Trauma, Survival, and Recovery: The Truth About Addiction with Joe Polish, Dr. Don Wood, and Tim Westbrook

How do we best help people that struggle with addiction?

We've got to change the way we speak to these people. It's not about their character or morals, but they make it feel like it is. You couldn't possibly do it any differently than you're doing it based on what you've experienced. The key to it is to get to the trauma. And what I do in the program I'm doing is. And I think this is what makes it work. The brain has to get into optimal condition to heal. And as long as they're in a fight or flight state, it doesn't get into optimal condition. So it keeps running the programs that it ran because it doesn't feel safe. And if all of a sudden I'm saying to you, just stop that, Joe. Just give me that drink, you know, you don't need it. The mind's like, I'll die without it. And so are you going to just give up that drink? The conscious part of your mind would say yes.

Right.

That doesn't make sense. I'm ruining my life. I'm ruining my family. But the subconscious says, until you give me a better solution, I'm in survival mode.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network. All right, here I am getting ready to take off in the helicopter with our headsets with Dr. Don Wood and Tim Westbrook. We're over at Tim's place today doing a podcast in your sort of studio, which is normally you on Zoom. And so what we're going to do is we're going to talk about addiction recovery and about life and about trauma and whatever else. We're also going to have a friend who is a pharmacist who's going to be coming in right now. So come on in and grab a seat over here, if that's okay. And she is. She's a cool person named Kristen who helps distribute Narcan and kits. She's a pharmacist and helps people prevent people from overdosing from addiction. So basically. So let's start with the definition of addiction. I'd like to hear both of your guys definition and perspective on it, and then we'll talk about what leads to it.

Okay. The definition of addiction is something that you do repeatedly despite negative consequences.

Yep.

I talk about addiction as a code. So it's a code to trauma. So trauma has created pain, and then the pain gets resolved by the code. Okay.

And when me and you first met, it was a 2019 at the Spartan World Championships in Lake Tahoe. And when I showed up, I was in the green room. Green room, which was an outside area, but, you know, called a green room. And you were on stage being interviewed with three other athletes for something that was, I think, a podcast and also being broadcast on espn. And I was. And you were talking about addiction, and you were talking about trauma, which I thought was quite interesting. And so when you got off stage during the break, because you were. Continued to be interviewed and stuff, I'd introduced myself. We got to know each other, and I said, you know, well, my views on addiction is addiction is a solution. It's not a problem. It's actually the solution. The drugs are the solution. The behavior is a solution. It's not a very good solution. It's a solution that has a lot of problems attached to it, but it's a solution to pain. And we had a pretty good conversation about that perspective. And then, of course, I liked Don, because he went up next and he said while he was being interviewed, met this guy, Joe Polish, and he's the only one that I've ever heard that actually understands what addiction is. And of course, because made me feel good.

Yeah, you got a little dopamine hit.

Yeah, exactly. And so, no, we totally hit it off. And so now, you know, both you guys come to Genius Network, and we've, I think, all collectively help a lot of people that struggle with. With addiction. So I've heard many definitions of. Of what is addiction. And I have a friend, Chris Doyle, with Y Intervention. He's an interventionist that lives in Pennsylvania. And I asked him, you know, what's the definition of addiction? He's like, two words. Can't stop. And, you know, it's pretty good way of summing it up. You can't stop. Now, the cause of addiction, my current understanding. And I always say that I record my research. I've been in recovery for over 20 years. So, I mean, I openly talk about my struggles with addiction with the pursuit of trying to figure it out. I record my research, and with my foundation, Genius Recovery, which I happen to be wearing one of the shirts. The goal is to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment, and find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share it with the world. And so let's talk about what the causes are. My understanding of it is it's a response to trauma. You know, I've learned a lot about that from my friend Gabor Mate and other really great. You know, trauma experts, that's your specialty is trauma. And I look at it from what I've learned from Dr. Anna Lembke, the, you know, biochemical aspects of it. Serotonin, dopamine. Some people may not have trauma in their life, but they are addicts because of the, call it the imbalance or the constant exposure to dopamine, where, you know, can create a craving. But there's a lot of. There's a big soup of chemicals in biochemistry and neurotransmitters in the brain and body that I'm too dumb to try to explain. I'm not a complete expert in this. So just off what I do in. In my life and what I've been exposed to, I think I know more than the average bear. We certainly all do. But I'm always constantly searching for, what is this? So you refer to it as a code. I would love to have you break that down and explain what, what that means.

Yeah, because when I talk about addiction, what I say is, it's basically a symptom of a problem. It's not the problem, but everybody focuses on the symptom. And so if you only work on the symptom, you never fix the problem. So I believe that trauma creates pain, Right? Emotional pain. It can be physical too, but most times it's emotional. And so the subconscious mind, which is survival based, wants a solution now because it operates in the present. So if you take the drug or take the alcohol, you just solve the problem, and so you get instant relief. So that's what the subconscious wants. It sees no consequences because your subconscious operates in the present. It has no connection to time. It solved the problem. When? Now, if it had a conscious ability to do this, we wouldn't have addiction. So as long as you solve the problem, the subconscious is fine. It can't see a consequence because it would have to relate to time to see a consequence. Oh, this is. The conscious part of your mind goes, this is bad. But who's in charge of survival? Subconscious. And so then what I say is, every time you repeat something I say, think of repetition as research for the brain. Every time you repeat it, you're telling your brain, here's the research to solve the problem, and then that becomes a code. Your brain is just a computer. And so if you start typing into your computer, have you ever had your computer say, oh, don't type that. That's not a good thing to type. It accepts the code, so it's literal. So that's why I say, if you don't get to the root problem, which is the trauma. The codes will keep running. And I know AA and NA really try to work on changing the way you deal with things. They're trying to change the code, but if you don't fix the problem that started the code, you're painting over rust.

Interesting. Okay, how, how do you translate that?

How do I translate what Don just said?

Yeah, or how, or, I mean, you can just tell him I don't agree with anything he just said.

Yeah, I mean, I, I, I definitely think that what he's saying is valid, and I think that an addiction is, it's the solution. As we know. We've talked about it, the addiction is the solution to the pain. If someone's feeling restless, irritable, discontent, a drink, a drug, Facebook, TikTok, exercise, gambling, having sex, all of those things are the solution to the pain. And I agree with you that, Don, that when someone repeats a behavior and it makes them feel good, their subconscious mind is like, immediately. It's like, what do we have, 60 to 70,000 thoughts every single day, and 90% of them are subconscious. So your subconscious mind is constantly telling you what to do. And if you're feeling like you're in pain, you're not feeling good, your dopamine is low, then any of these activities, the drugs, the alcohol, there's good things you can do too. Exercising is not bad for you, but a lot of times it's just easier for someone to go out and drink, drug, have sex, cheat on their wife. All those things create the dopamine. They make a person feel better. And now you have the subconscious mind that is wired to do those things, because that's just, that's the easy out. That's the easy solution. That's the easy to weigh. That's the easy way to feel good in the moment.

