The One You Feed - Empowering Families in the Journey of Recovery with Dr. Jeff Foote

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Dr. Jeff Foote is a clinical psychologist making impactful strides in the areas of addiction support and recovery. His work underscores the importance of understanding the nuances of addiction that empowers families in a loved one’s journey of recovery. Jeff’s approach lies in building bridges of communication and forging stronger connections within families confronted by substance use issues. The effective model, ‘invitation to change,’ is designed to uproot stigmas, foster better comprehension of addiction, and ultimately contribute to a transformative and supportive recovery journey. In this episode, you will be able to: Explore groundbreaking approaches to treating addiction and post-traumatic stress Understand the impact of genuine compassion and acceptance in supporting a loved with grappling with addiction Shift your perception of addiction, seeing it no longer as a flaw but as an aspect of human behavior Master effective communication tools that give support and comfort to loved ones struggling with anxiety or addiction Witness how families can be a beacon of positive change, crucially supporting the road to recovery To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi everybody, it's Ginny. You've probably heard me with Eric on some episodes of The One You Feed. I have a question for you. Are you your own worst critic? I mean, when you pay attention to how you talk to yourself, is it just kind of mean? And do you often feel beat down and just heavy inside? If so, I truly understand the struggle. I used to believe that relating to myself this way was what kept me performing at any acceptable level. And without it, I thought I'd drift off into the deep end and become a failure in pretty much every aspect of my life. But it turns out that's actually one of the inner critic's worst lies, that it helps you. I mean, maybe short term, you get a push and do well, but long term, it's corrosive and it actually keeps you from living

to your potential. I've created a free three-part video series that teaches you how to get to the other side of the inner critic like I have, and you can grab it today. Just head to oneufeed.net slash inner critic. I'm sharing this with you as not only an inner critic survivor, but also a certified mindfulness teacher. And you can learn to relate to yourself differently, living with an inner lightness and not a sense of being at battle with yourself.

And life is so much better when you're a friend to yourself. I promise. So go to oneufeed.net slash innercritic for my free mini course. See you in the videos. We can call it all kinds of things. We can call it a disease. And that's a whole nother discussion to have. But it's really, really different for different people.

How people get into this struggle, how they experience it, and how they ultimately can get out of it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Jeff Foote, a psychologist and nationally

recognized clinical research scientist with over 30 years of experience utilizing evidence-based treatment approaches for the treatment of substance use issues and post-traumatic stress. He's the co-founder of the Center for Motivation and Change, outpatient programs in New York City, Long Island, Washington, D.C., and San Diego, as well as the residential program CMC Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. Jeff is a member of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and the American Association of Addiction Psychiatrists. Today, Eric, Ginny, and Jeff discuss his books Beyond Addiction and his Beyond Addiction workbook. Hi, Jeff. Welcome to the show. Hi, nice to see you guys.

Hi, Ginny. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Hey, guys. It's so good to be here with you. I'm really excited to talk with you, Jeff. I think we both are. You've done some really interesting work in a couple of books now. One is called Beyond Addiction, and the newest one is called Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family and Friends, Evidence-Based Skills to Help a Loved One Make Positive Change. And I have to say, as somebody who has been in recovery for the vast majority of my adult life, I get asked so many times by family members and friends and partners of addicts. What do I do? What do I do? And there's been a response for a long time, which was, well, try going to Al-Anon, right? Like it's free, it's there,

it's something. But your book was one of the first things I'd seen that really went into depth about ways that you can have a positive impact on the person and ways that go beyond simply detaching with love, but actually not having to completely detach and being loving and be motivational and help lead them perhaps to change. And so that's why I'm so excited that we're going to get to talk about this. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I think that's a good read. There's been, you know, as you said, the traditional pathways that people are recommended to. And when families run into these issues, it's heartbreaking, heart-rending, terrifying. And when you're in the role of family member trying to help, or frankly, any role of trying to help, whether it's a friend, it's a therapist, there's a lot going on there

that's difficult. And there are a lot of tools that we now know are really useful that are not just setting limits and detaching. And again, those can be the thing to do at any given moment or not. So just to be able to have a larger toolkit and a greater understanding and a greater sense of compassion in this whole arena, I think is a pretty powerful thing. So that's what we've been trying to work at. Indeed. Well, why don't we start like we always do with the parable? Ginny, I'll let you take it if you like. I like, I would like to. All right. So it goes like this. A grandparent was talking with their grandchild and they said, in life, there

are two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And one is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent said, the one you feed. So I'd love to know how that parable applies to you in your life and also in the work that you do. I've used that parable before myself. I think it's a lovely narrative to walk through with folks, especially because that internal battle is really intense

for people. I think I've used it more in the context of I'm a clinical psychologist, so I do a lot of direct work with people struggling with substances and lots of other stuff. And there you are, there's the battle right in front of you internally with somebody, you know, I'm trying to take one path and keep getting pulled back to the other path and feeling really bad about that and beating themselves up and so forth. It's a pretty extreme struggle. And I, it's funny, I have a, my favorite painting of all time is by this guy, Frank Frazetta, who used to illustrate dime magazines back in the 30s and 40s of Conan the Barbarian. And they're the most stunningly beautiful oil paintings you've ever seen. And they're usually around monstrous battles. And one of them is this horrendous looking monster on top of this other horrendous

looking warrior. And what I've always taken from that, I show it to clients actually fairly often. And as an illustration of this is one, don't underestimate the battle because it's ferocious. And two, it's a little ambiguous as to who you want to win here. Because both of these guys are pretty horrendously struggling and terrifying. Reminds me of the parable a little bit. It's like, it's not necessarily clear always which path I'm going to take. And there are difficulties on both paths, actually. I've always appreciated the idea of like, how do we learn to have an awareness of the path that we want more and to be more intentional about that

