Episode 6 The Disease of Addiction

A discussion with the two retired CEOs of substance abuse treatment centers about addiction.

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SPEAKER_01 0:26

This podcast is meant to be about the journeys from life-changing setbacks to restoration. This journey takes on many forms and encompasses many different stories and topics, including addiction, prison, abuse, loss, illness, and other setbacks. The primary message is not so much the setbacks, but the personal, mental, spiritual, societal, physical, and other forms of recovery needed to emerge from these challenges with renewed hope and as better versions of ourselves. We will explore personal journeys and celebrate those who have waded through their own personal struggles and have come out on the other side, having not only survived, but against all odds are better because of the journey. This is meant to be a message of hope with the overriding theme that it is not the falls that define us, but rather the getting up. Thus the title, Miles Behind, Miles Ahead. Tom is the executive director of a nonprofit treatment facility. Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

I'm Tom Elmore. I am recently retired as CEO of a substance use treatment facility. Working the field for over 30 years and have a frame of reference for what recovery is all about.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Mike, the last I know you're doing something different, but you were also the executive director for a treatment facility. Give us a little bit about you and your background.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah, yeah, thanks. Like Tom, I've been uh been doing addiction work for almost 40 years at this point. And um, you know, I've got a if anybody could say that, you know, I I have a a good understanding, I won't say grasp, um, but a good understanding of what addiction disease looks like and what a solid recovery looks like.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Gotcha. Well, thanks, gents. Again, I'm really glad you're here. Um, so I'm gonna go ahead and uh and uh jump right in. Um uh when we do our series on addiction, um, maybe it'll be nice to have you back and talk to you a little bit about um uh get into a little bit more detail about a few things. Um, but but for the purposes of this, we're gonna just talk about it from a professional's perspective. So um you guys just feel free to step in anytime you want. Um, just a question for either one of you. Um, how how does the medical profession define addiction? Because I think a lot of people um think it's an uh a moral shortcoming or some kind of character deficiency. And uh, and so what how is that actually defined um uh by the by the medical profession?

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Tom, there's an easy one for you.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Well, the the definition has changed somewhat over the years, but we work from a place of understanding addiction to be the practice of some behavior or a pattern of choices and decisions that have negative consequences, and one continues to practice the same behavior over and over and over again, and in spite of the negative consequences. Now, in the medical realm, you know, the SU, you know, the substance use arena adopted that to say that when someone used a substance repeatedly, in spite of the consequences, they didn't use that to define addiction. Now, according to our DSM5, or which is the diagnostic manual that we use to classify levels of you know abuse, addiction, addiction is a is one of those categories of use. And it but there are different levels of use. There are some people who use moderately, there's some people who use in like in a minimal sense, and there's some people who use you know, be way beyond reason. So addiction covers, you know, that repeated practice of a behavior despite the consequences. And it is not restricted to substances. I mean, because we have, you know, it could be, I mean, we're looking at now treating gambling. We're now looking at, you know, treating food disorders. I mean, all those are considered addictions as well. Might might want to expand that.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Well, yeah, no, and I think, I mean, I would piggyback on what Thomas said. I mean, um, you know, some some of the just upfront things I would say, you know, uh you can get uh an insurance policy to cover substance abuse disorders. I mean, you know, it it's uh so if addiction were a moral failing or a decision process of some point that just people with poor character made, you couldn't get insurance to cover that. The medical industry wouldn't have that. So, you know, from my vantage point, you know, an addiction disease is is very well defined by the medical industry with a certain set of symptoms, and you have to meet the symptomology over a marked period of time to get the diagnosis, which is exactly how other medical model illnesses are diagnosed and treated. So, you know, there's a pretty clean diagnostic pattern, if you will. Um and then in the same breath, I'll say uh it defies definition, and I'm always love scratching my head at the various ways people present with addictive process.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

So um, and I'm gonna give that back to to my team to the folks in uh laypersons' terms, um, is that it is not a moral deficiency. Um, it is not uh something that I can wheel myself away from. Um the oftentimes, and uh there is some uh medical and professional intervention uh that's required. Um and I think it's important that people understand that. Um so so um, Tom, I think you talked a little bit about it can present as in gambling and and and then other areas, food. Um what does uh what does it what does it I know this is a very broad question, and and I'd ask you to be um let's let's just talk about substance use disorder, right? Um uh what does that, and when I say that I'm talking about drugs, alcohol, uh any mood of mind-altering chemical like that, um, what does that look like? Like when people come to would come to your facilities, what would that look like? Would it be uh some person and uh dressed up in rags that had a sack over their back that came in? Or I mean, what does it look like?

