawal After Long-Term Cannabis Use: What Nobody Tells You

People underestimate cannabis addiction. They underestimate it because the world has decided weed is harmless — and compared to other substances, the physical dependency is considered less severe. But after years of daily use, quitting is not just ‘stopping smoking.’

It is a full-body, full-mind reckoning.

I know because I lived it. I actually wrote down every symptom as it happened — sitting in my off-grid home in Portugal, no distractions, nowhere to hide, just me and the withdrawal and the river outside.

My Real Weed Withdrawal Symptom List — Written as It Happened

This is my real list. Every single thing my body and mind went through over 3 months.

•  Headaches

•  Brain jolts — that sudden electric jolt sensation that fires through your skull with no warning

•  Muscle spasms

•  Stomach cramps

•  Diarrhoea

•  Hot flushes

•  Itchy, sore eyes

•  Glands swelling up and down

•  Heart palpitations

•  Knees going numb

•  Leg rash

•  Leg sores

•  Blood pooling in the legs

•  Depression

•  Mood swings

•  Exhaustion — oversleeping for days at a time

•  Insomnia — then swinging back the other way

•  Joint pain

•  Anger that arrives from nowhere

•  Crazy, vivid, disturbing dreams every single night

•  Night sweats so severe I’d wake completely drenched

•  Dizziness

That is what 27 years of cannabis use looked like leaving my body.

I want you to read that list again — not to scare you, but because if you’re going through any of those symptoms right now, or you’ve been through them and thought something was seriously wrong with you — you are not alone. You are not broken. Your body is doing exactly what it needs to do to heal.

Why Long-Term Cannabis Withdrawal Hits So Hard

Here’s what nobody tells you about long-term cannabis withdrawal: the weed wasn’t just a habit. It had become the operating system. It was managing your sleep, your anxiety, your appetite, your emotional regulation, your nervous system — all of it. When you remove it, the body has to remember, completely from scratch, how to do all of those things on its own.

That takes time, in my case 3 to 4 months with some symptoms still lingering . It takes discomfort. And it takes an environment that supports healing rather than one that just gives you somewhere to hide.

The anxiety you feel when you stop isn’t just withdrawal. It’s the anxiety you’ve been medicating for years, suddenly with nowhere to hide. All of it, waiting for you on the other side of the last joint.

The vivid dreams happen because cannabis suppresses REM sleep. When you stop, the brain rebounds — flooding your sleep with intense, disturbing, hyper-real dreams night after night. I’d wake emotionally exhausted from experiences more vivid than anything in my waking life.

The brain jolts — those sudden electrical pulses that fire without warning — are real, documented, and deeply unsettling if you don’t know what they are. They pass. But nobody warned me about them and they scared me deeply when they started.

How Nature and Off-Grid Living Helped Me Heal

For me, the environment that supported healing was nature itself.

The off-grid life didn’t just give me somewhere to stop — it gave me somewhere to heal. The physical work of living off the land gave my body somewhere to put the agitation. The silence gave my nervous system space to recalibrate. The river, the trees, the rhythm of the seasons — they reminded me that there are cycles bigger than my discomfort, and that every winter, no matter how brutal, eventually gives way to spring.

Being in nature. Being truly with myself. Struggling in real, tangible, physical ways rather than the invisible internal struggle I’d been carrying for decades. It fixed me in a way that nothing else had come close to.

The brain jolts eventually stopped. The night sweats faded. The sleep came back — slowly, then deeply, better than it had been in years. The crazy dreams settled. The anger softened. The depression lifted. The joint pain eased. One by one, the symptoms on that list disappeared.

And what was left — underneath all of it — was me. Just me. Clear. Present. Alive.

For the first time in 27 years.

If you’re considering quitting after long-term use — do it. But go in knowing it will be hard. Give yourself time, space, and grace. Get into nature if you can. Move your body. Don’t perform being fine. Let it be messy.

Because on the other side of that list — every single symptom on it — is a version of you that is more present, more capable, and more free than you have ever been. It is worth every single one.

