Why THIS Leads to Addiction... And Why ‘Just Quit’ Never Works! Feat. Dr. Gabor Maté & Dr. Don Wood

What is addiction?

Let's define it. So addiction is complex, but it's manifested in any behavior. Any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and can't give up. Now, notice any behavior. I didn't say drugs. Most of the time we think about addiction, we think of substances. And that certainly is one important target of addictive behavior. But I said any behavior that could be gambling, could be sex, could be relationships, could be Internet, could be Facebook, could be shopping, as in my case, could be eating, could be work. Any behavior that gives you temporary relief, pleasure, but you suffer negative consequences, you don't get it. That's an addiction. Now let me ask you this question. According to that definition, how many people here will acknowledge that sometime or another in your lives you've had some kind of an addiction? Sometime? Okay? That's how relevant it is.

Okay.

And if I'm going with that stream, let me also ask you guys another question for which I'll ask some of you to just put your hand up and shout out your answers. I'm going to ask you not what you're addicted to or when or for how long. I'm just going to ask you. What did you like about it? What did it do for you? What did it give you in the short term? So who would tell me? Relief from relief from pain. Thank you. Anybody else? Sorry.

Control.

Control. Relief from pain. Gave you control. What else? Love, Somebody said escape from anxiety. Thank you. What else?

More than this?

Was that loneliness?

It dealt with loneliness. Okay, let's look at these things now. Escape from pain. Pain relief, sense of control. Relief from loneliness. What else did people say?

Anxiety.

Relief from anxiety. In other words, inner peace. So right away, when you understand that, you get that the addiction wasn't your problem. Your addiction was your attempt to solve the problem. And the real question is, how did that problem develop? How come at 7 billion human beings in the world, you felt lonely? How come you lacked a sense of agency, control, authority in your life? Why were you in so much emotional pain and everything you said? The loneliness, the lack of power, the lack of control, the anxiety, these are forms of emotional pain. So my mantra around addiction is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And this is where we can talk more about it. But as you and I both know, the current model of addiction is either the legal one, which says it's a choice that people make and therefore we have to punish them for it, or it's a medical one, in which case it's an inherited brain disease, but it isn't either of those things. What it actually is is an attempt to solve a human life problem, that of emotional pain, loneliness, distress, anxiety, whatever it is. And the real question then is, what happened in my life or your life, Joe, or everybody else's lives here, that.

We.

Incurred pain, and then how do we deal with our pain? Because the addiction itself magnifies the pain. It multiplies, increases it exponentially. So it begins in pain. As Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, says, addictions begin in pain and they end in pain.

Yeah, well, it was on this stage last year that actually, for the first time, publicly told about not only my drug addiction, which I, you know, for several years ago, is the first time I started talking about being a drug addict.

And what was that in your case? Cocaine? Was it?

It was cocaine, yeah. Well, I mean, heck, when I was between the ages of 16, 18, it started with, I would get high every day and smoke pot. I would take pills, speed, I would snort crystal meth, I would snort cocaine. And there was one day, I remember where I. And one day I was free, basing. I was on lsd, I was smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, taking mushrooms in, snorting crystal meth, all in one day. And I mean, like, I was in bad shape. And you've now, Gabor. When I was in Vancouver, you toured me around. Were you actually Vancouver's east side? Because you treated some of the worst addicts on Vancouver's east side for many years. And during that time, you know, I did a lot of drugs. And then I got. I moved away from the environment, started exercising, ended up getting a job in a mental hospital as a mental health tech. And I would take the patients that were there for addiction to aa. I would drive them to AA meetings and NA meetings, and I would sit in on those meetings, never realizing later in life how much relevance it had. But the core addiction was sexual addiction. Because I was molested as a kid. My mother died when I was 4. I was molested as a kid. I was paid money not to say anything between the ages of 8 to 10. And it wired in my head that sex is not an intimate act of love and oneness. It's something you do get off.

If I may interrupt, there was something else here too. So I'll talk about myself and I'll talk about you. So one of my addictions has been to work. In fact, that's a continued challenge for me if you look at my travel schedule. And so I got a certain Message from the world I was born in Budapest, Hungary, 1944. Jewish parents two months before the Nazis occupy Hungary. So I spent the first year of my life with my mother under Nazi rule. And she was in terror the whole year, as you can imagine. Parents killed in Auschwitz and so on. My father was away in forced labor. The message I got from the world is that the world didn't want me. Not because Hitler didn't want me, because I didn't know Hitler. But my mother wasn't happy. And children are narcissists in the developmental sense. They take everything personally. So when the bad things are happening, it must be about me. And if she's not happy around me, Thich Nhat Hanh, the spiritual teacher, says that the greatest gift parents can give their children is their own happiness, because the children take that personally. It's about us. We must be great creatures. So when my mother is unhappy and depressed and in terror, I get the message the world doesn't want me. And then at one year of age, she gives me to a stranger to save my life. So I don't see her for a month. I get the message, the world doesn't want me. Now then in Canada, 30 years later, 30 odd years later, I become a physician. Well, one way to deal with not being wanted is to become a doctor.

Not.

They're going to want you all the time. They're going to want you when they're being born, they want you when they're dying. And they're going to want you at every moment in between. And the beeper is always going. This is before cell phones, of course, and the beeper is always going. And you're getting validation every moment. And what it is, is a compensation for the sense of not being wanted that I've never dealt with. Now, in your case, you got a message as well that you're wanted through your body, you're wanted through your body. You're wanted when you're sexually available. That's the message you get. What are you going to do? So especially if you look at men who are sex addicts and women who are sex addicts, there's no such thing as, what's the word? An infomaniac. That's just a slander. What it really is is women or sometimes men who've learned that only through their bodies and only through the sexual act are they actually wanted. Well, that's really addictive because we all need to be wanted. And I think that's also what's behind it.

Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, and I lived with so much shame. Even though I started making money, I always had that deep shame and that secret life. And I just struggled. And the thing that became more apparent to me was I was in a, you know, I became financially capable of joining like a high profile group. And I joined a high profile group for people, people that were struggling with sexual addictions. And in that room were billionaires, famous athletes, politicians, Academy award winning actors and actresses, men and women. And I saw people that the world admired in their most broken states. And I realized, wow, that whole saying that which is most private is most public, that so many people struggle with this. And that's why I've now worked, wanted to use the platform that I have in business to go out and try to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment. And right now the criminal justice system is treating addicts when it needs to be something else.

