The Addiction Recovery Podcast I wanted to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for. It is intended for entertainment and informational purposes, but not considered help. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them.
But don't rely on a podcast or to be that form of help it's not it's just a podcast it's for entertainment and information only so let's keep it in that light all right have a good time learn something and then get the real help that you need from a professional all right so uh Back in the studio again with Scott. Episode 3. Episode 3 of Scott. It's going to be like Star Wars. Opened up Scott's brain. It's going to be like Star Wars. The prequel, the sequel. The prequel's prequel. Sequel.
And it's Mandalorian and all the other. Okay.
Is that Little Yoda?
Mandalorian? Yeah. Baby Yoda? Yeah, yeah. Baby Yoda's cool. Mando and Baby Yoda. And then the questionable Boba Fett show that's not really doing that well. I got kids, so I watch this stuff. Yeah. All right. So the last time we met, we were talking about, we got into the topic of surrender and powerlessness. And this is something that I have run into a lot in my practice, especially with all of my addicts, the idea of surrender. Don't tell me what to do. F you. I'm not listening to you. I
just got to fight this.
Yeah.
I got to fight this to death. I got to beat this thing.
Yeah. So, all right. So if we go through the steps, and for those of you who don't know the steps, step one, my life's become unmanageable. Step two, realized I needed to turn to a higher power to get that recovery. Step three, surrender to God as I understand him. Is it the higher power? All right. So the very first part of recovery is you are powerless, right? This addiction is more powerful than you are, right? And what is it in step 12? What's step 12?
Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we try to carry as much to addicts and practice principles in all our affairs.
Right, so now all of a sudden you're powerful. Right, how did that happen? I thought you were powerless, right? And this goes into the idea of once an addict, always an addict, right? Once you're powerless, you're always powerless. So you go into the 12 steps with step one saying your life's unmanageable and you're powerless. And then you go through this cocooning and metamorphosis through step four and five and six.
And then you go into the humbleness and the forgiveness part and hopefully understanding that in step eight and nine. And then all of a sudden you're out doing the good works. Yeah, it's awesome. Right. So how did you go from powerless to powerful? Well, you had to surrender.
So what does that mean for somebody who's heavily traumatized, as all addicts are, to give up the one thing that you kept clutching to that you felt was helping you get into recovery, which is your arrogance and your power, right? Your control. I'm going to control everything. Everything around me, everybody, while I'm spinning out of control.
Well, it's really hard to give up because I think that, like, I've been doing a lot of reading by a certain guy that wrote a book that's really good. I forgot his name. Anyway, that addictive behavior is like, a substitute action for something else. Mm-hmm. Right. Like, I'm powerless. Everything around me is all jacked up. My life is burning to the ground. Right. But I do have control over going and buying this beer.
So I'm going to go buy this beer because that gives me a little bit of sense of control over my life.
Really? I can control this. You think that's what that is?
But then, I mean, the beer, you know, the man takes the drink and the drink takes the man, right? But the action of, this is going to make me feel better and I can control this action. I think is a sidebar from sitting through a lot of stuff and trying to fix a lot of stuff.
That didn't
make a whole lot of sense.
Put on your addict hat. Not your clinical hat, but your addict hat. When I was drinking at my worst, I did do that. I felt that was very empowering. to walk in and go buy that wax boxed case of beer, long necks, and then throw it in my car and drive around in my car drinking.
I did that too.
Yeah.
I would drive in the little tiny roads up in Maryland and just be throwing beer bottles out the window and almost wrecking entries.
Oh, dude, you can't do that. That's five bucks you get back from the returning of the bottles. Not in Maryland. Really?
No.
You're kidding.
No. Oh,
geez. I didn't want any empties in my car. Wait, no, no, no. Hold on a second. I'm talking about the wax box that opened up in the center like a bar, like the bar type box. It was a wax box case of long necks. Oh, okay. You threw those out the window?
No, no, not through the bass ales. Oh,
you're an amateur. Come on, man. I found the liquor store where you could buy that. I was in my 20s. I got five bucks for returning the full case with the bottles and the wax box, and I think the total was 12, so it was cheap. Those were precious, man. You can't throw those away. All right, so anyway, it was very empowering for me to go do that, and then the drinking was, I really feel like I'm doing something with... this feeling that I can't stand.
