“The rain is a blessing in disguise
The flood’s coming and it’s drowning all the lies”
From “Face Everything And Rise” by Papa Roach
There is a parable about the “Good Wolf” and the “Bad Wolf.” A grandfather tells his grandson that there is a battle between two wolves inside all of us. The bad wolf is filled with feelings of anger, resentment and lies, whereas the good wolf is filled with kindness, empathy and compassion. When the grandson asks which wolf “wins,” the grandfather replies, “the one that you feed.”
Jacoby Shaddix – founding member, singer and songwriter for the band Papa Roach knows all too well the power of the bad wolf Shaddix has struggled with depression and substance dependence throughout his life. And in the past, he has turned his anger and resentment on himself as he struggled to recover. During our conversation for the Hardcore Humanism Podcast, Shaddix described how he recently had a lapse in his sobriety when he smoked marijuana. But rather than fall prey to the bad wolf, Shaddix explained that he embraced the good wolf and used acceptance and forgiveness to heal during his ongoing recovery.
To be sure, acceptance was not always Shaddix’s style. He is a can-do kind of guy, as is evidenced by Papa Roach’s 25 year and counting career, captured recently on their greatest hits album Greatest Hits Volume 2 – the Better Noise Years. Not having control did not resonate with him. “Acceptance and forgiveness are big parts of my recovery and big parts of my growth as an individual … Acceptance for me has been something that I’ve kind of wrestled with … I’ve been told acceptance is the answer to all your problems,” Shaddix told me. “And I’m like, ‘Well, I hear what you’re saying. But if I have to accept everything, the way that it is … it just doesn’t connect with me.”
And yet over time, Shaddix began to recognize the paradox of having more control by letting go of what he couldn’t change and accepting the world as it is in a given moment. “I have the power to change things in my life. And then there’s things that I can’t change,” Shaddix explained. “And sometimes I’ve got to just accept that that’s the way that those things are and move on. Because if I sit and, I guess, dwell in the space of trying to change something I can’t … then I’m just spinning my wheels. And that could be a real slippery spot for me. But I found that sometimes when I just let things be the way that they are, at the moment that they are, there’s freedom in that.”
Shaddix found that he had to apply this concept of acceptance to a recent lapse in his sobriety. “During the pandemic, I fell off the wagon and I was smoking pot … I just got caught up and depressed and just stuck in this space. And I wasn’t working an active program of recovery. And I found myself with a joint in my mouth, you know?” he recalled. “And yeah, it’s legal in California. And yes, it is medicine to some people. But it’s not to me. Anytime I put any kind of mind-altering substance in my body … there’s like this veil that gets dropped on me and just kind of like isolates me from the world. It isolates me from the potential of who I can become and puts me in a space of inaction.”
One of the consequences of the bad wolf is that when we struggle with accepting our mistakes and spiral into self-criticism and shame, we tend to isolate from others who may otherwise be able to help. But Shaddix’s new approach allowed him to show himself kindness and reach out to people who could help him. And his brothers in recovery supported him not only for not further breaking his sobriety with alcohol use, but also by letting him know that it was good to reach out to avoid that bad wolf path. “I was like, ‘Hey, man, this what I’ve been up to, I need help … I need help getting myself back out of this …,” he said. “You know, I told my guys, you know, well, at least I didn’t drink and they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s good,’” Shaddix described. “‘But you were heading straight towards it, homey. Like, that’s where you are going.’ And that was a really hard realization, but a good realization for me to have is to really understand like, I was feeding the bad wolf … I was just doing the wrong things. And I know that for me to drink is to die.”
Being honest and talking with people who supported him allowed Shaddix to grapple a bit more with the paradox of acceptance and change in his life. What came through in his discussion is that acceptance was not an absolute concept. And he recalled how one of his friends in recovery told him that he doesn’t always have to accept everything the way that it is, “‘You know, there’s things that you can change about scenarios, whether it’s your proximity to certain people or the way that you interact with certain people. And the result that you get, you can change those things … You have power.’”
Shaddix’s approach to acceptance has also included his understanding of his relationship with his father and how he’s approached their interactions. He explained that he has felt more forgiving towards his father than he had at different points in his life. “Forgiveness has been a really powerful tool in the things that I’ve learned in my recovery, you know. Because I dislike carrying around resentment … It’s like a heavy weight, you know, it’s like this backpack full of sh*t that you’ve got and you’re just lugging it around. And that is painful … It’s like, pray for your enemies, right? And I’ve been doing that a lot lately … That’s counter intuitive to who I am, as an individual … to pray for my “enemy” or my enemies, or the people that I feel like have done me wrong or whatever…,” Shaddix explained. “I wrote a song based around forgiveness. And, you know, the song is called “No Apologies.” And it’s a song to my father. And, you know, we’ve got a broken relationship…he was absent from my life for a majority of my life. And I just wanted to say to him … ‘You don’t have to say you’re sorry, to me’ … I understand why you are the way you are and what you went through … I have no time to carry any kind of resentment or hatred or, you know, anger against him because it’s just, there’s no, there’s a freedom in it, man.”
This forgiveness has opened up a new dialogue between Shaddix and his father, who is a Vietnam veteran. “I called my dad up, I tracked him down. It took me about a week to catch up with him and find him. But I just, I wanted to just let him know in my own words, okay, you know, I hold no resentment against you. Matter of fact, I love you, no matter what. Period. Straight up. Like, that’s the deal …” he said, “The cards that he was dealt…when I look at him, I’m like, Fuck, that’s overwhelming. The things that he had been through. And it just, it made for kind of a disastrous family situation. And I understand it. And it was a really, really healthy conversation with my dad – a lot of laughs, a couple tears. And, you know, I stand on the other side of that moment of forgiveness in my life and feel like just a better man, you know?”
The experience of how his brothers in recovery and his father responded to his more accepting approach resonated with Shaddix. And he recommitted to being kind to himself if he struggles. “There’s a saying that says, ‘We don’t shoot our wounded.’ And that’s like, when people go out and they’re, you know, living their life on their will and their terms,” Shaddix described. “And when they decide to come back into the rooms of recovery, it’s like, ‘Welcome back.’”
If you think you just heard something, it’s the howling of Shaddix’s good wolf.
Photo by Bryan Roatch
