327: 🐺The Wolf You Feed — On Addiction, Recovery & Codependency — and What We Get Wrong About All Three with Eric Zimmer

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The most important thing is you find out how you can take care of yourself and get through this. What causes somebody to get sober and somebody else not to is a great mystery to me. People will put forth theories and they've got. But when you get right down to it and you watch people on the ground, you just, I don't know. They did, they didn't. They seem to have the same circumstances, like, should you kick your kid out or let them stay at home? I don't know. I don't think there's a right answer. I think there's the answer that you have to be able to live with, and there's the answer that's going to allow you to have some sanity in your own life and not go down with the ship.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of the only move that matters is your next one.

Notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back, Pivoters. I am so thrilled to be here in person today with new friend Eric Zimmer. We got introduced by a mutual friend and longtime friend of the POD and my life, Jonathan Fields. And Eric's coming in from Ohio to New York City. So we have this rare moment that not only do we get to meet in person, but as us podcasters do, why don't we just hit record on this coffee talk?

Totally.

So welcome, Eric, to the show.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. It's so fun to be in person.

I know, it's wild.

Jonathan has been just a deep gift to my whole life. I mean, he has just really been so wonderful.

He's that kind of guy. I love how Christopher Casey Carter, he's a previous guest. He calls him his menschtor.

Ah.

Which I think is so apt For John, totally. So we love you, jf. Quick bio on Eric before we get into the show. At the age of 24, he was homeless, addicted to heroin, and facing long jail sentences. In the years since, he's found a way to recover from addiction and build a life worth living for himself. For the past 20 years, Eric has worked as a behavior coach. He's also a certified interfaith spiritual director, podcaster, and writer who is endlessly inspired by the quest for a greater understanding of how our minds work and how to intellectually create the lives we want to live. Since 2014, he has been hosting the award winning podcast the one you feed, based on an old parable about two wolves at battle within us. I feature that parable in Pivot because it's so related to navigating anything, but especially change. I love that that's the name of your show. And the list of guests that Eric has interviewed is epic. Anyone and everyone you can imagine, he's had them on the show. Kristin Neff, Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, Jonathan Fields, everybody in this space you've had on. So it's just an incredible body of work that you've created. And as I was preparing for today, I was thinking about this parable that in the story, a kid asks their grandfather, the grandparent says, we have two wolves within us. The kid says, well, which one lives? The grandparent says, the one you feed. So it kind of stops there.

Yeah.

And when I even told that parable in Pivot, I'm thinking, okay, so all we need to do is feed the good wolf of love and joy and that. But I feel like the other wolf gets left out of the conversation. And sometimes we act as though, oh, well, if you don't feed the other wolf, it will die. But in my experience, it doesn't really. It's always there.

Yep.

The other wolf doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't go away even if we're not consciously feeding it. Even someone like you who's been studying behavior change and spiritual practices for so long, you still probably have that other wolf, and it's still actually quite prominent in a certain sense. What's your take on that? I don't know. What's your take on the fact that they don't go away? They're always gonna be there.

It's one of the things I love about the parable that's always resonated with me was this idea that we all have these two wolves. So it normalizes that. Of course, we want to give a little Bit more attention to kindness and bravery and love and things like that. But there is also greed and hatred. I'm a longtime Zen practitioner. One of the vows is greed, hatred and delusion rise endlessly. I vow to abandon them. Right. That idea, like, it comes endlessly. Yeah. That wolf is there. And I love the way the story's framed because it sounds like it's kind of a close battle. It normalizes that we have all these things inside of us. And so how do we work with them, all of it skillfully.

And it seems like we can improve how quickly we feed the good wolf, quote, unquote. Maybe they both have good qualities, I don't know. Or at least the, quote, bad wolf, the fear and greed, whatnot. It's there. It's trying to help us. This kind of survival instinct type of stuff. I know you do a lot of work about the negativity bias that in this really bizarre way, humans are sort of programmed to focus on the negative. It's very strange. Or we have proclivities toward the things you said, like greed or jealousy, or I find people pleasing. We each might have our own pet vices that I find no matter how aware or how much quicker I get at feeding the good wolf, I still gotta be mindful about it.