Well, if you look at the criminal justice system, it's really based on this idea that, as I said earlier, that addiction is a choice that somebody makes. If somebody's not making a conscious choice, what are they doing punishing them? You don't punish people because they're suffering and they're trying to escape from their pain. You help them instead of making them criminals. And number one, number two, it's very arbitrary as to what we decide should be legal or illegal. Because give me a thousand heroin addicts who inject four times a day in a quantity that does not lead to an overdose, and give me a thousand people who smoke a pack a day and another thousand who drink heavily. Guess which thousand is going to be the healthiest and the longest living at the end of 30 years. By far the heroin group. So by far, I'm talking medical facts here. So by some, I'm not saying that heroin should be legalized and sold in corner stores like cigarettes, but I am saying that the decision to criminalize it is utterly arbitrary and has nothing to do with either science or logic or humanity.

Right.

I mean, you know, you cannot punish pain out of people. And I mean, I have some stats here that I've heard you say that, you know, every month 911 happens actually.

According to the president's commission on addiction on the opioid crisis. And by the way, even when we talk about the opioid crisis, it's a rather arbitrary determination. Not because it isn't a crisis. I mean, it is according to the president's own advisory commission, every three weeks you have a 911 happening in the United States as a result of illegal drug overdoses, let alone.

We're just talking drugs. We're not talking all the other.

We're just talking illegal drugs. I'm not even talking alcohol or cigarettes or everything else. We're just talking overdoses. And. And now it's hitting the white middle class. It's actually helping to lower the life expectancy of the white middle class male for the first time in a long time. But it's been hitting our Aboriginal population for a long time. It's been happening there for decades. If you go to the native reservations in Canada or the us, Suicides, overdoses, they've been happening in epidemic proportions for decades. We just don't think that's so important. Not that it's happening to us or the people that we care about now. It's a crisis. And then if you ask the question, well, why is it that the Aboriginal population has got this tremendous rate of addiction? And again, that's a very interesting question. Because this whole idea that addiction is a genetic disease flies out the window when you look at the Aboriginal experience. Because the Aboriginals in North America had actually access to potentially addictive substances long before Caucasians came here. They had access to tobacco, they had access to alcohol. In New Mexico, they had access to psychedelic substances like peyote. And they even knew these substances. And then they even used them. But how did they use them? They used them ceremonially, not to upturn and diminish their consciousness, but to raise their consciousness. They used it to connect spiritually with creation. They used it to create community and contact and culture. The addictive use is just the opposite. The other use is to escape from pain. And it's alone and it's not communal. If the problem was genetic, why weren't they addicted before? The reason they're addicted now is because the severe trauma that they've suffered over hundreds of years, they're near extermination. And I don't have to give you all the details. I'm sure you know it all. Same thing in Canada. So what I'm saying about addiction, in short, is that every case of addiction originates in trauma. And that trauma could be overt. Like in the case of the Aboriginal population, their children in Canada being taken away from them, sent to residential schools for 100 years, where they were sexually abused and beaten up, and their culture and their language was denied. In British Columbia in 1960, I know a woman who was four years old in 1965 in my province of British Columbia, who at four years old was taken to the residential school where she spoke her tribal language. And the punishment was that they stuck a pin in her tongue for a whole hour. A four year old. And then she sits there for an hour and she can't put a tongue in her mouth because it'll cut her lips. And then the sexual abuse began. So then when I look at Vancouver's downtown east side, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use, we have more drug addicts there in a few swell block radius than anywhere on the continent. It's a shock to people even who come from Detroit and New York to Vancouver. 30% of our clients down there are first nations, are aboriginal people. They make up 4% of the population.

Why?

Because of the severe trauma that they experience. And this is the one piece, the trauma piece that you and I are so aware of. But that addiction. I was talking to a colleague of mine, Jamie. Where are you?

Jamie, you're here.

Somewhere in the room. She's a physician from Detroit.

Oh, Dr. Jamie, hope you in the room. Oh, she's, I think she's in the genius lounge.

Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. So she works in the emergency ward at Detroit Hospital and she graduated in 05 for medical school in Michigan. And I asked her, how many lectures on emotional trauma did you receive? Not a single one. How many lectures on how the human brain develops in interaction with the environment did you receive? Not one. Which is the same with me when I went to medical school, I don't know, 40 odd years ago. And so what I'm saying is that the medical world utterly misunderstands the problem and don't get any training in understanding human psychology. And the same thing is true of many of the programs where people go for addiction. So they never deal with the core issue. They only deal with the behavior of addiction. But the behavior is only a symptom.

Yeah.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you can get a copy there. I want to touch on ADD because I have been diagnosed with add. You have? How many people in the room would admit or think they have add?

Right.

And I've heard you, I mean you talk about in your book Scattered, that ADD is a response to trauma.

Yes, it is.

What does that mean?

Well, first of all, let me make a point that occurred to me when you were talking about your marijuana use and your cocaine use, doctor, Those are typical self medications for add, because the marijuana calms down the hyperactive mind. And if you get treated for add, what do they give you? They give you a stimulant which elevates dopamine levels in the brain. What do you think cocaine is? It's a stimulant. It elevates dopamine levels. So the point I'm making is that a lot of addictions are actually self medications for specific conditions, like in your case. Now, ADD. Again, the medical mantra around ADD, and I was diagnosed in my 50s and two of my children were diagnosed afterwards, the medical mantra is that it's a genetic brain disease. Well, it isn't genetic and it's not a brain disease. When you look at the tuning out, the absentmindedness of add, why do we have that capacity to tune out? Do you think nature gives us that capacity? We all have that capacity to dissociate, to tune out.

Why?

Well, it's very simple. If I were to threaten you right now, stress you, abuse you verbally, you would the number of options available to you. One would be to get up and leave, which is called flight. Or you could stand up and assert yourself and tell me to stop, which is called fight. And if you couldn't do either, given that, how many hundreds of people are here?

There's about 400 between both rooms.