Grief, Cancer and Losing a Parent: When the Body Finally Breaks

Then I watched my mum die of cancer.

The woman whose life had been so complicated, so painful — fighting to the very end.

I sat with her. I held her hand. I watched the light leave.

And I tried to hold it all together — the career, the responsibilities, the performance of being fine — while something inside me shattered into pieces so small I didn’t know if I’d ever find them all again.

Grief is not linear. It doesn’t arrive cleanly and leave when you’re ready. It soaks into everything — your sleep, your decisions, your relationships, the way you walk into a room. And when grief lands on top of decades of unprocessed trauma, the weight becomes something the body simply cannot carry anymore.

My body said enough before my mind was ready to.

The grief, the trauma, the 27 years of substances suddenly stopped, the relentless pressure of trying to hold everything together — it all compressed into my spine.

I lost the ability to walk.

Sciatica so severe I couldn’t stand. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t run from myself anymore.

The medical community is increasingly understanding what many ancient healing traditions have always known — that the body holds the score. That unprocessed emotional pain, chronic stress, and grief don’t just live in the mind. They live in the tissue, the fascia, the spine. They manifest physically when the psyche has reached its limit.

My body had reached its limit.

And lying there on the floor — forced into a stillness I didn’t choose — something finally cracked open.

Not broke. Cracked open. There’s a difference.

Because it was in that silence — the kind life chooses for you — that I finally heard the questions I’d been outrunning my whole life.

Who are you, without the doing?

What are you actually running from?

If your mum’s life taught you anything — are you actually living yours?

I didn’t have the answers. But for the first time — I was ready to find them.

Leaving the Corporate World: How I Made the Decision to Change Everything

That was the real beginning.

Not Portugal. Not the river. Not the off-grid life.

The beginning was the moment I stopped running and started listening.

The decision to leave wasn’t dramatic. There was no single moment of clarity where everything clicked into place. It was more like a slow, undeniable knowing — the kind you can’t unknow once it arrives.

I’d spent my entire adult life building a life that looked right from the outside. And I was done. Not angry. Not resentful. Just done.

I wanted to know what it felt like to be fully alive. Not performing being alive. Actually alive.

So I packed what mattered and moved to a caravan in a Portuguese forest. No running water. No electricity. No guarantees. No plan beyond the next season.

And for the first time in decades — I felt something real.

The Reality of Off-Grid Living in Portugal: The Beautiful and the Brutal

Because you deserve the full truth and not a highlight reel — let me tell you what the off-grid life actually looks like.

It’s waking up to birdsong and waterfalls and a sky so vast it makes your chest ache with gratitude.

And it’s fires tearing through the hillside and not knowing if your home will still be standing by morning.

It’s growing your own food and eating what the land gives you.

And it’s watching a whole season’s work fail because the weather didn’t cooperate.

It’s the profound silence of a life stripped back to what matters.

And it’s landslides blocking your access road and destroying your land .Sinkholes appearing where you least expect them. The damp that gets into your bones in winter. The heat in summer so fierce you can barely move before sunset.

It’s the freedom of building something completely your own.

And it’s the money terror of months when nothing goes to plan. Bureaucracy that makes no sense. Neighbours and local characters who test every ounce of your patience. Machinery that breaks at the worst possible moment. Crazy people who arrive with the territory of rural, remote living.

It is beautiful. Genuinely, soul-crackingly beautiful.

And it is hard. Genuinely, humblingly hard.

 I don’t share this to put you off.

I share it because you deserve to go in with your eyes open — not with a fantasy that shatters at the first hard winter, but with a real understanding of what this life asks of you.

Who Actually Thrives in an Off-Grid Life?

After years of living this life and watching others attempt it, I’ve noticed something consistent. The people who thrive off-grid aren’t the ones with the most money or the best land or the perfect plan.

They’re the ones who’ve done the inner work.

