The Resilient Mind - From 13 Felony Counts to PhD - Dr. Adi Jaffe

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Dr. Adi Jaffe is a UCLA-trained psychologist, addiction expert, and founder of IGNTD, a platform redefining what recovery and personal growth can look like. Having battled addiction himself, he transformed his lived experience into a Ph.D. and a career at the forefront of behavior change, bridging cutting-edge psychology with practical tools for lasting transformation. Dr. Jaffe's work challenges the conventional approach to addiction by addressing the shame, trauma, and internal pain that drive it, helping people not just recover, but fully reimagine their lives.Connect with Dr. Jaffe: https://www.adijaffe.com/Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient 🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind 🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMIND🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was born in a different country, moved to the States when I was 14 years old, right into high school. I don't think there was one full day that I wasn't high. And it led to a SWAT team arrest and 13 felony counts and facing 20 years or so in prison. That was pretty cynical. It is harder to take responsibilities. You know, I had about a $3 to $400 a day drug habit. Multiply that by, you know, 365 days in the year. You don't get resilient, you don't get strong, you don't move forward in life without putting in work.

There are no shortcut. And how can someone recognize that it's running their life? Confidence is an outcome. Confidence is the result of action. I couldn't get a job delivering pizza. Nobody would hire me. I applied to 50 or 80 jobs. I mean, I applied to a lot of different jobs.

If you start putting the work in today, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, today. you can change everything about your life. Let's say you're a runner. And when you first started running, running a mile was really hard. You're sweating, you can barely breathe, right? You're falling over yourself. You start running a mile four times a week. Running a mile is not that hard.

But now you've got to run a mile and a half. What made the change? I think one of the biggest things that made the change is when I realized it's to... Welcome to another episode of The Resilient Mind. Today I'm super excited to be joined by Dr. Jay, who's going to share his story, perspectives around shame, resilience, addiction, and we're super excited to hear more from his perspective. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to be here. So let's jump right in. So you have a unique story. And at your lowest point before the titles, the credentials, who were you at that time? What did you believe in? What was your identity during those moments? Love that opening question. You know, I'll start up by saying I, even though my name was the same and maybe in some basic personality characteristics, I was maybe similar. I just want to start up by saying, I think I was a completely different person. And, you know, we're talking 25 years ago.

So it's taken a couple of decades for me to become a completely different person. I would say it probably took the first decade to really work hard at it. But I'll answer the question directly. I was born in a different country, moved to the states when I was 14 years old, right into high school. and, you know, if I just had to kind of pick basic characteristics, I was pretty cynical. I was anxious and uncomfortable with myself. And to top that, was always worried about what everybody thought of me, but my expectation

was that they didn't think that greatly of me. And so I was always worried, you know, if I was having a conversation in a room or maybe with three or four different people around, I would be scanning their eyes and constantly wondering what they're thinking and if I'm saying the right thing, if I'm looking the right way, if I'm standing the right way, which created a ton of chatter in my head. It never felt quiet inside my head. And because of my own self-perception, I was always really uncomfortable. And that created a pretty negative experience. I was pretty unhappy most days just because of worry and anxiety that just never really relented. And what I found as a way to cope with that,

was alcohol and then marijuana and then harder and harder drugs. And when I use those, and I talk about that in my book, when I first found those, alcohol was the first one. I didn't know what to expect. I didn't really understand the effect the drug was going to have on me. But once I took it in, everything just kind of got quieter inside. And when it got quieter, I felt more comfortable. So that was a solution that I went for and that continued for about 12, 13 years in my life. And sharing a story about finding alcohol, then marijuana, then harder drugs, because I think a lot of people, there's quite a few people that find one of those solutions and start self-medicating for lack of a better term.