Okay, so you have 400 people here. You could ask for help. Those would be the functional options. But what if you couldn't escape because you're too small and powerless? What if you couldn't fight back for the same reason? And what if there's nobody to ask for help? Then what would you do? Well, you wouldn't do anything. Your brain would go into an automatic dissociative mode to protect you from the distress. So what it is, it's actually, it's an adaptation to overwhelming stress. Now, if you put me back into my first year of life, and there are times in the first year of life when every second, like in this space of time, millions of connections are being made in the brain. What's happening in my first year of life? My mother is stressed. The day after the German army marches into Budapest when I am two months of age, she calls the pediatrician to say, would you please come and see Gabor? Because he's crying all the time. And the pediatrician says, well, of course I'll come and see him. But I should tell you all my Jewish babies are crying. Now. Why are Jewish babies crying? Well, not because I know anything about Hitler or genocide, but because I'm picking up on my mother's stress. There's a quote here from one of my teachers that I'd like to read to you if you, if I can find it. And it says that the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is aware of its own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity and pain in the body of the mother or anyone else he's with. If the mother is suffering, the baby suffers too. The pain never gets discharged. So let's say what do I do then when my mother is depressed and stressed and terrorized? How do I deal with it? Can I fight back, escape and ask for help? From whom? I tune out. But then the tuning out becomes programmed into my brain. And then 55 years later or 50 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD or ADD. Now what I'm saying is that and I wasn't abused, nobody abused me. I just had a depressed and fearful mother. And being a very sensitive. And the more sensitive you are, the more you pick up on that. So in those add, and if you look at it's an adaptation, it begins an adaptation which later on becomes a problem. So I'm not saying it's great, I'm saying that it begins as an adaptation which then becomes a problem. That's the nature. These early adaptations, which children employ not consciously to protect themselves from stress, actually become problems later on. Now if you look at the question of why between 2002 and 2013, I'm being approximate here, the rate of ADD diagnosis in American kids has gone up threefold. What's going on? What's going on is that the parenting environment has become increasingly stressed for all kinds of reasons. And when the parenting environment is stressed, the kids are stressed. And how do they cope with it? They tune out when the brains are developing. Now they're getting diagnosed and medicated and all this mental health crisis. And what we're not looking at is what is it about the environment that actually fosters or foments that response in children. And I'm only talking about add. We could talk about anxiety because people who are addicted often self negate anxiety. They self medicate it with work, with sex, with tv, with distractions, and of course with drugs. And the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago had an article about the burgeoning rate of anxiety in American teenagers and Apparently, a third now of teenagers and adults in the United States suffer from anxiety. And why? Well, if it was genetic, it wouldn't be increasing, because genes don't change in a population over 10 years or 20 years or even 100 years. What's happening is that the conditions in which children are growing up is getting more and more stressful, and that has to do with the stress on the parents. And that also has to do, of course, with the workaholism of the parents. Like in my case, you know, the world thought I was great. I was out there delivering babies and helping the dying, palliative care and everything else in between. But what of me did my children receive? Not very much, because I was always trying to validate myself out there in the world. So then I pass on my trauma to them, but I pass it on not genetically, but through the conditions that obtained in my home. And my kids were small. Wow.

Wow.

What is the difference between. Because I wrote this down, I want to make sure I say it right. What is the difference between childhood trauma and adulthood trauma? Would the body respond differently to each of them? And would you handle them differently? And if so, how? Because there are things that happen. Happen in childhood, but then there's betrayals and things that happen in adulthood.

Well, let me tell you something. I don't quite see it that way. There is a very famous, and rightly so, child psychiatrist and neuroscientist and trauma expert called Bruce Perry, Dr. Bruce Perry, whose book with Oprah, what Happened to you? Is a recent bestseller. And Bruce points out that if you take kids and you get the first few months or years right.

And all.

Kinds of terrible things happen later, they'll be okay. But if you take kids and you get the first period wrong and they suffer a lot, all kinds of good things can happen later, and they'll still be in trouble. And when you look at the studies on ptsd, the people who developed PTSD in adulthood were people who were traumatized in childhood. And those adult experiences actually trigger the childhood trauma. So in a particular company of soldiers, maybe hundred, they go into battle. They all experience the same killing, the same cruelty, the same loss of their comrades, the same fear, the same rage, perhaps. And 20, 30 will come out with PTSD. The others will not. It's because those 20 and 30 were already carrying the trauma of childhood. So I'm saying that adult trauma is, in virtually every case I know, manifestation of unresolved childhood trauma.

Okay, well, that's. So Dr. Don Wood, you know, he has the line, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life. It would make sense why they do.

What it is that they do.

What have you discovered? Because you've. I mean, I wish I would have found the video of me and you driving around when you were pointing out in Vancouver's Dunton State. Yeah, yeah, you were. Because he wrote a book in, I think, 2009. You wrote in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

That's right.

Yeah.

And he. Which is an amazing book. So if you want to, you know, go deep into On Addiction, Gabor's written when the body says no, scattered. And then I think it's called Scattered Minds in Canada.

Yeah. This is my book on adhd, which is my first book after I was diagnosed with it and it was published in Canada with the title Scattered Mines in the US with the title Scattered. I think the thought was the American publisher didn't think the US public would understand the word minds. I don't know.

I don't know what the problem was.

But lo and behold, my publisher is going to bring out Scattered Mines in the US Again with the actual title, Scattered Minds.

You know what I admire about you too, though? You have never been like a marketer, like, let me figure out how to build my YouTube channel. And you now have millions of people that follow you because you say things that change people's lives and you help guide people. And you are a significant figure in the world. I mean, one of the most important figures. I constantly say to people that you're probably the most in tune, intelligent, articulate person describing addiction and disconnection of anyone I know. You helped Johann Hari, who has the, you know, the great line, you know, the opposite of addiction is connection. And then your. When you did your first TED Talk, you had a line where the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain?

Yeah.

And so you've really helped me understand that addiction is a response to pain. It is a solution to pain. And so even in the. My book, what's in it for Them? You know, the first chapter is which.

Thank you.

You gave me a nice endorsement for.