So one of the things that I always say is that when you, like, runners get the high.

Yeah, the runner's high.

It's because of an endamide, which is your own neurotransmitter in your own body that produces the high. So what I explain is, if I'm shaking your hand right now, so just shake my hand, but I start squeezing so hard, you're in so much pain, right? And I say, tim, if you just take a drink of this, I'll let go. So what happens when I let go? You get a dopamine hit because you feel better.

Right.

But is that why you took the drink? Right. You took it to stop the pain, but you, the Byproduct of stopping the pain is to get the hit of dopamine. So now you feel better, right? That's not why you started to drink. You wanted to get out of that pain.

So I was talking to Kristen earlier today and telling the story that when I first met you told a story about the heroin addict that she said, I'm self destructive. I'd like you to tell that story because I think it's very instructive.

Yeah. She came in and she said, I told my therapist I was coming in to see you. And he told me to be honest and upfront and let you know I have self destructive behavior. And so I smiled at her and I said, really? What would make you think you're self destructive? And she looks at me, she goes, well, I'm sticking a needle in my arm with heroin. You don't think that's self destructive? I said, no, I don't. I think you're trying to feel better. And I bet you when you stuck the needle in your arm, you felt better, right? She goes, yeah. And I said, the substance is destructive, you're not destructive. And you saw her and just what you talked about, I love what that's what you first started talking about is we got to stop shaming these people.

Right.

I've never had a drink in my life, never touched a drug ever once in my life. I never had your pain. Never had your pain. If I had, I'd be doing the same thing. It's not about my character, morals, willpower or ethics. It's all about pain. And the brain is designed to protect us. And so people will say to me, oh, I self sabotage. And I go, it's impossible. The brain's a survival brain. It's never going to sabotage you. It's going to protect you. It'll move you in a direction that looks like sabotage. Right. But it's to try to avoid pain and it'll move you in that direction. And pain is so powerful. I found an article which I thought was fascinating, I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, about a German sniper during World War II. He said, when we fought against the Russians, the Russians had no weapons, but a lot of people so they would run at the German lines. And my job as a sniper was to shoot and kill them. And he says, but another wave would come and another. They just kept coming. He said, we kept shooting them. He says, and then I figured out how to stop them because I didn't kill them. I shot them in the stomach. Now all these Russians are lying on the ground screaming in pain. The next guy didn't want to come out and pick up the weapon. That was a bigger deterrent than dying. That tells you how powerful pain is.

And it's freaking horrible to imagine being in that sort of situation. It's like, you know, there's a lot of awful shit that humans get themselves into due to each other. Circumstances, wars, things like that. There's a lot of trauma. I mean, I. Even when the pandemic was starting and I kind of was witnessing what was going on. And so from my perspective, it was very orchestrated. There's a lot of trauma in the world right now, and that's why we have just a giant addiction crisis. And so what is. If you had your way and could make, and you're already doing a lot. So none of this is take away all the good work that I think we're all trying to do here and that we are doing. If you had your way, what. How would you approach. If you had the ear of the. The people that could influence and make decisions, world leaders, people that are running countries, what would you tell them or what would you share with them that you think would help the most with all of this? Because let me add a little more color to this. I was driving in Vancouver with Gabor Mate a few years ago, and he had written in his book in the Realm of Hungry Ghost, about Vancouver's east side, where there's the, you know, the worst addiction problems. And that's where he spent many years treating, you know, people with addiction and people on the streets. And he told a story about how there was a juvenile detention center, and then a few blocks away was the adult jail, prison, I'm not sure what exactly they called it, but he. He said, you know, right now, a lot of the kids, foster kids, people that are in trouble, that are going there, if you fast forward five years from now, they're going to be locked up in this place because of all the trauma that they've had. And he told the story in the book, but then we drove through together and he was pointing out everything that he. And I was like, you know, if you could solve addiction, if you could, quote, unquote, cure it, you would have to get to the trauma and help them process it. You know, and it's not the. Necessarily the thing that happens to, like, you know, I was. I had a lot of a. Sexual abuse as a kid. And that led to what I believe that was the trauma, you know, the abandonment from my Mother dying, and a lot of stuff that happened in childhood. And it wasn't just the fact that that happened. I just had no one to talk to. You know, there was. There was no way to process it. So when you sit with that, people often think, oh, it's you were beaten or you were raped or you were abused. Well, yeah, that's maybe the instigation of it all, right? That's the start of much of it, but it's the not being able to do anything with that, and then it becomes this sort of infection, mentally, psychologically, that sits inside you. So I think we could do a lot with addiction if we could get to the young people before it becomes an addiction later in life. It became. The Addiction became the solution to the pain that stemmed from something I was never able to process. So saying all of that, what do we do with. How do we best help people that struggle with addiction? People that are listening or watching this right now, Some are addicts, some are in recovery. Others are just trying to make sense of it all. You know, they're family members. They have a loved one. It could be a brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter, whatever. Employees, employers, that sort of thing. If you ran the world, what would you do?

I think the best thing is I had a lady come in who'd been in alcohol addiction for many, many years. Multiple rehab. Her brother brought her in, and the first thing, I sat down with her and I said, there's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with your mind. And she cried. She goes, no one's ever said that to me. She says, I refuse to go to rehab. My brother wanted to take me to another rehab. I refused to go. And this is what she said was so powerful. She says, I refuse to unpack my shame, my suitcase of shame again, because that's how we're treating them, and we don't need to. And I loved what you said the very first time when you said, we've got to change the way we speak to these people. It's not about their character or morals, but they make it feel like it is. What I'm saying is you couldn't possibly do it any differently than you're doing it based on what you've experienced. And what I'm saying is the key to it is to get to the trauma. And what I do in the program I'm doing is. And I think this is what makes it work. The brain has to get into optimal condition to heal. And as long as they're in a fight or Flight state. It doesn't get into optimal condition. So it keeps running the programs that it ran because it doesn't feel safe. And if all of a sudden I'm saying to you, just stop that, Joe. Just give me that drink, you know, you don't need it. The mind's like, I'll die without it. And so are you going to just give up that drink? The conscious part of your mind would say, yes. Right. It doesn't make sense. I'm ruining my life, I'm ruining my family. But the subconscious says, until you give me a better solution, I'm in survival mode. Right. It will never go to that.

