Beyond Sober — Why Your First 7 Years Are Still Running Your Recovery

Welcome back to mindset for Recovery, the show where we go beyond just getting sober and focus on building the mindset that makes recovery last. I am your host and coach, DeMarcus Morton. Let's get into today's episode, You guys. We're starting fresh today. We're shifting our focus to you, your questions, your struggles, and the need for relevant answers. We're moving into a Q and A format, keeping it short, powerful, and focused on helping you build a life and recovery you actually want to keep. So let's just jump right in. For our first question, we're diving into the big one that underpins all the work we do, and it's a question I hear constantly, so I'm glad it came up. It's the disconnect that truly holds people back. And the question is, I keep hearing people talk about mindset in recovery, but what does that even mean? I'm already sober, so why do I need to focus on my mind instead of just staying away from drugs and alcohol? It's a powerful question and it's the absolute difference between staying sober and thriving in recovery. If you don't understand the patterns, programs and beliefs that are running your life, you will end up right back where you started no matter how hard you try. I know this because I witnessed this struggle firsthand. Growing up, I saw people unable to move beyond their own circumstances due to lack of resources and other contributing factors. And I lived it myself. Now I want to be clear. Growing up, I felt loved. I was provided for. But my upbringing, while loving was, was also defined by chaos. I grew up in Elizabeth Park, a low income housing community in Akron, Ohio. There we saw everything that comes with that kind of difficult environment. It wasn't just drugs and alcohol. It was poverty, constant fighting, and the kind of heavy trauma that makes you numb. Our housing development, called the bottom because we lived in the valley, right under two huge bridges on both ends, was unfortunately often the landing place for unresolved mental struggles. Seeing people take their own lives by jumping off of these bridges became a normal, unfortunate part of our lived experience. Trauma was everywhere. This harsh reality forced everyone to find a way to survive and a way to cope. But the saddest part is the chaos didn't just stay outside. It was playing out inside my own home. And that's where I saw it most clearly. My father was an alcoholic and his drinking made him aggressive. Eventually the situation turned domestic when I was around the age of five and as a result, my father had to go. He wouldn't be around much after that, and it wasn't just my dad. My mother was still young, and she took a job working at a bar, which kept her out late. And that quickly became a part of her social life. And as a result of that, around age 7, me and my younger sister started living with my grandmother, who lived just a few buildings down in the same housing projects. All of the instability, fear and chaos I absorbed during those years were doing one thing. They were laying the deep, fundamental blueprint for how I would learn to cope in my own life. I was being programmed to survive, and I didn't even know it. Years later, right after graduating high school, some friends and I decided to look for a job. So we went to a job fair, and that's where I applied, at a place called the Orienta House, which was a halfway house in Akron. Ironically, one of the drug and alcohol counselors that worked there was my old tennis coach, someone who grew up in the same projects and started a tennis program to kind of help keep us busy and to avoid some of the mistakes he made. Working there is where I truly discovered my passion for helping people, just like my grandmother had done. But unfortunately, not very long after that, When I was 19, my father had a stroke and died, ultimately due to liver failure as a result of his years of drinking. Now, I wasn't close to my dad, but even though I wasn't close to him, his death brought up a lot of emotions that I thought I buried away. Anger, resentment, fear of abandonment. It all started bubbling back to the surface. I didn't have the skills then to cope with those feelings. So during the week, while I was helping people like my grandmother on the weekends, I was partying like my mother and fighting like my father. I justified my behavior by convincing myself that I'm just called to do this work. But deep down, I didn't believe I was truly worthy of it. I was unknowingly repeating the very same behaviors I observed in my childhood. This is why the core of mindset matters. Even though I was finding my way professionally and helping other people, the subconscious programs remained in place and eventually showed up again. So when I started working in treatment as a counselor many years later in Los Angeles and observed client after client struggling with relapse, I knew exactly what needed to change. I started to incorporate the mindset work that worked for me directly into my clients treatment plans for recovery. It changed everything. You see, it's not enough just to focus on external behaviors. If you don't focus on the internal programming, it's only a matter of Time before it leads to a relapse. So let's break down mindset. Your mindset is simply a collection of patterns, programs and beliefs that were programmed into your subconscious very early in your childhood, primarily from the ages 0 to 7. When your brain is vibrating at a frequency called theta. You don't have to know what that means today, but basically is when your subconscious mind is highly impressionable. During those years, your brain is like a recorder that's always on and it's recording everything you're paying attention to. Your parents, other caretakers, how they cope, what their beliefs and values are, TV shows, cartoons, teachers, everything and everyone around you. All of that information is then deposited into your subconscious without filter. And based off of all of that information, you form your fundamental beliefs and perspectives about yourself and the world around you. Now, when you've experienced trauma, and by the way, trauma is not just the big things, it's often smaller things, ongoing stuff like instability, neglect and chaos. All of the things I described in my environment I grew up in. It often leads to limiting beliefs. And there's two that's going to limit us most. The first is I'm not good enough, which is wrapped up in fear of failure. So, for example, if you grew up hypercriticized or you didn't do well in school, you might adopt this belief early. I'm just not good enough. The second belief you might adopt as a result of negative experiences or early childhood trauma is I won't be loved. And this belief is rooted in fears of rejection if a parent wasn't present