This, deservedly, by the way.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I say be a pain detective, because what I've realized is that pain is a great messenger. And so to go back to Dr. Don Wood, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they do what they do. So I look through the lens of, where are they suffering? How can I help? Where am I suffering? What is pain trying to tell me? And right before I Came to this conference this morning for day two here. One of the people, one of the members in the audience said, do you know any good doctor for plantar fasciitis? I have this pain. I've not been able to get help. And one of the things I said was, I got someone I can recommend, Steve Ozanich, who wrote the Pain Deception, which I know you know Steve, But I said, listen to my talk with Gabor, because I think there. You know, I think there might be, not might be. I know there's a link between disease and addiction and pain because of unresolved trauma. And in your book, like chapters 27, 28 and 29, you go really deep into compassionate inquiry, which is your process. And I guarantee you, those who have not read Gabor's book, that alone is worth this book. Just those three chapters of giving you a process on how to even just look at your own life. And so. So my question is. And then I'm gonna come to add. Cause I definitely. We cannot have this interview without talking about that. Cause there's so many people here that identify with distractibility. So how does one change the atmospheric conditions of their life in a positive way? Because there's a lot of people running the world right now that are creating the worst shit storms on the planet. And so I just wanted to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, so the first thing is to recognize that that is a problem. A lot of people don't recognize it. They keep trying to run away from it. And one way to run away from recognizing that there's a problem is that you become addicted. So, for example, we did this the first time you spoke. But let me do it with this audience. Okay? I'll give you a definition of addiction that I don't think is controversial. So an addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure, and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences and they have difficulty giving it up despite the harm. So it's pleasure, relief, therefore, craving, short term, long term, harm, inability to give up. That's what addiction is. I said innate behavior. I didn't say drugs. It could include drugs. Of course it does. Cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol. But it could also be gambling, the Internet, pornography, sex, relationship, work. And in this culture, workaholism is rewarded like my workholism was rewarded. Shopping any range of human behaviors. The issue is not the activity, it's the internal relationship. Pleasure, craving, relief, harm, inability to give it up. So I'm going to ask you Guys, a question here. If, according to that definition, you recognize that sometime or another you had some kind of an addictive pattern in your life, just raise your hand. Okay, again, it's virtually everybody here. Now. The next question I ask is not what's wrong with the addiction, which we know, but what's right about it? What does it give you in the short term? In the short term, what does it give you that you like? Okay, I wonder if a couple of people just raised their hand and then shout out their answer. Okay, what does it give you in the short term? Or what did it give you? I'm not going to ask you what you're addicted to or how long or when. Just what did you. When you were in it temporarily, what does it give you? Anybody?

Serenity.

Serenity.

Okay.

Thank you.

Feels good.

So, a good feeling. Pleasure. Yeah.

Dopamine hit.

Of course.

Which means excitement. Yeah.

Stimulant. Escape.

Escape. Thank you. No. Escape from what? Escape from distress. Escape from emotional pain. Serenity. A sense of aliveness. Escape from pain. Are these good things or are they bad things in themselves?

The good things?

They're the things we all want. They're the things we all deserve. Actually, they're all the things we should have had as children. Which means that the addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your addiction was an attempt to solve the problem. Therefore, to talk about addiction either as an inherited disease or some kind of a choice that people make. And by the way, there are millions of people in jail in this country because of this social belief that addiction is some kind of a choice for which people should be punished. No, it ain't. It's an attempt to deal with life problems such as emotional pain. And so if you want to understand addiction, you have to look at the atmosphere again, as Don woods says, that people grew up under and what they're trying to escape from. So first, we have to recognize that there's a problem and not run away from it. Secondly, we have to accept compassionately all parts of ourselves, all aspects of ourselves, whether we like them or not. Because all aspects of ourselves are whether we like them or not. They came along for a reason. And if we ask the question compassionately, you might do something that you're not proud of. If you ask yourself the question compassionately. Why did I do that? What need was it serving? What was my organism trying to deal with? You'll find the answer if you ask the question. So you can ask the question two ways. Why did I do that? Or why did you do that? Do you Think there's going to be an answer? No, because that's not a question. That's an accusation against somebody else or against the self. And as one of my spiritual teachers says, only when compassion is present will people love themselves to see the truth. Now, if you ask somebody else, why did you do that? But I know you're a good person trying to do your best. Any idea why you did that? Now, that's the question. And the same with yourself. If you put to yourself, no, why.

Did I do this?

But, hmm, I wonder why I did this. That's what a compassionate inquiry is. And my belief is that the answers are within all of ourselves. They actually are. And if we are compassionate with each other, which is so much of what you talk about, and if we're compassionate with ourselves, then the answers will emerge. So that's the beginning, is to recognize there's a problem and to be compassionate about examining the sources of that problem.

Let's start with the definition of addiction. I'd like to hear both of your guys's definition and perspective on it, and then we'll talk about what leads to it.

Okay. The. 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, 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 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, 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 the solution. It's not a very good solution. It's a solution that has a lot of problems attached to it, but it's the 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, you know, 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 it made me.

Feel good, he got a little dopamine hit from that.

Yeah, exactly. And so, no, we totally hit it off. And so now, you know, both of 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 he. 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. 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. 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 Lemke, 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 could, 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 do you translate that?

How do I translate what Don just said?

Yeah.

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

Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that what he's saying is valid, and I think that an addiction is 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, dawn, 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, that there's. 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 way. 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 anandamide, which is your own neurotransmitter in your own body that produces the high. So what I explain is if, 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, right?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

You know, 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 you said. She said, I'm self destructive. I'd like you to tell that story because I think it's a very. 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 up front 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 this is what you talked about love with. 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, ethics. It's all about pain. And the, 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. He said, 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, how would you approach. If you had the ear of 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. 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 necessarily the thing that happens to, like, you know, I was. I had a lot of sexual abuse as a kid. And that led to what I believe that was the trauma, you know, the abandonment from my mother died, 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. That's the. 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, you know, brother, sister, mother, father, you know, son, daughter, you know, whatever. Employees, employers, that sort of thing. What if you. 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 because. 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 had 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 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 war. 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 podcasts and, 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 as sex is shameful and dirty, you know, it's not okay. You know how. 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 addiction is an intimacy disorder. It's a connection disorder. I think all forms of addiction, there's an element of, 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, 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 Carnes saying 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 could 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. 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, you know, 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, their. It's going to be impossible to quit. And I remember when I first got. 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. If it's. 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 smoke 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. And try. 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 never said I'm trying to quit. It was, it was, I don't drink.

Yeah.

Some of the world's highest achie pain and great angst. And it's a struggle. And I'm also glad like I met you when I joined a group for sex addiction. You know, lots of shame in sexual addiction and you know, much easier to talk about being a drug addict, talking about alcoholism than, you know. Yeah. I used to, you know, look at porn all the time. I used to go to massage parlors. I used to sleep with hookers, you know, and all that stuff. And I could never talk about that, let alone ever think I would say what I just said in front of groups of people.

Right.

And the whole saying is, you're as sick as your secrets and this. And it was really, you know, you and several other people and just a lot of 12 step groups and a lot of therapy and a lot of work that really got me to the point where I just, you know, I shed enough of the shame to where I could maintain levels of support sobriety for periods of time. And at this stage in my life, you know, the last time I had any bottom line behaviors in that department, you know, drinking and drugs were easy compared to, you know, the sexual stuff. It was in 2016 after a breakup, I had another relapse sort of thing. But then after that and kind of what did it is in this hotel, I stood up in front of a room of everyone. I don't know if any of you remember. Well, of course those of you would remember that I got up and I just shared as much as I could and I was like, this is either going to ruin my career or I'm just so done with this sort of stuff now. Do I still have shame? Of course. I experience all of these sort of things. But can you define two things? What is addiction? I want to hear your definition of it. And shame. What is shame? Because I know so many people here that have struggles, deal with it and they may not even recognize it.