Yeah, I think it is a constant. I don't know if I want to call it a battle. The parable is very dramatic. Right. I've often thought the language I would use more is we have a skillful and an unskillful wolf. But that's kind of a boring parable. Like skillful and unskillful wolf is sort of not a great story, but that's a much more accurate representation, I think, of what actually is going on inside of us is if, let's say greed. And greed really, in the Buddhist lexicon, doesn't mean greed necessarily in the way we think of it. Like, oh, I just want more money. It's, I just want things. And hatred doesn't necessarily mean, like, hatred, like, I hate you. It more means I don't want things. I push things away. So it's often talked about as clinging and aversion. Pulling the things we like towards us, pushing the things we don't like away from us. And that's just a normal part of what it means to be human. So when we find ourselves pushing something away from us, so called the bad wolf, skillfully working with it means recognizing, like, what's going on here? What is the underlying deeper need that I might be having? Why am I responding this way. Why am I reacting this way and not banishing it, but trying to understand it?

I know you've had Gabor Mate on your show. I loved his book in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

Yes.

And the huge aha that I had reading his book, that I felt no one, at least in my experience, had quite said it this way. He said, we look at people who are addicts or addicted to something, and you've been so honest with your experience. It's right there in your bio.

Yep.

And we assume that alcohol or drugs is the problem, but the way he says it is that it is a person's attempted solution at a deeper problem.

100%, yes.

And so we demonize. Oh, you know, we're here in New York City. There's people. You can see that people are doing drugs or there's all kinds of stuff going on and we make them bad or, oh, they're a drug addict, the drugs are bad. But it's all to fix and often relates to childhood trauma and it relates to this core wound or a core need for connection.

Yes.

Or I know you've talked on your show about being sensitive as a kid. I can relate to that. And if you're sensitive in this world, it's tricky sometimes. And so whether it came from God or Monty or from other places, in your journey through addiction, at what point did you realize, oh, this is just my way of self soothing or my way to try to. When did you connect that, oh, there might be a deeper problem? It's not the alcohol or the drugs that they themselves.

It was sometime after I got into recovery. It's interesting to think about what that deeper problem is. I got sober in a 12 step program in 1994 in Columbus, Ohio. So it was a very specific. There was a lens and a cultural thing to that. Right. But there was a line in the AA big book that I read and I remember. I mean, I have a terrible memory, but I actually remember where I was when I read it. It was an aha moment. And it said that selfishness, self centeredness, we think is the root of our problem. And I got that. What that meant was that I was always concerned about how do I feel? How do I feel? And so my addiction was an attempt to just really keep right on that. Like, I don't like how I feel. So that was my first big insight and it remains important to me today. Then there's another level to that, I think, which is why did I need to control how I felt so much? Why was I in this constant game of not being able to handle how I felt and thus medicating it. And so there were a couple levels of insight that occurred. So I can't say exactly when that second one happened. It did happen over time. And in the 12 steps, we do something called a searching and fearless moral inventory, Step four, and we look at character defects. And so again, there was a first level of sort of taking responsibility for the things that I was doing and the ways that I was acting. That was a really good first frame for me on behavior. But then once you do that, you immediately drop a little bit deeper and start then going, okay, well why? What else is going on? And so that was where I feel like traditional 12 step recovery sort of ended for me and I needed to go into a slightly deeper realm. But for me, and this is not for everyone, it was very helpful to be starting from a place of focusing on my behaviors and then moving into their deeper underlying mechanisms. But that's not the way everybody should do it. I'm not saying that. But I do think at some point, for everyone who's in recovery from a serious substance addiction, we do have to go a little bit deeper into what is it that's going on inside me. Because I think the core shift that it takes to remain sober, whether it be from heroin or alcohol, or not picking up our phone so often or whatever thing it is, the core shift is being able to go, oh, there's an unpleasant feeling here. And I can just be okay with that unpleasant feeling without having to fix it. Until that is done, we will always reach towards the coping mechanism because we don't know how to deal with the uncomfortable feeling. And my belief is that life, it just has them. It doesn't matter what you do, how many books you read, how many podcasts you listen to, how many spiritual retreats you go on, life is going to have uncomfortable things in it. And how we relate to those is really, you know, the whole game Back to that skillful, how do I relate to these things skillfully, knowing that they're going to come.

