What Keeps Us Caged: Breaking Free from Addiction's Grip

I think it keeps us stuck. I think that the fear of not knowing what to do, or the fear of doing the wrong thing, especially when people start to get educated on this topic, there's a ton of motivation to do it right. And there's a ton of pressure to make sure that, that they, that they do it right. So I think that fear is definitely enhanced with that, I guess, that motivation and that desire to do it right. So when we look at like what cages us, it's The things that I think cage us the most would be fear, fatigue, grief, manipulation, and also just lack, lack of helpful knowledge and lack of helpful support. So, and what I mean by that with the, you know, like we learn and then we try to figure out how to put it into place. We wanna make sure we do it right. We don't wanna mess up. And Campbell and I hear this all the time that it's, well, if I say this, then is it gonna make 'em worse? Or if I do that, is it gonna make 'em relapse? Or if I, if I hold that boundary, is it going to put me in the bad guy role? So there's a lot of motivation to do it right. There's a lot of desire because this is your family member. This is someone that you love. And so you do want to make sure that you do it right. But then there is that, that constant second voice over here in your head of, am I doing it right or am I going to cause more harm than good? And so I think that just that constant dialogue in your head definitely makes, makes you Tired and afraid. And Campbell says shame. Yep. But shame also keeps us stuck, and it's, it's that shame cycle. And you figure with addiction, it's shame. It grows in shame, it grows in secrecy. And so when, as family members, when we're ashamed of either how we're responding— and I see this a lot with partners where it's like, I don't want to be a doormat, or I'm staying and people tell me I should go— and so they, they end up with Just a ton of shame. Campbell also said, I'm faking and pretending. I wish you could elaborate on that. Send me a quick message on what you mean by that specifically. Um, because with that shame, it is like a shame that this is happening in our family, or even sometimes we can even have like shame for our loved one where it's like they have no shame, but I'm ashamed that they're doing this thing. Like, I feel bad for them. So, so all of those I think are, are Lots of ways, lots of emotions, lots of experience that hold us just stuck. And so we get caged by this. And then the longer we're stuck, the longer we're caged, the more we don't really know what to do or how to get out of it. She said, I think we act like it's not happening and then it can lie and protect them and ourselves, which is true because then it can be like this shield that protects them. And when we minimize and deny it, then sometimes that can let the addiction or let destructive behavior last a lot longer than if we were to say something. But a lot of times people get stuck in not knowing how to set the boundary or what boundary, what boundary will happen. Amber also said, you know, that hopes that it goes away. That's a great point as far as the— oh, Campbell said that. Oh, that's you. Okay, Campbell, great. You can talk to me there. So, so being able to say that if we don't acknowledge it, maybe it will just go away. And if we acknowledge it, then we may actually end up with Fight, or we may actually end up making it worse. So we'll just deny it and just hope it's not as bad as we think it might be. She's typing. Addiction gets traction from shame. Yep. So, and and the other thing with the emotional manipulation is our loved ones are so good at putting us in a position where we start to question and. Spin in our own minds where they'll be like, that didn't happen, or it didn't happen like that, or you're just really sensitive about this topic. So in our own mind, again, remember what I said initially, we have a high motivation to do this right. We have a high motivation not to be in the bad guy role. So then when they come at us with any kind of critique, we typically filter it in our logical brain and say, is there a point to this, or do they have a point, or what can I do to make it better? And then that does let them sometimes run, run a little bit longer with whatever it is that they're just spinning a lie or they're gaslighting, essentially. So let's see, it's hard for me to see those. Wouldn't shame— can you read that, Campbell? Wouldn't shame alone make them stop? Nope. Nope. With shame, we have quite a few, and Cameline is talking about this in our upcoming course, but with shame, we have quite a few different shame shields that we use. And so when someone feels an intense amount of shame, oftentimes what they'll do is they'll avoid. So they'll step back, they won't acknowledge it, or they use anger as a way to deflect the shame. It's also another way for them to kind of set a fire somewhere else so that the focus isn't on them. Or they people-please. And so in some ways, to kind of speak on that, they may promise us things. They may say it's never going to happen again, and that can definitely be because of the shame, but it doesn't motivate them to stop. But as family members, we can certainly think that that's what's happening. And again, going back to that emotional manipulation, that they can use that to kind of control the situation more so. There we go. My 24-year-old is facing prison time and asks, why isn't it enough to make her stop using? Heartbreaking. That is heartbreaking. That's really heartbreaking. And, you know, and the answer to that, unfortunately, is the brain. But, you know, I was just reading this thing not that long ago that talked about addiction in prison, and it was saying that for some family members, if we can look at prison almost as Reframe it in a way to where this may be a really good opportunity. Very sad, not minimizing it at all, but a very good opportunity for them to actually have the ability to get clean. I know there's drugs in prison, so that may not be, but, but I thought it was an interesting take on it. All right. Yes, I can hear Campbell now. You wanna try it, Campbell? I can't hear you. Can you guys hear Campbell? Let me mute Campbell and you unmute and see if they can hear you.