Well, first it's hell. But the real thing I wrestle with would be in defining would be it's a pathological relationship. It's an unhealthy relationship to a mood altering experience that has Life, damaging consequences. And you can't stop by yourself. You know, I mean, I've done a lot of things that had damaging consequences. Consequences to me, but I could stop it myself. I, too, as Joe talking. I've been in recovery from sexual addiction for 32 years. And I'm a workaholic. You know, those two things. More of a workaholic than I'm a sex addict. But the point is, to me is how, you know, is there anything wrong with sex? Of course not. You know, actually, on the media, the many. The many relationships that people say, well, porn's awful. Only if you use it. Awful. In my case, I did. It hurt me. It didn't help me. How would you know? Well, you have to know your values. What are your values? And if I do something against my values and it's hurting me and people I care most about, and I can't stop it by myself. For me, to you, I believe that's an addiction. So that's how I would define that. Yeah.

I can also say, too, because, you know, and I'd love, I mean you, anything, that I'm always wanting to understand and clarify my thinking and understanding of this. I look at all addictions as excess and deprivation. You know, when someone hears the term sex addict, you think, oh, that's a pervert. That's someone that wants to, you know, have sex with, you know, whoever, whatever, all the time. And there's a lot of sexual addiction manifest as deprivation, where you're not able to be sexual. You're not able to feel any real connection sexually. And so there's a lot of sexual anorexia that exists. It's binging and purging. That's what, you know, addiction consists of.

Yes, for sure. So to talk a little bit about deprivation, see, most people like not to identify themselves as addict. I get it. I understand. And I understand why. I mean, I've been over to 3500 SAA meetings and all kinds of meetings you can think about in my days and time. So you. When you walk in, you're basically saying, I'm a sex addict, I'm an alcoholic. I'm whatever I am. Okay, so who wants to do that? Well, it's helpful to be able to take that term and separate it from your personhood. Who am I? Who am I, really? I am an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. Have been, always will be. I won't get better on that. I'll become a better person in my behavior, and I won't get worse, no matter What I do, if I walk out of here and act out forever until I'm dead, I don't improve on that. A diamond is a diamond. That's what I've always been. So I'm saying that to say this is that it's so helpful to recognize how deprivation in my life fueled the addictive components that I engage. So that goes all the way back at the a kid. I grew up in a hellacious family. I grew up in a family of 12 children. To the best of my knowledge, all 12 of us were sexually abused in some form or another by. Through a church. They called it a church. It was a cult. So I have all kinds of craziness in the background. But the point is, to me is how do I fill up those needs that I have developmentally? Some people say, well, I don't want to go back and look at that stuff. Well, I would entreat you to consider Soren Kierkegaard. He's an existentialist philosopher. He says, well, life's meant to be lived forward, but it could only be understood backwards. So why do I want to look backwards? So I can understand. I don't want to live in that storyline. I want to give that up and to do so, if I can understand and if I can clean out some woundedness, it helps. But when I don't, I live deprived. And so I want to fill that deprivation up in my life. And so I use all kinds, not just one addiction. I'll use a cocktail of experience, of life, work, sex. I use sports, gaming. I'll use bitching and complaining. I use all of these things I can do to fill up and escape that emptiness that's inside. So what I always help people in is deprivation, fuels entitlement. Entitlement to what? To feel good again. And one thing for sure, any addiction really delivers. It delivers what it promises, at least for a brief moment, there's a payoff. I mean, you're gonna pay for it. But when you're in a lot of pain, when you're in a lot of, you know, just discomfort, then quickly, in a shortsighted way, I'll pick my addiction in that regard. Now, I think of it this way. I love what I heard Ned talking about yesterday. He talked about, I believe it was distractibility, changing into curiosity. He talked about impulsivity, being changed into creativity, and then it was hyperactivity into energy. Well, I think that about addiction, see, this whole lifestyle, it's a metaphor. It's a paradox. What do we do? Well, we just Take, like, we take opposites and make them different. So, like, for instance, addiction. My goal is to take my curse of addiction and make it a blessing. How do I do that? Well, I don't do it from run. I don't do it by running from it. I embrace it. I listen to it. You know, actually, I make it my understanding of the voice of God. If God's anything, it's that voice talking to me what's out of balance. It's that voice telling me what I need to address underneath. It's the legitimate need that must be met in a healthy way. And so I take a pause. I get out of the way of the addictive rush. You know, like sitting in the middle of a intersection in New York City, here comes a bus. You don't sit around, think, well, how'd I get here? You best get the hell out of the way. So I try to get out of the way from my addictive rush. And then I sit and think, what's a legitimate need that must be met? That's called intimacy. To self. To people I care about, intimacy is so important. And that's why we talk about addiction. Anyway, Joey, it's an intimacy disabling experience of life.

Yeah.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description.

Or.

Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Again, I've said this before. Most people in this audience heard me talk about my favorite definition of intimacy, which was given to me by a guy named Wharton, who basically is now 80 years old, in his 80s, and he volunteers his time to help people with sexual addictions. And he said, intimacy is a mutual, excellent 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 often think of, you know, not just intimacy romantically, but intimacy, the ability to connect with people. And the reason, you know, my. I always, you know, to use a Dan Sullivan term, front stage and backstage. You know, there's the front stage of what our clients see, who the world sees, and then there's the backstage. You know, in a business, it's like, what's going on backstage, you know, and front stage. And it's like you know, part of I sit and observe people and I observe my own behavior. And I often think, you know, you're either in communication with someone or you're trying to escape. You're either talking to someone and you know, as you guys meet each other and you talk, you know, you're either, you feel real connection with someone and other people. Like I need to kind of get away. And sometimes it's the other person, sometimes it's me. You know, if I'm not connected, it's really hard for me to connect with someone else. But then you take that into how much of my life was I trying to escape, you know? And addiction is a solution. My viewpoint of it, it is a solution to pain. Now we treat it like the war on drugs, but the war on drugs is the wrong war because the war on drugs is like a war on addicts. You know, the drugs are actually the solution. The problem is the pain. And if you don't deal with the pain, it's an attempt to self soothe. If you're, if you're depressed, if you're lonely, if you're suicidal, if you're hyperactive, if you're losing your freaking mind, you're stressed out, you're lonely. There's nothing wrong with wanting that feeling to go away or to change. It's how you scratch the itch, you know, with what you're saying. And so addiction works. It works really well. The problem is it has consequences. And those consequences could kill you, they could hurt other people, they could damage and destroy your life. So part of it is getting people to feel real connection and real intimacy and to experience it. And that requires the shedding or the processing of the shame and the fear. And so what I want to say, because up to this point in our conversation, a lot of people might be like, what the hell are you talking about? I don't identify a sex addict. I'm not staying up till three in the morning every night, you know, looking at porn. I'm not snorting cocaine. There are a lot of people in here that are full blown work addicts because workaholism is a respectable addiction. And it's a performance addiction. It's a, you know, there's, there's all kinds of things to it. And so I would really like, what is workaholism? How would you like, how does someone know if they're excessive?