path? And I think that's one way we've talked about it with people in this kind of a struggle. I will say that over the last number of years, and this is related to the work that we're doing now with families and helpers in this approach that we've called the invitation to change, that there are some really important elements around this whole idea of good and bad that are really powerful to sort of take account of. And if I had to try to put it succinctly as related to that parable, the idea of like, there's a good side and a bad side, and we got to stay with the good side can also be just a terrible setup for people. Sort of like, can I hit the ejector seat and make all the bad stuff go away? And the answer is no, you can't. You can't eject the difficult parts of yourself. You can't eject the difficult parts of life that are going to come around the corner tomorrow. And can we learn to

think about those two sides differently and relate to them differently? And in the invitation to change, there's one of the concepts we talk about is willingness. So as it applies to a helper, I'm trying to help my son, you know, I'm so terrified and I'm trying to get him to do the right thing. And I'm, you know, the impulse to control that situation, the impulse to make the bad stuff go away, I'm going to send them to rehab and then they'll fix them. And then it'll be good. You know, I'll send them to the wilderness camp and that'll get rid of this problem. Is that pull to temporarily make bad stuff, so to speak, go away as opposed to inviting it in and going, there's really hard stuff here. There's really good stuff.

Can we live with both? You know, the terrible chatter in your head that tells you what a horrible human being you are all the time. Like we can't eradicate that. head that tells you what a horrible human being you are all the time. Like we can't eradicate that. Can we put it in the passenger seat and just welcome it in the car and to go into another parable, another metaphor and say, we're not going to kick you out of the car. We know you want to chat a lot. We just don't really want you grabbing the steering wheel all the time anymore, but you're part of us, you know, and the quote unquote bad stuff. It's like,

it's not so bad. And it's part of who I am. And it's part of who I've become in my life and all the difficult, painful things I've struggled with. And can we accept those parts as opposed to being a choice between one or the other? So I hope that makes sense in terms of that response to the parable. But I've started to think about it that way more over the last bunch of years. Because again, that pull to go for the good and put away the bad, ultimately, it's not so helpful, I think, for folks. Anyway, that's my long-winded response to the parable. It's a wonderful response.

You're not alone. I mean, we have grown to think of our inner world that way too, in that it's not banish the bad and only focus on the quote unquote good, that it's about integration. It's about holding it all. It's about relating to it wisely and skillfully and doing healing work. And so I'm really glad that that's your response because it brings us to a point where we can sort of have a more integrated interpretation of things. But I agree with you that parable does tend to point us towards being maybe intentional with the choices we make so that we're headed down a path. And I just think about the role of community when, as you mentioned, sort of discerning what path we want to go down

and that the role of community can be supportive in us when we're trying to discern that. And that family and friends can be sometimes the closest community that people have. And it's wonderful that you start the actual book that you wrote around understanding that people have. And it's wonderful that you start your, the actual book that you wrote around understanding that people don't use substances in a vacuum, right? That family and friends often make the critical difference in someone's recovery. And I'd love to know, I mean, it's a wonderful thing to hear because so often it's a powerless feeling to be a loved one of a person with abuse and feel like you can't fix them. So could you sort of take us into the role that family and friends can make in a skillful way? Sure. Yeah. And I think you guys mentioned

that sort of that sense of there can be a more traditional set of ideas about this that have words like detach associated with it. Even if we tag on detach with love, which kind of softens it up a little bit, it's still this idea that to be helpful, you need to step back. And again, there are important things in there that not to be ignored. Like I may need to step back because my limits have been breached and I'm burned out and I can't do it and so forth. That's all true for certain people, certain times. But to the point you just made about making sense of the behavior, one of the foundational things we do with helpers, and again, I'll broaden that from family to lots of people, including therapists and mental health professionals and so forth, who struggle with this idea also, but especially within a family, the idea that

this is now entered into our world. This meaning, wow, I just realized my 15 year old is smoking a bunch of pot and he got kicked out of school. Or I just realized my husband has been drinking a ton and he's hiding and I didn't realize that's why he goes to sleep early every night. And I just realized my whoever is using quote unquote hard drugs and I'm horrified. I've never heard of such a thing and what's wrong with them? Nobody's trained in this. They don't send families to school to learn how to deal with substance use issues or compulsive behaviors and it just occupies this place in our culture that's really stigmatized and really looked down upon and really, what's the other word, othered that people use. You're outside of the norm, you're outside of the good circle, you're representing something

scary, something we don't understand, you're doing irrational things, you're sort of breaching the social contract here where we're supposed to be, you know, together and honest and open with each other. And now you're doing a bunch of weird stuff that's not that. And some of it's just weird and some of it's really harmful and some of it's really scary. So the natural response to that is to be scared or nervous or anxious or mad or want to make it stop. And one of the things we start with with people is to try to help them put it in a different context and spend a lot of time with this first idea in the invitation to change that we describe as behaviors make sense, which is walking through a bunch of common desires for us human beings. Like I'd like to sleep better and I'd like to feel part of, and I'd like to want to get out of bed in the morning and I'd like to be able to focus better and I'd like to lose weight and I'd like to be funny.

And I'd like, you know, there's a long list of things that we go through and we say, you know, to be funny and I'd like, you know, there's a long list of things that we go through and we say, you know, is anybody here not want some of these things or anybody think these things are weird or sketchy or, you know, immoral? It's like, of course not, you know? And then we say, well, so we actually have the magic formula for many of these things and it's called alcohol or it's called heroin or it's called crack or, or, and you know what? It really works and it works incredibly quickly and it's really reliable and I can just get it on my own and I don't have to worry about other people. And it's just a way to start to help people understand that the desire to use substances, we can call it all kinds of things. We can call it a disease

and that's a whole nother discussion to have, but it's really, really different for different people, how people get into this struggle, how they experience it and how they ultimately can get out of it. I can look around a room of 10 people and clients in a group here in our rehab. And there are 10 very, very different stories of when this started, why it started, what it means, what will be helpful to unlock that person and help them move forward in a more positive way for themselves. Really literally 10 different stories. You know, I have PTSD from being in combat and I lost my wife last year and I'm mourning and I haven't gotten over it. I don't know what to do. I am a 16 year old and I'm just a knucklehead and I'm