Who know themselves well enough to weather the storms — inside and out. Who can find dark humour in the chaos. Who fix what they can and surrender to what they can’t. Who don’t need external validation to feel like their life has value.

The land will test you. That’s not a warning.

That’s the gift.

Because every time it does — and you come through — you realise you are so much more capable than the world ever told you you were.

How Trauma Shapes Your Relationships — And How the Right Partner Helped Me Finally Quit

There’s something I want to talk about that almost nobody in the addiction and recovery space addresses honestly.

The role your relationships play in keeping you using.

When you grow up surrounded by chaos, instability, addiction and emotional unpredictability — that becomes your nervous system’s definition of normal. Of familiar. Of home. And so, without ever consciously choosing it, you tend to find yourself in relationships that recreate those same patterns. Partners who are emotionally unavailable. Relationships full of drama, instability, intensity, control . People who mirror the chaos you grew up in — because on some deep, wired level, that chaos feels like love.

And in those relationships, you need the weed. You need something to take the edge off. To calm the anxiety that living with emotional unpredictability creates. To hide the parts of yourself you don’t feel safe showing. To cope with dynamics that are fundamentally destabilising.

The weed isn’t just self-medication. In those relationships, it becomes essential armour.

Breaking the Pattern: When You Finally Choose Differently

The off-grid life, the inner work, the grief, the stripping back of everything — it didn’t just change where I lived. It changed what I was drawn to.

When you do enough of the real work — when you face the childhood, process the grief, understand your own patterns — you stop being attracted to the familiar chaos. You stop mistaking intensity for connection. You stop needing someone to hide from.

And that’s when I found something I’d never quite had before.

A partner who was calm. Supportive. Caring. Someone who didn’t recreate my parents’ patterns. Someone whose presence didn’t require me to manage, perform, or protect myself. Someone I didn’t need to hide from — or hide myself with substances around.

For the first time in my life, I was in a relationship where I felt genuinely safe.

And something remarkable happened.

The need for the weed quietly dissolved.

Not because she told me to stop. Not through pressure or ultimatums. But because when you finally feel genuinely safe with another person — when you’re with someone who meets you with steadiness rather than chaos — the thing you were using to cope with unsafety simply becomes unnecessary.

My mum had just died. I’d moved off-grid. I was processing the biggest grief of my life in the rawest environment imaginable. By every measure, that should have been the hardest time to quit.

But it was also the time I finally could.

Because I had the land. I had the silence. I had the inner work I’d been doing for years. And I had someone beside me who made me feel, for the first time, that I didn’t need to numb myself to get through the night.

The right environment. The right inner work. The right person. All three together — that’s what finally did it.

I want to say something directly to anyone reading this who is using substances inside a relationship that feels familiar but not safe:

You are not weak for needing to cope. But ask yourself honestly — is this relationship part of why you can’t stop?

Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for your recovery is understand the emotional environment you’re living in.

Life After Addiction: What Freedom From Drugs Actually Feels Like

I’ve since appeared on Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild, broadcast to 42 countries. I’ve built a life beside a river with waterfalls outside my door. I walk alongside others finding their own way back to something real.

And I am completely free. No substances. No hiding. No armour.

For the first time in 27 years — just me.

I want to be specific about what that freedom actually feels like — because it’s not what I expected.

I expected to feel lighter. And I do. But it’s more than that.

I feel present. Actually present. In my body, in the moment, in conversations. Not half-here while some part of my brain calculates when and how to get the next thing that takes the edge off.

I feel my emotions fully — all of them. The sadness when it comes. The joy when it arrives. The frustration, the wonder, the grief that still surfaces sometimes. And rather than that being overwhelming, it turns out to feel like being human. Actually, fully, beautifully human.

And I feel capable. Of handling whatever the land, the life, the day throws at me — without needing anything external to get through it.

I feel it in my relationship too. The clarity. The presence. The ability to actually show up — fully, openly, without the fog. To be genuinely seen by someone and not need to blur the edges of that with anything.