Yeah. That's why the war on drugs and just say no is. You know, first off, the war on drugs is the wrong word. It's a war on addicts, right? It's not the drugs. The drugs is solution. Let's have a war against the one thing that's making them feel good. And, you know, like, so, for instance, I don't like cigarettes. When I was a drug addict, I would smoke pretty much everything. Pot, hash, cigarettes. I would free base cocaine. You know, there's a lot of inhalation of substances. But, you know, having been like, I don't like cigarettes. I. They. My father died of lung cancer, predominantly in a lot of ways caused by smoking most of his life. And I also understand when someone puts a cigarette in their mouth, there's a ritualization to it. Sometimes it's, you know, if you watch addicts, they oftentimes don't take even a deep breath. There's a tension, right? And there's a ritualization to it. And if you're like, you just need to quit, just quit. Because you hear the word quit, you're asking them to quit. The one thing that makes them feel good makes them feel safe, right? And, like, earlier today, I did a podcast. I was being interviewed for a podcast, and I was talking about sex addiction, which was one of my core addictions. And I said, it's an addiction filled with a tremendous amount of shame. You say the word sex addiction, it immediately conjures up, oh, someone insatiable appetite for sex, porn addict, you know, having affairs, pervert, whatever. And a lot of addicts that are, you know, have sexual addictions. It's sexual anorexia. It's. They're not. It's their inability to be sexual and feel okay with it. You know, some. You know, one thing that I learned early on in recovery work, and I was having this Pat Carnes, who's one of the top sex addiction doctors in the world. He was one of the author, he wrote the original first book out of the Shadows on sex addiction. So I've got this interview with him on YouTube that's you know, we did years ago and I was talking with him about the difficulty with being in certain relationships and he says it's hard for you to be sexual with someone that matters. And you know, based on a lot of dialogue. And I was like, well what does that actually mean? Well, if you really love someone but your association is as sex is shameful and dirty, why would you be, why would you do that with someone that you care about? And when I was raped and molested as a kid, I was paid money not to say anything because my association was, is sex is shameful and dirty. It's not okay. And you get that wired into the mind when you're a child and then you're supposed to grow up and there's, you know, you look at movies and music and all the ways that everything is portrayed. And so what I was saying earlier today was, you know, sex is sex addiction is an intimacy disorder. It's a connection disorder. I think all forms of addiction, there's an element of, it's, it's, it's a connection disorder. Just you know, the Johann Hari line, the opposite of addiction is connection. And so my favorite definition of intimacy and I'm, you know, I've said this quite a bit because I, I find it to be, you know, quite valuable to, as a way to look at it. But it's what you said about safety. It was this 80 year old gay man that I never met in person but a guy that I was, I had sponsored in 12 step group said, you know, talk to this guy, lived in another state but he's like, this guy's very, very wise. And so I was having a conversation with him and this guy devotes his life to just helping people with sexual addictions. That's what he does now at this stage in his life. And he said, you know, definition of intimacy is intimacy is a mutual exploration of a shared safe place. Abuse is anything that takes away the safe place. And addictions are what we do to make ourselves feel good when we don't have a safe place. And I've thought about that a lot because if you don't feel safe in the world, you're going to look for a way to scratch the itch. You're going to look for a way to do that. And so even some of the most powerful physically strong high Status leaders. A lot of them have addictions. And sex addiction is like in many cases. I remember Pat Carnestane. It's the drug of choice for high level CEOs. You know, his estimates were about 60% of high level CEOs have sexual addictions because there's so much tied in with power and control. But, you know, these people can have all the money, they could have a lot of power, but they don't feel safe in the world. And if you don't feel safe in the world, what do you do? And so if you take away the blanket or whatever metaphor we want to use, you're left with shit. I'm not going to give that up unless I find an alternative. So as we live in a society that is telling people, quit doing that, quit misbehaving, you need to stop that. What they're hearing, the part of them is like, no, no, no, don't take away my sword, don't take away my shield. Don't take away my comfort.

Yep.

You know, are you out of your mind? And then you get this, you know, struggle and resistance, which is difficult.

And then they feel like they'll die. So it's so powerful that the number one fear for the human mind is uncertainty. So all of a sudden you take away, there's. I know that drug creates certainty. I know that alcohol creates certainty. And that's what I want. And that creates safety. And even though it's a mismessage. Right. It's all they have. And then you try to say you shouldn't do it, take it away from you.

Well, and the other thing when it's like the just say no doesn't work, is the identity piece. There's an identity piece. It's like, I am a drug addict, I am an alcoholic, I do smoke. And so until a person is able to change their identity, they're. It's going to be impossible to quit. And I remember when I first got clean and sober. I got sober in March of 2011, and I had a nicotine habit. I had a nicotine habit from when I was like 19, all the way up until I got sober. And then when I got sober in about April, within a month after, I was like, you know what? I need to not smoke. And I ended up quitting. And it wasn't really hard for me to quit smoking cigarettes because I just changed my identity. And I don't know how I was able to do it so easily, but that was kind of what I did, was I changed my identity. I Don't smoke. And if it's, I'm trying to quit smoking, it doesn't work. And I see that with people that are trying to quit drugs and alcohol and smoking and anything for that matter. If someone's, if they're, if I hear them say I'm trying to quit, it typically doesn't work.

I'm trying.

I'm trying, that means that they smoke, that means that they drink, that means that they smoke crack, that means that they, that they're a sex addict. And if they say, I don't smoke, I'm not a drug addict, I don't drink. And, and I, I was able to get clean and sober right away. I never relapsed, which most people relapse. And I believe that that was probably one of the things that helped me was just because I, I completely changed my identity and I went straight from, I'm trying. I didn't. I never said I'm trying to quit. It was, it was, I don't drink.