just hanging out with my friends and it got out of control. And you know, like those are all really different things. And one definition doesn't help when we apply it. So if I, as a helper can go, okay, what makes sense about this from the perspective of this person I'm trying to help? Why is my kid using, why is my husband drinking too much? Why does my dad abusing pain pills? And let me really sort of understand that and step into their shoes. It just changes the whole equation. It makes it a compassionate discussion. It makes it a compassionate feeling. I want to help them as opposed to feeling like, why are you doing this to me? So it's just a starting sort of foundational point of this is human behavior. This is not a demon that's come into your loved one. Sometimes

it looks demonic when it gets to be a really bad place. It's still not a demon. It's just a human being struggling in a more or less severe way, in more or less behaviorally disrupted ways. And you can understand it, actually. It doesn't mean you like it. It doesn't mean you accept it. It doesn't mean it's cool with you. It just means you can understand it, which really is such a shift for most people and just profoundly affects their ability to actually engage in a different way. And engaging in a different way is the beginning of a whole different trajectory forward in terms of helping and in terms of being helped. That all makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I got sober in 12 step programs and they saved my life twice. So I have great things to say about them. And one of the things that eventually caused me to sort of withdraw

from that to a certain degree was this idea that is alcoholics and addicts. We were fundamentally different than other people who quote unquote weren't, you know, they were the normies. We were the sick ones. Right. And I just ceased at a certain point to believe that because to your point, there may be something different in my ability to use alcohol from your ability to use alcohol. Right. And there may be something different in my level of coping skills versus your coping skills or his level of trauma versus my level of trauma, right? But the core human experience is, okay, I'm trying to make the best out of my life,

the best way I can figure out with the tools and the skills that I have. And for some of us, me, my way of doing that turned out to ultimately be very destructive for me. Right. But the underlying situation, which was I don't want to hurt so bad. Right. Is a noble quest. Is not that different than, say, the parent who doesn't want to hurt so bad because their child is using. Right.

And so to me, that commonality, seeing like, okay, this is just the human response to a difficult situation, not, as you said, a moral failing, not a thing that fundamentally cuts me off from the rest of the human race. Yes. Yes. Well said. Yeah. And that cutting off from the human race or that I'm different or we're different or us addicts kind of language to describe stuff.

Again, it can be a very powerful tool. And as you said, it may have been a very powerful tool for some period of time to kind of extend a hand and lift you out of a really bad place. And I think that sense of community and commonality is incredibly powerful of just, I have kept myself sequestered away because I'm uniquely bad, but now maybe there's a community of people who I can talk with and not feel shame every second. Okay. So that's incredibly powerful. And can we have more? Can we expand to the common humanity of all of this, which is whether I'm using heroin or not, we're all humans.

Yeah. That mutual understanding between alcoholics and addicts is a hugely healing thing. You know, I mean, I remember my first NA meeting and I took the book home and just sobbed as I read it because it was the first time I'd ever heard anybody put words to what was happening in me. You know, so I agree with you. Like there's that initial piece that is really beneficial. And I think it gets to the idea of labels, right? There are situations in which labels and diagnoses are useful and there are situations where they're not. And knowing when and how hard to hold a label or an identity is really kind of an ongoing dance. Yeah. We hired a pretty young person here recently just for a summer thing in our clinical setting,

just as a support person and really nice, really smart person. And they came to me after about a month here. I said, how's it going? And they were like, it's really intense and I'm really liking it. It's really great. He's like, I have to be honest, when I first started working here, I just sort of had this expectation that the clients were going to be like really hard to deal with and kind of a little bit like crazy and a little bit like monstrous. First of all, I was like, holy crap, really? Oh my God. Where did our hiring process go wrong?

How did you slip through the cracks? But secondly, I was like, wow, right. There it is. Stated out loud, you know, the cultural norm, the cultural understanding, like it's those people, they are different somehow. It's insane. And it's such a barrier to help to helping and to being helped. And, you know, it's not like somebody who's struggling in this way is not acutely aware

of what role they now occupy in society. You know, people struggling in this way is not acutely aware of what role they now occupy in society. People struggling in this way are very deeply understanding of the fact that I don't talk about this stuff with anybody because I'm one of the bad ones now. It couldn't be a worse setup for trying to get help. I mean, mental health in general, as you guys are well aware, is stigmatized. So there's sort of all kinds of difficulties with that, but I'll illustrate the whole stigma thing in another realm, which is we're doing increasingly through this fentanyl epidemic, we're doing more grief work with families. So we have a foundation that does training for families around the country and it's free and it's a great thing. And we use this invitation to change model to train family members and also now to train

professionals. But increasingly, we're having to deal with death and what they would call in the scientific literature, drug-related deaths, DRDs. And as I started to read that literature over the last year, because we don't want to reinvent the wheel here, and there's been a lot of really, really good work in this arena of bereavement, but more recently just started to do some work in drug-related deaths. And there's a whole literature on status of death, high status deaths, low status deaths.

You know, high status death is my wife fought to the bitter end with cancer and she always put on a brave face and we did fundraisers and, you know, she's the face of the campaign now and all that stuff that people go through in that kind of an illness, for instance, which is viewed heroically in our society. You know, she never gave up, her spirit never flagged, those kinds of things, which is fine, except for it's in contrast to then, oh, you died from a heroin overdose. Okay. So one, we don't really want to talk about that.

Two, isn't that kind of your fault? Three, isn't that kind of because you're a bad person and you kind of got what you deserved? I mean, it's all these horrific things tied to it. And you can imagine as a family member, first, you've been through this life now with this person where you felt like you couldn't talk about this with your family or your friends or anybody, because this is a stigmatized struggle. And now you've lost this dear person in your life and you can't talk about it either. And they say, oh my God, I'm so sorry your son died. What happened? And you're like, what am I going to say? So if I say he died of a fentanyl overdose,

what do I get back? I get judgment. So even in that realm of loss, the stigma stuff is so pernicious and so destructive to getting help. It really is. They're barriers and they are inaccuracies. I mean, it's not correct that this is a moral failing. It keeps people stuck and suffering and it's not helpful. We probably have listeners here with family members who are struggling with addiction. You say the first place to start is understanding and that behaviors make sense. So if I'm a friend of a family or a helper with a loved one who's got addiction, how do I begin to understand the behaviors that my loved one is exhibiting?