I'm actually wrestling and winning while I'm drinking. As well as
numbing.
Yeah, it goes away. Well, at first it goes away, right? And then you drink a few more and then it starts coming back. But now you feel real powerful because I'm doing something with this. You're not doing anything. No. But you think you are. I'm controlling this. Yeah, but it's controlling you. Right. Yeah. So how do you convince somebody when they come in that, listen, this drug is more powerful than you? You're not winning anything. There's no winning. You're not ahead of the curve here.
How do you do that?
I tie it more in with the unmanageability because of the powerlessness. Because I ask in group all the time, I say, what is a prime example of unmanageability in your life right now? And they'll pop off with a bunch of different stuff. I said, no, we're managing your life for you right now. We feed you. We house you. We have you go to group. We are managing your life. And that kind of makes people go, oh. But on the outside, it's different when you're not in treatment.
Yeah. And the problem being is your life gets so unmanageable that all you know how to do or want to do is drink or use more to ignore that and push it all away. It's like using sleep as an escape mechanism for your life, which I've seen me do too, and I see happens a lot. You're going to just keep going and going and going, and stuff keeps getting worse, but it's so bad that you can't stand being there, so you're going to go do this again. It's the cycle, man. Yeah.
And no matter how much destruction. I mean, I don't know how many times I woke up so hungover I was sick at work, or when I was in college, go to class. and I was drunk and I didn't remember anything. There's nothing worse than getting called out by a professor about that. When they catch you drunk in their class, that really is upsetting to them. You were okay with it. Well, you just didn't go. Right. I was smart. I went. I was on the freaking Dean's list drunk all day.
How did you get on the Dean's list while you were using?
I don't know. Well, you know what? I didn't get
good grades, so I stopped getting high.
Some of the literature shows that if you, the condition you're in when you study. Yeah, state-dependent learning. You have to be in that same condition when you're being tested. Otherwise, you're not going to do as well. State-dependent learning. Well, I took that for what it meant. Oh, you did research in that. I experimented with it. Heavily.
So finding ways to surrender to powerlessness, I think one of the things that I found is that, as Dan Siegel said from one of his clients when he was talking to her about what she was getting out of therapy and doing groups and things, and she said that it allowed me and enabled me to feel felt. And I think that that has always stuck with me. When I was doing my dissertation in my doctoral program, I was struck by those words, when he wrote those words, and how profound that is.
Because in my own recovery, I was not felt. You know, I felt very isolated. Now, some of it was self-imposed, but some of it was also because of having such a horrible family life and just, you know, being cast out. But feeling felt. And I think that's the thing. And when you said like those people that are like the hardcore street thugs who are crying in front of you, right? They're feeling felt in that moment by you or by, you know, When it happens in my office. It happens with all my exes.
A lot
of people just want someone to listen to them.
Listen
and care. Lean forward. Act like you give a crap. Care. Right. It goes a long way. People will not always remember what you say, but they will always remember how you make them feel.
Right. And that's true. And so if they feel not wanted or unrecognized or unseen... Like, it doesn't matter. You're treating them like everybody else. And women are probably the worst at that because they're very relational. So they live through that connection of words and feeling of community. And so when they lose that because they're sexually molested, especially at very young ages, and they're ignored by their families, they feel isolated for the rest of their lives.
And they become prostitutes and strippers and sex cam girls because they can control people around them. But they're not... They don't... feel felt. The guy who is constantly attacking other people or self-destructing. And it's like, man, when... What's going on with you? And nobody ever asked that.
They're in pain and they chose you to be a repository for that pain. So therefore, I'm going to bully you or, you know.
Control you or extort money from you, cause you pain because you're not seeing my pain. And so, yeah. And it's really funny because sometimes I'll get people in my office and I'm treating them and it gets to the point where it's like I know something's wrong. And I've listened to enough of their story and I recognize they're skipping over some things or they haven't included things. And I know exactly what that means. And I call it out and I say... So what happened when you were four?