Can you guys hear me? Okay, so I'll talk for a minute. So give we'll give Kim a break and we'll just go back and forth. I don't know what's happening, but anyway, I think the going back to the prison conversation is it could be a good opportunity to address the brain reset as far as letting all those extra neuroceptors go to sleep, but it won't be enough. I don't think like I would if someone. Could have a shift and let their brain get better while in prison, I would immediately follow it up when they get out with long-term sober living to let that sort of be the reset for the serotonin and the oxytocin that are really going to help. Because those are the 3 components to curing addiction: time for the brain to reset, and connection, and pride. And so coming out of prison is not— we're going to be breaking whatever connections were made in prison. So that's first of all problematic. And we're not gonna be coming out with a gobs of pride unless we did some huge project in prison, which most people don't do. And so if you could give the brain the chance and then go to long-term sober living and get a job, save your money, launch as independent, rebuild friendships, connect with AA, NA, build this sense of community of sobriety, that could be a massive home win. I mean, home run. That could be awesome. I think that that's the mistake that people make though, is because I've had several clients whose child has been in prison or jail. And when I recommend that, they're like, well, he won't do that. And no, they probably won't because they're tired of being confined. They're tired of all that. They just want to come out and be normal. So you would have to have the ability to have that conversation with your loved one to say, look, I get it. I love you dearly, but we've got to do this for you to be successful in life because Coming out of prison is a really tough spot. You know, you don't have a job, you don't have any money, often you don't have a car. And all good intentions— I mean, the hell is paved with roads to good intentions, and addiction is that. So I think that that's a really good point. This prison could be good. All right, my son is facing Why is it echoing again? Okay. My son is facing three years of prison time. He went to treatment to hope it would make a difference. However, they pushed his case out sixty days, and he relapsed immediately after leaving court. And this is exactly like addiction doesn't respond to consequences, you guys. And that's a really good example of that. Like most of us, when we're backed into a corner, as in now I've got a court date, I can be good. I can, I can, I'll do anything to to not get in trouble. But the minute we get just this far away from the corner, which is exactly what. happened. They pushed it out. He got out of the corner. And then that addiction comes right back in with, well, we have some more time. We won't— we'll manage it differently. No one will know. We'll get away with it. And of course, with addiction, that never ever happens.

Ever.

You can talk, Kim.

That was funny. I did raise my hand. Will you speak more about the shame? Because I know you sent me that, but I know you probably have more to say on that. So will you go back and touch on that?

So addiction eats up points, um, like Pac-Man points with shame. And what happens is they can't stand what they've done, how they're living, what's going on, because they're, you know, doing something that's either inherently against their family values, or they may be stealing, or they're doing all kinds of things. But instead of being able to say, I've got to stop, is the addiction says things to them like, well, you already You've already created all the shame. You should have more. Or there's 3 shame shields, and one of them is to create more shame, is to go toward it. And that's what happens with addiction, is it just goes toward the shame because it— remember, it lives in the survival part of the brain. So it believes that this person we love needs to use to live. And so it's gonna override the shame that goes to whoever's point earlier, which is children can live.

