On what led to him going to rehab:
“Nothing bad happened. I didn’t go to jail or anything. I just couldn’t stop. I was trying for the longest time, which sounds stupid, if you don’t know, you just stop drinking. I didn’t really know, until I started dealing with this, but if you’ve never had to look into it, you might not know, but if you just stop drinking, if you drink a lot, you can die.
I always drank. Drank beer all night, back in the day, sleep two hours, go out, wrestle 25 minutes. After shows, get f**ked up, wake up the next morning and sweat it out. Never had any problems.
At some point, it was the first time I tried to stop and I was experiencing for the first time, at least that I remember, alcohol withdrawal, which is as bad as withdrawal from just about anything. It’s dangerous, and a lot more dangerous in a lot of ways.
First thing they told me was, ‘Just quitting drinking, cold turkey at a certain threshold, which I was at, it’s the worst thing you can do. It’s the most dangerous thing you can do. You can go into cardiac arrest and die.’
What’s really common is you can have seizures. Something really bad can happen from that, that’s what happened to (Big) Cass (W. Morrissey), I was terrified of that for the longest time.
The feeling of it is crushing, physical, and anxiety. Not anxiety like you’re nervous about something, the physical feeling of anxiety. Your breathing is messed up, you’re twitchy. They call it the shakes because you’re literally shaking.
There were times when I would be at TV and I feel like, ‘People are going to think that I’m on drugs’ because I’m sober. I’d be talking to people and I’d have a little shot or flex just to mellow out because I’d be like, ‘People are going to think I’m on crack right now.’
I was leveling myself out for the longest time. That gets really tiring. Every match, especially at TV, were the longest days because I would be having this horrible alcohol withdrawal at TV, I was terrified I was going to have a seizure on live TV or on a plane and the plane would have to land.
To avoid that happening on a plane, I would never be at an airport and on a plane without being nicely buzzed. If I didn’t have time to hit the bar before I got on the plane or it’s morning and the bar is closed, I’d be sitting on the plane like, ‘Come on with the cart. Come on with the drinks.’ I was really scared of something catastrophic like that happening.
I was so exhausted with it because everything has to revolve around staying level. I couldn’t enjoy wrestling because I was so worried about that. You can’t go on TV and wrestle f**ked up, so I was worried, going through withdrawal.
As soon as it got done, it was this big wave of relief, ‘Got through another day, another TV, didn’t have a seizure and die on live TV. Sweet.’ Immediately start getting loaded because it’s been however long. Then you just end up drunk again. It’s this never-ending cycle of hell. There were months of absolute hell.
It wasn’t ‘I’m all stressed out and have problems.’ It wasn’t ‘I need to go to rehab and talk about my feelings.’ It was ‘I’m going to die.’ It can happen to anybody. I don’t know what the threshold is, but once you start feeling those withdrawal symptoms, be it alcohol or pills or whatever, that’s when you’re in trouble. Doing whatever you’re doing to normalize yourself, it’s a bad slope.”
On facing alcohol withdrawal symptoms when he and Renee Young had a baby:
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