Yeah. You know, okay, let me, let me speak to that for a minute because I'm sitting there. If I had to argue both ways of, do I agree or do I disagree with that? Because what I definitely agree with is that you're, you live into your identity, right? If you think you are, like, like I was talking earlier with, you know, Christine about the. Kristen, why do I keep saying Christine? I was with a Christine earlier, Christian. Like, it's confusing. Anyway, sorry. So about the addiction cycle, where it starts with preoccupation, where you're. That's where so much of the addict's time gets consumed with, is just the rumination, the thinking about it, the fantasizing, the craving. Right. The preoccupation and then the ritualization where, you know, so let's go this way. So there's preoccupation, then there's ritualization where you've set up your life. The rituals, the way you drive, you know, whatever you're substance or behavior is. There's rituals that we build in. Then there's the compulsive doing of it, right? The drinking, the drugs, the sex, the gambling, the work, the, you know, eating, what, whatever the, you know, whatever the addiction is. And then in, in that. So you, you do it, which may not even require a lot of time. It could happen very quickly, you know, shooting a needle in the arm. But it's the buildup. It's the before, the during and the after. Right. And then when you're after you've say, you know, you drink all Night, and you wake up with a hangover or whatever that hangover, there's always a hangover. You know, that's what consequences are. And so the consequences usually lead to despair. And in a state of despair, the addict often feels shame and guilt. And guilt is, I regret what I did. I feel bad. Shame is, I am bad. I'm fundamentally bad. And if you feel that you are bad, if you feel, you know, that deep shame, that's your. Your identity is, I'm a loser, I'm a drug addict. And then when you're in a state of despair, one of the best ways to get out of it is to start the whole damn cycle over again. You start fat. Like, I need another line. I need another drink. I gotta watch more porn. I gotta gamble some more. You just keep pursuing that. And that's a biochemical soup inside your body, your brain, your being. So if your identity is like, I'm not a pot smoker, I'm not a porn addict. I am not an alcoholic or whatever, or, you know, whatever it is, you know, I don't say, I'm trying to quit smoking versus I don't smoke. But you say that, and then you smoke. You have this contradiction of like, well, yeah, I'm saying the words, but I can't stop. And so therefore I'm a liar. And maybe my identity is, I don't smoke, but I'm lying because I said I don't smoke, but here I am smoking. So how do you. I think every addict, every human, for that matter, lives in moments of contradiction. And how do you make sense of that? Where you. There's this crazy industrial band I used to listen to, you know, many years ago called Big Black. And they had this one song called Bad Houses. And there's these lyrics that perfectly sum up addiction, cravings. And it was. I tell myself I will not go even as I drive there. So I'm not going to go. I'm not going to go as you're driving to that relationship that you shouldn't be in, that toxic person that you swear you wouldn't go back to that person, and you're on the way there. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. Hello? Are you there? What the. Is that? Like, what do you do with all that?

Well, that's the conscious mind saying, I'm not gonna go, right? Yeah, but the conscious mind doesn't control survival. It's the subconscious. And this is what I learned from the trauma. Trauma is a memory problem. So if you had a traumatic event when you were a child, all your senses are heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So how's it recording that memory? High def.

Yeah.

And so if I asked you what you ate for dinner last night, what did you have for dinner last night?

Well, we had dinner together last night, so. I know, right? That's a steak, Right?

So when I asked you that, you saw pictures, probably where we were and where we ate. Right.

We ate at Tarbells. My buddy Mark.

And we had a. And we had a truffle deviled egg. That was $75.

It was bizarre. Well, it didn't cost the same thing because he gave it to us. But that's what the.

Yeah, but the idea is when I actually that's expensive. You looked into memory.

Yeah.

Now last night was a great meal, but it wasn't high definition. Right. Trauma is high definition. So can you see why the system gets turned on constantly? Because it's looking at high def memory, constantly being reminded about it. And no matter how much your logical brain says don't do it, you've got this play running in high def high. Which turns on your nervous system. It has to. Because your subconscious sees everything as now, 10 years ago is now in a memory. So if you were getting hurt 10 years ago, you're getting hurt now. What is your mind going to do? Try to stop it. It can't stop it. So how does it stop the pain of being hurt? It numbs it. So what you're doing is blocking the access to the memory and that's what drugs are doing. So the key is not to try to stop the drugs, is to try to stop the memory from turning on the nervous system, which leads to the need for the drug. But we've got a pharmacist here who could tell you that. That's what you do, right? You block right pain, Right, by getting to the brain to block the pain receptors. Right. Trauma is the same thing.

Yeah.

It's trying to block the memory and then that solves the problem. But it doesn't fix the problem, it solves it. Now the key is to get in and reset that traumatic high definition memory. So now it goes into the same format as to what you ate for dinner last night. You don't forget it, but it's not going to turn on your. I call activate. I never liked the word trigger. I always said trigger sounds negative and violent to me. I don't believe our brains and minds are negative and violent. So it's activating your nervous system.

It has to It's a, it's a prompt.

It is.

So you know my buddy BJ Fogg, who wrote the book Tiny Habits, he's an expert in habits. He's a Stanford professor, very bright guy. Amazing book. I mean, so many of the top influential things that have teachers and things. I mean, one of his students created Instagram, you know, James Clear Habit stacking. Really. He learned that whole method through BJ Fogg and Near il, who wrote, you know, a lot of books Hooked and other books on indistractable. You know, we're have learned a lot from BJ Fogg and he had. What I like about BJ is that he's never. If anyone could say I know a lot about addiction, it could be. Certainly someone is, Is, you know, runs the Stanford Behavior Lab, right. I mean, he's a smart dude, but he, he's been very clear about, like, there's a big difference between habits and addiction. His thing for behaviors, he explains all behavior, good or bad, through behavior equals map motivation, ability and prompts. He used to call it mat, motivation, ability and trigger, but he changed it to prompts. And it's kind of funny because he's been teaching this for years. And then you have all this stuff with AI now. Prompting, right? Prompting. Like, what is a prompt? It's something that starts something. And you know, a lot of people are motivated. They don't want to drink, they don't want to do drugs. They don't want to be an addict, but they don't have the ability yet. They don't know what that is. I think in a lot of ways, when the ways that we've helped ourselves and the way we help other people that struggle with addictions, we're trying to share capabilities and abilities to have someone become more capable. But then there's prompts. How are. What are you being reminded? So I will often say, like, if you are an alcoholic and your job as a bartender, it's going to be really hard to get sober. If your job is serving drinks to people and that happens to be your drug of choice, you may want to get a different job because every moment you're prompting yourself. Right. But oftentimes people don't, you know, so for prompts, you know, tiny habits is like if you want to work out, but you're forgetting or whatever, you put your shoes in the doorway of your bathroom. So when you wake up, you're going to the running shoes, you know, that sort of stuff.

So.

So going back to triggers, what I wanted to, like me and Tim Having been in recovery, openly talking about it. I mean, if you were to go back in the lives where we were immersed in active addiction, we are constantly being prompted, triggered, reminded, whatever, and it's very seductive. It's so seductive that you're, you know, you're taken over by it. So what have you learned are the ways that you unlearn, you know, dissemble, disassemble that wiring. Like what? Because you take people through a whole process. You have, you know, your whole clinic in Orlando, and you also have online stuff, and we've referred a lot of people to you, and I've heard countless amounts of people that have transformed their lives when people are struggling. Tim at Camelback Recovery here has a treatment facility. He has an, you know, inpatient and outpatient for. Depending on the severity of what someone's dealing with, not just addiction, but in a lot of ways, just, you know, right before we popped on these headsets, I was doing transcranial magnetic stimulation in one of the rooms over here. So you guys do a bunch of stuff, but I wanted to hear, you know, what is the treatment? What is the way that you address this so that people can hear some of the solutions to this, if this is all making sense to them?

