Trevor Botkin is drawing from his experiences in recovery to bring peer support to the world of construction.
Botkin works with the Construction Foundation of British Columbia (CFBC) is involved in a project called The Forge, which is in the midst of transforming an old biker clubhouse in Langford into a support space for people in the industry.
“ This space will become the new headquarters of CFBC’s Forge suite of mental health initiatives. Everything from counseling to recovery coaching,” he said. “We’ll have a social opportunities for people to come together and hang out in an organized way with without the presence of drugs or alcohol.”
Botkin says initiatives to provide support and awareness to issues like mental health challenges and substance use in the trades can fail to catch on with workers if they don’t resonate with the people they’re trying to help.
“ You can have the best tool in the world. Guys just won’t buy it.”
He says peer support, people who have worked in the industry, experienced challenges, and successfully addressed them, is the “missing link”.
“As people who have been there and done that before, we immediately cross that barrier of them not seeing themselves reflected in you,” he said. “It’s harder to write somebody off saying ‘you don’t understand’ if you know full well they’ve been there and they’ve experienced something similar to what they’re going through.”
Botkin also spoke about some of his own experiences having gone through recovery.
“ I sit here six years into my recovery and I still have a counselor I work with. I don’t think there’s gonna be room in my life to not have a counselor. But six years ago, it was very stigmatized. I mean, I could have told you what I thought about counseling, and it’s not fit for the radio.”
Botkin started in the industry at 19 years old. At 29, he says he had to have a ruptured disk in his back fused. He says it was a turning point for his mental health.
“ When I had my back fused, I was like, ‘oh, I have to do this for the rest of my life. I’ve gotta be this tough forever.'”
He says eventually his whole life became about getting and using drugs.
“ That was the only thing keeping me going and allowing me to show up. So inevitably what would try and kill me, was my medicine for many years,” he said. “It allowed me to function, to be honest.”
Things came to a head in 2019.
“ My addiction had taken me to basically living in my mother’s basement where I was spending every bit of money I could make on drugs and had my poor mother convinced I was paying off credit card bills,” he said.
He was experiencing suicidal ideation, but ended up asking for help.
“I thought to myself briefly, they’re gonna find me here. Everybody’s gonna find out I have this problem that I’ve been keeping secret for, you know, the last 20 years of my life, and they’re gonna think I just gave up, and that, it was a, a bridge too far. I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“ I woke my mother up. a miracle happened. For reasons way outside of anybody’s control, I wound up in treatment the next day, in Cobble Hill and I started getting some help. And what I thought was a drug problem, and a me being broken problem, I started weeding through all that stuff. And, thank goodness, around 35, 40 days in, I started to become very aware of how wounded I was.”
Botkin says six years into recovery, he’s living life a new way.
“I’ve never had a gas tank so big. I’ve never been more resilient. I’ve never been more tough. But the other side of it is, I’ve never been a better father. I’ve got this opportunity to be a grandfather now and show up for my kids and my family in a way that I never was able to do,” he said.
“But it means I gotta pull over once in a while and I gotta check the oil and I gotta do some things to keep myself grounded and to keep myself sustainable.”
Botkin spoke about how he would pass on some of that message to people working in the industry.
“You know these guys, you get a handful of ’em in a room and you ask ’em a question. If things went sideways outside of a bar one night in the back alley, can I count on you to have my back?” He said.
“Every one of ’em would tell you that they’re that guy. They’ll show up for you that way. Then say, okay, ‘now I’m, I’m having challenges with my substance use. I’m struggling. I’m starting to drown in it. Can I count on you guys to have my back? Are you guys gonna tell me to go get my crap together and sort myself out? Or are you gonna say, Hey, what’s going on? Let’s talk about this. Right?'”
And I think when I speak in those terms and frame things a certain way, I get good reception from people.”
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