Or learn by shame. Addiction won't let you learn. It does because of that survival part of the brain. It believes that we need to use or do whatever we're doing in order to live, to actually survive this day. And so it doesn't, it doesn't respond to shame or consequences. In fact, makes us feel so bad that we keep using. Will you, um, take that, everything you just said, and then switch it back to how, how the shame process makes family members get stuck? Like how it kind of holds them, how it paralyzes them in, in the recovery process?

Are you talking about what our shame or— okay, their shame. Well, because they can't admit that they're— what they're doing is wrong. They lie. They make us the bad guy. They deflect. They flip it back on us. Um, they yell, they do all these things. And so I think part of their shame becomes things that we fight against and we're trying to like bat away, but we don't know that it's shame because we're angry with them. We're all the things that we are. We're angry. We're tired. We're frustrated. We're embarrassed. We hope we, you know, all the things that Kim and I sort of have alluded to so far is their shame shows up as the things that irritate us. And so we, we fight against that rather than if they just could come to you and say, this is horrible. I'm so riddled with shame. I'm so embarrassed I'm doing this. I don't know what to do. 99.9%, if not 100% of us would, would show up differently with our loved one. We would say, "What can I do to help?" I that makes me. I mean, we would use that empowerment triangle. Like that's got to be terrible. I would hate that if I were living like that. What can we do to help? You're a smart guy, but we don't. They they come at us with more and more and more of it, and they're punching holes in walls or opening up new credit cards. They're stealing from us or someone else. They're sneaking off in the middle of the night. They're coming home late from work. They're driving drunk. They're just. Going on it, but our response is based upon the the behavior, not the mental status. All right, so that's a good question, Kaylin. What I mean by all those extra neuroreceptors going to sleep is if you look at the neurobiology of the brain in addiction, it's complicated, and I wish I had a big whiteboard, but I don't. So. Normally, if our brain makes 3 dopamine and let's just say 3 GABA, which is associated with alcohol— dopamine is desire— if our brain makes 3 of each of those chemicals, there's going to be a neuroreceptor in the brain for those chemicals to go to, specifically shaped for each of those chemicals. And the— and there will be what's called homeostatic, which is just equal. No, no chemicals are floating in the brain. Okay. When we use on the side, we're bringing in a ton more dopamine, dopamine chemicals, because that's desire. And let's just keep it with alcohol. We're bringing in a ton more GABA than our brain would normally make because our brain normally makes GABA plates so that we can drive on a highway without freaking out that there's another car in the next lane. But when we have all these extra ones, the brain does 2 things. It says, we'll stop making these chemicals because we have a math problem. But we can't have all these chemicals floating around because that's just not how we work. So then it creates neuroreceptors for these extra chemicals to go to. This is why I believe that addiction is disease, because as these neuroreceptors are created by our brain to get the homeostasis it needs, we are now— we've organically altered an organ, which is the definition of disease. So all those extra neuroreceptors are what have to go to sleep in order for full recovery to occur. They go to sleep starting 35, 30 to 45 days of not using, but they go to sleep pretty much like toddlers on Christmas Eve. You know, one eye's open for Santa, but within like the first 3 months, a good bit of them are going to sleep. At 1 year, 90 to 95% of the extra ones are sleeping hard. At 2 years of sobriety, all of the external receptors in the brain are in a coma.