For example, can I really help them if they seem like they don't want to change? How do I even start to gain an understanding? What's a practical step here? Right. Well, it's funny. That's a great way to pair it. How do I help them if they don't want to change? So one of the things we know now is that one of the most powerful ways I can help them if they don't want to change is by understanding them. Yeah. As opposed to trying to get them to do something, if I can just start with understanding. So just to zoom out for a second, the invitation to change approach that I've been talking about is this model that we've developed over the last five, six, seven years that comes from a variety of other evidence-based approaches. And so we didn't like make it up and think,

oh, this is cool. We got a bunch of smart ideas. This is from several, three, in fact, major evidence-based ways of helping. One is called community reinforcement and family training. That's CRAFT. And that's a very powerful intervention that family members can use. Another is motivational interviewing, which is just learning a new way of communicating that is not confrontational, that is more helpful in terms of eliciting change and inviting change than it is demanding change. And then something called acceptance and commitment therapy, which focuses a lot on changing our relationship to our beliefs, to our own pain. As we say in acceptance and commitment therapy is called ACT. There's this idea of holding it lightly. So these concepts I have about myself or about other people or how much pain I can tolerate or

these kinds of things, I can kind of like be a little bit more gentle with those ideas and be a little more flexible with those kinds of ideas. So anyway, those are the elements that are going into this invitation to change or the ITC. And we arrange them in a circle around a wheel. And then there's spokes that are parts of these different sections. There's three main parts. There's helping with understanding. So I'll talk about what those are, but there's elements of how do I understand this in a new way? There's helping with awareness, which is really about, can I be more aware of myself in this process of helping, which is a crucial aspect of effectively helping.

And then the third part of this is helping with action. What can I literally do? What are my tools, which are mostly in the zone of communication tools? What ways can I engage in communication that are less likely to get in the way, more likely to help elicit change? And what behaviors can I change? What can I reinforce differently? What limits can I set? That kind of thing. So those are the three main parts. And then we always preaching practice, like no one's good at any of this stuff. You're really going to have to take some time to learn it. You're expecting, asking, wanting them to change. So if you think about that, you're asking them to try new behaviors. They're going to have to

take time to do that. And they need time to practice new things. Being abstinent from a substance or changing my relationship to a substance takes time and takes practice. So practice is an important part for everybody. Then back to what you were asking about, how do I help them understand on a practical level? One of the things that I have just encountered so many times, and I don't know if this will resonate with you guys, but just working with hundreds of families over the last bunch of years, when you ask a father, a wife, a whoever, let's just hold on for a second. What do you think is going on? Why do

you think they like drinking? They know the answer. It's not a mystery. Sometimes people will say, I don't know. It's crazy. That doesn't make any sense. But if you then slow it down a little bit more, and not that they always do and not that they know all the nuances of it, but people really will be like, yeah, my kid is really anxious. I knew the first time they spoke pot that they had changed their whole relationship to their own anxiety and it actually allowed them to hang out with their friends. And I was really terrified because I thought, oh no, this is going to go badly. But they understood the reasons. They understood what was going on in there.

And why does your husband drink so much? Well, he hates his job. We have a new baby and we have a three-year-old and he's not that good with kids. And he wishes he could be, but he feels bad about himself as a dad and blah, blah. So I think he drinks to go to sleep and just turn it off. Okay. Not that complicated and incredibly important. And you are actually an expert here, Mr. And Mrs. Family member, which is a really helpful way to start with people, which is not to assign them responsibility then for the change, but it is to say,

you're the expert here. You actually know much more than I do about your loved one. is to say, you're the expert here. You actually know much more than I do about your loved one. And let's start with what you understand about this, which again, kind of normalizes it and puts it back into the, it's not a four line fire kind of discussion. She's just like, you get it. You understand their behavior. That again, is one of these things that sort of helps change the equation as a starting point for most helpers. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to a couple other aspects, you know, understanding being really important. Another thing I think is for a family member to take a loving, supportive role, they have

to be able to manage their own emotions and what's going on inside them. And that can be really, really difficult. Can we just talk a little bit about that process? I don't think there's an easy answer for it. I don't think you're going to in two sentences say, well, just do A and B, which is what we want, or we want an easy answer. Like do this and you'll no longer be terrified. What are some things that family members can think about as ways of being able to cope and live in the uncertainty and the fear and the hurt? Yeah. So the way you just put that would be an important place to start, which is, can we invite you

to live in the fear and the uncertainty? So the second major section of this approach is self-awareness. And we start with very basic tools like, can you check in with yourself in terms of your emotions? Can you check in in terms of your physical body and how you're experiencing things? And you're always have a tight feeling in your chest and your stomach is in knots and your shoulders are up to your ears and you have headaches and you're constantly tired. And can we check in about your thought processes? Like I'm always having panicky

thoughts about like, we forgot, we didn't do enough, or we got to call that other person, or we got to, you know, so just starting with basic self-awareness, which is something that usually flies out the window and flies out the window reasonably as a human animal in the face of emergency. You don't usually stop to check in with yourself when you're standing there and there's a bear across the road. You just do whatever you think you should do and not even what you think you should do. You just do something, which is usually run, which is not necessarily the best thing to do. But that awareness is the anchor to then becoming a more effective helper.

