EP 2:37 The Myth of Abstinence with Dr. Adi Jaffe
In this episode of the Aftermath Podcast, host Dr. Dallas Bragg interviews Dr. Adi Jaffe, a former meth user, recovery coach, and author of The Abstinence Myth and Unhooked. The conversation critiques the traditional 12‑step, abstinence‑only model, introducing the "abstinence myth"—the idea that recovery success is wrongly measured solely by consecutive days sober. Jaffe proposes alternative metrics such as percent days abstinent, quantity of use, and broader quality‑of‑life assessments (relationships, work, health, etc.). They discuss the harmful effects of abstinence‑violation syndrome, shame, and black‑or‑white thinking, illustrating these points with client case studies (e.g., a woman reducing wine from 14 bottles a week to 2‑3). The dialogue covers the low success rates of conventional programs (90% drop‑out within a year) and the need for new, flexible recovery tools. Jaffe introduces his Sparrow model (Stimulus‑Perception‑Activation‑Response‑Outcome) and the EAT cycle (Explore‑Accept‑Transform) as frameworks for turning relapse into learning. They also explore the unique challenges of chemsex and meth use among MSM, the role of trauma, shame, and belief systems, and the importance of community, compassion, and ongoing personal growth. Throughout, both speakers emphasize a non‑shaming, data‑driven, and holistic approach to lasting change.
Chapters
But how about the percent of days abstinent that you've had out of the last month?
Yeah.
Right. Um, how about how many drinks you've had if you've had drinking days? Right. So let's take that same example. You've been sober for 29 days. You drank for 1 day. You're still 97% sober.
Yeah.
Right. A lot easier. There's this concept called the abstinence violation syndrome. It's a lot easier to say, oh crap, you know what, I fell off the wagon. I'm, I got a day. I'm still getting an A+ in my recovery though. Let's jump right back on. Then, hey, I just had an A, but now I have an F. Let's jump back on.
Um, but, but the Aftermath Podcast is an outreach tool to help men who have sex with men break free from the addictive patterns associated with chemsex. Otherwise known as crystal meth or Tina. I'm your host, Dr. Dallas Bragg, a former crystal meth user, now recovery coach. Here you will find a repository of tools and resources intended to eradicate the epidemic that is plaguing our MSM population. Please note that the views expressed on this podcast are not to be taken as medical advice. Also, we will be talking about drugs and sex, so if you feel triggered to use, Stop listening and contact your local emergency system and/or your support network. Let's go. All right. Welcome back to the Aftermath Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Dallas Bragg. Thank you. Thank you for coming and tuning in. And you are in for a treat today. I know that I am anyway. I— but before we get there, I just wanted to remind you that we do have a supplemental study guide that comes out with every episode. Don't forget to to click on the link in the show notes to get that. It gives you journal prompts and actionable exercises and reflective questions, and you can take a deep dive into the podcast. You will want to do that specifically today, I'm quite sure. And don't forget to sign up for our free Facebook community. So today's guest is somebody for me, I'm kind of fanboying out to have, to have you on here. And, and let me tell you why is that. When I first started thinking about coaching, I knew that my own experience was different and I felt like I was the only one. And so in my own recovery, I'd gone through drug treatment court. I had gone through court-mandated 12 steps treatment and different things like that. But what changed my whole trajectory, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, was an ayahuasca retreat. And I went to this ayahuasca retreat and I left saying, I have been focusing so much on consecutive days without using meth that I'm missing the larger picture here. And my, my measure of success is way off because what, what I'm really doing in recovery is what we're all doing in life. And that's a journey home to self. It's a journey home to our true light, you know, and ripping away the things, the beliefs that are blocking the true light of our soul. And so I know that sounds a lot of woo-woo to some people, but when I started to want to coach, I wanted to bring that message and say, you've got this all wrong. And so I was searching out there because I thought there's nobody else like this. There's nobody else that thinks this way. And then I found your Ignited Instagram page, and then I found you, Adi Jaffe, Dr. Adi Jaffe. I have called you Adi in my head for like years now, so I'm sorry if I say that.
You and millions of others, it's all good.
But I just want to say without further ado, and really you need no introduction, if you guys do not follow Dr. Jaffe, please, please do. He's a bestselling author. He's been on all the big TV shows. He's got He's, he has this program that we're going to talk about today called Ignited, but mainly the message that, that he sends is one that I want you listening to hear today. And so thank you. I really, really appreciate you being here, Dr. Jaffe. Yeah.
Thank you so much for having me. Um, you know, it always, it's always interesting, especially for those of us who's kind of been to the dark side of the world. To hear introductions like this because, you know, there's a little piece of all of us that, that questions sometimes our role as we, as we move forward.
Mm-hmm.
I've been at this 23 years now, so the questioning happens less and less. But, you know, I love, I love hearing that the work left an impact. I mean, that's, that's the main reason we do it. That's the main reason I do it anyway, is to try to help other people who are stuck like I was 20-some years ago, 24, 5 years ago now, um, find a better way. And, you know, you talked about one aspect of better, and I think better should not only have to do with how many days sober you have, it should be with the quality of life that you experience. And I love that the road back to ourselves is a— is the overarching concept. I think many of us forgot who that even is.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe many of us Didn't even know that person because of our life circumstances that brought us into a certain way of living. But, you know, maybe I'll, I'll go to the meat of it and then pull back in a second and we'll get, we'll get there again later. We were all babies at some point. We were all innocent. We were all worthy of love and of care and of nourishment and of safety. And at some point, Given whatever happened to us in life, either we forgot that it wasn't there for us, we had our own inner turmoil that led us to misperceive what was going on around us. Doesn't really matter that much how we got there. It matters per person, but it doesn't matter as a whole. And yeah, the thing that bothers me probably the most about the way most people find solutions for addiction. is that the language is so shaming and it's so much about us being broken, damaged, about our brains not working correctly, about our genetics being flawed. And I have to say, having worked with thousands of people, I, I pretty much disagree with almost all of it at this point. And, uh, and so I'm always happy to talk to people like yourself who are doing the work too.