You mentioned a little later in your journey, after having started 12 steps, an alcoholics Anonymous, or maybe I put words into your mouth. Was it AA at that time?

It was, yeah.

It wasn't called NA yet.

No, NA existed.

Oh, it did.

It was interesting, though. As a heroin addict, I went to aa. I mean, there were reasons for that. And again, I don't wanna speak generally because I'm talking about a time and a place. Right. 1994, Columbus Ohio NA wasn't real strong.

And to me, it was a lot of street and drug talk that was really triggering for me. And AA was a lot more established. There were people who had been there, who had been sober a lot longer. And it was at least where I was was. We didn't talk about alcohol or drugs very much. We talked about recovery most of the time. And that's just kind of what I needed. And I think that's. I don't know if that's still the case, but I know there were a lot of us drug addicts running around AA at a time when AA was sort of like, don't mention your drugs, you know, but that's just where we ended up.

You mentioned later finding deeper layers.

Yeah.

Do you mind sharing what some of those were, some of those insights that you had? Was there a specific thought that would create the most discomfort or a specific feeling that you were able to pinpoint?

I mean, I think for me, you hit it earlier. It was connection. It was lack of connection. And so we often think about doing drugs or alcohol to minimize negative feelings, which I think is in a sense true. But to me, it was about creating connection. And I think for a variety of different reasons that I'm not entirely sure about, I had just gotten really good at damping down all my emotions. So what I felt most of the time was kind of dead. So long before I was an alcoholic, I was a kleptomaniac. If it wasn't nailed down, I took it. And some of the time it was cause I wanted something. But most of the time it was just the thrill of it. You know, I would break into schools at night and steal computers. And I mean, I didn't care about computers. I don't know why I did it, except I knew it was thrilling and it made me feel alive. And so alcohol and drugs did the same thing. At least initially. That's what they did. They made me feel connected to the world. They made me feel alive. Now, over time, the terrible cycle of addiction is that you don't like how you feel. So you take drugs or alcohol and then you do things you don't feel good about. So now you like how you feel even less, which means you have to take more. And that's the downward spiral that happens. But certainly in the beginning, for me, it was really about connection. I mean, and it was. Alcohol and drugs were a great solution for a while. I still maintain I have never quite found a better antidepressant than two drinks. But that doesn't work for me because two drinks becomes 10 drinks over and over. Like I've proven to myself again and again, it doesn't matter. Substance. Yeah, I will use it all the time.

And do you find. Does that map over to other things? Because I find sometimes these can be slippery. Like it means that I can't eat two cookies. I'll eat the whole bag. Or social media, if I scroll, I don't go on there much because if I go on, I'm suddenly down a rabbit hole. I'm caught.

Generally, yes. I mean the number of people who give up a substance and turn to another substance. By substance, I don't even mean substance. I mean sex or gambling or shopping or eating or, you know, there's a lot of that that occurs in the recovery community. And so, yes, I do have a proclivity to that, but I feel like I've outgrown it to a certain degree, which is a dangerous thought. Because then the thought comes, well, if you have, can't you drink?

Yeah.