How did that impact what is going on in your life? I know you've got a story about the SWAT team, being in jail. So how did that all play out? Yeah. So, I mean, I'll start at the end because you just said it. That's where the book starts is, yeah, it did. it led to a SWAT team arrest and 13 felony counts and facing 20 years or so in prison. But when people hear that, that sounds like an extreme endpoint. And I get it. I get that it sounds

like an extreme endpoint. But I got there through hundreds of smaller decisions. So, you know, I also talk about in the book about how I started drinking. And I mentioned it here was a sleepaway camp. As I mentioned, it kind of gave me this comfort. But what ended up happening because alcohol gave me my comfort and then weed because a girl I liked in school offered me weed and I wasn't going to say no to a girl that I liked. And so what ended up happening was I never really had to deal myself with the noise in my head because what I learned was I can just take something and the noise will disappear. And so what that created is it kind of created two different lives for me, my sober life when I wasn't high or I wasn't affected by anything. And by the way, I also found my

escape in music, right? There were other things that I escaped into. It wasn't only drugs and alcohol. But whenever I felt really uncomfortable, I learned I can drink something, I can smoke something, I can take a pill, eventually I can snort meth, I can smoke it. And so when I found those tools, it made sure that I never really had to deal with what was going on inside because there was a shortcut to feeling okay. And so year by year and within that month by month, but like I said, over about a 14, 15 year period, I just kept leaning more and more heavily on the drug. So I actually got arrested four or five total times in my life. It's just that that last SWAT team arrest was really, really serious. And the reason it was that serious is as my drug habit grew, it got very expensive,

number one. And it also meant, and this happens to a lot of people who struggle with addictions. It also meant that more and more of the people around me that I found myself spending time with were either drug users or drug sellers because I was using actually just gave a talk in Oklahoma city. And so I did a little calculation. And, you know, I had about a three to four hundred a day drug habit, multiply that by, you know, 365 days in the year. And when you have a $120,000 a year drug habit, you're either rich or you have to sell drugs or do something else to get a lot of money. And I wasn't rich. So I started selling drugs when I was 19. And it started out with weed with cannabis and then start selling ecstasy and then started selling really anything

anybody asked of us and by the time that SWAT team arrest happened it was meth and ecstasy and cocaine a little bit of weed um i didn't like selling weed but then pills and you know mushrooms and ketamine and it was just like i used to joke that we were like a 7-11 for selling drugs because I was looking to make money and not feel my feelings and so the more drugs I could take on the better I felt. And this is not an exaggeration, but probably from the age of 19 slash 20, I think 19 till 25, 26 when I got arrested and went to jail. I don't think I was sober for one day, really. I don't think there was one full day that I wasn't high. And it looks crazy now in retrospect. But at the time, it was just a gradual escalation of escaping from my reality.

And was there a turning point that you made a decision or you're like, okay, this cannot continue. There were a bunch of turning points. There were a bunch of turning. And the reason I say that is, you know, you asked me in the beginning who I was. And I've now done so much reflection over this in the last 20-some years. And like I said, I've become a completely different person. But really, just like it took 100 different decisions to get myself all the way to the bottom,

it took hundreds of other decisions to get myself out. And so when I was faced with all that time in prison, the first thing that concerned me more than anything. over more than becoming a good person, more than finding happiness, honestly, more than making my parents finally proud of me, more than finding a partner for life. Like all these other things came later. But the first thing I was really worried about was how do I stay out of prison? I literally got myself to a point. And, you know, some people listening may have gotten themselves in a pickle or a difficult situation where they may lose their marriage or they may lose their job

and, you know, things of that nature. For me, it was the law. And I knew I was this close to making one more mistake that would land me in prison for decades, you know, 20, 30 years. And thank goodness, I at least had the wherewithal. Like I at least understood if I go there, my life is never going to be the same in a bad way, right? There will be, it will be very, very difficult to turn around. I was 25, 26 years old. If I would have spent 15, 20, 30 years in prison, we obviously, we would not be having this conversation right now. My life would have been very different. So that was Turnaround number one was just realizing I need to stay out of prison. But the thing is, I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know how to live normally. I didn't know how to behave like a regular person. And I, you know, again, that sounds odd to say. But when I started drinking at the age of 14, you know, at 26 years old, I had just, that's how I'd cope with my whole life. I ended up serving a year in jail. I got what's called a, I got an eight year sentence, but it was split up into seven plus one. And essentially what the judge said to me, me. I went to rehab during while fighting the case. I went to rehab and I started straightening my

life out. But again, with the main focus being, let me do whatever I need to do to stay out of prison. And the judge said to me, look, you're doing well, but I'm going to give you these eight years. And it's called a seven plus one. If you do this one year and you do it well, what does that mean? You don't get in trouble. You don't fail drug test. You stay on the right path. You'll never get those seven years. They'll get erased. But if you screw up, you're going to get these other seven years on top of whatever else comes up. And so I had this very, very short, very narrow runway. And when I got out of jail, I couldn't get a job because I had nine felonies on my record.