Great. Good, good. You know, So you were, you know, I, you've told your story a billion times, and if you're listening, I want you to go and research the story and buy, and buy the book. So we have The Abstinence Myth and we have Unhooked here and, and buy the book. But so you were, you were a big meth user. Um, and his, so your story involved SWAT teams and police officers and guns. And so I had to giggle because. Anytime I met a straight man in the meth world, he always had a bunch of guns, you know. And then anytime— and then on the gay side, there was never any guns. It was just funny for me. Yeah, it was funny. It's always funny for me to compare and contrast the worlds that exist with the same substance, you know.
No, that's funny. I actually— I love that. It's, it's True. Also, I mean, I, when I think about, I never really thought about that dichotomy, but when I think back, all the meth dealers and heavy users that I knew who weren't, you know, there was, there were kind of like these classes, right? There was the more flamboyant kind of gay party life customers that I had. And, and for them, the drug was a, I mean, for all of us, it was a sex drug. Let's just be honest. Like, you know?
Yeah. Yeah.
You, you, you can't, you can't really have sex like you can have sex on meth. Um, ever, which is not necessarily a good thing, by the way, right? A few hours into it, you're kind of going like, man, is it, is it, is it time to leave now? But so that was part of it, all of it. But I think for— you're right, for at least the straight men that I knew, and there were a lot of them, but most of them were selling, most of them were also on the selling side who were buying from us. And for me, um, there was this machismo, like Superman robot Kind of element to meth, right? It made you not have feelings. It made you stay up for 2, 3 days at a time, which made you able to do more and achieve more. And yeah, and it often involved, I don't, I don't know that it often involved violence, but it often involved this kind of like persona of potential violence and crime and, and yeah, trying to be bigger.
Mm-hmm.
Emotionally, psychologically than you really were.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for gay men, we, we've kind of been, you know, closeted and we've had blankets of shame and, you know, we've desired to be sexually free, you know, and we have internalized homophobia. All of that goes away, you know, with the meth. As soon as we have meth, all of that, it goes away. So a lot of times I think it's, It's the feeling of being free of all the weight we carry on a day-to-day basis that we're really addicted to, you know?
Yeah.
And of course the sexual part, you know, I mean, the chemsex scene in the gay community is hypersexual days and days, orgies, orgies, all, you know, it's all of that too, but it's our chance to finally be sexually free without having the insecurities.
Yeah. And I think that, you know, between The Abstinence Myth and Unhooked, what you're speaking to is a concept. I'm not the only one who talks about this, right? The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. I mean, there, there are a lot of other books that talk about this, but, but so do I. And it's this idea of everybody looks at the substance. They say you're a meth addict, you're an alcoholic, you're a cocaine addict, you're a marijuana addict, you're a sex addict. And they forget that underneath all of that, the substances are just the endpoint. It's just the, the end thing that you found to fix the, the pain. And we, and they say that, by the way, even in 12 steps, they say that, but then for some weird reason, they bastardize it and, and flip it on its head and go, okay, so you have all these problems because you're POS and you're broken and you're damaged.
Mm-hmm.
Instead of you're this whole person who's loved, lovable, loving, but lost, shamed. Um, I don't know where you grew up. Where'd you grow up?
West Virginia.
Yeah. So I'm just gonna make, you know, because I've obviously had— I mean, not only because of my meth story, but, um, because of the work that I do, I've, I've helped, I don't know, at least hundreds of gay men, many of whom struggle with meth, but also with, uh, with alcohol. And I imagine being a young kid in West Virginia realizing you're gay is not easy. It's probably not easy now.
No.
But I imagine in our generation it was incredibly scary. I mean, not just shameful is where you get to later when you realize you can actually be gay, but before, probably just scary. And the thing you want to do more than anything else, if, if your story is like the hundreds of others that I heard, Is you kind of just want it to go away and you want to fit in. You want to like girls, you want to be attracted to girls because all your friends do. And it would just be easier if that were the case. And so you get drunk, you get high, you do whatever else you can to kiss girls and be like, you just try to be normal. But that's what shame is, right? Shame is feeling like who I am is not good enough. It's too different. Is not going to be accepted by the people around me. Mm-hmm.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that's, that is totally it. Right. I mean, you, I mean, it was scary, especially if a lot of us have religious trauma. Right. And so like for me being grown up hearing Jesus is going to come back any second. And if you're thinking about a man, you're going to hell for eternity. You're going to burn in flames for the rest of eternity. And so always living with that fear of like looking in the sky, like, you know, when is he coming to take me away? Is that, that adds to that, you know, and then you grow up with this hypervigilance. Um, and so yeah, that, that, that is fear.
Yeah. You grow up with hypervigilance. You, we can understand these things as adults, right? Like, We can break them down and understand them logically, but, but there's a felt sense of fear, a felt sense of not belonging, anxiety, right? Shallow breath, always looking over your shoulder to make sure nobody's figuring out how you're different, right? All, all that, that's, that ends up being the experience. And, and for me, I write about this in the book, mine had nothing— well, it's not even true. I doubted my sexuality at some point. I feel like, I think a lot more men somewhere between the age of, you know, 10 and 18 have experiences that make them go, wait, what's going on?
Mm-hmm.
But my main thing was just social anxiety in general. I never felt like I fit in with boys or girls. So the first time I found alcohol, and I talk about this in the books, I was like, oh, I didn't know I could, I could feel like this. I could talk to girls and just be all natural. And so That was a real revelation for me. And that's, I, I've, I hear that experience in almost anybody that I work with at some point. They go, oh yeah, I, I remember the moment when I realized this gives me something that I, I didn't even know I was looking for, but now I found it. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I read that, if you're from your story, it was a, what, a college party or something like that, or maybe teenage, I don't remember. But when you describe—
Yeah, teenage.