And to me it's just a risk reward thing. Right. I'm like, well, maybe I could. Maybe I could have a couple drinks a couple times a week. And what would I get? I'd get a few hours of slight buzz. That would feel nice. That would be lovely. What's the downside? Oh, you burn your entire life to the ground again. Right. So I'm like, eh, just not worth testing that theory out. But I do think I've become less impulsive over time. I've become less compulsive. I'm much better able to find a middle solution with a lot of different things without having to be at the extreme. But when it comes to alcohol and drugs, for me, I've just made the decision that, yes, to say none is an extreme position. And I don't like extreme positions. But in my case, it's the wise position given the tremendous amount of damage that I've done. And the story that we talk about in my bio is I was sober at 24 and I stayed sober about seven years, eight years. But then I went out and drank again. And I didn't go back to heroin, but I had to get sober again. Which tells you it didn't work out. You know, it didn't work out. So I was only doing alcohol and marijuana and I was making more money than I'd ever made. I had the best job I'd ever had. I had just gotten promoted. Everything on the outside was good, but on the inside I was a disaster. And I was just lucky Enough to sort of have been sober long enough to know what that felt like. And I knew I'm completely out of control. I'm not doing heroin, which means that my consequences aren't as great because it's legal. Well, marijuana wasn't. But inside I was just as sick. I knew that. And so I got sober again. So I've tried that a couple different times. That was my thought when I went back to drinking. I thought, well, I'm a little older now. You know, I was seven years ago. I'm just a kid. I'm making good decisions in my life. I mean, look, I'm successful in my career. I'm in good shape. I'm a pretty good dad. And heroin's a terrible idea. We all know that. Like, yeah, just don't do that. But I bet. I bet I could probably drink again. And it turns out that that didn't work. It did for a little while, but it just escalated. So that was a long answer. I don't want to try that a third time. I have too much to lose.

We'll be right back. Just after this.

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In that relapse, do you think there was a preceding thought that something became uncomfortable again? Even being uncomfortable with that level of joy or success? Like, was there a thought that came before saying, I could do just one or I'm doing great, like that discomfort piece again?

Yes, there were a variety of things that happened. I mean, one of the things that happened was at about seven years sober, I had a son with my wife at the time and she and I had met in a heroin dealer's house and had both gotten sober and made it through with some ups and downs. But then she came home one day and said she had fallen in love with someone else. And I was just kind of heartbroken. Now, I'm not blaming all of that on her. There were obvious reasons that she was in a position to want to do that. Right. But I was pretty devastated. And the person she'd fallen in love with was in aa. It sort of caused a little bit of a break between me and my.

Recovery and the connection, like you said.

I was just angry. I mean, I knew that it was ridiculous to be angry at AA as a whole. Like, how can they allow it? Of course they can't not allow. I mean, there's no such mechanism in AA to be like, you can't do that. Right. Like, that's part of its beauty. But it caused a little bit of a break in me, and it also caused me to start going deeper into other modalities of healing. But somewhere in there, I turned a little bit of a corner. And that corner was I actually wasn't feeling great. I was not feeling good again. And so I started doing what we talked about. I started reaching out for other things. And so I had become very promiscuous. I started smoking. Now, my parents smoked, and I hated it. I had gotten to be 24 years old, heroin addict, and never smoked a cigarette. Like, I hated them. And I started smoking sober at like 32, which in retrospect is a sure sign. Like, whoa. The wheels were coming off at that point. Then, yeah, the thoughts just sort of started coming, yeah, well, maybe, you know, maybe. And then I found out that my brother, who had been a heroin addict with me and had gotten sober about a year after me, had gone back to drinking and he reported everything was fine. And so that was kind of the final piece for me. I was like, oh, I thought it was this genetic thing, but if he's doing it, you know, So I just wanted a reason to do it. And I started dating a woman who drank a lot. And so just one day I thought, well, why not?

Yeah. And it's like when that part of you wants to find a way or a reason. We're so good at that. That pleasure seeking part.

Yes.

And I'm guessing your brother, it must not have worked out to go back on drinking. Right? I don't want to assume, but I.