And they tell me and they just break down and the tears and everything and then they run because they're afraid of feeling felt and they're embarrassed or they're ashamed or they're upset or they think I am thinking something about them and they run and I have to struggle sometimes to get them to come back and sometimes I'll lose them after that. They drop the bomb, they part the curtain and then they run.
But also that seed's been planted for later. Yeah. That's all I do is plant seeds. Sometimes I feel like I'm a crappy farmer, but you know,
well, you've got a bunch of plants that they look all weird and deformed when they come up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I do love where I work though, man.
It keeps it fresh. Definitely.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So feeling felt, I think, um, I think feeling felt is a very important part of it. And, and if you can, you can make somebody feel felt in their recovery and, they're probably going to have a good chance of getting there.
Well, if you feel, if, if somebody feels felt, then the walls can start to come down and therefore they stop fighting, which equals surrender.
Right. So now they are okay with surrender. Yeah.
Or they can, they can at least chew on the concept. Yeah. Right. You know, like there's a really good essay by Henry Tybo. If you're into the 12 step, he was a, psychiatrists that worked a lot with AA, the difference between surrender and compliance.
Voluntary, involuntary.
Yeah. Compliance is I'm going to do this because I have to. Surrender is like I'm going to do this because I want to, which is kind of the same thing as, you know, surrender and giving up. Giving up is just, see, this is where the language comes in, admitting defeat.
Right?
But some people don't take that word defeat very well. So that's where the difference in language, linguistics comes in. Where language can be difficult, right?
Yeah. Especially English. So finding ways to have people feel comfortable with surrender. They finally quit fighting. because they're defeated in it.
In medical community, in the medical world, when you're treating somebody and they are struggling, whether you're giving them a shot or you're performing some procedure or something, they struggle, struggle, struggle, and then they just stop struggling, their heart rate goes down, their breathing rate goes down, and it's like they've surrendered to the treatment. They're still in the same amount of pain, They just are no longer fighting it, and that's when you can actually treat them.
Sometimes we have to sedate them into surrender, but sometimes they just voluntarily get there. But it's an important part of recovery, I think, the idea of surrender. Definitely. But you've got to do it in a place where you can be safe surrendering.
Yeah. I mean, all my own actions and behaviors and thought processes and feelings got me sitting in rehab.
They got you there. Yeah.
So, I mean, so is it a good idea for me to just use that same thought process and behavior and actions when I leave? Does that make sense?
I don't know. Doing
the same thing over and over, expecting a different result,
right? Yeah.
Yeah. No. I can't get myself out of a situation I got myself into with the same thoughts and behaviors.
So that's another important point, I think, in the recovery process is, you know, anybody and everybody can be sober in rehab. It's forced. Some people
can't.
Well, yeah, I mean, your facility. Don't do that last week, but
anyway.
They sneak stuff in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to be really, really conniving to pull that off. But you're in there. It's forced compliance. It's when you get out into the real community that sobriety is where it really happens. It's when the rubber meets the road. Yeah, because it's voluntary. That's why I think environmental
supports are important. And how do you find that? You ask your rehab counselors and they can hook you up with Oxford Houses or find some other step-down program. What I did early on, I went to an Oxford House. I didn't want to go. But later on, I looked
at that. Wait, wait, wait. We have listeners all over the world. So let me explain what an Oxford House is. All right. Or you explain what
an Oxford house is. An Oxford house is a group of... It's either male or female. There's no intermix. And it's run by the residents with oversight from like a chapter if you need it. But it's a sober house. If you use, you get evicted. You know, that kind of thing. Which was good for me early on because I was scared to get high. But also, I looked at my Oxford house as a safety net. If I want a roof... don't get high. And I could equate that really simply.
If I like having a bed and not being on the street, don't get high. I called it a safety net. Or if you get a job that you're drug tested on. If you like having employment, don't get high. It was A plus B equals
C. Right, but you also have to have some place to be able to deal with the feelings that have come up that made you want to use at that moment, right?
But I didn't crack that stuff open until like year three or four. Well,
that's because of how long it takes to get clean and sober.