And so I went back to school. So number one, stay out of prison. Number two, I have to get, I have to do something proactive, right? I can't just sit on my butt for the next seven years and hope that everything turns out okay. So I couldn't get a job. I looked hard. Nobody would hire me. So I went back to school.

And in that, in that rotation, there were many, many, many times where I had to get very humble. And I think that that was another really big piece of the equation for me. I'm not the only 18, 19 year old, 15 year old, 20 year old boy who kind of thought he knew everything about the world and could outsmart everybody, but I was definitely one of them. And I had to get some humility. You know, I had to understand that I may have more to learn than I imagine and then kind of sit back shut my mouth a little bit and learn from others. And so there were many, many of those little decisions where I had to get a little bit more humility, get a little bit more wisdom normally

from other people, not for myself. Read a lot of books, do a lot of self-reflection and start really learning what it's like to live this life without constantly running away from feelings, away from fear, away from challenge, and actually lean in. And I kind of equate it now to exercise, right? It's like the harder you work, the more resilient you become, not because you started out resilient, but because you have made yourself face challenges so that when the universe, when the world presents challenges, you don't have to run away. Fascinating. And I'm thinking your story reminds me of a quote, which goes something along the lines of Rome was not built in one day. And then the side product of that or the other side of the coin is Rome didn't fall apart

in one day either. Yeah. And it's like the power of those little decisions basically highlight what you're talking about and how over time they can either drastically change your life in a positive way or maybe in a not so positive way. Yeah, I agree. There's a Chinese proverb that, you know, it says the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

What I love about that proverb is it's true, right? No matter how hard the challenge you're trying to get through, it starts with small action. But the other thing that isn't said in the proverb, but it makes sense if you just think about it for a second. It didn't just start with a single step. The journey of a thousand miles started with a single step, and then a second step, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. To go along with this and the Rome sample you gave for anybody listening right now, what I've learned 25 years, I'll learn more in 20 more years, right? But what I've learned even in this time frame, there are no shortcuts. You don't get resilient, you don't get strong, you don't learn, you don't move forward in life without putting in work.

There are no shortcuts. And as a kid, and I'm taking up, you know, 25 years old, I feel like I was still a kid. But as a kid, I was always looking for the shortcut. I was always looking for the hack. I was trying to figure out how to get success, how to make something of myself, how to have money or get girls or do well in A, B, or C, whatever it is that I was interested in, how to develop my character, whatever it was that I was looking for. I was looking to do it in the shortest way possible, not the most successful way.

And I think that's another thing that changed for me is I don't look for shortcuts anymore. I look for the path that almost guarantees me success. And then it's like, okay, journey of a thousand miles. Take another step and another step and another step and you'll get there. And I think a lot of people that have made decisions in the past often believe that the mistakes that they have made define them. What convinced you that your past did not define who you were? To be honest, I think just showing up over and over and over, even when it was hard and even when it was imperfect.

And even when, if I'm honest, it felt to me like the efforts I was putting in were beneath me or like the work wasn't worth my time. It was just showing up to those things. And then seeing the results. I like this concept. So, you know, like I was saying, I used to be a really anxious kid. And I used to think, right, we've all went to school. We've all had friends. You know those people that they walk in the room and everybody wants to talk to them.

They're confident. They seem like they've either never made a mistake or they don't care about any mistake they made. So, you know, I knew kids like that in elementary school. I knew kids like that in junior high. I knew kids like that in high school. I used to think they were born with it. And confidence is like a trait. It's like something you have.

There may be some people that are born with it, but my version of confidence and the version of confidence that I've seen in many other people that I've worked with now in my life, either my own mentors or people that I've helped. is confidence is an outcome. Confidence is the result of action. I'm now confident. Now, I'm not confident across the board. There are things that I'm more confident about and less. And the reason is, it's the things that I've done over and over and over and over. And I've proven to myself that I can do with success over and over and over. Not perfectly. Sometimes not even as well as I wanted to on every single try, but I keep succeeding in them. Now my mind, for me to do well. And I can give a really clear example. So I was speaking at a conference on Oklahoma City, I think literally four days from now. I don't know. It's been a whirlwind of a few weeks. But I had