SPEAKER_02 8:02

I mean, addiction doesn't have a uh there is no when you look up addiction in the dictionary, you won't have a picture of this is what an addict would look like. I mean, you know, addiction appears in so many different ways. I mean, you could have someone that that is living an exclusive lifestyle and still be suffering from addiction. And then you could have the person that you know, a lot of times I think for the sake of convenience, people like to categorize addiction as being something I could visibly see. But that's not always the case. Addiction could exist, it is again the continued practice of some behavior in spite of the consequences. And some people do a really good job of masking the consequences. You cannot see the devastation or the impact it is having on the person. But I think we we could miss, we could misdiagnose or we could miss something in thinking that we we could have a picture of what addiction looks like. I think what we're talking about is like the characteristics of addiction and some of the things that some of the behaviors, like when you mentioned the moral deficiency, some of the things that people may adopt in order to facilitate the continued practice of that behavior may seem to be a moral, I mean, like stealing and manipulating folks and mismanagement of finances, infidelity, just a whole bunch of different things. But what it looks like, I I think it would be very hard to say that there is a real definitive picture of what addiction looks like. We have the more common ones, but there, you know, like I said, addiction could be you could be sitting right next to somebody in church that's suffering with addiction, and they may not look anything like the person that's outside trying to borrow a dollar to get a church.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Gotcha, gotcha. Mike?

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Yeah, I mean, I again I could just piggyback on that. I mean, I could give you countless examples and in both directions, answer the question. You know, when I worked in the public sector in a public detox for years, there were literally the police would bring people in who were wearing burlap sacks and living under bridges and drinking themselves to death. And when I worked in and uh in the same place, you know, the public sector facility, you know, housewives and regular guys who were uh, you know, just people that you'd see at the grocery store, you know. And when I worked in the uh uh in the private sector nonprofit, but I've worked with, you know, to Tom's point, not only could you go to church and the person next to you could be, you know, secretly alcoholic or addicted, you know, I've worked with more than one priest or pastor who was drinking the communion wine before the service, you know. I mean, you know, I've worked with captains of industry and people worth hundreds of millions of dollars who ended up sitting in a chair by themselves with a bottle of liquor, hopelessly addicted and completely miserable, and had everything, you know. And so there's it's it's a e it's an equal opportunity disease process, as are all medical model diseases. You know, how did how do you pick who gets hypertension? How do you pick who gets diabetes? Who knows exactly what causes those? You know, every you know, uh that there's a definite genetic link for people with addictive uh issues. There's no two ways about that, in my opinion, and certainly my anecdotal experience, but it's it's anybody, you know.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Wow, that those those are some really good things. I think that that educates uh a lot of people. Um so um part of my journey is that uh I started uh drinking uh in my early adolescence, right? I was 13 years old, and and and uh as I mentioned in an earlier episode, we were um we were mixing uh slogan and tang, and we thought we were the greatest bartenders the world has ever seen. So um, but uh what does the research say about like adolescent experimentation with alcohol and other drugs in terms of the probability that it will lead to addiction? Mike, you go first this time.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

In in my experience, and the research is very clear the earlier someone starts using, the higher the likelihood of developing an addiction is concerned. I think the research would suggest uh clearly that you know, uh alcoholism in particular, if someone starts drinking at 14, they're like the likelihood of them becoming an alcoholic, full-blown alcoholic, I think is maybe four times greater. I I could be grabbing that number out of the air, but it's it's a significant number, you know. And, you know, there's a lot of arguments out there, and the arguments is going to start getting a little more focused this summer in North Carolina around pot, but it, you know, like is pot the a gateway drug? And you know, I think what's happening in my experience is that that definition of what a gateway drug is expanding, in my head, what that means is people who are willing to experiment with drugs regardless of what it is early on, the likelihood of increasing that experience goes, you know, grows exponentially for them over time, regardless of what substance it is they started. I would suggest there's a big argument out there for people who started taking drugs or drinking starting with cigarettes. So, yeah, you know, a simple way of saying that the earlier someone starts, the more likely that they develop as an adult a full-blown addiction.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

