In praise of “Memor to Self”
A Testimonial: Memo to Self — The Essential Second Half of Kevin McCauley’s Story
If Pleasure Unwoven taught families the science of addiction, Memo to Self shows them what surviving it actually looks like — and as its direct sequel, it completes a story that no family touched by addiction should go without seeing.
What makes this film so uniquely powerful is that Dr. Kevin McCauley isn’t narrating someone else’s case study. He is living proof of his own thesis. As a young Navy flight surgeon caring for Marine Corps aviators, McCauley became addicted to opioid pain medication following a surgical procedure — a story he has told candidly in interviews, describing how a routine prescription became “a superhighway into addiction”. What followed was devastating: relapse after relapse, forged prescriptions, and eventually a court-martial that ended his Navy career and sent him to the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, including a stretch in solitary confinement (drkevinmccauley.com; Northbound Addiction Treatment). Even after his release, his ordeal wasn’t over — he was arrested a second time by Medical Board investigators for prescription forgery and placed on five years of formal probation.
This is precisely why Memo to Self matters so profoundly. It picks up exactly where that darkness left off and answers the question every parent silently asks: can someone truly come back from this? McCauley’s answer isn’t a platitude — it’s a blueprint. Drawing on the extraordinarily high recovery success rates seen in monitored programs for physicians and airline pilots, he lays out concrete, replicable “protective layers” for sustained sobriety — treatment, mutual support groups, drug testing, meaningful work, and what he calls “hedonic rehabilitation,” learning to feel joy again without substances. It reframes recovery not as a fragile miracle but, in his words, as “neither rare nor random” — something that can be expected when the right supports are in place.
For families, this is the missing half of the conversation. Pleasure Unwoven explains why their loved one couldn’t simply stop. Memo to Self shows them what a real, sustained pathway back to a full life actually requires — patiently, without shame, and with genuine hope grounded in someone who walked through prison, professional ruin, and public disgrace and rebuilt a life of purpose. Today McCauley has maintained over fifteen years of continuous sobriety, lectures internationally, and serves as a Senior Fellow at Meadows Behavioral Healthcare.
I consider this film essential viewing — not just for families of people struggling with addiction, but for anyone who has ever doubted that someone can fall as far as McCauley did and still emerge whole. Watched together as a pair, Pleasure Unwoven and Memo to Self give families both the science to understand addiction and the living proof that recovery is real, durable, and worth every ounce of the difficult, hopeful conversations it takes to get there.
You can watch it for free at Dr. Kevin McCauley’s Vimeo page.