Yeah, teenage. When you described that, I was like, you know, this is the same. You know, I live in the gay part of this, but when I read that, I'm like, this is really essentially giving us the same experience with a substance. You know, there's nearly no difference in terms of what it gives us. So I thought that was really interesting for me to read and realize. Um, can you, I want to ask you something. You, you say something in The Abstinence Myth, which, which by the way, I read Unhooked and I suggest if you're listening, please do it. Please read it. Um, please buy it. The Abstinence Myth, I have not gotten too far into yet, but you know, you start out with saying that the recovery system is broken.
Yeah.
Um, and can you talk about that? And here's why, is that so many listeners here, all they know is 12 steps and all they know is it works if you work it, which to me can be used as such a gaslighting tool.
Hmm.
You know, to say you're the problem. But in reading The System Is Broken, then it opens my mind up to say, you know, maybe there's a system, a systemic problem here. And if you're listening to this, this, maybe you can relieve yourself of a little bit of shame and open yourself up to other possibilities.
Yeah. So, you know, there's that, the passage, the how it works passage in AA. I actually have an article on Psychology Today. I think I wrote it like 10 years ago, maybe even longer than that, 15 years ago, called How It Doesn't Work. Um, and yeah, I think that's one of the most shaming. I mean, there are many, but I think that's one of the most shaming or potentially shaming, um, passages in the Big Book. And the reason is what it suggests is AA is perfect. Mm-hmm. The system will absolutely work for anyone who really commits to it. So if it didn't work for you, it's because of you.
Yeah.
And, and look, on its face, that statement doesn't have to even have to be wrong. But I propose that there's a much— I can, I could propose a much better recovery system, much simpler, um, that would follow the exact same rationale.
Hmm.
No matter what, don't follow your addictive behavior. Just keep going with your life and never succumb to it. It's one step. It's a one-step program. And it works if you work it. So if you follow that one step, you will never have a drink again.
Guaranteed.
'Cause the one step tells you not to. Um, but obviously most people wouldn't be able to uphold that. And the reason is they've tried to control their behavior God knows how many times before. So just because you added 11 steps and you added God 15 times in there, and you, you know, you talked about resentments and a, and a, a character default list and, and making amends, right? You, you made a, you made a, it's a nice process. The 12-step process is a nice process.
Don't.
I'm not against it. It's the idea that it's flawless and therefore the only reason anybody fails at it is because of them. That's the problem, especially when you look at the statistics, the real statistics, which are 90% of people don't make it to a year sober in 12-step. 90% of people.
Okay.
So again, for clarity, millions of people have found recovery with AA. in 12-step, millions of people. It is the most popular 12-step, I mean, uh, recovery program in the world. Certainly the most popular free one. But Islam is one of the most popular religions and Christianity is one of the most popular religions. That's a little bit like the two of them fighting each other about which one is, is, has the right God because they're obviously in contrast to one another and cannot co-survive, which we're going through in the world right now.
But, mm-hmm.
AA's assertion that it is the thing that will fix it, by the way, which in a few pages away, it says that they have no monopoly on, on, uh, help. So there's a, there's a lot of confusion. And as you pointed out, one of the main reasons for me is I know a lot of people who are really successful in, in 12 steps. But I'll say that most of the people that I know are incredibly successful in 12 steps make 12 steps one of the tools. In their recovery toolbox. It's not the only one. They may go to therapy, they may have a daily practice of yoga or meditation, they may do plant medicine. Uh, although I would argue if you're doing plant medicine every week in order to find your salvation, we may want to look— we may want to look at that. That's starting to become an issue.
Yes.
Um, and so there's nothing inherently wrong with 12-step a system. I think there's some things that we can improve on it and modernize it. We just had a debate about that, I think about it 6 months ago. Um, and a lot of people within 12-step agree. They actually just put out a new book that tries to modernize some of the language because the language is pretty ancient now.
Yeah.
Um, and then you talk about the abstinence myth. And so other than the shaming about— like, we would never say to somebody who got cancer treatment and the the therapy didn't work, right? Like, let's say the radiation didn't work. We didn't say, man, you really, I need you to want this radiation to work because if you're not fully committed to the radiation, it's not gonna help your cancer.
Mm-hmm.
It may just be the treatment. It may just be the wrong treatment. And so in the abstinence myth, one of the things that I suggest is, like you said, most people in recovery have learned to measure their recovery by how many days abstinent they have.
Yeah.
And that's okay. That's one metric. I would argue it's not necessarily even the best metric. Mm-hmm. But I certainly know a lot of people who are doing better at 6 months of, uh, consecutive sobriety than people who are at 20 years. And I know people who are at 30 days who are doing really, really well, whereas there are other people who've been sober for a year and are miserable a-holes who nobody wants to talk to, but they're sober. So they kind of use this badge of honor. And so I think we just, we just need to be a little smarter. I know we like simple answers, but sometimes the answer is just not that simple and that's okay.
If I'm listening, what would be some metrics that would help get me out of this shame cycle?
Love it. Great question. So we'll start really, really simply, right? So consecutive days absent, and here's one of the big problems with it. Everybody knows this, right? But you can have 29 days, drink on the last day, and from the consecutive days abstinent approach, you're back to zero. You have zero recovery. Now, a lot of people deal with this, right? In AA, you gotta go take a newcomer chip, and the idea is you're back to the beginning, but you're not really back to the beginning.
Mm-hmm.
You've had some experience with recovery. You've learned some. I know people who relapse after 5 years. It would be hard to say that they're exactly where they were before. And there's a huge shaming element to having to go back to the start of the line. So I'll start with, um, use-based ones, right? And these, these are all the abstinence myth, but how about the percent of days abstinent that you've had out of the last month?
Yeah.
Right. Um, How about how many drinks you've had if you've had drinking days? Right. So let's take that same example. You've been sober for 29 days. You drank for 1 day. You're still 97% sober.
Yeah.
Right. A lot easier. There's this concept called the abstinence violation syndrome. It's a lot easier to say, oh crap, you know what? I fell off the wagon. I'm, I got a day. I'm still getting an A+ in my recovery though. Let's jump right back on then. Hey, I just had an A, but now I have an F. Let's jump back on. Um, but, but I'll tell you a story. I tell this in The Abstinence Myth. This is from an actual client. I had a client who was drinking 2 bottles of wine every day. So think 14 bottles of wine a week.