And the research supports Mike's um point that when people adopt a behavior like using substances early on, the other development things that would be happening, say for an adolescent, how to cope, how to deal with laws, how to deal with all these other things that are happening in a normal development, some kind of way get hijacked because now you've got this influencer in the picture with how people perceive, you know, life, how they deal with life, how they respond to adversity and that sort of thing. When they learn about um different ways to fix a feeling with a feeling, when they learn that early on, it's kind of really difficult to unlearn that. So you have where where some folks are learning how to deal with life on life terms, when you introduce substances on early on, for a lot of people that becomes the go-to thing. Well, I don't like the way I'm feeling. Here's a way that I can change the way I feel. Now I'm not dealing with anything, I'm not solving any problems, but I'm dealing with the feelings. And a lot of folks do look at addiction as a feeling disease, basically trying to replace one feeling with another feeling.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Gotcha. Wow, that's good information, and I appreciate that. Um, so uh here's another uh uh uh question. It's a sort of a sticky subject, right? Um because in a lot of people's minds, and in some instances, folks have used religion to stop drugs or alcohol. And I hear it a lot, right? Turn it over to God or just pray. If you if you worry, don't pray, and if you pray, don't worry. Um and I my personal opinion is that um those kind of fixes are like um praying diabetes away. I uh uh I was at a I heard a speaker once say, um, if you want food, go in the closet and lock the door and just pray away and see if a hot dog comes squirting through the keyhole. And um, and I think I think that's the same kind of thing here is that um is that is that people have that um have that perspective. So like it's a touchy subject, but could you guys kind of expound on um on how those things interact and um and if it's more exception than the rule or what is your experience with it?

SPEAKER_00 16:38

I'll wade in real quick. So people were finding recovery. Let's talk about alcohol just because it's it's easier. People were finding recovery before there's 12-step programs and self-help groups, you know. AA itself is born of a Christian movement or a religious movement from the Oxford groups, right? And you know, the the the mid to late 1800s were were you know there were huge temperance societies and temperance movements in this country that were all based in religious codes, and you would sign contracts to become a member. You know, 400 years ago, John Wesley, who started the Methodist Church, was he he was a big leader in temperance. You know, if you're gonna be a Methodist, you couldn't drink, you know. So uh it's not a new, it's not a new thought. Um, but I think the the people I've seen who have successfully used a religious path to find recovery, and they're out there and they're happy and they're doing it, but they're doing what the religious people do. You know, they're they're going to the institution, they're participating in the functions, they've developed relationships within that structure to support what it is they want to do. They've developed a personal spiritual practice to support this goal they have of not drinking or drugging. Um, and they do it with a disciplined, they do it in a disciplined measure to get the results they're looking for. You know, so that's really no different than what we're asking people to think about when they come to treatment and and do whether it's 12-step work or other forms of recovery. Um, but someone who's yelling at you, you know, all you need is God and just go to church and you'll stop, that ain't helping anybody. You know, and um, you know, and because they're in in my experience, people who are addicted, when they finally make it into treatment, you know, they are filled with so much guilt and so much shame. A lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them have all these unresolved family issues and trauma issues, plus they're pretty sick. You know, they need some help, they need they need some support. They've there's a lot of work to be done to kind of clear the road into this new life of recovery. And just saying, you know, you'll just go to church, you'll be okay, that's that's not helpful. You know, so it it's a long-winded answer because it it's not just do this and you're okay. It's there's a whole lot of stuff you gotta do, and then you gotta keep doing that in order to stay okay, you know.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Gotcha. Tom.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

I think with the addiction process, once one admits that like in in the first step, when one admits that there are powers over the addiction and that they're like so.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

When you say the first step, you're talking about the first step in recovery programs.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