You know, I wanted to just. I just. I was thinking about something real quick that I wanted to mention. So I'm thinking about, you know, someone. Habits versus, you know, if someone has trauma and their subconscious mind and they're programmed to live life a certain way. And, Don, I'm hearing you, and you're saying we've got to get rid of that trauma. But then I'm also just thinking about habits. And it's like, if I identify as someone that drinks, then I'm gonna go back to drinking. So it's almost like we've got two separate things here. And it's whatever I believe, whether I think I can or I think I can't, it's true. And so it's me believing that I can quit. It's me believing that I can. It's me believing that I'm healthy and fit. If I believe that I'm fat, guess what? I'm probably gonna be out of shape and fat. And me believing that I'm fit is like, that's. I believe I'm fit. I believe I'm healthy. I believe I'm fit. And that's how I live my life, and that's my lifestyle, and those are my beliefs. So it's almost like I think there's. And then you've Got BJ Fogg's motivation, ability and prompt. So we have all these prompts. So there's, I think that the two kind of the, the behavior change is one aspect of, of stopping addiction or learning how to live life a different way. And it's like all the, all the things that people have to do. It's not just the stopping drinking or the stopping the drugs or the stopping the sex addiction or stopping the gambling. It's learning how to live life differently. So it's almost like simultaneously or maybe they happen at different times. Someone has to create a whole new life that's new eating habits, new sleeping habits, new exercise habits. They pray and meditate. They, they exercise. They, they create new friends, new people, a new environment. Because the environment always wins. So it's like how do we, you know, how do we create the perfect, the perfect program for somebody? I don't know if the perfect program is there.

Well, that's why I talk about. There's two problems you have to deal with. First is the explicit memory. The way we store details in explicit detail. Only humans do that. No animal does that. Animals learn through association and repetition. That's the coding part of the memory. Okay, so if you work just on the coding part of the memory and try to retrain the brain not to go towards that drug or alcohol or whatever it is, but you never got to the explicit memory. It'll keep turning it on. And so you're fighting that, you're white knuckling it constantly. So what I do is first get to the explicit memory. That's the four hour program. I do education and science helping you to understand it. Then we work on three different traumatic events. But the key to that four hours is to get the brain into optimal condition that it will make the changes to that high definition memory. I'll give you an example. I had a guy US army sniper who had to shoot and kill a 12 year old boy for eight years. He's at the VA being medicated. And he said, I can't talk about this anymore. He says, I got arrested at the VA last week because I started picking up tables and chairs and throwing them. I don't want to talk about it. I said, good, I don't need you to talk about it. Well, what are we going to do? I said, we're going to fix it.

By the way, before you get to this, because it just begs. Why did he have to kill a 12 year old boy?

He was ordered. So There was a 12 year old on a road and he was Advanced patrol. So he radioed back, there's a 12 year old with a rifle on the road. Well he said, approximately 12 years of age. And so they said, fire a warning shot, he'll take off. So he fired a warning shot and the kid just was looking around because he doesn't know where it's coming from. He says he's not moving. He said, well fire three shots at his feet, that'll get him running. So he fired three shots around him and the kid just started returning fire. So he said, he's returning fire. They said, take him out. And he said, I can still see the bullet going in between his eyes. I can't get that out of my head. Over and over and over. And so what I did. So that's a high definition memory. So once I got him into optimal condition, I could then reset that into sort of a low definition. We're not changing it, but we're taking the activation out. And so by the time I was finished, he gave me a complete description and he goes, how the bleep did you do that? How am I able to talk about it now without shaking and crying? And I said, because for eight years your mind's been trying to get you not to pull the trigger. It's been calling for an action, but you can't answer the call because it's not happening. Anytime you have an emotion, a feeling or a sensation, your mind is calling for an action. What's the purpose of fear? Escape a threat? What's the purpose of anger? Attack a threat. So he was going through years and years of anger about what he did. And his mind kept saying, don't shoot. Well, he can't not shoot, so he goes into depression. Depression's a function of the brain. It's shutting down the emotion because the emotion hasn't got the action. You're not answering the call. So to protect you, it stops calling for the action. So now you go into a depressed state. Depression is the absence of emotions. And so once I explained that, it totally changed his life. And I worked with Boston Marathon bombing survivors. The lady who ran the whole MGM Vegas shooting, right, I stopped in actually before I came to to meet you in Lake Tahoe, not meet you, but where I met you in Lake Tahoe at the Spartan. I stopped in and talked to her and did the same thing. All she could see is all these bodies and blood and everything all over the place in high def. Once I take and her testimonials on our site, once she got through the program, she's not forgetting it. We're not going for happy about it. We're just stopping the activation of her nervous system. So now she can talk about it without expressing emotion because it's no longer happening.

No. It's fascinating. So do you believe all addiction comes from trauma or just parts of it? Versus like, let's take someone who gets addicted to opiates or different pain meds they get. They break their neck. In a, you know, high school kid, you've many stories like this sports injury, playing football, has a severe injury, gets put on opiates, you know, pain meds, becomes addicted, life is ruined. Doesn't seem like the kid had a bad childhood or anything like that. But the drugs, you know, override the, the nervous system, what, whatever the heck they're doing, right? And they, they become addicted. Now I believe that if there's trauma present in someone's life that has not been processed, they're going to definitely have more of a propensity to become addicted than someone that does not. But how do you explain that sort of stuff?

So you've got the two memory systems. You've got the explicit memory of the accident, right? And then you've got the coding memory, the associative memory that animals have. They learn through repetition. So when they have the accident, now they're in pain. So then they start taking a solution to the pain and they start building a code. So you've got to work on both. If you don't fix the code, they don't fix what started the code, the code will keep repeating. And so then they get stuck and then we call them an addict. And all it really is is the brain saying, well, I know how to stop the pain. What's the problem? And it sees no consequence to it because it has no connection to time. The conscious mind has a connection to time and goes, this is terrible idea, let's stop this right away. Who's going to win? The survival brain.

Yeah. And then you, to your point earlier, it's like your brain just wants to survive. So you'll do anything, Anything, anything. And that's, that's what. When it leads to the lion cheating and the stealing.

Everything's all about survival and safety. And so nothing else matters, nothing else. Because it's in the moment and it sees everything as now. And so if you have to solve the problem now and you have a resource, just like you said, and somebody comes along and says, joe, that's really bad, stop it. Right? Just don't say no to drugs, you're gonna Say, I'll say no when you give me a resource. Another resource. Yeah, but until you do, I'm not. I'm gonna keep going with what I know. It's that literal.