Wow.
Older woman. That's a lot of drinking.
Mm-hmm.
By any, by any measure, that's a good, a substantial amount of drinking, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
And so after 3 to 6 months on Ignited, she, she was down to drinking about 2 bottles to 3 bottles a week. Mm-hmm. So she went from 14 to 2.5, let's say average between 2 and 3. That is drinking 1/6 of the, what she was drinking before. Right.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
She was now getting, she was having 87% more sobriety. Went to her therapist, had an appointment, and she was— she celebrated this with him. And she, he said, yeah, but I'm still worried that you're drinking. And I said, where else in the world, if you got an 87% improvement in your symptoms, like, right, if drinking is really what we're worried about and you're drinking 87% less, why are we not celebrating the hell out of that?
That's right.
That's right. She's drinking not every day. She's drinking 3 days a week or so. And on the days that she's drinking, she's not even finishing 1 bottle. She's having less than a bottle. So she's drinking half on each day that she's drinking and she's drinking on less than half of the day she was drinking on before. I call that a win.
Mm-hmm.
And I, in my opinion, this is what I talk about in the book, is if you can just land on that alone, you can say, oh my God, I got from 14 bottles to 2.5 bottles a week. What if I can get to 2 and then 1.5 and then 1? And what if when I get to 1, everything is fine? What if what they told me before was a lie and I can actually handle a bottle of wine a week? Now, again, I'm not even suggesting that people should be drinking. I'm just saying, Mm-hmm. if you listening to this right now don't believe that going from 14 bottles of wine a week to 1 or 2 bottles of wine a week is a win, Then I'll ask you why. What's— yeah, what, what is not okay with a massive improvement but not being perfect? And part of the reason, and you know this, Dallas, um, those of us who struggle with addiction, we tend to be perfectionists. We tend to have black or white thinking already.
Yeah.
And so I think this really hurts us. It's like failure or success, perfect or a piece of shit, you know? It's like there's no, there's no middle ground. And I think the middle ground is a good place to go. So those are just recovery use-based kind of numbers. But then there are other things like in Ignited, we have people fill out a quality of life assessment. How are your relationships? How are things going at work? How are your kids? Are you having fun in life? How are you taking care of your health? Right? Most people, when they come to me, we score these things on a scale of 0 to 10. Most people that come to me, Out of, we have 10 different fields. They're scoring like 20 out of 100, 25 out of 100 in their overall quality of life. As that goes up, as that rises, your sense of self improves. And also you have more to lose. I mean, you're how many years into recovery are you now?
7, over 7.
Would you say that 7 years in now you've built a life that is more full? Uh, that you are more protective of, that you would be more upset to lose after 7 years than you had when you first entered recovery?
Oh yeah, for sure. 100%.
I think that's the biggest win.
Yeah.
People in AA will hate the following sentence, but you know, I'm 23 years meth-free. Um, I can pretty much guarantee you I'm not going back to meth this year. Yeah. Not even today or tomorrow, like this year. Right. I'm not going back. It's, it's not even on my radar. Why? Because the person I am right now, the life I live right now.
That's right.
180 degrees is not enough. It's like a 720-degree turn from where I was before. It's, it's so different than who I was 24, 25 years ago.
Yeah.
I have no desire. It would be so bizarre for me to go back to smoking meth again. And I was, you know, for 6 years of my life, I smoked an 8-ball a day. I mean, I was, it was wild.
Wow.
But, um, but it was, it was normal. And living a normal life was strange. And now I live the life I have now. Nit is my normal. And the idea of being a daily user of heavy drugs is so far outside my norm. That I would never go back to it. But it's not only because I've been abstinent from meth. I'm not sober, by the way, for anybody who's listening right now, I am not sober. And I, I'm very open about that. I'm very clear about it. Um, I had, last time I had a drink, oh, I had a one drink at a birthday party actually this past weekend, but I probably have like 3 drinks a month in my life now. So yeah, it is possible. I'm not prescribing it to anybody listening right now. I'm just saying the stories of recovery are incredibly varied and they're incredibly different. We shouldn't try to put everybody in a box and imagine that we all have to belong in that box alone.
That's right. That's right. Thank you. Yeah, I, I always say, you know, I'm 7 and plus years meth-free, but I also drink. socially under certain circumstances, right? Like if the kid, the kids and I get together to play cards, I'm drinking some bourbon, right?
Yeah.
The chances of me, of that leading to meth for me are zero. Now, some, that's not the same for everybody, but I, I had a post on social media recently where I held a sign up and it said, you're not allowed to define sober for me. And it went, it went viral. It was like 200,000 views. Jelly Roll even commented on it. Um, But I got so much hate mail from 12-steppers saying that I'm killing people. So what do you say to that? Like, how do you respond?
I used to get those phone calls, man. I used to get the phone calls back in the day before social media was as big as it is. It used to be phone calls to my office. Um, first of all, number one, we don't have to respond to all the hate in the world. That took me, that took me longer. Initially, I did feel like I had to respond and defend myself to everybody. We don't have to defend ourselves. Number one, nobody is perfect. By the way, let me just say outright, in case it's not clear, I've done enough work to know that this next thing is true. I could also be wrong. I may be wrong.
Yeah.
And that's also okay to say. It's worked for me. You know, I went to this conference, I was getting my master's and I was presenting some research that I had done, and I was walking through the hall with my little poster going to put it up for the research, and I met this woman. I was so naive. I was so early. This is 2003, maybe 2004. So I was just a year out of jail. For people who don't know my story, I served a year out of eight years of sentence in jail for drug dealing. And yeah, my recovery was not was not a very clear path, but I got there. And so. gotten into graduate school because I couldn't get a job. I'm going, I'm in Washington, DC to present. And there was this woman at the table, at the AA table at the conference. And I was like, oh, I started a conversation with her and I was telling her that I was sober for 3 years, but that, you know, I'm in graduate school now and I'm not part of the program anymore. And I was telling her this story really kind of proud. There's no shame as I was telling her the story. If anybody cares, they can read in other areas how I made the decision to leave. It was a It took 6 months to make that decision. It was a real process. But she lets me finish my sentence and then she hands me her card and she says, we'll save a seat for you. And the complete dismissal by her of my reality, because her reality didn't match.
