The Journey of Shane Spurgeon: From Struggles to Self-Acceptance

Growing Up Different in Jefferson County

When I talked with Shane Spurgeon on Nightmare Success, he didn’t sugarcoat how things started. Shane grew up in Jefferson County, Missouri, in what he called “the valley.” His dad was a truck driver, home only on weekends, and Shane was the oldest of three kids. But the real struggle was internal.

“I was just parents were great. My dad was a truck driver. So he was only home on weekends, you know, on the road,” Shane told me. “And then when he did come home and that’s nothing against my dad, but you know, like I was in trouble a lot. You know, it was back in the early 80s where, you know, ADD and ADHD and all this stuff was… Nobody talked about that.”

Shane couldn’t sit still in school. He spent months with his desk outside the principal’s office because teachers didn’t know what to do with him. His mom even moved him to Catholic school, hoping the nuns could help. It didn’t work. He was expelled from St. Pius as a freshman after an incident involving a female student.

The clothes he wore to school weren’t cool enough. He didn’t fit with any particular crowd. Sometimes he got picked on. Baseball was his one escape, the place where he felt good at something. But once he stepped off the field, the negative voice in his head took over again.

Finding the Wrong Crowd

After getting expelled from Catholic school, Shane transferred to Fox High School. That’s where he found people who accepted him, but for all the wrong reasons. They smoked weed, drank, skipped school, went to the mall to shoplift. For the first time, Shane felt like he belonged somewhere.

“I got a crowd that I belong. They like me, you know, like me. And that’s where it all does,” Shane said.

He stopped playing baseball. At 17, he dropped out of school and moved out of his parents’ house. By then, his parents had divorced, which Shane saw as more evidence that he wasn’t good enough for anything. His oldest son was born around this time, but Shane was selling weed and acid, not making any real money because he was using most of what he sold.

“I chose drugs and alcohol for everyone and everything. And that’s including all of my kids. And I have, I have a lot of kids, you know,” Shane explained. He has five kids now with a sixth on the way, all with different women. Each time he promised himself he’d stay and do the right thing. Each time he chose substances instead.

The Indictment That Changed Everything

Shane thought he was doing better when the hammer fell. He’d stepped away from cooking methamphetamine for almost a year, though he was still stealing pain pills from his dad and using bath salts. In his mind, this counted as progress.

Late one night, high and disoriented, Shane got a call from his dad. The chief of police wanted to talk to him about some robberies. Shane was so strung out he didn’t think twice about walking into the police station. The marshals were waiting with a federal indictment.

“I was oblivious because I was just so strung out, I didn’t know what was going on. I’m like a diamond for what? It’s just a blur,” Shane remembered.

He spent 14 months in county jail, most of it in a unit under construction where the windows were boarded up. The only time he saw daylight was going to court, which happened exactly twice in those 14 months. For nine months, he lived in a space not much bigger than the room where we recorded this conversation.

Six Years Inside the System

When Shane finally made it to Forest City Low, a federal prison in Arkansas, he felt free after those 14 months in county. The compound had over a thousand inmates and a big yard where Shane could actually move around. He immediately connected with someone he knew from southern Illinois, which got him in with the white inmates right away.

Shane spent his time working out and playing handball. He got heavily tattooed, covering his head and working on his face with racially inspired ink. But he made clear this wasn’t about looking tough. “I was doing this to cover me up. I don’t, I didn’t like to look at me. I sure didn’t want you to look at me because I feel you’ve seen me. You’ve seen what I always felt inside. And now it’s that scared little boy. I’m going to cover that up.”

After two years, Shane transferred to a camp in Pekin, Illinois, but that lasted less than a month before SIS (Special Investigative Services) caught him with contraband. Six months in solitary followed. Then they shipped him to Beaumont, Texas, a maximum-security prison where he’d spend the rest of his sentence.

The Program That Started Real Change

Near the end of his sentence, facing potential new trouble, Shane talked his way into RDAP, the Residential Drug Abuse Program. He needed that year off his sentence, and he convinced the staff he was serious about change.

His counselor was Linda Smith, and Shane credits her with seeing something in him that he couldn’t see in himself. “Miss Smith’s seen something to me that I just didn’t at the time. Maybe for the first time that’s happened. Somebody’s seen something.”

One day, looking out the window, Smith asked Shane about his goals. He didn’t know what goals were. She asked about his beliefs about himself. Shane didn’t understand the question. When she showed him a list of negative core beliefs and asked which ones resonated, Shane said all of them did.

The program wasn’t just about drugs, Shane realized. It was about him, about the voice in his head that had been running the show since childhood. For the first time in his life, someone was helping him examine why he felt like he wasn’t good enough, why he kept choosing substances over everything and everyone he cared about.

Where Shane Is Today

Shane’s story continues beyond his release. He’s working on getting some of his tattoos laser removed, the ones that no longer represent who he wants to be. He’s dealing with beliefs about himself that took 30-plus years to build and won’t disappear overnight.

The scared little boy from Jefferson County is still there, but now Shane can see him clearly. He understands that success isn’t about having the truck or the girl or looking intimidating. It’s about being free from the prison he built in his own mind, one negative belief at a time.