Yeah. And it is a complicated thing. And so to go to my point of change, the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment, and find the best forms of treatment to have efficacy. You know, one of the things that I'm trying to do with genius recovery is distribute insight, perspective. You know, in 12 steps, they share experience, strength, and hope. I mean, those are three good words to share. You share your experience, you share strength, you share hope. Hope used effectively gives people aspirations. It gives people possibilities. I also think hope is false hope. Selling hopium, making promises that are never going to come true, painting a picture of this future that is not even a possibility for many people actually creates hopelessness. I think a lot of hope is used to manipulate people. So it all depends on how it's shared, how it's distributed. And so I think of find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share them with the world. And so from what have you guys discovered, let's say in the last year, if anything new that advances your abilities of what you're already doing, or something completely new that you're like, wow, this holds some real merit and this has some possibilities or anything. Like, for instance, I'm a huge believer in 12 steps because of the community aspect to it. I don't give a shit how much someone bashes 12 step groups. I know people whose lives are saved in every single day. Millions of people are helped by 12 steps that do the steps and do the work and share experience, strength and hope. And they show up and they help other people. Right. There's a lot of people that attend 12 step groups and never do the steps. And then they say, you know, meetings don't work. And I always say, well, that's like saying gyms don't work. No one would ever say a gym doesn't work unless they're an idiot. You, like, people don't say gyms don't work. Well, if you go to the gym and you sit on a bench and you don't do the yoga class or hop on the bike or whatever, then you know, you didn't exercise. Can't blame the gym. But for some reason, people do it with 12 step groups all the time. And people that have ever done complete steps in how to sponsor, not that they won't have relapses, not that their Life is magical and perfect because to your point, I don't think there is a perfect thing. It's nice to aspire to, but, you know, I don't think, you know, there's always going to be, I believe, you know, constant room for improvement. But it's, you know, if you do the steps, your life is going to get better. But there's a lot of areas that 12 steps don't do. Back when it was first created, they knew nothing about trauma. They knew nothing about exercise, nutrition, you know, the plant medicines and psychedelics, which could be good or bad. I mean, I've had some transformative experiences with plant medicine psychedelics, but I was incredibly resistant to it because the branding of drugs, like the drugs that kill people are legal. The drugs that can save people's lives are illegal. We don't need a war against drugs. We need a drug against war. And I'm talking about the internal war war that exists in most people's psyche if they're. If they're severely, you know, traumatized or just, you know, traumatized in general. So what have you discovered or seen? And it could be packaged in a particular way. It could be a new modality. It could be something that you think is worth talking about, that if. If anything, it might not. It might basically. No, no, it's. It's all the same. You just got to do the work.

Well, the one thing that we're doing right now, and I've talked to you about, is we're doing studies on DNA. And what I have, we're just going to be publishing this study now, is that when trauma is active, it actually changes the gene regulation. So the genes that regulate inflammation upregulate, the genes that regulate the immune system down regulate because the focus is on survival. So the mind that's operating in the present says we're in danger. We need to increase inflammation to protect ourselves. So that means we don't need to do maintenance because we're in survival mode. We got to get away from the lion. We don't have to. Afterwards, we'll start doing repairs. So the immune system is weakened. So now you've got people in addiction who are stuck in that position. And they keep getting. So not only do they have the addiction, they keep getting sicker because now they're susceptible to all kinds of disease because their immune system's weakened. And so now you got that combination. But what we're showing in the study is that when I get the trauma resolved, the inflammation comes down, the immune system comes up. It Goes back into balance. Our minds and bodies are designed to heal. What's interfering with it is the constant threat that it loops and loops and loops and keeps it in an active state of fight or flight. And if you resolve that, it'll start taking care of itself. The Lord said.

Yeah, that was a signal from. That was confirmation of what you're saying.

Exactly.

There's many ways that I could try to make something up to try to like, you know, but by the way to the audio, the lights change. So if you're listening to just the audio and you're like, what the hell is going on here? It's just the. The lights kind of turned off for a minute.

But that's the science. And what I love about it is we're proving that trauma is at the root cause of it all. And what I love about AA and NA and what they do really well is just like you talked about, they create community. Right. Which creates what? Safety. Right. They create connection.

Right.

So all. And they're working on the codes. The only thing add to that is the trauma. If you could add a way in to do that and fix the trauma, boy, that would just push that to a whole new level. That's what I think we can do. That's why I'm excited to work with you and work with Tim and say, let's get that added to it and you'll change everything.

Yeah.

A whole new way to treat addiction.

Okay. No, that's great. That's great. If you can only choose one person to work with because you think one's better than the other, who do you.

Have to do that?

I just love putting these people in those sort of situations. What's your favorite child, though? That's right. What about you? Anything you've learned?

Yeah, so. So for me, my. My first 10 years of sobriety, I mean, I. AA was. That was what worked for me. And I was in it. And I went to meeting, you know, and I. And I actually worked the steps. You know, I had a sponsor, I worked the steps. I. I went to one or two meetings every single day. I did service work. I was connected to that community. I learned how to do a gratitude list every single day. All the things that they say in aa, I took suggestions. That's one of the big things for me is to the newcomers take suggestions. Because your best thinking got you where you are today. And your best thinking is not going to get you out of it.

And.

And we all know some very smart people that are just not able to get clean and sober because they're too smart.

Oh, yeah, no, those are the hardest people to get sober is the smart ones, because they think they can intellectualize their way.

They haven't lost everything. They're, you know, and they're.

Yeah. And by the way, I'm not saying this because I think I'm like some intelligent person, like, part of it. Early on in recovery, I had read so much self help, I'd gone to so many seminars. I was like, I've got to be smart enough to figure out how to, you know, you treat it like it's a business strategy, like we're gonna write a sales letter. You know, it's. No, it's like the ones that just.

I don't think I need to do step four. I don't think I need to do step nine. You know, it's like. No. So I, I fully did the whole. And. And I was. I was, you know, 100 abstinent, and I was not open to psychedelics. I wasn't open to, to like suboxone maintenance or anything like that. I just was. I was hardcore. Just. No. No drugs, no alcohol. And over the last few years, there's just more and more evidence that supports ketamine, mdma, other psychedelics. And so I just have become more open to it. And what I've realized is that changing the brain, because it's a brain disease and changing the brain, if there are ways that you can change the brain and make it more plastic and make it more malleable, and I don't know if I'mI'm proceeding that correctly, but there's some new things out there, including ketamine and other psychedelics and tms, Transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is the new, the newest thing that we have at our treatment center. You're going through the TMS process right now, and it's non invasive. It's not a drug. There's zero side effects. And it's just, it's a, It's a game changer. I mean, combined with something like your program. So there's lots of different things out there which I believe help, I guess, reprogram the brain that I'm really excited about. I mean, I'm. I'm going through the TMS program as well, and I'm finding, like, I'm. I'm finding some. Some things that about myself that are really working. And it's like, for example, I'm. I'm like, not as.