three talks. So in one day, I was going to stand up in front of a crowd for about six hours in three different talks. All three of these talks were brand new talks that I've never done. I created them for this conference. And they followed the book that I just written. The thing is, because I'm already, I have a family, I've got a wife, three kids. I've really two jobs. And I do other things for clients. So I had a really, really busy two, three weeks before it. And so I was getting ready for this talk. And even the night before I had to go give the talk. I didn't get it to where I wanted it yet. So I remember, I was talking to my wife on the phone. And one of the things that I'm pretty, now I have a lot of rituals in my life in order to continue having that success. And I'm

sure we'll get to that at some point, but there are a lot of things that I learned I have to do to stay resilient, to keep that strength. Again, it's like a workout, right? If you're a really good runner, you can't just stop running for three years, come back and be a really good runner again. You have to keep it up. So I was talking to my wife the night before. It's about 10 p.m. The talk is at 8 a.m. So I knew I was going to wake up at 5.30 or so, again, get ready, get warmed up and then go deliver the talk. And I had to go to sleep because I can't, I can't just stay up all night working on this thing. I have to get my sleep. And I was talking to my wife and I was saying, man, I haven't gotten this thing to where I want it to be. But I've now delivered

hundreds of talks, hundreds. I knew I knew I was going to do it. And I knew it was going to turn out well on the other side. And that's from a guy who used to be really, really socially anxious. And the idea of standing up in front of a thousand people to give a speech would have scared me. I would have run to the other side of the world. It would be the last thing I would have wanted to do. Yeah. But I've now done this so much over the last 20 years that my confidence, comes from the fact that I've proven to myself time and time again that I can do it. And so when you say some people let their past and their failures define them, I think there's a missing piece for a lot of us. Or there was for me for sure. And again, for a lot of the clients that I work

with. I think many of us think that when we fail, it means we are a failure. But what I've learned now is that if you want success, you're going to fail a lot on the way to that success. And so the job is just to not quit when you fail. It's to learn. There's a quote from Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, which he's the Watson computer is named after him. He says, if you want to succeed more, double your failure rate. And the first time I heard that, it really made no sense to me.

Like, why would you double your failure rate to succeed more? But then what I realized in the way that I kind of adjust that talk, I literally spoke about at that conference, is if you fail more and you can, commit to learning from each failure, then if you double your failure rate, you will learn faster. So every time you fail, your job is to just look at, okay, why did this not work out? How can I make it better next time? So you fail more, you learn faster. And then the key is to actually change your behavior when you learn from the failure. So it's not about avoiding failure, it's about learning from it. And what I've found now, look, you're talking to a guy who had nine

felonies eventually, served a year looking at eight years, five years of probation. I couldn't get a job delivering pizza. But like nobody would hire me. I applied to 50 or 80 jobs. I mean, I applied to a lot of different jobs. Nobody would hire me. And I've gone from that to owning multiple businesses, you know, having a beautiful, incredible full life going out and speaking and teaching others, writing books, none of that would have happened if I wasn't just willing over and over and over in the last 25 years to put my neck out a little bit, risk failure a little bit, and then every time I experience that failure, sit down, be humble, not take it personally, learn, and then move forward.

You speak openly about shame as a central driver of addiction. What does shame sound like internally? And how can someone recognize that it's running their life? I'll start with the cliche that everybody talks about around shame. Shame is and guilt are different, right? Guilt is when you feel like you did something wrong. Shame is when you feel like you are something wrong. Like there's something wrong with you.

And so what it sounds like internally, and this is a great question because a lot of people will have a hard time knowing if they have shame or not, but I think this will help clarify it. If you speak badly about yourself in your own head to yourself all the time, you're struggling with shame. And let me give an example. I think shame is one of the most damaging emotions you can have.

Now again, there's what we call kind of like functional shame. What do I mean by that? It's like if you feel a tiny bit of shame, you're normally pretty good, but you feel a little bit of shame because you feel like maybe you started acting in ways that are not upholding your values and are not the way you want to behave long term.

You can self-correct quickly. But most shame is really, really damaging because you start believing you're bad, you're wrong, you're not good enough as a human. And so you start acting in ways that support that and you start noticing other people behaving towards you in ways that support that shame and it's a downward spiral. So the example I give a lot of my clients is this. Most of us have encountered babies at some point in our lives, right?

