Day 11: Eliminate Judgement

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Welcome to the twelve Days of Heart holiday anxiety reduction tips. This is day number 11, and I am your guide, Dr. Don Wood. You know that now. And we're going to be taking a look at number 11, and I'm going to again, how do we start? Put on our holiday hats.

Feel free to put one on if you want to while you're listening to this. That'd be cool. I've been good. Have you been good? Right, Holidays, great time to be good again. We've been looking at the 12 days of Christmas, the theme, and so let's look at what happens. Let's get forgot about this. Can't forget her. Alexa, play some holiday music.

Here's a station you might like. Holiday favorites on Amazon Music. What do we got? Oh, there's no Place Like Home. We heard that before. But it's a great song, so we can do it again. So let's see. On the.

11Th day of Christmas my true love gave to me. 11 Piper's piping. Am I glad we stopped looking at this? Literally, I have no idea. 11 pipers piping. Okay, so that's what. What we've got. So let's take a look then at the number 11. What is number 11? So 11 is sort of a tricky number. You think about it, how many times is 11 an important number? You never hear, oh, lucky number 11. Right. It's more than a dozen. It's one less than a dozen. But more than 10. 10 is usually, oh, he's at 10 or she's at 10. Right. It's often reserved. This is interesting. It's often reserved for the best player on a soccer team. Eleven's sort of kind of the underdog of numbers. So let me tell you a little bit about our number 11. She was a soccer player, very, very popular, beautiful, superb athlete, best player on our soccer team. And her name is Michelle. And Michelle fell into addiction for 17 years from her teenage years. And during those 17 years, she lost.

Really, really, really struggled. And, you know, and even really before I sort of met Michelle, boy, we got this loud, don't we? So let's see if we can get this down a little bit.

So with Michelle, she, like I said, had been struggling with addiction for a long time, suffered an awful lot. And I met a lot of people in addiction and it really helped me understand, if you remember one of the earlier lessons or one of the earlier tips that we talked about was understanding number 11 is really talking about judging and judging people. So we need to stop judging people when they're in that kind of addiction. Addiction is really. It's affecting every family in this country, Whether rich, poor, white, black, doesn't matter. It's now a big, big problem in this country. My buddy Joe Polish started the.

Genius recovery network to really help. And as he said, we need to change the dialogue about addiction. And not just addict. Right? But the IDEA Tip number 11 is let's not judge people who are different. Let's not judge people for having a different way of life or things that they're struggling with. You know, I used to hear that, oh, addiction is a weakness. It's a character flaw. And it really. I don't believe that. I don't really believe that at all. People get stuck in that kind of a lifestyle. It's very difficult to get out. The good news is Michelle came to see us two years ago. 17 years of addiction. She's absolutely clean. She's leading her life the way she wants to now and has had no desire at all to go back to that. So she is a miracle, and we're very, very proud of her. So, again, one of the things that she said which was really powerful when she first came in, she says one of the secrets to why she felt she did so well is because when she came in, we didn't judge her. In fact, the words I said to her is, michelle, there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your mind. You've had some events and experiences that your mind is not okay with, and you found a resource to block and basically numb that pain. So that's not about her character or willpower. That was about human behavior trying to stop the pain. So stay tuned for another tip in your email, in your inbox. And there it is.