They don't die. They don't go away, but they're in a coma. So once we get someone to two years of sobriety, we are really sitting in the in the fat seat for keeping them sober. Now it now it is a choice. Up until then, it's a sort of a neuroreceptor game. And remember, Amber named these things years ago. All those extra neuroreceptors are what Amber calls hungry monster mouths. And what those hungry monster mouths do is they validate and rationalize using. Because they, because they live in the survival part of the brain. So you can see how it's like a giant tumbleweed of progression and making sure that it, it lives because this believes it. This rationalizes and validates it and makes sense to us because it's in our brain. And so we do it. And that's, that's the secret. So that brain recovery is massively important, like vital, but pride and connection come right behind it. Like it's a triangle of, of Equality. Okay, Kim is saying my ex-husband was an alcoholic and passed away at 49. Our 30-year-old son is now an alcoholic crew member, says Dad, as Walt Disney. Yeah, and I don't know that We need to belie that, like unless the son is acting like oh I see what she's saying is that that it didn't happen like that that he didn't die because the alcoholism he died okay yeah and I think that would just come from some education about addiction in general which my guess would be is your son is the alcoholic doesn't isn't going to listen to that because he doesn't want to hear it so I think you might just have to Just say, well, in your own head that he's got faulty thinking. I don't think you're going to be able to convince him about that based upon the dad. I also wonder, Kim, on that if your son, if that's kind of like a, I would imagine it's a protective stance as far as how your son is processing his dad's death. And so if he can glorify him and romanticize, and it probably serves two functions, one I'm going to honor my dad in the way that I remember him, and I'm also going to justify my harmful behavior by comparing it to my dad, but because I've glorified his memory and I've glorified him. But, but from your side, I imagine that's a really hard spot to be, which kind of supports what we first started talking about. And, you know, our grief and our fear and wanting to do it right and wanting to support our loved ones really can— it, it can hurt us, or it can keep us stuck in this problem even longer. So, um, Bree, should we turn it over for them to ask questions, or should we just keep talking? I'll let you decide. Okay, Campbell, you want— do you have more to say, or should we turn it over to questions?

I think she's been answering. I think she's been posting the questions as we've been going along, so I don't think there are any extra ones. I'm scanning it. I think she's Has been putting them up there. I do think your point on on what she just said about her son is that's a shame shield. Is I'm going to live build this fantasy of what happened with dad because if I have to admit that dad died of alcoholism and I'm also doing that, then I would have to admit that my life could become unmanageable and that survival part of the brain. I cannot say this enough, but. The survival part of the brain believes we need to use to live. This part of the brain is so strong, you guys, that if we if we couldn't swim and we fell into a pool of water, so no limbs, no trees, no stones are going to you know hold us down. The frontal lobe, which is our thinking part of our brain, automatically screams: Hold your breath! We are human. We are water. We do not breathe water. We breathe air. Hold your breath. And if the frontal lobe remained in control, nobody would drown. We would float back up to the top and we would breathe. But the survival part of the brain doesn't know we're human. It doesn't know we breathe air. It doesn't know we're in water. It doesn't know any of those things. It just knows we need to breathe to live. And that survival part of the brain overrides that frontal lobe and screams, breathe! And we do, and we drowned. The survival part of the brain is what keeps people alive when they are brain dead for for sometimes days, and there's that agonal breathing because the survival part of the brain doesn't want to admit this is gone. That my life as a human is no longer going to be recognizable, and it fights to live. And that's how strong you guys. That's how strong addiction is. Is it will kill us because these neuroreceptors scream. Use one more time. It'll be okay. There won't be fentanyl in what I'm using. It just it just screams these things because it believes that the substance or process must occur for the person to live. And this is why it's so baffling and uncanny and clever and desperate and beats us because that's that's hard to beat. Like think about that drowning metaphor, you guys. Like that's Really powerful about the brain. All right, Julie, how do you motivate someone when they say they want to change but they just seem to be stuck? When the using reduces, other things get worse— bulimia withdrawals. Yeah, that's the problem, is lots and lots of people say that they want to change when they're like having a moment of clarity, but the brain won't let them. So they look stuck. They are. They are very stuck. And in this case, when she talks about the bulimia, bulimia also gives you short-term pleasure chemicals that are associated with the same things that come in heroin or weed or alcohol or gambling or porn, all those things. Like those short-term pleasure chemicals that are associated with all addictions are the problem is we get addicted to those. And unlike pride and oxytocin, which we can't go get, they just happen because we live good lives. We have Good talents. We have friends. We do a good job at work. But food, shopping, drinking—all those things have to be done over and over and over and over, which is addiction. So they they look stuck because their brain is stuck. All right, Kim, I'm gonna let you take over for a minute just because I've talked a lot.

