'I’d become everything I hated': One man finds his David to battle the Goliath of addiction

Most people have heard the Biblical tale of David. Usually the tale of David versus Goliath, whether by reading about it in the Bible, or hearing it in a sermon or testament in church. Even if not, the phrase “David and Goliath” is popular, used often to denote an underdog situation, wherein a smaller, weaker opponent faces a much bigger, stronger adversary.

In the Bible, Saul, the 1st monarch of Israel, had previously defeated the Philistines in battle. The Philistines return with an army to attack Israel, and both forces gather on opposite sides of a valley. The Philistine’s champion, Goliath, throws down a challenge for single combat, but none accept. David, a young shepherd hears Goliath’s challenge, and accepts the challenge. Though offered armor, David takes only his staff, sling, and five stones from a brook.

David and Goliath face off, Goliath with his armor and javelin, David with his staff and sling. It’s said that David, outmatched by the massive size of Goliath, simply hurls a stone from his sling and hits Goliath in the center of his forehead, ultimately killing him.

The story resonates because people find themselves facing their own David versus Goliath.

But David’s story is much more. Over the course of his life, David was frequently the vehicle God used to display his compassion and redeem his people.

Sean Morton was one of those people, who has faced his own Goliath and now works to help others find redemption and compassion.

“I grew up in a home of addicts,” says Morton. “I chose very early on to not do that because I saw the consequences of it, the elements we were around. I absolutely hated it as a kid.”

Morton grew up in the south, near lower Alabama by the Florida panhandle, in a compound of sorts.

“The Morton Compound, with everything people would expect in that kind of environment, the southern hillbilly culture-drugs and alcohol, racism,” he said.

There are other, more nefarious activities he was exposed to as a child — violence, abuse, incest. At the same time, his family was very Christian, with church every weekend.

“It’s all polar in my mind, but somehow it was all very compartmentalized, and I knew at a young age I didn’t want to do those things,” Morton said.

When he was in his teens, his immediate family left the compound and moved to Washington State, but he still couldn’t escape drugs and alcohol, and recalls being close to other family members that were into that scene, but he remained strong, maintaining a sober lifestyle.

At this time, he was put into therapy to deal with sexual abuse and PTSD and issues surrounding his abuse, something Morton doesn’t shy away from discussing.

“I highlight the abuse because ultimately that trauma is what fed my addiction,” Morton said.

Through his teen years and into his early 20’s, Morton continued with therapy, gaining some control over his PTSD, learning behavioral therapy, and abstaining from drugs and alcohol. He met and married his wife, a girl he’d met when they’d been young teenagers back in Florida. They had both grown up in a world of drugs and alcohol and both had vowed to not fall into that life.

“I was 13 or 14 and declared I was going to marry her, then met her again when I was 17. I was only supposed to take her out once, but we were married about a year later,” he recalls with a smile.

As they established their lives, Morton says that his wife was always able to handle alcohol without falling into addiction, but after a lifetime of work to abstain, Morton gave in and took a drink when he was 21.

“That first drink, I literally became an alcoholic overnight. I was completely trashed that night,” he said.

Having never experienced alcohol up to then, it went straight to his brain.

“It felt so good. I no longer had to do any of the therapy or the disassociation that I’d learned because I’m living in a state of disassociation,” he recalls now. “All the stuff, all the trauma, the things that were in the foreground of my mind were gone. I didn’t care. That week, I started hiding from her. Waiting until she fell asleep to walk to the store. Not wanting to start the car just in case it would wake her up.”

It wasn’t long before he transitioned from the lighter alcoholic beverages to harder ones, even waking up and mixing Mountain Dew with rum. He says he drank constantly, but still stayed away from drugs.

In 2006, when he was 28, his daughter was born, and he was instantly smitten.

“Having this child, so perfect, so innocent, so sweet. She was too much for me. And then realizing that I’d become everything I’d hated,” Morton said.

Amid his love for his daughter, Morton experienced self-loathing, questioning, and believing that no better than the family he came from.

“The victim in me decided to be even more of a victim. I don’t deserve this little girl, I have nothing to offer her, all my self-worth and my value,” he says with a sigh, “I just felt worthless, and I got to a place where alcohol just wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough booze in the world. My last day of drinking before I turned to drugs was trying to cope, and barely feeling it.”

It looked like his bout with Goliath was going to end in defeat.

“There was just so much pain within me that I couldn’t deal with it all. I just needed to escape it,” he said.

All the while, Morton worked in sales, selling truck parts to large trucking companies. The position afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout Washington, Idaho, Montana, and northern California.

“It afforded me the connections and ability to go where I wanted with my time and my money,” he said.

He was presented with cocaine, which offered him the “solution I’d been looking for.”

His solution took him out quickly. Within a year-and-a-half, Morton seemed to hit bottom, losing his job. His wife was threatening to leave with their baby daughter. The drug use opened his wounds and ultimately made them worse instead of the euphoria he’d felt as they masked his pain.

“I was trying to medicate the pain and make it go away, but it ultimately made it worse. The more drugs I did, the more the pain would hit, the more things I had to try to act out in to get the pain to go away. And it was sex,” he said.

Morton says at the time, he had no limits, that when he was far gone within his drug use, very little mattered. Not his daughter, nor his marriage vows.