Can'T speak to his story. He still drinks. It didn't spiral in the way I did. I don't know whether it was the right decision for him or not. Right. We all have our opinions, but for me, for whatever reason, the good news with me, and I do think it is Good news is that, like, once it starts, I go pretty hard, Meaning it wasn't too long before I was either drinking or smoking pot or taking other drugs to combat the fact that I was drinking. You know, I'm drinking, so I need a Valium so I'm not hungover, and I'm smoking pot, which makes me groggy. So then I'm gonna snort riddle. I mean, it's just I get extreme quickly, which I think is kind of good, because I know a lot of people who went out who were sober a while, went back out like I did, and have never found their way back. And part of the reason they've never found their way back is it never gets quite bad enough, but it never gets really good either. They're caught in a limbo. If you ask them, they are always saying, like, I really want to quit. I need to give it up. But they can't because it's not that bad. So I'm somewhat fortunate in at least my previous times.

It gets pretty bad for me in different ways. I've always said the universe has me on a short leash because as soon as I veer, I get very extreme health. Things will happen that are so dramatic that I can't even go down that path for too long because I get yanked back into place.

Which is kind of a good thing in a lot of ways, because giving up those sort of behaviors that comfort us and numb us or connect us artificially or whatever, giving those up means we have to find ways to get to those things without whatever the thing is, food or drugs or gambling or whatever. We have to find our way towards those which are the behaviors that tend to lead towards human thriving.

I want to come back to that. You had a great conversation on your show where the mic tables were turned. Your partner, Jenny, interviews you. It was an episode I'll link to in the show notes called how to create a Spiritual Principle Centered Life. One of the things you both set. She kind of knew this about you, that you don't love the term rock bottom. Tell me why. I'm curious. What's with that term? And also maybe after that, we can talk about the loved ones. It's almost like, I think it's very hard for loved ones or people who are codependent with someone who's addicted to know what to do. Do you let them hit rock bottom? What is rock bottom? It might be jail. It might be death.

Yep.

It must be so excruciatingly difficult for the people around. Oh, the one in the centerment for the people to know what to do. And what does rock bottom even mean? So I'm curious to hear your take on this because I've always thought it'd be very, very tricky to know what that would be.

It is. I'll speak first to the rock bottom and then we could talk about the family piece. So I don't love the term rock bottom because it implies there is a bottom. And for many people there is no bottom, meaning it's just a free fall that never ends. Right. So we see people get sober because they feel a little groggy in the morning at work and they want to clear her head, and so they just give up alcohol. Well, there's no sort of bottom there. I mean, I walked by 15 of them on the walk down here, unfortunately, who probably some form of substance abuse and mental illness have brought them to a bottom that for most of us would be unimaginable. And they're still going. So I've known lots of friends who have died, who've gone to jail, who have gone through things that would cause most people to do anything to avoid, and they just keep using. So it assumes that there's a bottom, and I don't think there is. It also means things have to get to a certain level of bad before you decide to change. And I think that's also not a great way of thinking. That's changed a lot over the last years, particularly with the sober curious movement that's happened. But we interviewed a woman, she's been on a couple times. She was the first time I'd ever heard it phrased this way, which was the question isn't really, is it bad? How bad is it? Is it bad enough? The question is, would my life be better without it? And that's a real reframe. That's the reason. The other reason I don't like bottom is that I don't think just consequences are what get people sober. They can be a big part of it. Like, you don't change a behavior if everything's going great with it, right. There's to be no reason to. If you go out a few nights a week and have a couple drinks and you love it and it feels good and you don't suffer anything from it. Like, why would you give that up? You wouldn't. And that would be wise, probably. So bottom doesn't do it on its own. I think that we also need at the same moment that the consequences weigh in on us, and they do over and over and over. In an addict's life. There's lots of moments of like, oh, God, this has got to stop. But at the same time, there's got to be hope. If you don't have that, then the bottom doesn't do any good. It just causes despair. And I've said that I think one of the most dangerous periods of my life was after I had gotten gone to inpatient rehab for my heroin addiction, admitted to my family and everyone what was happening, stayed sober 30 days and started using again. That was a dangerous time because in my mind, I thought I did it. I did what they said to do, and it didn't work. So I guess I'm just always going to be this way. For me, that's a dangerous place to be. It's a despairing and dark place to be. So I wasn't gonna get out there. You know, I needed the hope to come back also.