I mean, well, people close to them can remind them how hurtful.

I'm glad that's funny to Joe, but then, no, that's okay.

That's good. How do I know I'm a workaholic?

Because it's real easy to make excuses for performance. Look how fucking rich I am. Look at how much money I've given to charity, you know, all that sort of shit.

Yeah, I think it's. It's what takes me away from my soulfulness. Now, that's kind of a nice little thing, statement to make. But, you know, when you really dig into it, I have to be more to keep from being less in order to be good inside. And I can't ever stop. I remember once, about 20 years. It was longer than that. It was 25 years ago. I'm getting older here.

How old are you now?

I'm 70.

70?

Yeah. So I remember deciding I was going to cut back and only work a certain number of hours. And I remember going back in their backyard up next to our fence, and I sat and I went through withdrawals. Literally shakes. It was embarrassing. It was crazy. I don't know of a lot of people who do that about workaholism, but I sure did. But what I did is I found. I tried to find my sense of okayness in what I do, not who I am. And that's that great problem. Not everybody who struggles with finding meaningfulness in their being. I call it my amnes. But all is out here doing stuff. They're not all workaholics. I get that. But what I want to share is this. There's an interesting thing. I've been reading and listening to this woman named Pema Chodu. And many probably know who she is, this Buddhist female monk. And she talks about how she's learned unconditional confidence. And she said, okay, if you've listened to her piece on unconditional confidence, she shares the metaphor. Walking alongside the Oregon coast, and she's lost in her thoughts. The tide's out. It comes in, it knocks her sideways, rolls her into the sand. And she said, for a moment there, I thought I was going to drown. So I stand up, gather myself, and I get hit by another wave. And she said, well, you know me. It lasted maybe three or four minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. But I got the sense of knowing that I could go down and come back up and I would not die. Well, she says this, here's the deal. I can't control the results of my life totally. I do a lot of things to create success. I'm all about achievement, personally. I want to achieve. I want to be the very best I possibly can be. It certainly has been A part of that goal has been a part of my workaholism. She says I can't control the results, but my unconditional confidence is that I can control. I'm going to go down and come back up regardless of results. I can make meaningfulness no matter what I face or deal with. That's been a great sense of source for me. So I can't try to compete and compare and say I'm this. I can compete. I like to compete. I am that, okay? But that's not who I am. Well, I found great, great peace. And all these guys I work with who have women, who have all this status and stardom and all this stuff, ultimately all that has not brought peace. See? And so what brings peace is knowing that I can find meaningfulness where wherever I am, I can be present right here just with you, Joe. I'm not worried about what these guys think or I'm challenged not to. I really just want to have a conversation, be present right here.

Why?

Because that's where meaningfulness is. You know, I was a minister way back there. Heaven, hell, that crap. Well, my. My thought was, this is what is heaven and hell. It's my decision on how I engage you right now. And for me, heaven is just hanging out with you. Because I know this. I know I don't know you in this environment. I know you. We have coffee, we talk. We talk about addiction. We talk about your life, your world, all that stuff.

It's fun.

I love you as a friend. I love your spirit, Joe, your soulfulness. I was telling my wife last night, I said, joe, you know, I have all these marketer guys I work with. Joe is a different cat. He's a guy who's a real, genuine, authentic person. That's not easy to accomplish, being authentic goodness. The hardest thing I've ever done in my life is to be truly honest. Nobody accuses me, Joe, of being. Walking around telling a bunch of lies, but looking at myself in the mirror and saying honest, real things down deep inside and sharing them with another person who I choose to. To trust. Now, that's tough. But that brings a lot of peace. So that's the opposite of what workaholism can do. See, a lot of guys, I'm trying to do more to keep from being less. And what happens in all that? Deal? Shame makes it so. What does it make it so? It makes it. I can never get enough of what I really don't want. I really don't want to keep doing all this craziness. I do it anyway, because it's the only way I know how to escape what? Emptiness, you know? And it's an interesting thing to sit with discomfort. I mean, my God, who does that? And yet to do so, to lean into that, opens a whole avenue of genuine, authentic peace. It's not about religion. It's not about that stuff. I mean, I tried that for more years. You care to know? It did not work for me, but this process we're talking about does. I love what Ned said yesterday about the default piece. Because, man, is that great. See, with shame, I get all these messages in my head. You think, well, if you're in recovery, then you got it all together, right? Oh, never. You just realize how much you don't have it together. And so what happens is I have these voices in my head that tell me all the stuff that Ned said so beautifully yesterday, all this craziness that I tell myself. What I've learned is how to bring myself back to center. Shame is that part. See, it's like this. Shame is like people say, well, shame is bad. It's just what we have. It's there. Call it whatever you want. It's like acid in a battery of a car. If you keep it in the battery, then it starts the car. If you take it out, put it on your skin, it'll burn you. If I put shame on my personhood, my sense of self, it'll hurt me. But if I take it and I put it on and I put it on the behavior that I did. I mean, we've all done shitty behavior. No one's excluded. But if I take that shame, I put it on my behavior. What happens to transforms to compassion? When I think about the ways in which I hurt my wife. We've been together for 46 years now. When I think about the way I hurt her when I was unfaithful, when I acted out sexually, I'll never forget her eyes, the look in her face. What does that do for me? I could turn it on myself, say, you piece of shit, what's wrong with you? You know? Or I say, you know what? I would never want to hurt someone who is that precious, that desirable in my life again. And it transforms that sense of shame into compassion. Let me read you something that Pema Children says. She says this compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when I know my own darkness well and can be present with. Can I be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when I recognize our shared Humanity. We're all in this together, baby. We really are. And there isn't that much difference in you and me. And I learned how to hang with people in a most paradoxical way is by hanging out with my own brokenness. Not wallowing in it, but recognizing how that has been a link to my own brilliance. And I am a brilliant person. I'm happy to tell myself that. I answer my shame with positive affirmations. And like I heard Ned say yesterday, it doesn't happen with one and done. Seldom is this kind of transformation a one and done piece. It takes condition. Just like I get up every morning and run at five in the morning and do my thing, I don't want to do it. I usually wake up with a bad attitude every day that I have to address every single day. I know. So that's.

