Trey Laird: Founder of The Lighthouse Sober Living

We were honored to host Trey Laird, founder and chief executive of The Lighthouse Sober Living, as our November 2022 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Trey traded equities on Wall Street for 22 years, and for six of them took opiates every single day while his production numbers stayed excellent. He came to tell our group how that happens. You can watch the full recording above.

Give it thirty-six minutes if your work is still going fine, nobody has ever asked you a hard question about it, and you know something at home has quietly stopped working. Give it to the spouse who has started noticing and not said so. Trey speaks without notes, and he does not soften the years before anyone found out, which for members with a sentencing date is exactly the stretch Doug Passon builds a mitigation case out of.

The company credit card, and why good numbers stop the questions

He went to work on Wall Street in Manhattan in 1993. His first boss handed him a company credit card and a theory of the business.

my boss gave me a credit card and told me the more I take my clients out and do business with them, as more I take them out for dinners and games and nightlife, the more business they’ll do with me.

He was out most nights for two and a half years. The drinking climbed, the cocaine climbed, and every hour of it sat under the umbrella of doing his job, which he was doing extremely well. A career that keeps paying you is not a neutral fact here. It is what keeps anyone from asking the question, including you. Anyone who has held that seat, or heard Tom Hardin describe the same trading floor pressure, knows how many good quarters stack up in front of one hard conversation.

Can moving to a new city fix a drinking problem?

The first crack was logistical rather than moral. He woke up at his father’s house on the Jersey Shore with no idea how he had gotten there or what day it was, and the car in the driveway told him he had driven it from Manhattan. He called his father and said he needed to get out of New York, without using the word drug or alcohol.

His father did not argue, and did not name the problem either. He countered with San Francisco, and a reason made entirely out of clock arithmetic. It is two sentences of advice, and it bought his son six quieter years.

Then his wife suggested they move back east. His first thought was that he would have a problem with drugs and alcohol if he went, and he dismissed it in the same breath, because saying it out loud meant telling her. What he found himself doing three months after the moving truck arrived is the beat that stops the room. If your own plan is a new city or a clean start after release, watch that stretch next to A Guiding Light During My White Collar Prosecution.

How a prescription after surgery became six years of daily opiates

December 2002. A one month old son at home, and stomach pain bad enough that he drove himself to the hospital in the middle of the night. His appendix came out, and he went home with opiate pain medication. He had never taken an opiate before. What that first dose felt like is the hinge of the whole talk.

From the week between Christmas and New Year’s until July of 2008 he took them every day. He walks our group through how the counting goes without once reaching for drama, and by 2006 he was lying to his wife nightly while his self worth stayed parked in a career that was still going well, the identity question Dr. Erin Frey’s restoration study now asks our members to put into words.

Then his doctor called the trading desk and asked him to step off the floor. What that doctor said about his liver, and what Trey said back before hanging up and carrying on, is the exchange our members quote afterward. Anyone who heard Brian Cuban describe lying to his own psychiatrist will know the reflex.

Trey met Jeff Grant around 2016, while he was finding the recovery community in Fairfield County, the same corner of this work our group later heard about from Tony Dominguez.

it was a resource that I knew nothing about until the day that I needed it. And then all of a sudden, you know, all these people like Jeff materialized.

That is the line to hold onto if you are watching from inside a case, from the other side of the bedroom, or from the first year of rebuilding a life after prison, when the people who show up are most of what you have. He keeps it short on purpose now, because his sponsor has warned him that past twelve minutes he will probably start lying. Press play.

About Trey Laird

Trey Laird founded The Lighthouse Sober Living and The Lighthouse Recovery Coaching 365 Program, and is chief executive of both. Before that he spent 22 years as a Wall Street equities trader, starting at Bankers Trust and finishing at Lazard. He attended the Trinity School in Manhattan and Dartmouth College, has five children, and lives in New Canaan, Connecticut with his wife. He travels regularly to speak on recovery and treatment, and credits his decision to recover out loud with much of his life today.

This presentation was free, open to all, and held on Zoom on November 8, 2022. It is part of the Tuesday Night Speaker Series hosted by the White Collar Support Group, which meets on Zoom every Monday evening.