Early on, it was base stuff. I'm scared to get high. I'm going to camp out in meetings and I like having a roof so that equals don't get high.
I could understand that in the beginning because I was really shot out so you know it was just base simple stuff you know and then all of a sudden you stay clean for a little while and stuff gets really complicated yeah and you see somebody going through that base simple stuff like one dude sometimes in Oxford houses I saw in a meeting one time they have double rooms at first you share a room that's usually like the master bedroom in the house and then when somebody gets evicted or leaves you
move up to a single room and there was this kid sharing about how he had like a month clean and he was sharing about how happy he was that he got a single bed and he was out of the double room and I'm like man things have gotten complicated look at the joy on this kid's face for getting his own bedroom I'm like and I'm looking back I'm like man things have gotten so complicated but look at this joy in the simple stuff, which is what it's all about. But you look, reflect on my own path.
It's like, things got, we're really like at the time parents were dying and all that really complicated stuff going on. And there's this kid just sharing that simple beauty right there. I'm like, wow. Kind of brings you back to basics.
Yeah. Yeah. Very, very much so. And, and so what is, what is recovery? Cause we're, We're going to run up on time here. What is recovery? What does that mean? I'm in recovery.
What do I see it as nowadays? A complete and total change on my perception of the world as well as my place in it.
So you're living a different way. Oh, yeah. And you don't know what that way is going to look like while you're trying to get there. It's scary. Yeah, but you don't know what it could be.
If you told me I'd be back in college full-time at two years clean, I would have laughed at you.
I would have laughed at you, too. I think I was laughing at you.
That was at six,
I think. Yeah. But again, and I've had people say this to me that I hadn't seen for 30 years, you work with addicts? Doing what? And I'm like, well, I'm a therapist. How did that happen? Like, they knew I was a huge, hot mess. And how in the world could I have possibly gotten to where I'm doing what I do and have an education? What do you mean you graduated from college?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, three colleges. I have three
degrees. Yeah. What?
What?
Like, I got my plan set out. Bachelor's, Master's, LCSW. Yeah. I have a plan.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. It's a five-year plan. It's a good plan.
It is a good plan. So when you make a change, you don't know what that change is going to look like. It could look like you work as a plumber in some small town in Iowa, and you're happy, and you're sane, stable, and sober. And it's like, that's awesome.
That's the key, is having a little bit of comfort and happiness in whatever you're doing in life. Walking through the world.
So recovery is happiness. That's your place, right? If you really do find your place, I would hope that at that point you can say, I am happy. But if you're not really at that place and you can't really say, I'm happy, then I don't know. It's kind of like, was recovery worth it?
And I think that's why people give up so easy.
Because they're not happy?
Well, they think it's going to take... less than two or three or four years to kind of get a little glimpse of what recovery is
after they spent 12 years destroying themselves yeah yeah six months later you're fine
18 months later and you're still not feeling happy you're still you know your brain chemicals are so jacked up on meth that you don't smile for two years and they just give up like me i didn't sleep right for 15 months Wow. Yeah. They're not surrendering. They're not surrendering. They give up. Yeah. And they're like, fuck it. This is too painful. This is never going to get better. I'm stuck in what's in front of me, looking in front of me, and I can't see the future of what it might be like.
And I'm going to go and get high because this just sucks.
So if you're listening to this somewhere in some other country and you don't really understand addiction treatment as we understand it because we – Being in this country, we do it and see it in a certain way. I think universally, there are some universals about addiction. One, you have a trauma background. If you're an addict, you have a trauma background. Gabor Mate is all over that. But my experience also is that I haven't met an addict yet who didn't have severe trauma.
If for no other reason, what you did when you were an addict traumatized you. But before that, you got into addiction because you were traumatized. What happened to you when you were an addict? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Two, it doesn't happen quickly. My minimum is two years. And that first year is all about experiencing recovery for everything the first time, right? So everything is experience. There's no knowledge. There's no wisdom. It's pure experience. And everything is new. Yeah?
Yeah, and it can be horrible. I mean... It is. Because you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know what you're feeling. Yeah. You're like... They give you these little sheets in rehab with little faces on it with the feelings underneath. You don't know what you're feeling. You're like, I feel this way. And you point to a face. Right. And that's how you learn what feelings are. Because you're all dysregulated all the time. You got mad and sad.