Mm-hmm.
It was like a slap in the face. And I remember actually, again, I wrote an article about it cuz I was writing for Psychology Today a lot back then. And it was just so interesting to see. It's like the two, for her, the two realities couldn't coexist.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Like AA couldn't be right if my story was also right. And that was strange to me the first time I ran into it. So when I started a treatment center the first time in 2010, 2011, yeah, we got, we got some serious hate. Um, mail, cuz through PR and things like that, we got some exposure and people would tell me, you're gonna kill people.
Yeah.
Now, to be fair, I've now been doing this for 16 years professionally, like 16 years seeing clients since I started running groups at Matrix. Um, I have had 2 clients die. Hmm. One of them died a year and a half after the last time I saw him, so he was under the care of somebody else, but I've had 2 clients that I've, I've worked with die. That I know of. It's terrible.
Yeah.
It's, I don't know that it ever goes away. It's, it's one of the worst parts of this job is nothing is guaranteed, but millions of people are dying.
Right.
Hundreds of thousands are dying every single year just from alcohol and drugs. Don't even include nicotine in there, right? Just from alcohol and drugs, we've got upwards of 200,000 people every single year that are dying. And that's been true for over a decade. So, and I talk about this a ton in both books, less than 10% of people with addiction help, with addiction needs get help, less than 10%. There are about 43 million people in the country that need addiction help. Only 2.5 to 3 million are getting help every year, less than 10%. Mm-hmm. 60% or so, well, 30% don't even finish their treatment. So 30% don't make it to a month. 60% or so are gone within 3 months. 90% are gone within a year.
Yeah.
Out of recovery, out of 12 steps, out of their community group. So less than 10% get help and 90% are gone within a year. That means we're helping less than 1% based on the established criteria of what helping means, which is meeting criteria for 1 year of sobriety. So if we're helping only 1%, Dallas, I think it would be hard to say that the system is working.
Yeah.
So you know what? Maybe I'm wrong, but fuck it.
Yes.
We need something different.
That's right.
We need something to help the other 99% who are not being helped right now. And if some hard book thumping, 12-step loving, it's my way or the highway kind of people hate my version of it or hate your version of it. No offense to them, but fuck 'em. I'm not, I care way more, way more.
Yeah.
About the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who are out there suffering. AA is here, right? Everybody knows AA is here.
Right, right.
They don't need more PR. We're good. There are tens of thousands of meetings all over the world. They have members all over. Keep doing your thing. I'm not even asking you to stop doing your thing. Keep doing it. But you're helping this much.
That's right.
So we should probably try to come up with some other ways that help others. And the haters along the way, let them hate. I hope they follow their program. I hope it doesn't make them use because of what we're doing, right? I hope they stay on their path. We'll stay on ours.
That's right. Yeah. Lovely. Thank you. Thank you. So there's something about that. There's the relapse, uh, response to relapse is a big one, um, that gets my, the listeners kind of stuck. And there's something that you said, it was a sentence in your, in Unhooked, we succeed or we learn. You know, and that really, really stuck with me. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah. So now you're gonna make me, sorry, I'm gonna do this live cuz we're here and I, I hate co-opting other people's quotes. So that quote is based, um, that, that quote is based on somebody else. Oh, or, so let me, uh, let me see the, the specific original one. Um, Nelson Mandela, his version was, I, um, uh, I never lose. I either win or learn. Um, ah, okay. So that's his version. My version is paraphrased, but again, I, I never, I never wanna make somebody think that my, my quote is original if it's not. Um, but yeah, look, this is, this is hard for a lot of people to understand. This next thing we're gonna talk about, it's really, really hard. So especially in a world of recovery, Where relapse is considered failure. So this is a big part of the Ignited program and it's a big part of the, in Unhooked book.
Yep.
We've all, and by all, I mean the people probably listening to this right now. I think we can all, I can include us all in a box, but we all learn to avoid failure in life.
Mm-hmm.
That's been a primary message, right? So for me, that came in school originally. Right? You should always get A's. B's are bad. C's are like failing. But honestly, it happened with girls. You know, for me, the, I remember the first girl I had a crush on in junior high and I asked her out and she said no. It felt like my life had collapsed, right? It felt like, oh my God, I'm, I'm gone. I'm dead. I shouldn't even, I was actually kind of bullied is the wrong term for it, but all her friends kind of made fun of me for, at school for like 2 weeks after. Of course, I had the audacity to ask the most popular girl in class who had a boyfriend if she wanted to go to a movie. So I was also dumb about the way I went about this. But long story short, failure to me felt very final.
Hmm.
What I've learned now, 25 years into my old self work, is failure is always part of success. Always, always, always. Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, has a quote, if you want to succeed more, double your failure rate. And the first time I heard that, I mean, I'll be honest, it really took me back because I thought of all the times that because I'd failed at something, I stopped trying. Well, relapse is a little bit of the same thing.
Yeah.
Right? If you're trying to control your drinking, you're trying to control your meth use, you're trying to control your porn use, you're trying to control your gambling, odds are in the process of trying to control it, you'll screw up. Even if you stop drinking, odds are, unless you've done a ton of work, you'll redirect that coping into something else and find yourself in trouble again. In Unhooked, the whole point of the Sparrow Model, which is kind of the model that I show people on how to create change, it starts with the thought, with this notion. When something goes wrong, before you try to fix it, before you try to do anything about it, stop. You, you went to try to get a specific outcome. You were trying to get a specific result. Not drink, not black out, not— use porn, not use meth, not gamble, not fill in your blank, and it failed. That means something along the line didn't work. Instead of feeling shitty about it, pause and try to figure out what it was. This is your moment to learn.
Yeah.