That goes back to the wolves.

Yeah.

It's like, we can't just try to starve the bad wolf, the unskilled, or the bad wolf. We actually have to feed. There has to be some hope, something to look forward to, something to do this for.

And then families. Families are a tricky one because the conventional wisdom has very much been sort of a tough love, don't enable.

Right.

There's a lot more research that's starting to show that kindness and compassion towards the people in our families that are addicts can be helpful. So it's a tricky line. I think generally everybody in the field would agree you don't want to be enabling someone. And enabling would mean essentially allowing them to dodge the natural consequences of what they're doing. That's not a good idea. Bailing your child out over and over and over again. Right. Might not be the problem. Continuing to give them money when you know they're spending it on drugs might not be a great idea. But these are all gray areas.

What do you do when the parent is thinking, I'm giving money, but if I don't, they will end up even worse. The free fall all the way down. Like, I get. It's so hard.

Or the wife. You say to a wife, like, don't keep covering for your husband at work, but he's the breadwinner. There are not easy answers to this. I mean, my recommendation is that anybody that has a family member who's in active addiction seeks out help for themselves, whether it be through Al Anon, whether it be. There's lots of other places to do it, but to go through it alone, it's too much.

It Also seems like an important piece for the person who is the family member who they themselves might not be addicted but to not support at the expense of their wellbeing. And that's hard to do. I have my own codependent habits that I've worked on over time and it's a really tricky line as well of being generous and giving and caring and then noticing, oh, this is affecting me now or this is negatively impacting my life now. I need to step back or put up a really tricky boundary. It's hard, but it's so crucial.

Yeah. I always say the most important thing is you find out how you can take care of yourself and get through this. Because there's no guarantee that anything you do or don't do is going to affect. We just don't know. What causes somebody to get sober and somebody else not to is a great mystery to me. People will put forth theories and they've got. But when you get right down to it and you watch people on the ground, you're just. I don't know, they did, they didn't. They seem to have the same circumstances like should you kick your kid out or let them stay at home? I don't know. I don't think there's a right answer. I think there's the answer that you have to be able to live with and there's the answer that's going to allow you to have some sanity in your own life and not go down with the ship. Because the ship might go down, I hate to say it, it might, and you can't go down with it. So your own well being is extraordinarily important and it also puts you in a better position to be able to do the wise things with the other people and provide what support you can. Because you're coming from a place of strength versus a place of breaking down. The reality is if you are really close to an addict or an alcoholic, you will get sick mentally, emotionally, physically. It will grind you down. And so getting help is critical. Support is so critical.

There's another Gabor Mate book when the body says no about that. That is actually the people that are trying too hard to please others or prop up the support that become sick themselves.

Yes.

We'Ll be right back just after this.

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The other piece that I think would be really difficult because I have a tendency, as we've explored similar topics on our two shows, but toward anxiety or worry that if you're the family member, to not worry constantly. And we know that worry ultimately is not gonna be productive. However, they have no control over what the person is going to do or not do. And yet not to worry. How are they doing? Are they gonna be okay? Where are they sleeping tonight? What are they doing? What a practice to pull back from that. Even just for parents in general. I don't have child parents. I have a fur baby dog rider. And sometimes just terror will strike of what if something happened? Or what if this specific scenario happens because we saw a red flag? You know, you deal with that, you.