And when you look at a baby, just a newborn, I think the vast majority of us can understand that that newborn is worthy of love, worthy of happiness, worthy of safety and being taken care of, right? They're worthy of support and having the opportunity to live a good life. So I think most, the vast majority of people listening right now have no problem doing that with a, with a newborn that they see, right, just coming into the world. But we all forget that we used to be that newborn. We were that innocent. We were that clear. We were that lovable, worthy, etc. And so when you start experiencing shame, what you're saying is I somehow moved from this lovable, worthy creature to somebody who's not worthy. And what I believe,

is that the vast majority of times that that happens, it's because of messaging from the outside world about what you're supposed to be like. And those messages create expectations in you that maybe you don't meet, or maybe they're actually damaging expectations, right? A lot of people are born into environments that are not healthy.

Parents who don't know how to show love. Environments that are full of violence and fear. And so we connect to those messages because that's what we're seeing in the world around us. we internalize them, then we start actually believing that we're not lovable, that we're not worthy, that we are violence, right? Like all those things start coming into us. And getting yourself rid of shame is the act of cleansing yourself from that and starting to

come to terms with how you got to this place in your life and believing in a really, really deep faith, believing that you can find a way back out of it. And how would someone go about doing that? Because I'm thinking of people that when they're feeling intense shame, or they've been feeling shame for like so long, just them believing that they are worthy might be a big jump, but they might not be able to access it right away. So what are, I guess, maybe some tools or perspective shifts

that they can start to take that first step in that direction? Getting good a shame is a big part of my unhooked method that I write in the bottom of the book. So I'm very, very considerate of exactly what you just said. First of all, a lot of people don't even recognize they have shame. They think they're actually bad people, right? So they don't consider a shame. They just feel badly about themselves and they think that's true.

Number one. So the first piece is recognizing that this is even something that may be changeable. Secondly, I like to say is acceptance. Acceptance of the fact that you have done your best until this moment, given what you knew and the environment you grew up in. And then there's compassion and forgiveness for self and others. So a lot of people that are listening right now, like here, I'll give you an example from, again,

I like to give examples from my past, but I can give God knows how many examples from other clients. So I'll give you one example for me, one example from my client. I grew up in a household, upper middle class. Like resources were not a problem. I didn't go hungry. There was no violence around me. Nobody ever beat me.

And at the same time, both my parents worked all the time. So I actually hardly ever saw my dad. My mom also worked. And, you know, their relationship wasn't great. And so there was a lot of conflict between the two of them, especially earlier on in my life and my mom because of her own struggles, even after she went to work all day, she would then go lock herself in her room.

She would get these really bad migraines and we wouldn't really talk to her all day. So it's not that there was no joy and no love in my life, but there was a lot of alone time, a lot of disconnection, a lot of isolation. I would go to school by myself, come back home. There'd be nobody home. I'd feed myself, go out, play with friends. come back home, see my mom at 7 or 8 p.m. or something like that. So just a lot of alone time, right?

Nobody said, I love you and my family. Nobody ever talked about feelings. Nobody really had sit down conversations and talked about anything meaningful. It was kind of like, you know, what do you have to do today? Did you finish your task? If you did, everything is good, then you move forward to you. So I grew up having a hard time connecting to others because I didn't get that modeled at home. I grew up thinking I wasn't good enough because my dad was very, very successful. And and I always felt like I was compared to him and I wasn't experiencing the same success. And just very resilient and capable

on an individual level, but very emotionally distant. And if you think about the way I grew up and I was anxious about what other people thought of me and I didn't really know how to connect to other people, it makes sense when you think about the environment I grew up. And also my mom was born to a Holocaust survivor, so a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety around her house.

So that was my environment, and it can make sense why I had a hard time connecting to other people. I spent a lot of my time alone. So I was very comfortable alone, still to this day, very comfortable alone, less comfortable around crowds. So that's one example, right? Now, I used to think there was something wrong with me. Then when I started looking back, I said, oh, it makes sense why I grew up that way that