There's several different um 12-step programs. And so I'm not, you know, this is probably you need another whole um podcast for that discussion. But when folks admit that whatever they're doing is not working, right? I'm just breaking down in that language. Whatever you're doing is not working. And you know, and you have tried to not do it, you've you know, tried willpower, you tried, you know, I'm gonna let somebody hold my check and I'm gonna put my money in the Bible, and I'm doing all these different things, and none of them work. I think what's left is in with that admission that this thing is bigger than maybe than oneself, then I think it's just the natural human inclination to seek out hope. And that's basically what the one of the tenets of the counseling profession is the installation of hope. Yep. No matter where you are, what's going on, there is still hope. You're still breathing. There's still maybe something we can do to change life as you're seeing it right now. And so I think it's not surprising to me that religion oftentimes is thrown in there as a source because it is a socially acceptable vehicle of hope. Um, faith and evidence, you know, belief in something that you may not have tangible evidence of, but just the faith that somebody else is espousing or talking about. But I think um it works for some folks, but I think for many people in recovery, they find that they need to base their hope on something that is that they can personally embrace. And I think the the risk we run when we have the zealots who come in and sometimes say, This is the way you get it, you gotta get Jesus in your life or whatever, they run the risk of the person who may not be ready for that. They need the hope. They may need to find the hope in some other way. But religion is often the go-to, it's like the get out of jail free car or something, because everybody's familiar. When you bring up religion and use the the word, when you bring up God, that is sort of you know that that just switches gears. And so uh uh I'm not saying that it's not a tangible tool, but I'm just saying that sometimes I think it gets overused and gets thrown in when people don't know what else to put in there to instill the hope. They will put the religion in there, thinking like, well, I can't explain it all, but here's religion. The religion, here you sort it out. Just take the religion and then just kind of explore that. And it works for some people. Maybe by the time that they get around to the fact that they gotta do some work on the inside, regardless as to what they pray to or what they believe. But the religion may buy some people some time, but I don't think we can build a real universal program around just the concept of religion by itself that needs to be. That's why we talk about the physical, the mental, and the spiritual, sometimes the emotional and the social. All of those things need to be developed as well.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Gotcha. Let me just add this right quick. You know, the if if religion, and again, not to be a not to be controversial, but if religion was the answer, then that would fix people right away. But I I've worked with a number of priests, preachers, pastors, TV evangelists, all people who had plenty of religion and were dying from alcoholism. You know, and so I think to that end, and this is one of the things that I think that sets addiction process apart from other medical model illnesses, is the spiritual impact. You know, somebody gets cancer. What I would suggest, and I think this is true, that the when people get terminal illnesses, sometimes the sicker they get, the more spiritual they become. You know, as they don't need their body anymore, they start to merely move into the a spiritual belief, into a spiritual practice, into a place of open spirituality where they know they're going away from here, but they're going to go on some other kind of journey. And so they start to get different, they start to get better spiritually. People who are addicted are just the opposite. The longer addiction, active addiction goes forward, the sicker someone gets spiritually until there's this collapse right into this self-centered black hole of selfishness and self-centeredness and self-loathing that you know that has to be has to be treated holistically. And so, you know, you know, me and Tom both, I think, would tell you very clearly that a good treatment practice is going to address someone's mind, body, and spirit, you know. And um, without those three, without that approach, in in my experience, people just tend not to get well. You know, they might stop using, right, but they're not getting well. You know, so the spiritual impact of late-stage addiction is really pretty incredible to witness sometimes, as is the blooming of recovery. You can see people come alive in recovery from a spiritual standpoint as they start to make connections with with a new life, you know. Gotcha, gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

So they say they say I don't know where I heard this some years ago. They talked about religion being for folks that didn't want to go to hell, and spirituality being for folks who have been to hell and didn't want to go back.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