Get help to deal with it. That's why I say, I don't think you can do it on your own. It's too much. It's too extreme. It's interesting. Later this afternoon, I'm interviewing someone here in this very studio, and she wrote a book called Future Tense. T E N S E Future Tense. And it's about the benefits of anxiety. Saying like, we've gotten to the point where we consider all anxiety to be a bad thing and you want to get rid of it. Well, anxiety is telling you something about what matters to you and what's important and ideally used right. It prompts you to do the things that improve your circumstances. That's why it doesn't feel good. It prompts a response. However, once you find yourself in a situation that you absolutely have no control over, worry is completely destructive and doesn't do you any good. So I think there's a realization of recognizing, like, here's what I can do. It's this little bit, and here's what I can't do, which is a huge amount, and I'll put my attention on what I can do. And what does fall into the can do category for family members or friends of addicts is taking care of yourself. That falls into the bucket that you have some ability to control. So that's where the energy that can't go to fixing and that is going into worrying and obsessing. If we can turn that energy towards, okay, what does this mean for how I have to take care of myself, to make my life better, to make myself stronger, to make myself in a position where I can be more supportive, where I can be more kind? Because we do know that shaming an addict doesn't work.

Shaming anyone wouldn't work.

Yeah. And, I mean, we read a book recently. I can't remember the title of it. I should get it to you to put in the show notes because it was a great book about family members of addicts and really progressive ideas and a lot of great stuff. But their number one rule was stop yelling. It doesn't work. It absolutely doesn't work. So how do you stop yelling? Well, you can't stop yelling when you're at the edge of your rope all the time. So what can you can control? You can control how you'd relate to your own mental and emotional health so that you're not doing things that are pushing the addict further from recovery. I'm not saying it's anybody's fault that someone else is using. It's not. But there are things that are more conducive to recovery and things that are less. And yelling at somebody and shaming them and making them feel bad is not something that is conducive because it doesn't work. Because all of a sudden now the addict has to become defensive. They have to defend their choices, which in their heart of hearts, they may not actually want to defend or think needs defending, but they will if someone's coming at them. We're all that way. If I started accusing you of a bunch of things right now, you're going to get defensive and start saying why that's not true. So sort of summing all that up is if we can take that energy that's coming, the natural worry, which is care, and we could say, okay, what can I do? I can learn to take care of myself in the best way I can so that I can be the best support to this other person.

And so true what you're saying. I can relate in the sense that actually, for the first time ever, I shared at free time my third book about an OCD disorder of pulling my hair out, that I still struggle with and in the early days of it, I would do that. And my family, if they saw me doing it, would like, yell. Not violently yell, but like, hey, stop that. Or don't do that. That kind of thing. But what it misses is that it's a response already to a moment of agitation. It's an unskillful stress response to even do the behavior, whether it's biting your nails, in my case, pulling out my hair. Of course it's terrible. But it's an unconscious response to a trigger, a small discomfort or a big discomfort. So then the person yells or snaps. Now all of a sudden, I'm wrong. Now it digs it into the ground.

The discomfort that you're even more tense and agitated. Yeah.

And it just doesn't work. That would never prevent the next time.

That's right.

It just doesn't work.

Yep.

So I just had to say that because it's almost like we really need to be observers in all this. And even the codependency literature is coming around in a different way because it's like just pure tough love or telling people who are the family members or again, codependent in other ways. Like, in a way, we are a codependent species, so we can't make the phrase itself so wrong.

I mean, and it's not even a real scientific phrase. It just kind of bubbled up out of the recovery world. But you're right. We are a species of relation. To think that we're not going to relate or that we shouldn't care is to ask ourselves to do something that is against the very nature of being human. Yeah, I agree 100%. And I think it also speaks back to the point about pulling your hair or quitting drinking or whatever it is. I think that those sort of changes are very much a learning process. You have to learn to do it. Some people have even posited that that's what addiction is. It's a learning disorder. That something in your brain no longer can make the connections that say, like, when I do this, a bad thing happens. Like it's a learning disorder. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's an interesting idea. But learning is absolutely a part of it. And we don't learn under stress. When we're under stress, we defend, we react. We become emotionally very stimulated. And that takes away from our ability in our prefrontal cortex to learn. And you have to be able to learn to change a behavior. So we've got to take the emotional temperature down on whatever These things are. And go. Okay, what can I learn here? But somebody yelling at you about pulling out your hair, even if it's just stop. It does not. It turns the emotional temperature up. And you're not going to learn how to not do it from there, because if you knew how to not do it, you probably wouldn't do it.