That’s new. That’s extraordinary. That’s worth more than 27 years of temporary relief ever gave me.

The miracle is that the kid who grew up in those rooms — scared, carrying things he should never have had to, numbing himself just to survive — is sitting here, barefoot on Portuguese soil, clear-headed, present, and free. Not despite the pain. Through it.

Finding Gratitude for Trauma, Addiction and Loss: How Pain Becomes Your Greatest Teacher

And here’s what I want you to hear — really hear.

I am grateful for all of it.

The childhood. The abuse. The trauma. The 27 years of substances. The career I hid inside. Watching my mum take her last breath. The body that finally gave up on me. The weed withdrawal that stripped me raw. The fires. The landslides. The brutal winters and the summers that nearly broke me.

Every single thing I would have done anything to avoid.

I’m grateful for it all.

Not because it wasn’t brutal. It was.

But because every single piece of it made me who I am today. It gave me a depth of understanding that no qualification, no course, no comfortable life could ever have given me. When I sit with someone who thinks their story is too broken, too shameful, too far gone —

I don’t look at them with pity.

I look at them with recognition.

I’ve been there. Not near there. There.

Every wound became a doorway. Every dark chapter became a lantern I now carry for others walking through their own.

The pain didn’t break me. It built me.

Are You Actually Living Your Life? 8 Questions That Might Change Everything

 I want to ask you something. Not to be provocative. But because nobody asked me these questions early enough — and I wish they had.

Read them slowly. Don’t rush past them. Let them land.

1.  When did you last do something just because it made you feel alive?

2.  Are you living the life you chose — or the life that was chosen for you?

3.  What would you do differently if you found out you had one year left?

4.  Is the version of you that shows up every day the real you — or the one that learned to survive?

5.  What are you numbing? Work? Scrolling? Drinking? Busyness? What are you not letting yourself feel?

6.  If your life was a book — would you want to read it?

7.  What’s the dream you’ve stopped letting yourself say out loud?

8.  What would change if you stopped waiting for the perfect moment and accepted that this — right now — is the only moment there is?

The answers to those questions show you the distance between the life you’re living and the life you actually want.

And the distance is never as far as fear makes it feel.

How to Start Changing Your Life: A Realistic Guide for People Who Are Serious

The off-grid dream is real. Portugal is real. The freedom is real.

And so is the journey to get there — and to stay there.

It takes longer than you think. Costs more than you plan. Breaks you in ways you didn’t expect and rebuilds you in ways you never imagined.

So I want to give you something practical. Not just inspiration — but a realistic starting point.

Step 1: Do the Inner Work First

Before you research land prices or visa requirements — get honest with yourself about what you’re running toward and what you’re running from. The off-grid life will not fix an unfixed inner life. It will amplify it. Go to therapy. Start journalling. Get clear on your values, your fears, your non-negotiables. This is the most important step and almost nobody does it first.

Step 2: Research the Reality, Not the Dream

Talk to people who are actually living it — not just the ones with the beautiful Instagram feeds. Ask about the hard parts. The money. The isolation. The bureaucracy. The moments they wanted to give up. The reality of Portuguese rural life — the fires, the language barrier, the infrastructure. Go in informed.

Step 3: Build Financial Runway

The biggest reason people fail at this transition is money. They underestimate costs and overestimate income. Before you make any move, aim to have at least 12-18 months of living costs accessible, and a realistic plan for income generation that doesn’t rely on everything going perfectly.

Step 4: Take One Small Action This Week

You don’t have to blow everything up tomorrow. You don’t need a perfect plan. You just need to move. One conversation. One enquiry. One email to someone already living the life you want. One honest conversation with your partner. One afternoon researching areas in Portugal.

Momentum is everything. And momentum starts with one step.

The Life You’re Longing For Is Not a Fantasy

The whisper you keep hearing — that pull toward something different, something realer, something more you —

That’s not doubt.

That’s not a midlife crisis.

That’s not irresponsibility.

That’s the truest part of you. Still waiting. Still believing. Still alive.