That's.

That's about me. But I'm saying to you that if I condition myself and I go back, just like, think of it this way, Joe, let me leave you this. It's this idea. Some kid who's playing basketball, okay? So he's playing for a college team. The time's run out. His team's behind by one point, and he's at the free throw line, and he has a 1 and 1. He has to make the first to tie the game, the second to win. So what happens? What do you know? Well, the guys behind the goal are doing everything they possibly can, legally or illegally, to try to get him to miss that shot. Okay, what does he do? He chap. He just programs back to the summer where. What did he do? He practiced a thousand free throws. And then what he would do, he'd run wind sprints until he almost dropped dead. And then he'd go practice and then he'd run up and down the bleachers, and then he'd have his friends beat on him and then yell at him while he's making those practicing. And he draws all that in on that one critical moment. And if he misses, he goes back and does more of it so he can improve. So the goal isn't to be before and after like, I'm finally, now I'm all together. I just want to be a little bit better today than I was yesterday. And, man, has that made a big difference in my life. And I tell you, if you practice what I. I haven't read that second chapter of that book you told me. I'm gonna go read it. But the point if you practice what I'm hearing being said, that'll work. It'll help me anchor myself in what my authentic sense of being an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. I never knew that. I mean, I knew that here. Cause I'm a smart dude. But I never knew that in my guts until I. I practice it every day. I practice it this morning, I practice it tonight. I practice when I walk off this stage, it's just being that. So I really think we have hope in transforming shame. You know, all these energies that are negative for you. Anger, you know, what do we do? Well, what we do, we have to redefine it. It's just an energy source. That's all these feelings are, you know. So mine, as a responsible adult, is to move that energy from what I don't want to. What I want. So I'll take some time. When I'm angry is to throw it up. I just make sure I don't throw it up on people that I care for. If I had the flu, I wouldn't want to throw up in your lap. I'd go to the bathroom. So I don't want to throw up in somebody's lap. But once I throw that up to that person, I move it to the issue of injustice, the issue of oppression. And then I move it to what I want, you know, and what I want is respect, dignity. I want to treat myself that way and treat you that way. And the more I work with it, the better I get. I'm not perfect. I have to circle back and make amends all the time. Because I'll fuck it up. But still, what I've learned is how to be true to myself. And you know what's more important than never acting out again? It's knowing how to find your way back, isn't it? Isn't that really important? I mean, if you go out for a hike with somebody and the guy says, I've never been lost in all the times I've taken people out for a hike. Or if you say somebody take another guy and he says, well, I have a compass here and I know how to read the sucker. Well, who would I want to go with? I'll go with the guy that got the compass. I just need to know how to. How to find myself if I lose myself. And you can learn that, that's what recovery is about.

Absolutely.

No, this is great.

Thank you.

The way that addiction manifests itself can be very different, as you've already described, in all the various different ways that people have addicted. You know, these behaviors that you can see from gambling and sex to love Addictions and money addictions and everything. But at the core, very many people are being driven by the same sorts of, you know, concerns, the self centeredness and the fears and the guilt and the shame and the remorse and the various different things that are driving them. Their own delusions and their own, you know, their own struggles, their own pain, their own suffering. And they're not consciously aware of how their behaviors are potentially negatively impacting the people around them. Right. And so when I say they're not necessarily the sickest person in the room, the addicted person, the addiction itself can be an indication that the entire family system has issues. Right. And so sometimes an intervention is, I mean, not sometimes. Oftentimes it's kind of like a staggered thing. It's like I'm helping each person as we go, as we lead up to this conversation that's going to happen with their addicted loved one. But if I'm really doing a good job in a successful intervention, I want at least one, if not two or three, or everybody on the intervention team to be engaging in their own form of recovery and some kind of support resource for every individual person and to have them arrive at the conclusion that I'm not going to this recovery program for them. I'm doing this for me. I'm doing this because I can use this. And if the starting point is just, at the very least you have been negative, impacted by your loved one's addiction, that has had a serious effect. And it would be tremendously helpful for you to get help to connect with peers that have been through the same circumstances at the very least. And then move that up to therapists, move that up to workshops, move that up to intensive, you know, workshops or therapies that may be going on. And usually there are, you know, intensive codependency workshops and things like that that may be going on for, you know, four to seven day periods that I've recommended. And of course, you know, just like people who go away for rehabs, oftentimes it's. They're not interested in going initially and then when they come back, they go, that was the greatest thing I ever did. Right. Thanks so much for, for recommending that. And the other added piece of leverage for any family members, you know, like, so it's like if the addict is the last to know and you're the first to know, well, well, as it was with my mother's case, there is no better way to help your addicted loved one than for you to go through the paces yourself. If you have entered a recovery program yourself and you're able to model recovery and you're able to model going through the very same resistance and challenges that they're going to feel. Because oftentimes I'll recommend it to parents and say, let's say go to Al Anon and they're going to come back and say, I don't think that was for me. I didn't like it. They're just talking about this and they're talking about that and it's like, yeah, that's exactly what your son is about to go through. So if you can overcome it, then when they say it, then you get to have a very different conversation. You get to have an empathetic conversation where you go, yeah, I know exactly what that's like. I had to get through that too. But if I just sit through the hour, usually I hear one or two things that are really helpful and I find it valuable. So that's why I keep going. If you can say that to your kid versus my kid says he doesn't want to go to meetings, they're not going to work. It's entirely different. And it doesn't give them the ground to stand on.

No, you're absolutely right. Well, what advice would you give family members that feel help, you know, hopeless or helpless in the face of, you know, a loved one's addiction?