That's it. That's just it. And then even if in that moment I might stop, it might lead to a 10x situation an hour later.

Yeah. It drives behavior underground.

Drives it underground. That too.

Which is not helpful. Right.

And there may be part of me, even to this day, that would say, well, I'd rather do this thing as a stress release. Then I don't care if you yell at me. It wouldn't even prevent. It's like, whatever. The experience in that moment doesn't counter how soothing that's right.

Something is, you're gonna keep doing it and it's gonna put strain in a relationship. That's what happens. Nothing good comes out of that. Now, can other people be supportive in changing behavior? Absolutely. If you were to say to somebody, like, I pull out my hair and I don't even know I'm doing it, could you just gently let me know when I'm doing it so I at least start to know? Okay, there's a way that I can support you in changing. That actually works.

That's what I have with my husband, because he bites his nails and he'll say to me, if you see me doing this, tell me to stop. Or like, his body doesn't work well with alcohol. It just doesn't digest it well. He says, if you see me put a beer in my hand, like at any point in the future, just tell me. Remind me that I'm asking you this right now. So sometimes if he's biting his nails, I'll say, not even just stop. But I'll say something up like, you're biting your nails. What's on your mind? Inevitably, there's probably some moment of stress coming up, arising in his thoughts. We're just about out of time, sadly. I know, right? So I want to close with something beautiful that you've written. I've talked about liminal space on this show before, but I've never heard it put quite this way. You say it's a posts that we'll link to in the show. Notes about life's dark hallways. You say you've undoubtedly heard the saying, when one door closes, another one opens. But what's not talked about is the dark hallway in between these closing and opening doors, when in the dark hallway, we can feel lost and scared, and it's very disorienting. How long until the next door opens? No one can say. So if we could leave listeners with just one word of wisdom, or even an experiment they can try when they find themselves in the dark hallway, not yet knowing where the next door is, what would you want to leave people with?

Knowing that that's the way things often are could be really helpful, because the conclusion usually is, I'm in a dark hallway and I'm always going to be in this dark hallway and I'm never going to get out of it. And that, back to our discussions earlier, does not lead to hope. It leads to despair. So knowing, like, okay, yeah, I'm in a spot right now that feels dark. I don't know what's coming. And then just leaving our minds open to the fact that things change. I've had more experiences in my life, and maybe listeners can reflect on this, too, where something that I thought was really bad happened, and it was bad in that it really hurt. It really sucked. But then later, you know, this podcast and what I do now, which I feel like is the work of my life, like, right in the job I'm supposed to be in. But it came when a solar energy company that I'd started and ran for about four or five years failed. And that was heartbreaking. I was really, really upset at the time. I just was upset there wasn't anything to do but be upset and grieve the loss of something that I loved while also keeping my eyes open for, like, well, what else? Yeah, this is really painful. And what else? So I think that's the thing, is to recognize we're in a dark place, know that everything changes, and just continue to, while grieving the place you're in, say, well, what else? Because things come along, if we look for them and we search for them, what else?

And you and I am smiling because we share a love of the parable we'll see of the farmer and his son, where every event is like, such a dramatic story and the tides turn in every direction. But every time he just says, we'll see, and it's like, the company closed. It's horrible. The worst day, the worst thing that could ever happen to you. We'll see.

Exactly. And I don't know that in life we necessarily get to the equanimity of the farmer in that story, who just is like, his neighbor comes over all, oh, my God, your son fell off the horse, it's terrible. And he's like, eh, could be good, could be bad. I don't know that we get to that level of equanimity, but we can get to that level of at least wisdom where, yeah, when bad things happen in life, it hurts. Okay, that's fine. We don't want to run away from that. That leads to addiction, right? All the bad things. So I can feel that. But I can also have a perspective of wisdom. And the wisdom perspective says, yeah, something else is coming.

That's beautiful. Eric. Thank you so much. This is such a treat to meet you record in person.

Been so fun.

I know time flies when you're having fun.

Indeed.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Foreign.

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