Transcription
There's been more progressive thinking with recovery and addiction and more medical advances, but yet I feel like things are getting worse and worse every single year. The numbers go up and up and up. Like, why do you think that things are so bad right now despite like some of the advances that we've had?
Well, really happy to show you actually. I got this yesterday. First, just have depress the the mental trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. We live in a toxic culture. So, if you imagine a laboratory petri dish in which you're growing organisms in a brew, we call that culturing a culture broth, by the way, that's the technical term. If a large number of organisms cannot brew, we're dying off or getting sick, you'd call that a toxic culture. So, well, on the one hand, we're making advances in treatment, the social conditions keep hurting people really badly. My contention is is that we live in a culture so out of sync with human needs and which is so traumatizing to so many people on so many different levels, and it's so stressful for people that diseases and addictions and mental health conditions are burgeoning. By the way, if you look at the numbers of the people dying of overdoses or or the number of kids who are trying to kill themselves or the number of people being diagnosed with depression and anxiety, the number of women being diagnosed with autoimmune disease, these numbers keep going up and up and up. If you see them as just individual pathology based on genetics, we have no explanation because genes don't change in 10 years or 20 years or 100 years. So if these numbers are going up, it's because there's something going on in the environment. What's going on in the environment is our culture is getting increasingly stressful. So it doesn't matter what advances you're making in treatment as long as the conditions that brew illness, physical and mental and addictions, are continuing to worsen, you're going to get more and more people getting sick, and that's what's going on.
But in addition to that, I have to to say that specifically when it comes to addiction or more broadly speaking medical illnesses in general, our advances are technical, but they're not advances in wisdom. So that most physicians still don't understand trauma. In fact, most physicians don't even get a single lecture on trauma in their training, which is unbelievable. And many addiction programs are still not trauma-informed. They they're they're focused towards getting rid of the behavior, which itself is a useful goal, but unless you deal with the underlying dynamics that drive the behavior, you can expect relapse in large numbers. So we live in a society that's not trauma-informed. We have a legal system, an educational system, medical system that's ignorant about trauma, and we have social conditions that breed trauma on every level. That's why things are getting worse.
Yeah, it's really well said because it's I feel like sometimes in the addiction community, it's like people just like, "Alright, just get sober, get to recovery, put the Band-Aid on." I think obviously like getting sober is a great first step, getting into recovery is an awesome step. Yeah, but I think people have been sold this idea that once you get sober into recovery, that all of a sudden life gets easy, and it just doesn't. Life gets, it gets so much harder because now you don't have that coping mechanism that you have been suppressing things for for so long. And I know one of the keys to recovering from addiction, recovering from trauma, recovering from some mental health issues is kind of having the goal to bring your yourself back whole, which you talk about in your book, "The Myth of Normal." And maybe I want to give some people some hope and that they can, if they're listening to this, you know, improve their lives and recover from trauma and recover from addiction. So what steps can somebody take to reestablish some wholeness in their life to help them heal?
First of all, you said when people get sober, I make a distinction even abstinence and sobriety. People become abstinent, but that doesn't become, doesn't mean they become sober. Like abstinence is good. It means you're not using something to temporarily escape from yourself. That's good. You're not getting drunk, you're not getting stoned. That's good, but that's not the same with sobriety. Sobriety is a real capacity of conscious presence. So you can become abstinent without being consciously present. That's the first point. The second point is, as you and I have been agreeing in this conversation, the addictions are always a form of coping, of escape, as you just said. When all of a sudden you stop using the addiction, it doesn't mean that all the problems you've been trying to escape have gone away. You've just taken away a powerful coping mechanism for a good reason because that same coping mechanism was creating more problems for you. That's true, but all that pain, all that turmoil, that lack of inner peace that you're experiencing before you become addicted are still going to be there. In fact, because you're absent now, you're you're going to really feel them in a way that maybe you've never been felt before. So now you have to work your way through that to their traumatic source. So it's actually with abstinence that the work actually begins towards sobriety, towards conscious awareness. So that's the journey.
Now, recovery, interesting word. I used to be for a few years an English teacher, so I pay a lot of attention to language. So what does it mean to recover something? Get back, right? Exactly. Now, what is it that people get back when they recover their lives? Yeah, they get back themselves, right? And you ask for some good news. Here's the good news. If what they get back, get back is themselves, it means that the true authentic self was never destroyed. You lost contact with it as a result of trauma, but because it can be never be destroyed, we can regain that contact. So that capacity to reconnect to ourselves, to our true selves, to truly recover ourselves, that's with us as as long as we're alive and conscious. So I'm totally optimistic about human capacity for healing. By the way, healing, the word itself means wholeness, which means that we become whole. All these parts of ourselves that we cut off because of trauma, we can reconnect with our healthy anger, we can reconnect with our love, with our joy, with our sense of meaning and purpose. We can reconnect with our genuine commitment to be in contact with others. All these things are available to us. So trauma doesn't destroy anything. It cuts us off from things that never themselves go away. And recovery is the reclaiming of our whole two selves, available to us always, always, always. And that's the basis of my absolute optimism.
That's going to give some people some hope because I think a lot of times people feel like one of the biggest problems. I personally didn't go to AA or NA, and one of my biggest problems with it is that everybody has to identify themselves as an addict or an alcoholic. Where I personally think that, do I think that maybe some people just, they're further down the the addiction spectrum than others? I think sure, but I think there's a lot of people, most people that maybe just situationally they got addicted to something or maybe they used it as a coping strategy or maybe they had, obviously we talked about trauma and the role that that plays or their environment. I mean, just stressful situation at a job, and then they end up identifying themselves as this addict, and they're told that they're going to be like this the rest of their lives, and they just begin to say, "Okay, like, what's the point of even trying to get better? What's the point of even trying to improve my life? I'm going to be an addict the rest of my life. This is my destiny."