We often talk about that in terms of this invitation to the helper. It's not just an invitation to the person we're trying to help change. It's an invitation to the helper to be part of the change process. And to really make that clear, like you are part of this. It's not just, can we get this person to do this and change that? You're part of the change process with them, which includes very foundationally you being aware of yourself. And the, you being aware of yourself has to do with how do I react? How do I intentionally choose how I'm going to act as part of being a more effective helper? But it also includes checking in with myself, being aware of myself with compassion so that I can take in the fact that this is so freaking

stressful. I can't believe it. This has been going on for a year or a month or 10 years, and it's still happening. And I'm embarrassed and I's still happening and I'm embarrassed and I'm stressed out and I'm terrified and like, okay, that's important to acknowledge. To be a sustainable process as a helper, you actually have to look at the gas gauge on the car. Just driving down the road and going, I'm not looking at the gas gauge. I just have to get to Nevada tonight. I'm just going to keep driving. Okay. Don't look at the gas gauge, but you will run out of gas. So ignoring the internal process ultimately will catch up with you. And it's not a compassionate way to approach yourself and it's not sustainable. So those are sort of basic tools. And there's all kinds of ways to start to help people notice themselves and check in with

themselves and just the behaviors they didn't start to notice about themselves. Can you, you know, check in at the end of the day and do a little journaling about, you know, how, how anxious were your thoughts today or how many negative types of thoughts do you have about yourself or check in every hour for one minute and see what has been the nature of my thinking over this last hour? You know, am I in panic mode? Am I in self hatred mode? Cause I haven't done this right.

And you know, am I just numb and I'm ignoring everything? So those are basic self-awareness ideas. But something else you said also makes me want to talk about another part of self-awareness, which is the thing I was referencing earlier, that idea of willingness, which is also a pretty crucial part of being a helper, which is the idea of changing our relationship to how difficult this is, the pain of this. And again, totally normal. I put a hot knife on your skin. You're going to pull your arm away or push my arm away. We want to get away from pain. The impulse to control the

pain, to make it stop, to push you away, to go away myself is really strong and is ultimately not going to be such an effective way to help. So the issue is not how do I tolerate more and more pain? The issue is, can I change the way I understand this? Because ultimately the idea of willingness is you are living with your values. You want to be a helpful to this person you love. You want to stay connected. You want to be reliable for them and you want to stay connected, you want to be reliable for them, and you want to help make things go in a new direction, that is by definition going to be painful. That's the other side of that coin. So my value is what I care about as a person and the way I want to show up is one side of the coin. The other side is always going to be, this is

difficult. This is uncomfortable. This is scary. This is heartbreaking. And can I start to understand that that's okay? I don't have to make that go away as part of this equation. And in fact, it is part and parcel of this process that we're engaged in. Let's put it in a positive realm. If we think about being in love, that's a coin also. So not many people who've actually been in love think that's the best thing ever and nothing bad ever happens. It's awesome. Once you get in love, you're good for the rest of your life. Most people experience love as, and then I got my heart broken and then they did this and that and I couldn't believe it.

Or I got scared and then like, it's a mixed bag. And the more intense the positive feeling, in that case, love, the more risk is involved, the more really painful, difficult things are going to come along with it. So sort of asking the question, would you rather not have love as a way to take away the pain? You can do that. You can stay away from relationships and keep the chances of that kind of terrible, heartbreaking pain, keep them low, get them to go away. And you lose the other side of the coin, which is I have an experience of feeling in love.

So I'm going to be a helper. Great. That's awesome. That feels important to you to do that with your loved one. Can you get your head around the fact that it's scary, it's vulnerable, bad things happen, you'll feel bad, you'll feel disappointed. It's okay. Can we include both of those as part of this process? You know, a lot of the things you're describing there for me fall under the umbrella of

mindfulness. I'm a mindfulness teacher and I have a mindfulness practice. And I mean, learning about mindfulness and practicing mindfulness, I think is something that can help you gain self-awareness. It can help you gain emotional regulation and increase your distress tolerance. It can help you gain emotional regulation and increase your distress tolerance. It can help you learn how to be with this pain and the discomfort without feeling like you need to banish it or run away from it. I mean, there's so much that can be gained there. So I just mention it as listeners are hearing all of this. That's also another avenue to pursue. And that would do a lot of the things you're talking about.

Yeah. As a self-compassion and mindfulness person, you're probably familiar with Kristen Neff or- Yes. Yep. So she's done a lot of research on self-compassion. And one of the elements of self-compassion is present moment focus or mindfulness. So if we apply it directly to, I am a family member, I'm trying to help, and my kid is

not home yet. Just to make it incredibly concrete. What is a self-compassionate, self-aware, mindful tool? And why is it important in that moment? Because I can then anticipate them coming home for the next two hours, which is not being present. It's living in the future. I can keep reciting all the nasty things I'm going to say to them for making me feel so scared. I can be remembering when this happened a year ago and they had been in a car accident and it was horrible. And I'm just imagining that's what's going to happen now. None of that's about being present or mindful, you know.

So you're right. It's a very powerful tool. And it's a part of this idea of the self-compassion part of this, you know. How do I not go to those places and stay here with what's actually real? So then do you recommend, and as part of what you do, give people training in that? Because it's one thing to recognize, to check in and go, okay, I'm upset inside. I'm living in the future, telling myself stories that may not be real. in the future, telling myself stories that may not be real, it's a whole nother thing to actually then be able to somehow work with that in a skillful way. Because the emotions around this

stuff can run so high. I mean, the thought of your child dying, there's not a much more primal thing to wrestle with. I just want to be compassionate to listeners and people listening to say like, these are all the right actions, but the emotion around it doesn't just change easily. How do you encourage people to be on a learning journey with that and to be able to manage those really primal sort of emotions? So I think of this model as one that allows for tons of room for skill building and learning from lots of different buckets. I'll go back to kind of the center of the circle, the invitation to change circle being practice, practice, practice. It's an ongoing mantra and it's a mantra of self-compassion to your point, which is, yeah, these are good ideas.

And now what? Right. Like what the hell, like what am I supposed to do with that? Yeah. You try sitting there at 10 o'clock at night, not losing your crap, you know, about my kids not home yet. So we do encourage people. And part of that is, is normalizing it in a community. I'm looking around the room at a bunch of other parents who are also like, oh my God, you know, how can I possibly stay calm in those moments? I'm getting feedback from people who have stepped down that road a little bit further and have actually had some experiences of being more mindful and what it gave them. So I can draw on the community support and learning for that. And then there's formal practices. You know, what does it mean to be

more mindful? You know, can I start to be more mindful? Can I start doing a meditation practice? Can I start doing square breathing? Can I do any number of very basic beginning ideas of how do I stay present a little bit more? I think in the context of early work with people, it's also about, can I talk about this with other people? Can I get feedback? Can I get support? Can I normalize this? get encouragement. We get it, you know, we get how hard that is. And let's start with that. Let's affirm the fact that this is really hard and there's a really big lift, you know, and you're not going to know how to do it very well. Yeah. We've talked a bit about understanding your loved one, why they do what they do. We've talked about how important it is

to care for yourself and gain some of these self-awareness and self-regulation tools. So let's move on to actually how to help. Right. You talk a lot about starting where your loved one is. And you also introduced this idea of a positive communication as a critical skill for making change. You say positive communication skills will improve your odds of being heard and your loved one feeling understood. But for any given conversation, the outcome is not guaranteed, right? You talk about not attaching to the outcome.