That it's not hopeless, that you know the cliche, it's, it's darkest before the dawn. I mean that's the really, you know, every single person, me and you included, right here on this call. But everybody I know that is, is, is sober today, had family members around them the day before they got sober that thought, this is hopeless. You know, like the day before we all got sober, it looked bad, it was hopeless, it was helpless. And here we are, there's 20 plus million people that are in recovery today. And sobriety is just as likely for your loved one as anybody else that's achieved it. Because there is a solution. I mean, there is an answer for starts with separating your loved one from the addiction. Identify that what's going on here is addiction and start thinking about, okay, how can we deal with the addiction? Not how do we fix my kid, how do I, you know, if you can't solve for, you know, he's a jerk, there's no way that you can solve for he's a jerk, but you can solve for his addiction, you know, leads to some of these jerk like behaviors. Right? And so separating your loved one from their addiction is really conceptually one of the Biggest things. And then from there, you're able to treat them with empathy rather than all of the various different things that we see with stigma. And you just wouldn't be using language like, you know, you're a screw up. How could you do this? You're disrespecting us. You're, you know, you don't, you don't care about us. How could you do this? If you loved us, you would stop. You would never use any language like that because you've separated them from the addiction. And so addiction has an answer. Addiction has a solution. And, and as soon as you get there and as soon as you recognize that addiction requires help and your loved one is not going to seek help on their own, well, you're like 95% of the way there now. It's okay. Who can help us? Who can help us have the conversation that's going to lead them to go get help? And it's my estimation that probably 8 out of every 10 parents who are struggling with an addicted child can likely get their kid started in a recovery program simply with a little bit of guidance, a little bit of extra information and, you know, education around addiction recovery and how to have this kind of conversation right now.

That's great.

So let's just say someone happened to.

Come across this conversation we're having right now, and either they're an, they're struggling with addiction themselves or they have a loved one, a family member, you know, a child, young, old, whatever that is struggling with addiction. And they just. So they've gotten some ideas. They're hearing us. We've planted a seed, which is pretty much everything that I do with Genius Recovery is I want to plant seeds. You know, I don't run treatment centers. We just. It's an educational platform. 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 that with the world. Which is hence the reason for, you know, talking with you is putting just education out there to guide people. So what would you say? Where, what do they do first? Where do they start? You, you, you get these conversations and calls all the time. I don't know what to do. What do I do? And, you know, that's. I always like hearing people that have been there, done that. What do they do? Where do you go first? I mean, how would you answer that question?

What I tend to use is something I call the severity and worry scale. And so on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm just saying how, how severe is. Whatever it is that's happened most recently? Like what, whatever the circumstances is, like, on a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is it and how worried are you? And now typically, parents are just, it's always a 10 on worry, but you have to actually kind of just like, use a little bit of discretion here and just be like, you know, like, how worried should I be about whatever thing that just happened? You know? And if you wind up at a 10 on severity and a 10 on worry, if you're somewhere around 18 to 20, then I would speak to a professional interventionist. Just speak with someone, you know, if you Visit my website, whyintervention.com why intervention.com as of right now, we offer, you know, like free clarity calls and we just get a little bit of strategy and guidance about what the situation is. Like, just get it, get a handle on it. But otherwise, anything less than that, severity wise, it's, it's just get started on learning more about addiction and recovery, doing your research on what recovery resource you can connect your child or your addicted loved one to. Where would I bring them if they were to come to me right now and say, mom, Dad, I have a serious problem and I need help? You need to know what to do next. Be ready for that. Because what we, what I do. And, and initially, Joe, like, I was really surprised by this. Not surprised. I, I was like, pleasantly surprised. And now it's become more routine, of course. But in the early days, I couldn't believe how well it was going when I would just be talking to someone over the phone after I had gotten trained in intervention. And then I start just giving them, okay, here's what you're going to stop doing. Don't say this. Say this instead next time you see them. And then he's on his way to rehab, I'd be like, oh, my God, like, I couldn't even believe that it worked so well, you know, and so you have to have the resource lined up. You have to have your plan, abc, have it, know what you're doing. I think that's probably like really legitimately about 30% of it is that now you have a tangible place in mind, you have a tangible outcome, you know, and, and you don't not research it because you say, well, I know he's just going to say no. He's just going to refuse anyway. So why would I even. That's, that's a bad idea. Like, do the research and find the place, you know, consider your Insurance information or whatever it might be. But find the resource, even if it is a local 12 step meeting, whatever it is, have it in mind. And then you're already really, as soon as you start educating then you can go to your own 12 step recovery program. Also. And I have the why Intervention podcast. There's a genius recovery podcast. There are literally dozens, hundreds of free resources available that are going to give you more insight into addiction from the minds of people who actually were dealing with addiction. It, you know, so that you can, you can navigate this thing in a different way and of course get your own support. Getting support from people that have been in your shoes is invaluable and, and everybody has a program that works for them, you know, so if you, if you, if you try Al Anon and Al Anon's not the one. I recently I worked with a mom who as soon as I found out that her, her father was an addict, I suggested adult children of alcoholics. And then it was like she was like this is the best thing that ever happened to me. You know, like this is because now it's, it's so narrowly identified to her now where it's like this is what is going to help me. So once you're working whatever program of recovery that, that might be beneficial for you, that can't help but to have a positive impact on the people around you.

Yeah, yeah, that's really good.

First off, I would be fascinated to know why that is the case. But I want to first have you define what is addiction? I mean, what does that mean?

Well, there's many definitions of what an addiction is, but here's what it boils down to. Addiction is a brain disease. The brain has become altered and when a person starts a behavior like a kid takes some nicotine, what he doesn't know is nicotine stays in his brain for 30 days so he doesn't feel like he's got a problem. I haven't had a cigarette in three weeks. But the fact is the brain is adjusting and so it feels like a choice when he starts and what happens if he uses it to cope with stress and cope with pain. The actual way that the brain is structured shifts. It moves. Even in gaming, we are now seeing that kids become so addicted to gaming that some, we are quite certain some kids brains don't actually unfold naturally. So what happens is that the brain is altered and it's self administered. You do this for yourself and has a lot to do with how you perceive things. So for example, you and I were joking before the show about this research out of Stanford where people were given the same bottle of wine. One group is told it's 90 bucks, other group is told it's 10 bucks. The group that got the 90 buck, they got higher than the group that had the 10 buck wine.

So same wine, same wine, thought it was $10, the other was $90.

So it's really what your perception is. And so what happens then is that the brain actually then starts to reset itself, recalibrate itself. And then that person gets to a point where it crosses the line. It goes from where it's an impulse to where it becomes compulsive, and then it becomes addictive. And then you have a problem where a person can't stop. And they make promises to themselves they're going to stop. And they can't stop because the brain is now at a place where it can't go backwards by itself. So it's a little bit like other things that, you know, of Alzheimer's or other brain diseases. There's now something wrong with the brain. And we can see it, we can look at it, see pictures of it. We know that it's a problem and that it's treatable.

Okay.

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