And so that helps for the layman. I mean, just to understand that some people have already experienced something so devastating in life that they're looking for a deeper reason, they're looking inside. Like, what do I need to do to keep from going back there? Right? And religion could be the set of the practice of a set of doctrines and you know, rituals that may have nothing to do with development of character or anything like that. You could just be marching through the rituals and doing everything just as you're supposed to do it and not connecting anything to the development of one's character and getting close to something bigger than yourself, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Right. Uh yeah, it does. I I know that some people would argue that um the practice of religion does get you closer to something bigger than yourself. I my thoughts are you can do both, um, but you but you better do something um something uh other than um just religion. Like you can do you can do both, but but what religion? Religion is as defined as just a rote repetition of stuff. Go to church every Sunday, uh tithe, pray, but what about all the work that's required on the inside to grow and get better? I know that um there's a lot of things that I brought um to my recovery with me that weren't covered in church, right? So um, and I'll leave that there because uh we we we gotta move forward. So I want to talk a little bit about relapse. And uh relapse is uh for those that don't know what I mean when I say relapse, my understanding of relapse is that you stop using the substance uh or the gambling or the sex or whatever it is, you stop using it, and then um for some reason you start back and you go back down that destructive path. Um so, but from your from you guys' perspective, um, what is relapse? Does it constitute failure? Um is there hope? Um let's just talk about it and and um is it a is it a uh something that's a part of some people's journey in recovery?

SPEAKER_00 28:26

So relapse, uh I think relapse in my opinion, well defined is a return to symptoms, you know, a return to active disease. And um, you know, addiction, addiction disease is no different. It it is a disease that's prone to relapse if the the treatment is not is not uh if the treatment is interrupted or ineffectively applied. So I reject the notion that people say it's a relapse and disease or that relapse is a part of recovery. I I just uh that's just it it that just gets under my skin like you wouldn't believe that relapse is not a part of recovery. You know, relapse is relapse, relapse is a return to being sick. Um now I think to your point, Stanford, relapse is part of some people's stories, if you will. You know, and I've you know I've worked with tons of people and they'll come to treatments and you know they'll they'll their head is down, they'll say, I'm a chronic relapser, and I'm very quick to say you're not a chronic relapser. That's a shame-based statement. That's a label that's been applied by themselves or people around them that indicates that they're pretty hopeless and there's something wrong with them, that they're a bad person. But there are people who've had chronic relapses. In other words, they continue to get sick or stay sick. So why is that? Well, it's because the treatment has been either ineffective or or not applied effectively. So, and in my experience, you know, relapse is a process that starts a long time before people have a return to use, you know. Um, often, in my experience, rooted in unresolved shame, unresolved grief, um, unresolved trauma, you know, um, that it feeds uh incorrect beliefs and notions of oneself or you know, or poor coping skills or patterns. And when put in a corner, people you know revert to a default setting of using. So if if people are willing to do the work to, you know, to take that inside journey, you know, to do that introspection and start to do the hard work of emotional spiritual recovery, relapse does not have to be part of their process, you know, but relapse does occur for people who are not treating their disease effectively. And again, that's that's true across medical model illnesses. You know, if you're diabetic and you're not watching your diet, you're not losing weight, you're not checking your sugar, you're not, you're not doing all the things, you keep showing up the doctor's office sick. And the doctor, you know, chastises you or gives you direction. And if you don't do the treatment, you don't get well. And addiction disease is no different in that in that respect.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

Tom I think the research supports that addiction, the roots of addiction run so deep, I think that a lot of folks think that they deal with like the surface, what they feet see on the surface, or what they feel initially. But there is, when we get back to the root cause, I mean, and that and that takes some that's some work. And sometimes it can be for an individual, that could be a very scary process. Because you're talking about going down and pulling up feelings and trauma and all kind of some of the stuff that you had just would rather not even think about or talk about, you know, some of that may have contributed to why we use in the first place. And that's why this process of recovery, I think sometimes folks use sometimes I think they use the term recovery somewhat loosely because, you know, just because someone hasn't used in a while, we, you know, we call that abstinence. But a recovery process is a change in character and it's an ongoing process. And I think sometimes people, we could become complacent, or we could think that, well, I've been doing this long enough that I'm an autopilot now. I can just, I can cruise on out from here. But like anything else, if we stop doing the things that we need to sustain and nurture the recovery process, then we are, in effect, maybe looking at undoing so much of the progress that we accomplished. And it's just some of the things, you know, we hear sometimes people use the verbiage like, if I don't leave the basics, I don't have to come back to the basics. Some of the things that they did did early in the beginning of the process, when they had like a sponsor and they were working staffs and going to meetings and doing whatever the thing that it was that kept their recovery alive and vibrant. Now, and that may change. What it looks like at five years may be different in 15 years or 30 years, but there's always the focus, is always on who that person is. You know, as a recovering person, you know, I'm an addict, and I have to always remember that my perception of the world is seen through the lenses of someone who is characterized by those symptoms that Mike talked about. And so just because I'm not doing things today doesn't mean that I'm not still capable of doing it. And this disease is insidious, meaning dangerous in ways that we can't see. So we may be closer to a relapse than we think if we are complacent or we become, we lose our humility and become arrogant, or think that we know that we're smarter than the disease. You know, we got it all figured out. And we can set ourselves up to where help, the help that we get from the recovery process, we could cut ourselves off from the help. And I'm and I strongly believe that before a person can resume using again, they got to get rid of everything and everybody that could stop them. They got to remove slowly, psychologically, mentally, physically, they got to remove everything that gets in the way of them using again. They got to find some kind of way of discounting that. And that's what I think happens a lot of times when folks resume the using behavior because they they let go of all of the things that kept them from using once upon a time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