I would end up having a hard time expressing love, feeling love, feeling emotions, because I didn't get it a lot when I was growing up. So acceptance is about being able to look back. And then forgiveness and compassion, right? My dad worked really, really hard. He didn't have really good parental. role models. I can forgive him and I can have compassion for what he was going through. And I can also forgive myself and have compassion for myself for the way I reacted to him, which made me

create even more distance than me more suffering in my life. So that's how I did that for my own life. But I have a client that I work with. I've done this a few times, but I'm just talking about a present client that I work with who got beaten at home, could never really measure up to what his parents wanted because of a physical issue that he had growing up, like went from birth. they really wanted him to be an athlete and be really successful physically he couldn't do it he just his body had a deformity he couldn't do it so he he felt judge and they told him literally multiple times they told him that he was damaged you know as a kid that might be harder to forgive and have compassion for your parents that they beat you and told you you're a loser and you're damaged goods

but if you can't find forgiveness and compassion for yourself and for others then you're stuck right you keep there's like a core there's a there's a string connecting your past to your present. Because every time you think about your parents, every time you think about your childhood, there's this negative emotional string that's just connecting you to the past. Forgiveness and compassion for yourself, others, how you grow up. It helps you sever that core so you can disconnect from it, experience more freedom. And then that freedom, you have the opportunity to do what we talked about earlier, which is to do the actions that will build confidence and we do shame now because none of us can change the past. But what we can change is,

the way we relate to it, the way we process it now. The emotion, the thinking about the past brings up in the present, that is something we can change, even if we can't change the actual events. And one of the things just hearing your story and those examples is, I think that it illustrates that sometimes when we think about the past, we are looking for big events that happened that might cause that capital T trauma. Yeah. But there are also a lot of people, and I'll include myself in that, that our home lives in the past were positive, like overly positive, parents were available, they were kind. But sometimes there might be certain events that as a child,

we might have interpreted or internalized the experiences as I'm not worthy enough or I don't get attention, so I need to work a little bit harder to get attention. If I act in a certain way, my parents would not love me. And so there might not necessarily be big tea, but maybe small teas or the way we process emotions at a young age is now influencing how we are showing up right now. So there's a drawing in my book that talks literally about the thing that you're mentioning right now. And it goes like this. You're right. The vast majority of us think of big tea trauma.

Assaults, rape, you know, beatings, heavy-duty bullying, right? Really, really negative experiences as a child, a death, right? I've had friends and I've had clients who found somebody close to them after a suicide and saw a parent or a sibling dead. Those are big T traumas. Most people, yeah, I think I can say this, the vast majority of people in the world understand that an experience like that shifts your understanding of the world.

Totally. But all you need is one of those. and it can create a massive, massive shift in how you relate to people and how you see the world. But what about ongoing small little things? We've all heard the phrase, death by a thousand cuts, right? And the idea there is that you can get a really, really negative impact by just small, almost like paper cuts, like thousands of little hits. I think the same thing is true of trauma. I'll show you just, I want to share this because I think it's exactly part of what you're talking about right now.

And it's right. People can absolutely experience pretty substantial trauma from many, many small events. Now, what I like to say is it's an additive or even a synergistic effect. So one big T trauma, I'll share this for just 30 seconds for everybody who watches the video. One big powerful event right here, and you'll have trauma. A bunch of small little events, repeated small tea, you'll get a trauma. But imagine living in an environment. you said loving, et cetera.

Imagine living in an environment where the trauma is not necessarily magnificent, but still large and repeated. I'm talking about the dad who's showing up home and screaming at everybody drunk every day, right? There are some areas of the world where, you know, I'm not talking about big beatings, but I'm talking about beatings, right?

Like, you know, more than spanking, but less than hospitalization kind of beatings. If you have repeated and powerful traumas, I think that people end up in those scenarios can have very difficult to unload shame experiences because the way they see the world, the, I call it their perception, the lens through which they analyze all their experiences will always be colored by the traumatic experiences that they have as a child. So you said the magic words, it's how you understand it as a kid, but I couldn't agree more. that it doesn't have to be big tea. If it's repeated and repeated regularly enough, you can have relatively minor events that most people then later in life actually consider normal.

They may not even consider them as traumatic at all. And I love that. You say normal because I think in some cultures are getting disciplined by like a belt or like a stick is normalized. And my culture I know in Zimbabwe, it's one of those things. I'm like, yep, it's a part of the, it's a cultural part and many parts of the world too. So it's almost normalized and expected.