I know because I spent 27 years trying to silence that voice with substances, with busyness, with a career that looked good from the outside.

And the moment I finally stopped running and started listening — everything changed.

Not overnight. Not without pain. Not without the fires and the landslides and the withdrawal and the grief and the rebuilding.

But it changed.

And it can change for you too.

You don’t need to be fearless. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You don’t need the perfect circumstances.

You just need to begin.

So Begin. 🌿

And Now I Help Others Do the Same 🌿

Let me be straight with you about something. There are a lot of coaches out there. A lot of people with certificates on their walls and carefully worded websites who will hold your hand, validate your feelings, and send you away feeling temporarily better — without ever saying the thing that actually needs saying.

I’m not that kind of coach. Not because I don’t care — I care deeply. But because I’ve been where you are. Not metaphorically. Actually there. In the addiction. In the trauma. In the relationship patterns I couldn’t see. On the floor unable to walk. Sitting beside my dying mother. Going through 27 years of substance use and every withdrawal symptom that came with it. I have sat in the dark places you might be sitting in right now. And what helped me wasn’t gentle.

What helped me was truth. Raw, clear, compassionate truth — delivered without the padding that keeps people comfortable and stuck at the same time. That’s what I offer.

I hold diplomas in CBT — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy — NLP, and Life Coaching. I ran a spiritual healing centre for years, working with some of the most profound healing traditions and medicines on the planet. I’ve held space for people navigating trauma, addiction, grief, loss, and the kind of suffering that doesn’t show up on a doctor’s form.

But here’s what no diploma gives you — and what I also bring: I’ve lived it. Not studied it. Not observed it from a safe professional distance. Lived it. The addiction. The childhood trauma. The grief. The patterns. The withdrawal. The rebuilding. The moment the body gives out. The moment something finally shifts. That lived experience isn’t a footnote to my qualifications. It’s the most important thing I bring. Because when you sit across from someone who has genuinely been where you are, something different happens. The defences come down. The performance stops. Because you know they can’t be bullshitted. They’ve heard every excuse. They’ve used most of them themselves.

What working with me actually looks like — I’m not going to spend six sessions gently exploring how your childhood might have influenced your adult patterns. I’m going to tell you — clearly, directly, and with complete respect — what I can see from the outside that you can’t see from the inside. The pattern you keep repeating. The story you keep telling yourself. The thing you’re using to avoid the thing you actually need to face. I’ll say it with care. I’ll say it with empathy. But I will say it. Because the uncomfortable truth delivered with compassion is worth more than a thousand sessions of comfortable validation.

I’ve helped people walk away from addictions they’d carried for decades. Seen people completely restructure their relationship patterns after finally understanding where they came from. Watched people leave careers, relationships, and lives that were quietly killing them — and build something real on the other side. Not because I’m magic. But because I know the terrain. I’ve walked every part of it myself.

CBT to understand the thought patterns keeping you trapped.

NLP to rewire the deep programmes running below the surface.

Life Coaching to build the actual structure of the life you want.

Spiritual depth from years of working with healing traditions.

And real, lived, hard-won human experience that no classroom ever taught me.

The people I work best with are the ones who are done. Done pretending they’re fine. Done with the gentle approach that hasn’t moved anything. Done waiting for the right time, the right sign, the perfect moment. Ready to be honest. Ready to be challenged. Ready to actually change — not talk about changing.

Because you deserve someone who tells you the truth. Not the comfortable version. The version that actually sets you free. 🌿

Book my Airbnb on the river https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/1220308602650176903?unique_share_id=034680f7-e131-4a01-9132-4d1f94e162f2&viralityEntryPoint=1&s=76

📩 Or Work with me: wylderoots.org/work-with-alex​​​

Or visit my website wylderoots.org where I have many courses and blogs that will help too .

— Alexander Sully | WyldeRoots

Riverside. Portugal. Off-grid. Clear-headed. Free.

Living proof it’s possible — all of it.

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