You're just dysregulated all the time.
You're mad and sad. And that's all you really know. Right. And there's maybe a smile here and there when you're laughing before things get really bad. But then you're like pointing to a face and you go... Oh, that's embarrassed.
Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I didn't know what that was. I did not know. Three, when you get into recovery, the question about what does that recovery look like is really going to be determined on a lot of different factors, right? Did you have to change? Here's recovery-isms. There's only one thing you have to change to get clean. It's over. Everything. So what does that mean? Did you have to eliminate all your friends? Did you have to change your job?
In the process of recovery, not to attain recovery, but in the process of recovery, I ended up changing my entire life. So your life is not going to look like it did at all. And sometimes it'll look somewhat the same, but a lot of times it's not even close. You know, a lot of people who get into recovery, maybe they were an attorney before or an accountant, and now they work in the recovery field. I was an IT guy. Completely, yeah. It's completely different, right?
So you don't know what your life is going to look like, but you do know that it's going to look nothing like it did before, and that's okay. And four, you have to make yourself emotionally available to other people. And that is the most dangerous, difficult thing to do For addicts. Because it's risky. Because you could get burned again. And because, number two, you were traumatized. So number four, you have to trust people and you have to invest in people.
So that means you've got to get around people that are worthy of your trust. And addicts don't trust anybody.
And also they're very hard differentiating who's worthy early on. Because all the people that are in, if you go to 12-step, all the people in 12-step are not there for your benefit.
They
don't want what's best for you. There are a lot of sociopaths. There are a lot of predators.
A lot. You know. Thirteen steppers. And the girls, you know. Thirteen steppers, man. Yeah. So you have to be emotionally available, which is risky. Yeah. And you're not going to be emotionally available six months in, nine months in, 12 months in, year and a half in, two years in. And that's okay. So don't get into relationships. Don't pretend like it's just going to go away. Don't start making friends with people that aren't in recovery. They're dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
And they will undermine your recovery.
Nowadays, I'm okay with that.
But
I noticed a really nice smooth out after five years.
Okay, wait. Operative part of that sentence, after five years. Around the
five-year mark, I noticed it was a noticeable smooth out of the way that I perceived things, the way I responded and not reacted to things, right? Five years. The way that I just existed. Five years. Yeah, five years. Five months? No, no. And people hate hearing that. I know. That's why I keep saying it. Five years. Yeah, five years.
Five years.
I mean, I'm about eight and a half now, but five years.
Five years. Yeah. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. Yeah, I see it. The people that I know that have been in recovery for five years or longer, and I knew them before, unrecognizable. There's a smooth out. Unrecognizable. I
think I met
you when I had
probably either five or six.
Yeah.
Something
like that. I think it was just
like five and a half. And you saw, you probably literally saw this movie down in me. But I was dealing with a lot of stuff. Well,
yeah, because you showed me the pictures of you and I'm like, what? Whoa. That's Satan. Who is that? That's my alter ego, Skippy.
That's Scott right there.
Yeah. So it's five years. Yeah. No, I agree. Well, you know, Scott, you have imparted A lot of wisdom in these episodes here. And I want to thank you for coming in and dispensing that wisdom. You're welcome. You're welcome back anytime.
Thank you.
I am sure that people listening to this, no matter where you are in Germany or Australia or England or Canada or United States or South America, wherever, you will learn something. something you'll learn by taking on Scott's words of wisdom. Thank you. Those in recovery, the masters of recovery, usually have something to say, and it's worth listening to. and learning from. So thanks for coming in, man.
No problem. Thank you.
That was awesome. It
was
fun, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. All three sessions. You're going to have to come back again, I guess. I want to thank Scott for coming into our studio and talking to us about all things recovery and addiction and treatment. It was awesome. Let us see what comes up the next time on another episode of Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. And remember, it's not how many times you fall down that matter, it's how many times you give back up.
And you only have to give back up that one last time to get sane, stable, and sober. So thanks for listening, and I'll catch the next episode.