And, and so relapse Is really an opportunity because if you're seriously motivated about trying to change your behavior, and just so it's clear to anybody listening to this right now, changing your behavior is hard. It's not easy. Um, you and I have been through it. It was hard when we did it. It's hard for all the other people who do it. Every once in a while you hear about somebody who had a really easy time, but my notion is for most of those people, something really, really hard happened before it became easy.
Yeah.
So they got a DUI and almost killed themselves and their family members. And all of a sudden it was like, oh shit, I gotta change. Right? Right. Hard before, before easy. But use your relapse, learn from it. So in, in Unhooked, we have this EAT cycle, explore, accept, transform.
Right.
And, and I'm sure we'll get more into it, but This is how you learn in life. And just so, just so it's clear to everybody, this is how you learn in relationship. This is how you learn at work.
Mm-hmm.
This is how you learn at school, right? You get a question wrong on a quiz, in a math quiz at school, you learn what you did wrong, and that's how you don't get it wrong next time. But if every time you get a question wrong in a math quiz, you ignore it and you never wanna look at it again, or you don't do math again, You're never gonna get better at that.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's an important point. And what, what we're missing is we, we put recovery tools in this one box when this is like, these are life skills.
100%.
Right? 100%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's, isn't that what addiction really is though? Isn't, isn't addiction really about A relative lack of resilience, grit, and ability to handle severe discomfort. So we find ways to mask it. I mean, right. And the same thing happens at work. I mean, I work with high-level executives. I work with professional coaches in, you know, in professional football and hockey and basketball teams. I've worked with professional athletes. I've worked with professional— musicians and artists and people who are doing really, really well in life. If you're listening to this right now and you think there are people out there who don't have self-doubt, who don't have anxiety, who don't struggle with difficulties, then you, you believe in some fantasy world that doesn't exist.
Mm-hmm.
And life is about figuring out where I'm performing well, where I'm not. Explore, understanding why, getting into acceptance, acceptance for self, forgiveness for self and others, compassion for self and others, sitting in this place of saying, okay, I'm not perfect, but I'm okay. And then figuring out what we want to do about how to change. And oftentimes, whether we like it or not, that change looks like nothing we've done before. Because if we, if it would have been familiar, we probably would have found it. a while ago. So it's kind of this ongoing, never-ending— you're 7 years into it, I'm 20-some years into it. It never stops once you start looking. It never stops. You're always, always, always changing and improving.
Yeah. Yeah. So the— for those listening, there's the Sparrow Model in your book. There's the EAT Model. I just wanted to extract where I think, where I see the listeners stuck. And that is this, in the EAT is the acceptance part.
Yeah.
And here's what, and here's why is because in this chemsex underworld that we get into, we, we are hypersexual, but we're also, we want to get more taboo, more taboo, more taboo. So what happens is we have Zoom rooms. Where you can use with other men 24/7. Um, and you have to be using in these rooms. In these rooms, there are certain things projected on a screen that are very taboo. And I'm talking about, I'm talking about stuff with children and, you know, just things that you would never watch otherwise. You get involved and you, you Participate in scenarios that you never would before, right? A lot of straight men come to me and they're bound by this guilt of, I was with men, but I don't like men, right? Because it's as taboo, it's more taboo, more dopamine. A lot of the listeners are stuck in, I can't believe I watched that, participated in that, it turned me on. And now I'm just, they're, they're, they're stuck in this, I'm a bad person. And then because I'm a bad person, I just keep using anyway. So what would you, what is your advice in terms of, I mean, I know it's a big process, but what are some, maybe some initial steps in trying to accept what you did on meth?
First of all, great question. Secondly, I mean, you're totally right. A lot of people skip over the accept phase and think they can do it without it. Um, I talk about it a little bit, like there are a few different metaphors I've used for this in the past, but over our using life, over our life, as we've done things in the world, I kind of equate it to imagine, you know, those storage spaces that you go rent out. Imagine you rented yourself a nice big storage space and it's full and every time Something happens in life that is too hard to deal with, you kind of put it in a box and put it in the corner. I think a lot of us, by the time we decide it's finally time for us to do whatever the hell we need to do in order to get to the other side of the, of our life, we kind of find ourselves in that previously totally empty storage space with barely enough room to stand. Maybe we're crouching in the corner because the whole rest of it is full of little boxes, full of crap we don't want to deal with. That we've hid behind, we've lied about, we've forgotten about, we've repressed, we've used over, right? So it's everywhere. And really the only thing that we can do is to gradually, and this is a, an extended process where you have to really have compassion and gentleness for yourself and for others. And we have to start unpacking those, you know, and, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna use some of the specific pieces that you spoke of, and I could be 100% wrong about any of these cuz I'm not talking about a specific person. I'm, I'm making up a scenario. So as you're listening to this, Dallas, please feel free to correct me at any point in time.
Yeah.
And as somebody else is listening to it, you know, I'll, uh, I'll use the cliché of, you know, if I, if I say something that doesn't fit your scenario, see if there's a version of this that fits yours. Mm-hmm. And you can, You can fill in the details of the story.
Mm-hmm.
But I know that a lot of us who, um, who get involved in, in drugs and alcohol and, and things that are also related to sex, right? Which are pretty heavy. We came in before the drugs and alcohol with a lot of shame around our sexuality. For me, there wasn't a deep trauma around sex. And by that, I, I mean like no abuse, no sexual assault that I know of anyway when I was younger. Like I found porn when I was 11 years old and certainly for an 11-year-old kid started regularly looking at things that were above my pay grade. Right. And that created this distortion. It created just a distortion in my mind of what sex is.
Hmm. Yeah.
My guess is almost everybody, if not everybody who's listening to this and got involved in these sorts of things, has their version of that. And from the stories that I know, and, and it's sad how little recognized this is. I know within some religious circles it's more recognized than others, but a lot of men, a lot of children, but a lot of men have had inappropriate sexual experiences. Other people touching them, other people showing interest in them when they were too young. I mean, obviously we've all talked about women having that, right? And that's That's kind of par for the course, right? Like most little girls have been inappropriately approached, touched, assaulted, et cetera. But I think people underestimate how often that happens to men.
Yeah. Yes.