And I think the Tom's point, and and I'll just add, you know, like men and Tom's heard this, I've heard this, you've heard this, Stanford. So someone will come back to a 12-step meeting and say, Oh, relapse, and someone will go, Well, what happened? They'll say, Well, I stopped going to meetings. Well, the act of not going to meetings doesn't cause relapse. What I want to ask them is, what was the decision to decide? How'd you decide to stop going to meetings? What's happening there? And to Tom's point, what is it about that that you've made this conscious decision to start pulling away from the very thing that was gave you this new life? That's the relapse process, that decision to pull away, not the act of not going, the decision to not go, you know. And I think that, and and I and I appreciate Tom saying this, that the word complacency, it's a huge word, right? You know, I've seen it defined at one point as smug confidence. You know, the difference between I got this and I can do this, those are two very different mental positions. And the I got this is an indicator that, yeah, the disease is saying, no, I got you. You know, it won't be long now, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Wow. Whew, good stuff, man. I I I love these kinds of conversations. Very informative, and uh, a lot of it is my own personal experience and also kind of touches me at a deep place. Um I want to just ask you two guys, um, because I want to, you know, we talk about hope. Um, um, what would you say to someone that's um that's an active addiction and and seeking recovery? Um, what what would you say to them to encourage them that you know it's not the end of the world, that there's a way out, that there's hope. What would you say, Tom?

SPEAKER_02 36:59

I'll tell everybody that we're in the we're in the middle of a story, and there's a lot of blank pages left to be written. And we and you know, we have the first half of our story, it's already been written, and you can't change it. It is what it is. You can learn from it, you can you know build on it. But we have so much of the story is yet to be written. So we are in the middle of something, and it's up to each individual to determine what the what the rest of this story is gonna look like. And we are we have more power than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. I mean, just because of who a person has always been doesn't mean they have to be that from now on. So, I mean, there is the there is the phenomena of change that can happen at any point in time and place. And, you know, and I tell that to myself sometimes. Because sometimes as I get older, I start to tell myself, well, you don't have much story left, so now you can let your guard down and relax. You know, I mean, I've got to, in fact, this is like I'm looking at like the fourth quarter, right? So those are some things I gotta have some priorities, I gotta be probably more diligent than ever before. Because the time that I have left is very valuable. So I would tell folks to look at not so much as the history that got us to where we are, but look at what is yet to be unfolded, what is yet to come. And we have so much um opportunity in that to have something very different maybe than we've ever had before.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Gotcha. Mike.