And then there's this idea that we think that, okay, so if it's normalized in our mind, that means it didn't affect us. Yeah. Yeah. Look, you said something important, right? If it's normal in a culture, then you are likely to meet many other people

who've had this similar experience. And then the expectation is that you will all react to it the same way. When I think of beatings, I try to remind people like, again, I talk from my own experience, right? I spent a lot of time alone. I thought of myself as being very resilient and independent. But I think as a kid, as a little kid, and it could have been when I was six months old or a year or three weeks old or two years old.

I don't remember the event I'm about to talk about. But I'm sure there were moments before I got quote unquote resilient and independent where I was sad that my mom wasn't there. Or I was sad that my dad wasn't there, right? we just got resilient because it kept happening. And so we still had to live. I still had to figure out to survive. Now take a kid who at the age of three started getting beat regularly.

Even if it's normal because culturally it's normal, think about the first time a child goes from, mom and dad love me, they feed me and they give me hugs and they hold me to, oh, wait, mom and dad also beat me. I think that transition, that's a big transition. And we can sit and debate whether it's worthwhile, right? Look, life has consequences. You need to learn consequences.

You need to understand that you can't do anything you want because, you know, life will present itself with challenges and you need to figure out what the right and wrong response is in different moments. I get that, but we still get to talk. But how does that kid react the first time dad goes from the guy who plays ball with me and I have fun with to the guy who beats me. That's a big, that's a big leap for a child. And kind of connecting that to addiction, is that kind of maybe why people might end up getting addicted to certain things. And today now, addiction is expanded to social media as well, our phone addiction and all those like different, I guess, options that we have. Is it that there's something within us that we are trying to quiet that might have happened in the past and that we are looking for that external solution?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the whole model of unhooked, the reason it's called unhooked, is what you just mentioned, the way I perceive it, is those are the hooks. So my hook was that I needed people to think I looked good enough or looked cool enough or said the right thing or behaved the right way. That was a hook. I needed approval. I needed outside approval. When I didn't get it, it caused a lot of anxiety. But the thing is, I didn't, if I'm honest, I didn't even know if I got it or not. I never talked to the people. I was just projecting my own self-negative talk onto other people. So I always felt less than, I always felt like I wasn't performing enough. And that has to do with my dad and my mom and all these things that happened when I was a kid. So I'm walking around

the world thinking I'm not good enough, thinking people are judging me, thinking I'm not popular enough or not enough people like me or they don't like me enough. That negative self-talk is going on all the time and it's kind of destroying my experience. It's not allowing me to be present. It's not allowing me to enjoy almost anything, right? I'm at a party. I'm not enjoying my time with my friend. I'm judging myself constantly.

And I think when you talk about that experience, a lot of people can relate. Again, I was at this conference. There were like 350 people in one of my workshops. And I think almost everybody's hands went up. When I said, can anybody relate to either when you wake up in the morning or when you're going to sleep at night, just having these thoughts flooding your brain about everything you screwed up

and everything that's waiting for you the next day and everything that didn't go right. If you have that experience, most people are going to try to find a way to not feel it anymore. The hard work is to shift your thinking around it, to shift your perspective, to understand the failure is part of success,

to do all the stuff that I talk about in the book, which is to learn to accept and have compassion and understand that you're different than other. That's hard work that takes months, if not years. It's easier to take a pill. It's easier to have a drink. It's easier to smoke something. It's easier to go into Instagram

and just spend four hours looking at other people's lives and not have to think about your own. And so, yes, the way I see it, addiction is essentially the end result of a lot of internal discomfort. And then some people find behaviors that can be damaging to them, but help that negative thinking pattern internally. And so they end up leaning on those for long periods of time. And typically, by the time you realize you have an addiction problem, it's been 5, 10, 15 years. where do you think the line between personal responsibility and self-punishment is?

You mean in terms of the addictive behavior or just in terms of the life experience? Both. Look, in terms of life experience, I'll kind of say it like this, right? None of us are responsible for what we went through when we were children. We just not. We had no autonomy. If you were born in an environment where, again, I'll just go some of the examples we said before, right? Where you were beaten regularly, you didn't deserve it because you had no choice, right?

even if you were honoree or you weren't respectful, you were a child, right? You didn't understand. You don't understand the context. So I don't think we have a ton of personal responsibility in that sense for the environment that we were born into and the way it reacted to who we are. But as you start aging, think teen and above, right, young adult, we start getting more and more responsibility. And I don't have an age for you, but somewhere in that range.