emotionally or physically, or if you were bullied, which is also part of my story that I'll get into at another time. You might adopt this belief. Now, there are three important things to know about your subconscious mind itself. Number one, your subconscious mind doesn't think. It only runs your programs. Secondly, your subconscious mind is 10,000 times more powerful than your conscious mind. So this is in part why you take a couple steps forward and end up right back where you started. Because you're fighting against a programming system that is much, much more powerful. And the third thing that's important to note about your subconscious mind is that it influences how you think, not what you think, because it doesn't think, but it does influence how you think. So let's trace the loop. If the program you adopted very early on is I'm not good enough, again, wrapped up in fear of failure, your thinking patterns will match that. You might have thoughts like, I can't do it. I'm a screw up or to make it relatable to recovery. I can't stay sober. These negative thoughts influence how you feel. When you feel sad, anxious, depressed, the brain kicks in and says, hey, we have to get out of these feelings quickly or we're going to be in trouble. So your brain goes searching for a solution in your programs. So if you grew up in an environment where people yelled and screamed as a way of coping when they were angry, much like I did, that becomes a part of your coping strategy. If you grew up in an environment where there were drugs and alcohol present, even if it wasn't problematic, the brain makes a note. When we see people do this, they change. So even substance use becomes a viable solution for you as well. Now, the outcome of these negative coping behaviors doesn't necessarily bring better results in your life. It only reinforces the initial belief, making it stronger. This is what we call a neural pathway, a closed fix program that keeps getting you the same results over and over again. You have the belief influencing your thoughts, which influence your feeling, which influences your behavior. The outcome of the behavior reinforces the belief. Think of it like a well worn path in a forest. The more you walk down that path, the more it remains worn and paved, the less you walk down it, the more it gets covered up by the leaves and debris. But the path is still there. Nothing in your brain disappears. So if you're asking, why do I need to focus on shifting my mindset? The answer is rooted in the simple neurobiological fact that the old trail is still there. Even though you've gotten sober, the neural programs are still running in the background. And that's why when you hit a wall of anger, depression or anxiety, you feel triggered to use or to reach for a new substitute behavior. Our job together is to get clear about what are the old programs you've been running so that you can start to adopt new ones that get you different results in your life. And that's why in my coaching groups, we focus on three absolutely critical areas to shift your mindset. Number one, self awareness. You have to know the programs you're running. 95% of your day is spent in the subconscious running the same thinking, feeling and behavioral patterns. If you're self aware, you can begin to recognize these patterns in real time and choose a different response, allowing you to adjust and shift. The second area we focus on is self confidence. This is your overall attitude about what you can do and accomplish. The more skills you build, the more you trust your overall ability to continue to execute. Improving this area begins to dismantle that I'm not good enough belief and you stop viewing failure as a final verdict and start seeing it as fuel or more information. The third area we'll focus on is self esteem. Now this is how you feel about who you are, your value and your worth. This is critical, especially in our community when we often have high self confidence in our ability to hustle and to survive. But low self esteem because of historical and systemic trauma, high self confidence and low self esteem is a recipe for self sabotage which we're actually going to explore further in the next episode and answer how do we address that? Now when you improve your self esteem, you dismantle the I won't be loved belief because when you like you, when you feel good about you, you're not so concerned about what other people think about you and your life won't be predicated upon their opinion. Now when you improve these three key self awareness, self confidence and self esteem, your belief shift, you adopt new positive thinking patterns and you start to feel good about yourself. And when you feel good about yourself, you don't need negative coping behaviors and everything in your life begins to change. So before I let you go today, I want to leave you with a reflection for the week. The whole purpose of this work is to shine a light on the programs that are running 95% of your day. So take a moment and think about the behavior you want to change most right now, that thing you do to cope when stress is high. Now ask yourself this where did I first see this exact behavior being used by someone else when I was young? That link you make is the first step towards self awareness. And look these three core areas Self awareness, Self confidence and self esteem. They are just the starting line. A well rounded thriving recovery requires a full toolbox. That's why we focus on these three core areas in addition to other essential coping strategies and wellness tools in our online coaching groups. I've taken everything I've learned over the last 20 plus years working in mental health and addiction, combined with my earlier experience in social services program development and improving system structure, and made it all accessible in a monthly membership covering a wide range of topics throughout the week. So if you're ready to move past the frustration of repeating the same behaviors and truly thrive in recovery, I encourage you to Visit our site www.mindsetforrecovery.com and see what we're all about. I appreciate you listening and if you got something out of today's episode, please give us a review and subscribe. It really helps us to reach even more people in our own community. And lastly, if you have a question about mindset, cultural healing, trauma or addiction, something you need clarity on to keep moving forward, I want to hear about it. The fastest way to get your question question answered on air is to email me@mindsetforrecoverycloud.com again. I'm Demarcus Morton and I'll see you next episode where we tackle the next challenge of the Worthiness gap, Self Sabotage. The question we'll be answering is because of my past, I feel like I'm just not worthy of a good life. How do I stop saving self sabotaging my recovery.