“I was open to anything and everything, spending very little time at home, very little time with my daughter. I don’t know if I consciously thought that at the time, I just know I would avoid her,” Morton said.

Morton’s wife finally dropped an ultimatum — get help or get out. He chose to move out.

“Treatment at that time didn’t sound like the right move. I’d have to stop doing drugs,” he said.

Then he found out that moving out in the state he was in, also meant he lost his daughter.

“What I failed to realize is that somehow, in my head, I needed that contact with my daughter. It had to be on my terms and very distant, but I felt entitled to it, to have some kind of contact, and when I chose to move out, the assumption was that I would still get to have that contact with my daughter,” Morton said.

His new reality included a “no contact” order. He wasn’t allowed to come to his house, wasn’t allowed to see his daughter. Morton had only his motorcycle and drugs, It took a few weeks for that to sink in, and without an idea of where he was going to go, he ended up in a trap house.

“I did still ty to see my daughter, but cops showed up and told me not to come back. My wife cut her phone off, cut my phone off. I had no way to connect with my kid. In that truth I sat in that trap house,” he said, noting he still has a hard time articulating that time.

“Without the presence of my daughter in my life, I had no reason to live,” Morton said.

And in that dark moment, he chose to just die. Painfully, he recounts that he decided to just lay there and let whatever happen, happen. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink water, didn’t do drugs, and the list of drugs is lengthy. The only line he didn’t cross was heroin. Morton was in a self-inflicted detox, believing he was going to die from the pain of it.

“I was doing so much drugs at that point that I genuinely believed that the detox itself would kill me,” he said.

If God puts a Goliath in front of you, He must believe there’s a David inside of you.

Something akin to divine intervention happened to Morton.

“I got an anonymous package. I woke up one morning, and somebody had thrown this package on my bed. I opened this package up and there was an AA book, an AA meeting schedule, a handwritten letter, and a $100 bill. The letter just described me, the man I am today. It was like somebody got a vision of who I really am outside the drugs.” Morton says. “I didn’t really know who they were describing. But this person said, ‘You are goodness, you are loved’ and how I could be as a parent and a husband.”

It was almost too much for him to process. He’d been low, waiting to die in the basement of a trap house.

The $100 was for gas for his motorcycle, the schedule was so he’d know where to take himself on his motorcycle, the book, well, that was for him to read and learn how to do the things he would learn in AA.

Morton steadfastly maintains the anonymity of the letter writer, saying only it was someone from his past who knew what kind of person he was before, and where he was at that moment.

“I think the heart of it all is God giving me a message directly. Because the person who sent it shouldn’t have known where to send it. I didn’t even know the address,” he said.

That package was enough for him to stop praying for death, and instead praying Psalm 57, asking for God’s mercy.

Morton also leaned on the story of David, though not the heroic version of him slaying Goliath, but the man who cheated on his wife, who killed a man because he got a woman pregnant.

“I knew he spent his time in a basement of a trap house, metaphorically, hiding from Saul, hiding from lions, from bears. My Saul, my lions, my bears were the drugs, the chemicals, the trauma,” he explains of relating to the story. “There’s a man that did worse than I did at that point and was still after God’s heart.”

Morton found the desire to stay sober, to live, to be something for my daughter. After a month living sober and in AA, Morton found a safe place to stay, away from the danger and risks the drugs, and got a sponsor. He also began repairing his fractured relationships with his wife and daughter.

“My wife got wind of my recovery and my sobering up, and somehow got my contact information and we started emailing and texting back and forth, even though she remained very guarded,” he said.

Morton went on to say that his wife had conditions to be met, like random screenings before he could see his daughter, which he did gladly.

“She deserves a dad who loves and cherishes her, and I wanted to be that person. I was willing to do whatever anybody told me to make that happen,” he said.

That was his catalyst. The catalyst to becoming an addict was the abuse. The catalyst for sobriety is his daughter.

His wife attended Al-Anon, got a sponsor, and went in to therapy, the things people need to do when a loved one is an addict. She set boundaries, made amends, and a little over a year into his sobriety, Morton says God opened another door that allowed for the couple to reconcile and become a loving unit.

His daughter recently turned 16 and has known her father as a sober, Christian man for 14 years.

“I have super open communication with my kid. We talk about my addiction, we talk about its impact on her, about my work, everything. There’s no filter, she’s well aware of everything,” he said.

Morton and his wife will celebrate 25 years of marriage next month.

He earned a college degree and began working as a Youth Pastor, specifically reaching out to teenagers, a group he believes are often overlooked in most churches. He has worked at True North Recovery since 2019.

“What I want people to know about people suffering from SUD is that we are in fact people. It’s easy to box someone in and vilify them as a junkie, addict, or drunk and hold those labels over them, forgetting that we are people, hurting, scared, trying to survive people. And the best way for a person to overcome their addiction is to be part of a community, a loving, boundary-setting, generous community,” he said.

Morton also says that while his story reflects a risk someone who took a chance and sent a drug addict $100, he adds that this is not prescriptive to hand out cash, but it is descriptive of how sometimes taking generous risks can be the difference between life and death.

“Look not at who the addict is, but try to see who the addict could become, if we can see their potential and help them see it as well then we can set them on a path to recovery,” Morton said.