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Yeah, and and and Tom said it earlier, um, and and you know, and he's he's 110% correct. Then, you know, the the the first the the first tenet, if you will, of of counseling, you know, is the installation of hope. I mean, that's you've got to give someone a a toehold, you know, somet a ledge of some sort to hang on to, right? And so, you know, the the multitudes of people that I've worked with who come into treatment broken and see no way out, you know, the what do you do with that person? You know, what if that person's been to treatment ten times already? You know? Um, what if they've had, you know, ten relapses? What if the they've been completely shunned by their friends and family, and and you know, then and here they come into treatment again, and you know, what do you say? And and and and I love what Tom said, you know, that if you can get someone to hear that, you know, that this is your story ain't over. And and I think that's what what I would tell somebody, you know, when what I've said to people, you know, that it it doesn't have to be like this. You know. This is this is this is not how things have gotta be. This is how things are right now. But you know, grab on to what I believe of nothing else, and that things can be different if you'll if you'll allow for that, you know, and and try to touch that that that remaining spark in somebody that I believe is still in there for buddy. I think that that essence of each of us is can't be damaged. It just gets cuttered up, it just gets covered up, you know, you just get more crap piled on top of it. But if you can touch that with somebody and you know, and get them maybe to latch on to your own belief that they can get better, people will move. And and then I think the other piece of that as well, and and you know, this is treating people with dignity, you know, treating people with love, treating people with patience. You know, you know, it's a that old thing meeting people where they're at. If someone's at the worst day of their life, you know, checking in the treatment again, you know, telling them, I'm glad you're here, and you can get better. You know, you've you've got to give people a lifeline of some sort. Whether they believe that or not is not really the issue. If they'll just believe that maybe because you believe that. You know, how many times do have we heard people say this? You know, when you go to an NA meeting or an AA meeting and you're brand new, and somebody comes to you after the meeting and gives you a hug and says, Oh, we're glad you're here. Keep coming back. Man, for some people that's that's they're like, What? Keep coming back. Ain't nobody told me that in years. People people keep telling me, get the hell out of here. You know. So, you know, it's those kind of simple things, a simple love, a simple a hug, a touch, a word. But it it's trying to make some kind of connection with somebody for just a brief moment in time to where you they can see there's this spark available where things can be different than this, you know. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

Gentlemen, I want to thank you. I'm sorry, go ahead, Tom.

SPEAKER_02 41:59

It's not about addiction. Addiction, one of the characteristics is that you dare not dream. I mean, if you're thinking like addiction teaches an individual to don't even think about doing better. I mean, so when you we meet somebody who's struggling with addiction, you gotta understand too that they're thinking, that their self-image, there's you know, they're how they see themselves, the conversation that they're having with themselves is sometimes a very negative one because it hurts to plan to do better, want to do better, and every day you fall short. And so addiction kind of you know becomes the a way of thinking that you dare not dream of getting up out this whole. I mean, so you learn how to exist and survive in that state. So when somebody comes in and says, hey, you could do better, we need we need to understand and carry the message that when we we're saying that, we're also uh we're presenting an argument against what is going on sometimes in somebody's head and in their heart. Right. And they're thinking, like, yeah, I know y'all, y'all got are doing better, but it's not gonna work. I mean, they don't really believe. Because when we talk about the installation of hope, when you remove hope and the space, when you take hope out of somebody's being, then despair could set in where hope was supposed to be. And so when you come in with the hope, there's no room for the hope because despair is a setup shop, and despair is like this where this is our place right now. And so you got to try to some kind of way, get hope in there some kind of way, and sometimes you have to be real creative with how you know. Sometimes you talk, you might tell your story, you might talk about yourself, or you might show somebody else, look at remember so-and-so, you know, he look how he did, but you have to do something to get hope in there because if you take hope out of a space, despair, uncertainty, fear, all of those things move into that space. And so sometimes, that's like we're sometimes us working in the field, when we're trying to you know bring the hope. That's why we have to work with our clinicians to help them understand. You don't give up on somebody just because they didn't, the first day you met him, they didn't respond to your terrific class you gave or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 44:37

Right.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

You're thinking he's not serious about treatment because he didn't, you know, he didn't turn around 24 hours, right? It may take who knows how long before someone, you know, makes room for the idea that maybe I can do better.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Gotcha. Gentlemen, we are out of time. I am so, so grateful that uh that I was able to have you two guys on. That was some very good and insightful stuff um for our audience and a lot of it for me too. So uh a lot of it resonates with me. Um, so I really appreciate it. Um I'm gonna um again, I'm gonna uh thank you guys. I really, really appreciate it, and um see you soon. For those of you that are suffering from addiction or that may know someone who has this disease, I hope this was helpful. Once again, thanks for coming. See you next time.