And so in a way, if you grew up and had some of these experiences, some that you brought on your own, like essentially I found my dad's porn stash is what happened, but ones that you brought on your own and then kind of found yourself enmeshed in and totally obsessed and compulsive about. Or things that got put on you, a neighbor that made some advances they shouldn't have, a, a bigger boy in the neighbor, like whatever the hell happened.
Mm-hmm.
Remember that these things happened to you. They're part of your psyche and, and you had to figure out how to deal with them. And so some of the things that are the most repressed are actually reactions. The reactions that we're having, trying to make sense of a world that honestly just didn't make sense around us. Parents, neighbors, loved ones, media, et cetera. It's brothers, right? Sometimes you hear about this within families. Like it is, it's just so easy to judge. It's so easy to judge ourselves and other people. I'll go back to something I said right when we started this. We were all babies at some point. Newborns.
Yeah.
Even the people who Did the things they did to us. We're just innocent newborns at some point. Life just has a way of fucking with you. It, it just does.
Mm-hmm.
And so I'm sure I can under— I can see why you feel shame and you would feel guilt and feel like you had done bad things. In that universe, in that world. And back to, I'll go back to that sparrow thing, right? So the outcome is the current feeling of shame, embarrassment, guilt around some of the things you've done. Okay. Now let's go unpack how they happened. Um, I said this in a, in a previous podcast. And so, because it gets played sometimes to me, um, I remember, you know, so many of us, Spend the majority of our life trying to run away from parts of ourselves and parts of our past that we really don't like. We move to new places, we take on new personalities, we shift jobs, we shift relationships, and it never works. It never works, and it never will. The only thing we can do, the absolute only option in our world is to stop, turn around, face all of it head on. Take the pain, take the difficulty, take the discomfort. Try not to do this alone. It can be too much to do alone.
Yeah.
Professional helper, a community you can rely on, a group. anything, but go and examine the deepest darkness. Joseph Campbell has this quote in his book, uh, um, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The cave you fear the most is the one that holds your treasure.
Mm-hmm.
Go into the darkness. Look at what it tells you. Start unpacking it. What I found in my experience with, again, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people, is that's where the rewards are.
Hmm.
The rewards are hiding under the pain. It's like Pandora's box, right? You, you have to get rid of all the ghouls and all the demons and all the evil in order to find hope at the bottom.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but that's what, that's what gets us there. So for anybody listening who feels like they've done too much, first of all, know you're not alone, right? Millions and millions of other people have done what they feel like is too much. And today is Tuesday. Mm-hmm. So what are you gonna do today in order to just release a little bit of that? And then what are you gonna do tomorrow to release a little bit more? And then I want you to close your eyes for a minute and imagine your life 3 years from now, 2 years from now, 5 years from now, and you're free of maybe not all that pain, but half of that pain. You're free of 80% of that pain. What would it feel like to wake up?
Yeah, I love that. Again, we think in a lot of extremes and we say, I like that you said What would it feel like to be, to have 80% of that pain gone? Right. But we, we think we need to be healed and it's gotta be completely like with a taken care of with a bow on top. And it just, it's all gradient, right? It's all gradient shades of healing.
It's all gradient shades. Again, I'm 25 years into this. It's not all gone, man.
Right.
It's mostly gone, you know, but I just, My wife thought I was being an asshole this morning. Like, okay, you know?
Yeah, right. Yeah.
Yesterday she told me how great I was doing. Today I was a dick. Like, yeah, life, life doesn't show up with cherries and ribbons and, and whipped cream every, every single day, right? It's not roses. Yeah, some moments are, and we should, we should have a deep— that's one of the practices I really recommend in, um, And unhook. We should have a deep gratitude practice that allows us to connect to the things that are great when they're great. Uh, we should cherish them because they're great. We shouldn't walk through the day expecting every moment to feel that way. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Yes. Thank you. Um, I have one more question and then I, I don't wanna take up a lot of your time, but looking at the 9 steps of Ignited, and I'm gonna Put the— if you're watching, I'm just going to quickly put that on the screen, your Ignited page. So just so everyone can see. So we'll go up to the top. This is your website, as seen on everywhere, Dr. Oz. But it's— we're talking about tracking and celebrating progress, obviously. No shame, right? We focus on the root cause. In healing misaligned habits. And of course, you know, you have 24, looks like 24/7 coaching. You're always here for you, engaging community, um, work one-on-one with live coaches. What a great program. What?
Thank you, man.
This has it all. Um, but one thing that, that really stands out to me, and so we're going to put, of course, the website into, in the show notes, but Is your, your talk about beliefs, right? As a first step, like examine your, address your challenging, address and challenge your underlying beliefs. And it's— Yeah.
That, so, you know, that part became, it became an even bigger part in Unhooked, but yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, in, in that when I talk about going back home to self, right? Like we, we are, it seems that we find the person we were before the world told us who we were, right? And, and we're given these beliefs about ourselves from the world around us. And what I do see is, yes, there's been men I've met who are 15 years meth-free, but still live with this lens. that they see the world through that is so delusional, right? That keeps them going back to these meetings every day because they can't handle life. But it's all about this, the perspective they have because of the beliefs they have on themselves. So what are, again, I'll ask like, what are some first steps for the listeners to kind of start to examine and understand what their beliefs are and how they're hurting them? Yeah.
First of all, I love this because I think it's necessary. And when people see the SPARROW, so SPARROW stands for stimulus, perception, activation, response, outcome. Stimulus, the trigger, the thing that started the whole event for you. Perception, the lens through which you saw that trigger. And then the activation, the physical, emotional activation that got created in you because of your belief. What I tell people all the time is if you think that you get triggered to use, you're wrong. You use because of an uncomfortable feeling that you have inside.
Right.
The feeling came up because of the way you, you saw and processed the trigger. So you don't get triggered to use. The trigger makes you feel a certain way, you use because of the feeling. And so if you can process that little part between Why does this trigger make me have this feeling? You can stop the using. But now that takes a lot of work because there's a belief piece in there. And you said something I wanna say, I love it. You said that, you know, that these, these people are delusional. You know, in an interesting way, Dallas, we're all delusional.