So I'm wondering if you can just explain a little bit about what are positive communication skills and what does that look like in practice? Sure. And a lot of that work, as I said before, there's sort of the different elements that go into the invitation to change. A lot of the positive communication skills come from motivational interviewing. That's a, you know, an approach developed by Bill Miller and Stephen Rolnick probably 35 years ago. It's now much more widespread in the culture. Lots of people get training in that, you know, who doesn't get training and it is family members, but who does get training in it is professionals, get training in it is family members, but who does get training in it is professionals,

which is unfortunate that that's a split. But I sort of think of them as a wolf in sheep's clothing, those kinds of skills. People think of them as, oh yeah, those are just simple management skills. And I learned that in management training. And the difference between how simple they might seem and applying them is that when it comes to your own family, everything goes out the window. So the same executive sitting in my communication skills group in our treatment program, who's like, this is a little basic, isn't it? And then I say, yeah, great. Why don't you try the seven steps of positive communication in requesting that your wife address you more respectfully? Go ahead. Let's put that communication together. And it's just, excuse my language, but a shit show.

It's like, yeah, that doesn't work so well when you're talking to your wife, who you're really mad at and frustrated with. And their first response is like, just take the freaking garbage out, will you? Or just talk more respectfully for me. Okay, great. You missed only seven out of the seven elements there. Let's, let's try it again. So that's where those skills really matter is when the temperature is higher and the temperature is higher when it's our family or someone we care deeply about and who's making us upset or scared or whatever. So motivational interviewing has some very basic communication skills. The thing that we start with, however, again, most foundationally in communication is,

can we figure out ways to listen? Because again, if I'm distressed, you're doing stuff that I don't like, I wish you'd stop, please. If you stopped, I'd feel better. That's our basic starting point, right? So wouldn't yelling at you be good? Wouldn't that be effective? Or wouldn't just telling you to knock it off be a good thing to do? Or let me just be real with you and tell you what a jerk you're being. All those kinds of ideas, which again, are normal, normal reactions to difficult situations and wildly ineffective. So if you sort of put yourself back in your own shoes and go, well, what's helpful to me if someone's suggesting something new or suggesting I change something or giving me

some feedback? What's helpful? What have I noticed in my life that's helpful from a good manager versus a bad manager, a good teacher versus a bad teacher, a parent where the interaction went well versus a parent when the interactions didn't go well. Someone demanding stuff, mandating stuff, dictating things to me, using a crappy tone, insulting me, taking away my autonomy. Those aren't usually on top of the list for people about what helped me. And certainly not what helped me sustain that change. Maybe you can get me to do something this moment by raising your voice enough, but we're

not going to go down a good path probably if that's the way you got me to do this. So what are the things that help people? And just starting with, can I just understand what's going on with you a little bit? So it connects to the understanding section of this whole thing, but it's just as a human interaction, can I legitimately sit with you and try to listen to you? It's an entire form of couples therapy. Imago therapy is based on, can you just freaking listen and nothing else? Can you just listen and reflect accurately, reflect back what I just said, instead of inflecting it with everything that you wished I said or wished I

would do. So that's a profound place to start. And we do just very basic exercises of just listening to in dyads, in trainings with parents, with each other. Can you just listen and then say nothing? And then what's it like to listen? I just wanted to say something. I wanted to interject. I wanted to offer an idea. I wanted to give a suggestion. Great. We get that. What was it like for the speaker to not have you do that? It was like a blessed relief that someone wasn't jumping in. I'd never have anybody listening without cutting me off and telling me their story. You know, all that kind of stuff is what you usually get when you help people try to learn basic ideas about listening. So that's one place that we start with positive communication. You might not think of it as communication, but that's communication.

How do we increase communication between two people? Listen. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll interject there and just give a little testimonial. My mom and I went to therapy together at one point in time and engaged in that exact thing

where I would say a few sentences or a couple sentences because you get more than two or three and it's too much. So you say a couple sentences and then my mom would have to use my words and say the exact same thing back. And it is shocking how hard that was for both of us because what inevitably happens the first time is you're listening through your own filter. So what you say back is actually sometimes grossly different, but often subtly enough different that the meaning isn't the same.

So really getting the words right and saying it back to one another, like you said, just doing that. And then when I would say something to my mom and then she would say it back to me exactly, I felt so heard often for the first time. And that alone, so that she heard me really was powerful. Like it got us from being opposing people in a situation to like sitting side by side. I just wanted to underscore, like having been through that too. You're right.