I don't.

I'm not as irritable. I'm not getting irritated. I'm not as attached. I'm like, huh? Wow. Like, this isn't really that big of a deal. And I believe that the TMS is helping me.

It's brain training. Right. Your brain will do whatever you train it to do.

Right?

Right. And that's what TMS is doing, is retraining the brain. So if you've got a very low active area in your brain, in your frontal lobe, right. You're going to be depressed.

Why?

Because it's not running. So you have to train it. And that's what they're doing with TMS is teaching it to come back into regulation. Right. And what. Repetition keeps repeating it, and eventually the brain goes, okay, you want me here? I'll go there.

Yeah. And I think it's combined with the prayer and the meditation and the breath work and the. And the cold plunging and the red light therapy and eating healthy and getting enough sleep and hanging out with people that I learned from. So all of those things are really helpful. So it's like, I'm not just going to TMS and then hanging out with toxic people. I'm doing tms and then I'm surrounding myself with people that I want to.

Be like, yeah, no, that's very good. I think that's a really important point because I've always liked Ernie Larson's. He wrote the books. He's written a couple books. Stage two recovery, where most people think of recovery as getting sober, but we all know a lot of dry drunks, they abstain from drinking or whatever, but they're still dealing with all the issues and oftentimes can be real assholes. Right. But he talked about stage one recovery is ceasing or stopping the substance or the behavior that was, you know, pretty much making your life unmanageable and making you a real pain in the ass to everyone around you. Stage two recovery is dealing with the underlying causes of what caused you to use for pain relief, in our language, you know, drugs, alcohol behaviors in the first place, which he would say has to do with the ability to be in relationship with other people. And so if you can't be, most addicts can't have a relationship with themselves that's functional. And if you can't have a relationship with yourself, that's functional due to the coding, you know, you sure as hell ain't going to operate very well in the outside world. Right. So if you can get yourself right, then everyone around you, and that's, I think, a really important point. You know, you can do a Lot of stuff. But if you go back to a toxic environment, toxic relationships, you know, and toxic is relative because I hear toxic people all the time refer to some of the healthiest people in their life as those people are toxic. And it's like, if you're toxic and you perceive as a healthy person to be the asshole, it's really. You're just witnessing delusion of your own making, right? So it's funny because in relationships we find people whose dents match our dents, right? And when I was the most fucked up in my life in active addiction, I somehow magnetically attracted people that really helped encourage that. And they were all fucked up. And you like fucked up. People find each other, you know, you.

Attract what you are.

What's interesting, the girl I was telling you about was on heroin, right? She said to me, three months later, I was talking to her and she says, this may sound really strange, she says, but people keep asking me, did I change my hair color? What am I doing different? I get a haircut. She goes, and I look in the mirror and I feel like I do look different. She says, and then people at work that I never knew even work there are stopping by my desk, not on a romantic basis, but asking me to go to lunch and hang out and have a. And she goes, my energy has changed and they're attracted to it. When she was on heroin, they didn't know what it was, but I'm just staying away from her.

No, absolutely. There's. Call it whatever aesthetics, call it, it frequency when you see energy.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can tell you there were like people that didn't want to have anything to do with me.

Yeah, it's a darkness, right?

Yeah, it's like an antenna. I mean, it taps into whatever you're kind of putting out, you know? And yeah, I mean, we get really woo woo and sound esoteric as hell and, you know, all kinds of stuff. But the bottom line is if you, if you start getting your life to work and then honestly, I just care if someone's life is working or it's not working, you know, but it is.

Energy because that's what you are. That's why people are attracted to you, right? Because you have an energy to you, right? And it's also a vulnerability to you. So all of a sudden it's safe to hang around you, right? Because you're not going to judge them. And that's why they're attracted to you, right? They don't know it. They couldn't put a. They couldn't write it down. Exactly what it is. But that's what it is.

And if I, even if I am judging them, I'll say things to them in such a sarcastic manner, they'll be, that's cool that, you know, I could. Yeah. And I do that to myself constantly. No, you're, you're right though. I mean, I, I the really.

You.

Know, because you expect me to say a smart ass thing right now. There is something magical about feeling safe with someone and them feeling safe with you. When in the past, you know, Because I'll tell you, like I, in my latest book, you know, I write a lot about givers and takers, right? In that we all want something and you want to make sure that your give is equal to or greater than your want. Because, you know, takers are the types of people that really annoy us. If you look at your closest friends that you really appreciate they're contributing more than they're taking, right? And when you're in active addiction or you're in a state where you're selfish or you're self centered or you're desperate, that is an energy of taking and people don't like it. And when you're in that state, you know that you start sizing people up for what you can get out of them. Like a drug addict that has no money views everything through the lens of how am I going to get drugs? How am I going to get, you know, in money? Money is an interesting thing. Like, I think money is really important. I don't, I do my best not to poo poo money. Because you think money's not important, try living without it. And there are people that will lie, cheat, steal, kill other people for money. And it doesn't mean the money's bad. It just means the mechanism of how they're associating with it is. And when you no longer have that white knuckling craving, I gotta go get something. There is a peace that does not exist when you're in that craving state. And that's why I think being it, being an addict is real human suffering. You may not even see like some people, you can see their addiction because of what it does to their body. Like really bad drug addicts or someone that is, you know, a food addict, you can, I mean, you can observe, be it anorexia or obesity, you can. Because addiction lives in extremes, right? But there is a weight that comes off your being when you really do the work. And what you're saying, when people started coming up to her at work and saying it's like, amazing. And that's where I want people to get to. To get a taste of that. Because if you feel that and you can set up your life in your intentions and you become committed to it, that's where you get real change. Because I always make, you know, I always make a comparison between caring and commitment. You know, if you ask, like, I do it to my entrepreneurs, you know, at Genius Network, you know, I'll ask, you know, how many of you care about your kids? Almost everyone that has kids raises their hands. Unless you're really pissed at one of their kids, but you know, they're kid. How many care about your health? They raise their hands. How many of you care about your job, your career, your clients? Everyone raises their hands. Of course they care. But how many of you are eating food and not exercising or doing something in a way that doesn't seem to be congruent with the person that really cares about that? And the thing is, there's a difference between caring and being committed. Everyone cares, but are you committed to it? So when you get to a particular place in your life, I mean, that's what I had to grapple onto. When you're talking about finding an alternative, like, man, once you get a taste of that, hold on to it for dear life. And we've all had conversations where I don't have time to do all this stuff, you know, like, because you rattled off a bunch of stuff that could be like, I have to breathe and do cold plunging, I have to go to meetings and I have to eat well, and, you know, there's like 14 other freaking things and go to therapy and then go to 12 step meetings. And it's like, you know, I always say, because it was said to me early in my recovery, if you put 10% of the effort into your recoveries you did to your addiction, your life would change. And if you put the time into your recovery that you put into your addiction, not only is your life going to totally transform, you're going to have a lot of extra time, too. Because any active addict puts a shit ton of time into being an addict. I mean, it takes a lot of work.