I couldn't agree with you more. So I've been to 12-step groups sometimes. I've had my addictive issues, and there's a value. I mean, I have to confess that what I'm about to say, you know, party, I'm going to completely agree with what you just said, but probably I'm going to push back a bit. When somebody stands up in front of a group and says, "I'm so-and-so and I'm an alcoholic," it's a brave step. They're saying, "I'm going to stand up in the front of a group of my fellow human beings and acknowledge that I'm engaging in a behavior that's been harmful to myself and to others. I'm going to stand up in front of you despite whatever shame I feel about it because I want you to know me and I want you to support me, and I'm not going to deny it anymore." But that's a positive step in itself. However, there's a danger in it. And the danger in it is exactly what you just outlined, which is that you completely identify with a certain behavior. You say, "I'm an addict." No, you're not an addict. That's not who you are. You're a warm-hearted, loving human being who used a certain addiction as a coping mechanism. That's who you are, but you're much more than that behavior. So that whenever somebody identifies themselves, this is what I am, I'm going to say, "No, no, that's not who you are." So if I could possibly outlaw the word addict, I would. What if somebody, every time you use the word addict, instead of addict, you'd have to say, "So-and-so or myself is or am a human being who suffered so much pain that they use this particular behavior or substance to suit themselves for a while." What if that's what you had to say every time you wanted to use the word addict? Now you have a much more complete picture of a human being. So I agree with you, and don't identify with some behavior that you had to adopt as a coping mechanism, but that doesn't characterize who you really are. There's a danger in that identification. So it's, it's a limitation of who you are and who you ever were. So on the one hand, I see the value in that kind of acknowledgement, but I also see the danger of identifying with that acknowledgement.
Actually, I agree with you on both those things. I I guess I was more trying to emphasize like the latter of what you said about just long-term identifying with that. I mean, trust, I have a lot of friends in the 12-step community. I've been to meetings myself, and I do think they are valuable. I do think they are beneficial, but I do think it's flawed in some way as well. And I think there's a lot of benefit to reducing the shame and stigma and just owning who you are in that moment and getting in front of a group of people and creating and forming new relationships with those people to recover from addiction, mental health, trauma, and that sort of thing.
What's the path back to wholeness? I know you you said like coming back to ourselves. There's hope for that, and we can do that. Like I know you outline like, I think it's four A's in your book, "The Myth of Normal," to help people become whole. Like, what are those four A's and how can they be used to, for people to feel like themselves again?
Well, the four ways that I list are pretty arbitrary. I could have mentioned more, you know, but they include healthy anger because a lot of people grew up in circumstances when they weren't allowed to experience healthy anger. And healthy anger is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's a boundary defense. If you don't know, like you say, you were bullied in school, part of your problem when you were bullied was that you didn't have hard of be in touch with with your healthy anger. And the bully can always sense that because the healthy anger is just a boundary defense. It says, "No, you're in my space. Get out." A lot of kids are socialized out of their healthy anger because of parenting practices that we talked about. So healthy anger is just as no, really important. It's not the same as rage. It doesn't have to be aggressive. It's a boundary defense. So that's an important A. Is the capacity to set boundaries? People who develop autoimmune disease usually have no capacity for healthy anger, or at least their capacity for healthy anger has been suppressed. As the anger that they suppressed turns against them, so does the immune system. That's why there's so much autoimmune disease amongst women, by the way, within the society. They're told that the woman's anger is unacceptable. I'm not talking about rage, I'm talking about healthy anger. So that's the first A.
Another A is agency, the sense of that we are in charge of our lives, that we're the ones to make the decisions. So that even if I go to a doctor with a health issue, ultimately I'm I'm the one that's going to decide what path is right for me. I'll take the advice respectfully, but it's up to me. And the same thing is true in everyday life. Who's in charge of your life? Who's living your life?
Authenticity, that you and I have already talked about, that's one. Another one of the A's. So these various concepts that we adopt them, they can help us sleep. I didn't put this into the book, but awareness is an important A of mindful awareness because so much of our functioning, to speak for myself, but most people I know, is is unconscious. So to be aware of our minds and what arises in our minds is just an important dynamic. So there's lots of pathways to healing. I never say that the ones that I outline is the only one. I think the biggest thing is curiosity towards oneself, the willingness to ask questions, the willingness to let go of ideas that no longer serve us, the commitment to be authentic, the willingness to learn from negative experience or disease can be a great teacher. Addiction can be a great teacher. I mean, let me ask you this, when you consider what you've learned from coping with your addictions and overcoming them, aren't you grateful for the learning that you've be able to acquire?
Of course, I wouldn't trade it for anything. So the addiction was your greatest teacher, wasn't it? Yeah. Why do we have to go through such painful experiences though to get these lessons? I just wish that, I mean, obviously I'm grateful. I wish there was otherwise. You know, the I in a book, I quote his Greek playwright Aeschylus, 2500 years ago, he said that the way the master or God created us, we have to suffer, suffer into truth. And let's face it, suffering is a big wakeup call. Now, I don't recommend that people should suffer to wake up. I'm trying to make people conscious before the suffering happens. But, you know, when suffering does come along, it can be, can use it as a teacher, not just as an enemy to get rid of. What is this trying to teach me now? So keeping that mind of curiosity open, I think is so essential.