It's so powerful just to hear one another really and listen. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So continue. Sorry. No, if you put it in the context, just that simple process as a beginning step, if you put it in the context of, could you talk to

your husband and just say that this is really scary for you. You don't understand exactly what happens in terms of his drinking, but you'd like to understand and you'd like to listen. Yeah. Okay. So you invited that discussion. Then he takes a chance and he says, well, I get really stressed out and I don't know what else to do. And I know it's a bad thing to do, but I just, that's what happens. If your response to that is, yeah, but can't you just do yoga more? And don't you realize how bad that is for the rest of us? I'm not in listening mode anymore. I'm really sort of requesting you to talk so I can jump all over it and get my point in and litigate my case as opposed to, can I actually just hear what you're saying? If nothing

else happens, we've made a huge step if I just stop and listen. There are lots of other communication strategies that are also pretty straightforward and again, equally hard to do. So like for instance, simply listening, not so simple, but directly out of motivational interviewing, there's this idea of asking open-ended questions instead of closed ended questions. So closed ended questions are ones you can answer yes or no. Are you feeling better? Yeah. No. Like that's my only choices, right? How have you been doing? That's an open ended question or using affirmations in response to what someone is saying. I really appreciated how open you were with me about that. It's simple. I really

appreciated you speaking at all and taking a chance. These are not big things. They're not like rolling out a bunch of skills I got to learn and practice over and over again. They're just like, just try it. And these are things that are hard in the context of stressors and fears and anger and upset. So learning how to ask an open-ended question, learning how to affirm something that someone is saying, as opposed to just looking for the thing that's irritating that they're lying about again, really starts to shift. Are you going to even take a chance and talk to me anymore? Like I desperately want to communicate more. Why can't you be more open with me? Well, because every time I'm open with you, you tell me what to do differently, or you tell me what a schmuck I am,

you know, whatever, but you're not actually paying attention to me. So one, can you listen to, can we learn some pretty straightforward tools that encourage more openness? And can I reflect back? That's another one. What in motivational interviewing is called the ORS skill. So that's O-A-R-S, open-ended questions. Affirmation, appreciate you being open with me. Reflection, let me just make sure I understood what you said. You said that often you feel really stressed out and so Friday nights is a great time for you to meet your friends and drink. Did I get that right? No, I didn't say that. Okay. So at least we're trying to get on the same page. That's what a reflection helps us do. As opposed to me assuming I understood it and going off into some other realm, that's not actually what you meant. So again, they can

seem pretty straightforward, but especially in the context of stressors and family difficulties, they're really not basic. They're really like, okay, we can start to repair this system here just with the way we're talking to each other. Yep. In one of the books, you say our mandate has become, how do we help you shift your motivation? And you also say that one thing we know is that confrontation is the arch enemy of motivation. So talk to me about the role of a family member potentially wanting someone to shift their motivation into wanting to get sober. Or is that even the right way to think about it? You know, walk me through that. Yeah, sure.

There's just been a number of studies also about the use of confrontation, confrontational strategies or approaches to other people, both within substance use but within other areas. But just sticking with substance use, pretty much all of that research, a lot of that was done by Bill Miller and the motivational interviewing folks and summarizing lots of different research studies. Confrontation with other people is a really strong indicator of not changing. You can produce non-change with confrontation. It is a very natural pull, again, because someone who you care about is doing stuff that seems to not make any sense. And I just need to let you know that you're doing stuff that doesn't make sense and tell you to stop doing it. And that should clear it up. And again, that's not a crazy thought and it's a natural pull, but it's not how most

people change by being told, knock it off. That's bad. You're bad. Do something different. Because one of the problems with that, and that's the basic issue of motivation is that's coming from you, not from me. So we don't even have to put confrontation in some big black light. It's just what it does is it just keeps the locus of change over in your lap as the person who's confronting me, not in my lap. And if we can come up with ways to help me internalize, why would I want to change? Then we're talking about real change and we're talking about sustainable change, which again is in, especially with substances, you know, people struggle with substance stuff for years and years and years. So we're talking about sometimes a really long-term path, not like a quick fix,

getting you to go do a thing, go to detox. The relapse rate after detox is like one of the highest recidivism rates in, of any sort of struggle that people have in the world. The number of people who relapse after a strictly just a detox, physical detox episode is like 90% because there's nothing else happening other than we got you to do this thing and got you to physically stop taking the supplements for five days or 10 days or whatever it is. Nothing else has shifted. So it really brings back the question of how do I help you think about what matters to you about this and not have you be back on your heels defending against my onslaught, my confrontation? So that's the problem with confrontation.

It makes me defend as opposed to be open. And that's not what we want to have happen if we're trying to help someone change. If I'm getting you to be more defensive, I'm losing you. And again, it feels natural. And it's not that I can't break through in some way in this particular moment, but it's me breaking through you. It's not you breaking through your own difficulties. I'm the one who smashed the vase, you know, not you.

And then you're just left with the broken pieces, but you have no path forward, really. You just got smashed into. And I want you to start to have power in this situation and ownership of this. A very common exercise we do with people struggling with substances, and this is then related to some of these helping ideas, but is let's do a cost benefit of your substance use. And let's do a cost benefit of, let's say your goal was abstinence, which it doesn't have to be abstinence either, but let's say it was. Let's look at the cost of your use. And that's the thing that most people are expecting you to

want to ask them about. Like, let's look at how bad this is for you and all the dead things that's happening in your life because of this. I don't know if you're aware of this. Like, are you kidding me? Of course I'm aware of it, but okay, we'll go through that list. But let's also talk about the benefits you get, right? That's part of the, the behaviors make sense part. I actually want to hear what's good about this for you. I'm not trying to deny that entire half of you as a human being. You're doing these things because they help you in certain ways. And there's this destructive part for sure, but it's helping you still. Both of those are true. We don't need to have it be one or the other. And then let's look at the costs and benefits of if you don't use this substance

anymore, what's the benefit? We can all cheer that on and say, I'm going to have a good life and I'm going to be a virtuous person. Okay, right. And what's going to be hard about that? Let's look at that also. I won't come out of my house because I'm so freaking anxious when I don't smoke pot. I don't know what to do with myself.

All right, that's going to be really hard. Can we look at all of that? Why would we look at all of that? That's the opposite of confrontation. It's the opposite of me selling you a bill of goods saying, look, this is a really terrible substance that's happening and what's doing to your life. And you're going to have a great life if you stop. Okay.

That's me selling you an external bill of goods. It's ignoring all the other realities. Like I really like smoking though. And I'm really anxious when I don't smoke. And if I can have that discussion where we include all of that stuff, all of the parts of the reality here, then I'm actually talking to you as a whole person. Then I'm actually asking you to assess it for yourself and whether this change is worth it.