It takes a lot of time.

It's because of survival.

Yeah.

So of course, what would you spend more time on than anything is surviving.

Right, Right. So that's why you do anything to survive.

We'll stay in addiction because it's all about survival.

Yeah.

And they're in so much pain, and that pain creates the threat. But that's why I Say, what it really comes down to is memory. One of the things, when I was doing the research to put the whole program together, one of the cases I studied was a gentleman called Henry Malaison. Have you ever heard of him?

I've heard the name, but I. He's the most studied brain in history.

But this is what told me this was a memory issue.

Yeah.

Is that. Henry Malaison, when he was a child, fractured his skull in an accident, started having blackouts and seizures, lasted all the way into his 20s. Finds a neurosurgeon, this is in the 50s when they're doing lobotomies, Finds a neurosurgeon, says, oh, we can fix that. We're going to drill two holes into your head. We're going to remove your hippocampus and part of your amygdala. Right, okay, sure. Right. I don't want to have blackouts and seizures. So they do that. They don't know that the hippocampus is responsible for processing memory. So they take out his hippocampus. He seizure stop. Now, this is what I found, which was interesting. And his seizure stopped, but he could never remember anything again. So he was like an animal. Would watch TV shows over and over and never remember watching them because he couldn't store the memory. So what they said is, okay, we learned a lot. So they studied his brain about memory. But I looked at it and said they missed something. His seizure stop. Why did his seizure stop? Because it was never an accident. His seizures were connected to the accident. If he never had an accident because he can't remember it, that's why. So the seizures were the symptoms of the problem, which the accident was the trauma. And so if you. And that's what taught me. And I said he could still learn procedural memory. So they took a star. This is one of the experiments they did. They took a star, and they had a star outside that star. And they asked him to draw a star in between the two stars. There was a gap in between them, but he had to look in a mirror, right? Not look directly at the paper. So look in a mirror and then try to draw it. Now, if anybody tried to do that, it's hard to do, to try to coordinate that. So the next day, they did the experiment with him again. He never remembered doing it the day before. Every day he got better and better. That's the coding. That's why I said it's two memory systems. The explicit, which was the event, and the memory, which is the coding. And so you have to fix Both. Because if you just work on the coding and you don't fix the memory, the memory will keep trying to bring the codes back, and it doesn't forget the codes. And so taking it at a high definition into low definition won't turn on the codes. And it's. That's what taught me that experiment that they did with Henry, they watched him for 55 more years of his life. He could never retain memory again.

Wow.

For the rest of his life. Most studied brain in history. But I said what they missed was the seizure stopping. They never talked about that. And I said it had to be connected to the memory.

Wow. So, okay, so for. For timing purposes, Tim has a party tonight for his team, I believe.

That's correct.

Which is going to be boring to sell because he's not going to drink or do any drugs. So no hookers are going to be there.

Drug addicts. Yeah, no drugs. No drugs, no alcohol. We're going to do white elephant.

Yeah.

Just a bunch of normal people sitting around, around getting a bond with each other and try to talk about saving the world here. Right.

So.

All right, so what. What I would say is this is not the first interview that I have done with either of these. Tim has a podcast. I love Being sober. I'd like both of you to talk about how people can follow you and how they can find out more information about what you're doing. I also write about Dr. Don Wood in my latest book, what's In It For Them? Because you have this great line that if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they do what it is they do. And I've definitely popularized that great thought as much as I can because it brings an explanation to why people do what it is they do. And so if you understood the atmospheric conditions of someone's life, who's probably a pain in the butt to you, not that it makes it okay for them to be a pain in the butt. It just brings some understanding to it. And so this will not be the last time I interview both these individuals. And we're doing a lot of work collectively together to try to help people that struggle with addiction. So whoever wants to go first, tell people or any famous last words in this, anything about where they can follow you more.

Yeah. So just Camelback Recovery, we're a mental health and addiction treatment center. So anybody that's struggling, that wants to get clean and sober, they're struggling with their mental health, we can help. We have a full continuum of care. We have a Residential treatment center, outpatient treatment center. We also have an integrated health and wellness center where we offer transcranial magnetic stimulation tms. Joe is in the process of going through TMS right now and I'm really excited about tms. We offer ketamine assisted therapy, ancillary services. So we've kind of offer a big, you know, an array of services. So if anyone is struggling or with depression, anxiety, anything, then you can reach out to us. You can follow us on Instagram at Camelback Recovery. I have a YouTube channel, Camelback Recovery. And then I have a podcast. I love being sober.

Awesome.

And I got all those same Instagram, all that under Dr. Don Wood, Ph.D. or under inspired performanceinstitute.com we have an online program, a one on one session with me. We do this in groups. We've just now shot our digital program in virtual reality. Right. So you'll be able to watch it. So it'll be like sitting with me doing a session. And if you're dealing with anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress, panic attacks.

Right.

That's what it all helps with.

Awesome. And yeah. And what it's funny, that's one modality about virtual reality because I have a VR company, just recently acquired a new one. And so that's one of the many things that we're going to look at developing fantasy contamination. And that's a whole other concept that we'll talk about at a later time. But yeah, if you're someone that's out there that's struggling and hopefully you found this valuable and useful. And if you need help, there's a lot of help and support out there if you seek it out. And for GeniusRecovery.org is our site. It's an educational platform. That's where you'll find interviews like this. And also we have an AI companion at geniusrecovery.org, where you can ask any questions about anything related to addiction and support and help. And you can talk to an AI version of me, which could be quite traumatizing. It could be quite traumatized.

We'll fix it.

You got to change the code.

Exactly.

So thank you both. It's been great to enjoy the channel.

Yeah, I think so.

Now Tim has to go to his party, so we will talk to you next time. Have a wonderful day. Don't miss another episode of the Joe Paulish Show. Subscribe today at the joe paulish show.com if you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit thejopolishow.com 12.