All right, Susan. I've reached out to my addicted niece via text several times with no response back. Should I keep reaching out to her? And what words should I use? I wouldn't reach out to her if you've already reached out several times. I would give it a break just because the no response, if you keep doing that, it can definitely kind of push on that shame shield. And the other thing it can do is she can then weaponize your kindness, weaponize your humanity, and say that you're nagging or any of those things. So, I would break this up and I would maybe do, I don't know, 6, 7, 8 days in between. And then the words that I would use is I would just say, hey, just thinking about you, hope you're having a good day. Or I would say, I saw this funny thing and it made me think of you. Or You know, hey, I went to get a vanilla ice cream cone. I remember how much you loved those, or how much you love those. Just thinking of you, you know. So you can hear on that, I'm not asking any questions. I'm not requiring anything from her in response, but I am giving her that little bit of like, I think about you, I love you. And, and this serves 2 purposes. One, the opposite of addiction is connection. And so we're keeping that connective line open. It also lets her know, hey, I still see you as a human, because oftentimes when people are struggling with addiction, they do feel less than human. They themselves in the world can mirror that back. So it speaks against that. And the most important thing in my mind is when she's ready, if she's ready for help, she'll reach out to you more likely because you've kept this connection open.

I think that's a really solid point. And this is where we tend to get stuck as well as the loved ones, because we tend to harp on what they're doing that's wrong. We tend to harp on how it's hurting our feelings, what's going badly. And we do forget to see them as people. I mean, In the moment, it's very difficult. I totally get that. But I think the more we can remind them that they are people, that they have value, that they're that they are more than addiction, the more that they can at the certain when they get these moments of clarity feed that and reach out for for help is is to do that. Like even when my son wasn't living with us as a young guy, he was out using. If he showed up and you know came home for dinner or Wanted a new pair of socks. Like we fed him, and we're very kind and loving to him, and we certainly gave him new socks. But we didn't talk about where he was, what was going on, what was he doing? We just didn't talk about it anymore. And eventually, we kept that connection, and he when when he was done, he reached out and said, "I'm done. I can't live like this anymore. Can you guys help me?" And we did. So I think it's very difficult to do that because we are mad at them. We are tired. We are. Angry, we're sad, we're all these things. But if you cannot show up like that all the time, if not always, I think that helps. All right, Melanie. My young adult daughter has recently experienced a great deal of shame based upon incidents from her alcohol use. She's reached out asking for help with her use, but after sending her the info. For a program, she has yet to contact them. Does this mean we're back to square one and another incident needs to happen to push her forward again? Probably, but I wouldn't say you're at square one. You know, remember in these stages of change, there's pre-contemplation, which is I don't have a problem, you people are crazy. Contemplation is have a problem, maybe, maybe not. Preparation is definitely have a problem, maybe not today. And then action, which is have a problem taking Taking action. She stepped into the action stage of change there for a nanosecond maybe, and then the disease pulled her back out. That is completely normal. And if you'll just sit, don't push it, just sit on it. There will be something else. There will be another moment of clarity. There will be something and she will reach back out. And you just— that's where we tell people all the time, be ready. Have a treatment facility picked out. Know that there's a bed. If you're paying for it, know that you can afford it. Have all these ducks in a row so that when we get these moments, Clarity, we can say here. You know, we can take you to XYZ today, and then and then sometimes that's what needs well almost always that's what needs to happen. So you're not back to square one because there's progress going in there in the act then the stages of change. It's just the disease pulled her back out. All right, you guys, we are out of town time. I'm terribly sorry for the technical issues. I swear to Buddha, we just need to hire someone because. We know what we want to talk about, but we sometimes just have problems. So thank you for your patience, and hopefully this was helpful, and we will see you guys later. All right, thanks a lot, you guys. Bye.