Cause you know what? It might not be, that might be the answer at this moment in my life. It's not worth it to me to change my substance use pattern. Like that would be really helpful information to have open between the two of us, as opposed to you pretending that you're all revved up about this new abstinence thing, and you're going to do it. And gosh, darn it, you're going to commit to this, you know, like, no, you're not. That's not actually what's going on with you. And it would be much better for us to be able to be open about that, not by me smashing

through you and going, you need to be honest, but me asking you what's true, what's real, what can we actually work with? I'm going to get much more buy-in and much more sustained change than if it's really coming from you. We talked once before and we didn't actually get the audio right. And I think I asked this before, because as I hear you say that, it sounds like all the responsibility ends up on the family member to be patient, to be kind, to be accommodating when that's not necessarily what they're getting back.

How do you encourage people to work with that and to share what's going on with them in a way that's non-confrontational, right? In a way that's not coercing, like, because there is a bidirectional relationship there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, I think that would go back to the awareness part. So part of what we're helping people build as a helper in the awareness piece of this is, as I said before, it's sort of like the literal awareness of my body and my thoughts and my emotions. It's also awareness of my values. That's a chunk of it. Who do I want to be? How do I want to show up? And those things can include things like, I want to feel safe. I don't want to be yelled at. It's important to me to be in a respectful

relationship, which may lead me to say, look, Tom, I really want to help. And here's the things I'm able to do. When you get really upset and yell at me, I can't really be around for that kind of stuff. So these are my limits. So I'm learning how to take care of myself by understanding my values, understanding myself, and understanding my truth. I think to your question, like, who am I? Because I am part of this change. I am part of this equation. And I'm not somebody who really can tolerate having you yell at me. All right, someone else might be able to. Rolls off and they don't care. Not me. So I need to learn how to bring my voice into this discussion and be able to say those things. That's not confrontation. That's revelation. That's me being real about who I am and what my limits are and my need to

take care of myself and have compassion towards myself. It's not going to be by hanging out with you when you're intoxicated and being a jackass, you know, I'm not going to do that. So another helpful aspect to maybe explore here is the difference between enabling and reinforcing. You say enabling refers to anything you do that reinforces or increases the likelihood of your loved one's substance using behavior or any other behavior you don't want to support a positive reinforcement strategy works to reinforce your loved one's positive behaviors so there's a distinction there you explore things like withdrawing rewards or not natural consequences and ignoring but negative behaviors know, the art of doing

nothing. And finally, you also say that, you know, punishment just doesn't in the long-term work, that you don't recommend punishment, that punishing something only suppresses the behavior. And even in the short term, it suppresses the behavior, but it doesn't teach a new behavior, right? Which I think is a key distinction. Would you unpack the pieces of that that you think could be particularly helpful here? Sure. The word enabling become a somewhat unfortunate one. There are a number of things, and just hearing this from literally hundreds of families over the years, there are words that had meaning at some point and now have become condemnations and curse words. You're an enabler, you're codependent, they're in denial. I mean, these are words that have sort of lost their meaning, which is part of why we

try to define it a little bit. So that enabling has now become a catchphrase for if you are hanging in there and staying connected and trying to be helpful, you're enabling as opposed to your only path really if you're going to be helpful is to step away. And that's just flagrantly untrue. And it doesn't mean I'm a doormat. It doesn't mean I don't show up with what my values are, as we just talked about. But it does mean that I can stay connected to you in my helping efforts. And the ways we're talking

about staying connected, as you just pointed out, are the literal meaning of enabling would be, I'm doing stuff that I know is actually going to promote your substance use or other destructive behavior. And I'm just sort of like pretending it's not or wishing that that weren't true. I'm giving you 20 bucks in the morning because I want you to be able to buy lunch, but I know you always buy drugs. Okay. So I know that. So why am I doing that? Because it pains me to think that you're not going to have lunch. Okay. So can I step back and think that actually would be enabling? And it's not a dirty word. It's just a behavioral strategy that's not working the way I want it to work. And it's probably more about my discomfort than what's

actually going to be helpful versus things like positive reinforcement, where I can say, these are actions that are going to be, I'm going to support these actions. I'm going to reward them in some way. Rewarding can be just be, I'm going to are going to be, I'm going to support these actions. I'm going to reward them in some way. Rewarding can be just be, I'm going to be nice to you. I'm going to give you a kiss on the cheek. I'm going to cook you some dinner. I'm going to sit and watch TV with you if you're sober. Those are positively reinforcing positive behaviors.

And that's what we would be encouraging. When we see those behaviors, can we reinforce them? Can we underline them in a way that's going to grow them, which is what happens? And can we step away from those behaviors that are negative, not by punishing them, but by just withdrawing away from them? So if you're drinking, I'm not going to watch TV with you. I'm just going to go read in my room. So we're not going to have that nice time where we like to watch The Last of Us and

watch weird, bizarre fungi come out of people's mouths. You're going to have to do that on your own and you'll be really scared. So what do we notice about our loved one that they would appreciate being reinforced by that is positive behavior? And how do we start to incorporate that into our repertoire? The larger part of this is really how do we help families stay connected and feel like it's a positive thing? Because it is, it's just the loveliest thing on and feel like it's a positive thing? Because it is. It's just the loveliest thing on earth. And it's the most powerful force we have in change is a family member's love for their loved one. You know, they're hugely powerful force, which we're trying to, with this model and with the trainings and stuff that we do,

and with this book, say, you can do this. You can be a huge force in this change process. Most people, you know, 90% of people who are having serious substance problems never get any treatment, literally 90%. So can we do anything to impact that? It's not going to be by training another 150,000 therapists. That's not going to happen. I think it's going to be by saying to family members, you don't need to be ashamed. You didn't do anything wrong. You're not a bad person. You didn't cause this. And you can be a huge force for something positive happening here. And here's some tools for this, you know, and you're the best force for this because you love them.

You're never giving up. You're awesome. You know, and can we help you with some tools that are going to help you do this in a more effective way? Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Jeff, thank you so much. We both loved your work so much. I love this conversation. Yeah. Thank you so much. Sure. And it's a pleasure to have you on. Yeah. Well, really nice to meet you guys again and stop avoiding us at Kripalu, man. You got to come down next time. All right. Deal. All right. Great to see you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying

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