Mm-hmm.
But here's the beauty of that recognition. I don't know that there's an objective reality. I mean, there's, there are things in front of me, but you know, like I'm looking at people walking on the street in Union Square in San Francisco. I don't know where they're going. I don't know what they're doing. I don't even know that if I ask them what they would tell me is really the only objective truth about what's happening, right? There are an almost endless set of perspectives and beliefs about any given event. You've— I'm sure you've had— oh, everybody listening right now has got like watched a TV show with another friend or somebody else, or talked to a friend about a TV show you watched, and you both took completely different things from it.
Yeah.
Focused on completely different characters, remembered completely different scenes. So were those scenes the most important? No, they were just the most important ones to you. We're all living with lenses. We're all living with biases. We're all living in delusion.
Mm-hmm.
So here's the only question. If the beliefs that you have taken on over your life, the delusions that you decided to take on, I'll, I'll name some. The world is a dark place. You're born alone, you die alone. Nobody cares about you. Um, you are not worthy. You're never gonna be loved. You're not good enough for other people. You're a bad person. You're evil. Uh, you're stupid. You're too fat, you're too skinny, you're ugly, right? People never liked you and they never will. If those are— that's a set of beliefs, right? You have to control everything in the world in order for things to work out. Like, I can come up with a trillion, right? You have to always be right. You need to be needed by others. There's hundreds of these that we could just come up with. But if these are the beliefs that you hold onto in your head and they were taken on because of the life you grew up into, And they're your version of delusion. What if you could rewrite them?
Hmm.
What if you could take on a different set of delusions, one that feel nicer, like people are inherently good and they're gonna wanna help you in the world. You are lovable and you're good enough, not for everybody, but for more than enough people for yourself, right? Nobody wants a million friends. That's just ridiculous. You want like, I need like 7, I need like 7 to 10 good people in my life, right?
Yeah.
I'm more than lovable enough for people to care about me. You know, I'm smart, I have capabilities, I can do good in the world, right? Like, why not work really, really hard to be delusional in a way that serves you and your well-being and the people around you? Not self-serving, not selfish.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and I'm not making this up. There's research that shows that people who are happy, people who experience life as full of more joy, contentment, who feel good about their life, are not objective. They don't try to be realistic. They wear rose-colored glasses. They overestimate their ability. They overestimate their chance of success. They overestimate their standing in the world. But they get to walk through this world in joy. So what if we can learn from that? Right? What if, let's say your mom told you that unless you dress perfectly, unless you get perfect grades, you're never gonna make anything of yourself in the world. Again, I'm just making up an example. Well, she was obviously wrong because there are people who didn't get straight A's and are not perfect and don't dress perfectly and are doing perfectly well in the world.
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg is an example, and you may like him, you may not like him, but I would argue, you know, leaves something to be desired in terms of his dress code. Um, that was, that was a joke. That was just a joke, Mark.
Sorry.
I did not mean to offend you, Mark. If you're listening to this right now, um, don't, don't shut off my Instagram account. But, um, you know, the guy quit Harvard, like the guy left school, right? So these beliefs, this was your mom trying to teach you the best that she could in the world to make you successful, but she was wrong about a lot of things.
Hmm.
These beliefs, these lenses we look through the world at have a massive influence on how we then want to behave and how we want to show up for ourselves and other people. So there's a starting point and I'll end with one more quote. Thomas, I think this is actually Henry Ford. Henry Ford said, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you are right.
You're right. Yeah.
So if you want to change your addictive behavior, but you believe you're stuck for the rest of your life and you'll never be able to change, it doesn't matter what you do, you'll end up continuing to fail. So you've got to figure out a way in your head to say, oh, you know what? I listened to these 2 guys. They kind of seem like maybe they knew a little bit of what they're talking about. But I'm just going to choose to take on this belief. I can stop my addiction. There's a set of tools out there that'll do it for me. It's, it's, you know, Dallas's coaching program or this Ignited thing or AA or Smart Recovery or something is out there. Meditation, going and becoming a monk in Thailand, like whatever it is, there is something out there that'll work to change my life. Because if you start believing that, You're now on the search for what it is that will do it. But if you don't even believe it, nothing you find will work.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. I know we didn't take it. We didn't take too deep of a dive in your, the models, but guys, if you want to read Unhooked, it has all in the back, all the exercises, all the, you know, there's so much in here. That you can take advantage of. I have, as you can see, lots of pages marked. Uh, I was going to ask you about the 500 other things that are in here, but we just didn't have the time. But, uh, I, you know, I purposely waited too to read your stuff because I, in my coaching program, I didn't want to copy you.
Mm-hmm.
But I was, I was, but reading it really helped inform me and in my practice. So thank you. But But guys, check out Ignited, check out the books. I hope that you, I hope today gave you some, some, some perspective shifts. And that's really what this is all about. Spiritual growth, mental growth, recovery growth. It's all about one perspective shift after the other. And that's all we wanted to try to do today. And I, and, uh, Dr. Jaffe, did I miss anything? Was there something that I should have asked, do you think, that we, we could have covered? That would've been important.
No, no, no, no. I, um, yeah, no, I mean, look, we can, conversations like this can take weeks. Um, I appreciate our connection. I appreciate the work that you're doing. Congratulations on your, your success.
And thank you.
For everybody else that's listening, look, we're just 2 guys with our examples of what recovery can look like. Your recovery will look different. Uh, But I'll say something I said before. The work is hard, but it's goddamn worth it. Um, you get, when you get to the other side and you finish the work, you discover this world that you didn't even know existed before. And it's, uh, it's great and it's beautiful. And, um, I wish it, I wish every single person listening to this right now finds their version of it.
Yeah. Wow. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming. I really appreciate your time. I know it's valuable.
Yeah.
And I know, I know we've helped somebody today. So, all right guys, hope you enjoyed this episode. Get involved if you want. You know how to comment on YouTube and Spotify, or just send me a DM or join the Facebook group. We talk about the episode on there. So, all right, we will see everybody next week. Bye.