And I would probably put it at the 18, 17, early 20s kind of range somewhere in there. I believe the responsibility starts to understand and deal with whatever we were presented with as a child in order to continue improving our lives. Because I'll say this deeply, right, like that client I have who was beaten by his parents when he was a kid. He's 50 years old now. If we're going to continue allowing our past behaviors to drive our current behaviors, we're foregoing personal responsibility, right?

We are now allowing other people from our past, whether they're alive or not, doesn't even matter. We're allowing other people and their behavior with us, their interaction with us from the past, to dictate today. And now we are giving up autonomy. We are, because of our own relationship to the past, not allowing ourselves to make choices.

And, you know, this is the Resilient Mind podcast. Resilience doesn't mean always being strong, the way I see it. The way I see resilience, it means being able to deal, being able to come out of difficult situations with added strength, with learnings, with growth. And so my argument is actually for a lot of people I work with, look, those negative early life experiences could actually be your best teachers. They could actually be your biggest opportunities for growth if you allow them to be that. And again, that takes a lot of acceptance, a lot of removal of shame, a lot of belief that I can come from a place where I was beaten, where I was sexually assaulted, where I was treated unfairly,

that I could come out of that, remove the belief that it was somehow my fault. Because that's a problem, right? A lot of people take on the belief that they are somehow responsible, that they were wrong, that they were unlovable at that early age. And that's why they suffered the consequence. So you have to be able to leave that, have that internal compassion for self, et cetera, let that go. And even once you do all that work, you still don't know how to be better. That's just the acceptance part of the equation. You now have to go out and learn how to be different than the person your early life environment taught you you should be. I love that.

And I'm wondering, because you've worked with different clients, you've returned at, like, I think it's two books now. Two books, yeah. Yeah. Why do people like, why might someone resist change? So they're hearing this right now, but they're looking back at their story or they're like in denial that they're even addicted. Why might someone be unwilling to make that shift? Well, first of all, because they don't think it's possible. I think it's too late. They think the ship has sailed. I think that's the number one reason. Can I give you an example here?

So I'll give you an example that just happened to me in real time. Because I think once you get good at what I'm talking about, you develop awareness of this in real time. So you were saying, you know, so now you've written two books. And I believe I can, you know, I'm a psychologist. So I feel like I can read people relatively well. I've talked to God knows how many people you've done this for a long time. I was reading that as a compliment, right? You're saying, oh, you've written two books now.

I have friends who are authors. I have a friend who's in the middle of writing his 10th book. One of my other friends is, you know, 15, 20 books saying he's one of those, the 15, 20 books guy is a little bit older than I am too. But the funny thing is that old version of the old voice in my head that I'm not good enough, when you said two books immediately brought up those couple of friends of mine that are on book 10 or 20. because in my early life, the voice in my head was always about, but why aren't you doing this and why aren't you this successful?

Or why didn't you already accomplish A, B, C, and B. And so the interesting thing is, you know, you asked me right in the beginning, what did it take to change? I think some people, when they think change, they think they're somehow going to erase the past. Like it's going to disappear and they're going to become somebody different. That's not what happens. What happens is just that the way you relate to the old version of you change.

So I heard what you said. I was able to process it as what I believe you meant it, which was a compliment. I was able to notice, I was right, like you weren't putting me down that I've only written two books. You were saying, oh, you've written two books now. But I was able to then also notice this other parallel old voice that exists in my head. But I didn't get trapped by it. I didn't start going down a spiral as I would have in the past of judging myself. And that's to me the growth. Because the experiences I had as a kid, they're still true. You can't forget. I don't know if you can't forget, but I didn't forget. A lot of the people I work with, it's much harder to forget. It's a lot easier to develop compassion and release the emotional tether, right, the hook as I talk about it. The experience is still sitting there. I still get to look at it. And so I think a lot of people, they think if I can't erase that old version of me, I'll never be able to change. What I'm saying is you build on top of it. Like if anybody's ever been to an archaeological site, right? It's like the past exists and then we can build on top of it and we can grow and we can develop. You just don't have to be a slave to what happened in the past anymore.

So the number one thing I think the reason people resist change is that. They think it's impossible. It's one of the reasons, you know, I'm in recovery from my own addiction. I haven't used meth since 2002. I hate when people use labels like addict, alcoholic. Because if you identify as the problem, it's really hard to believe that you can change your identity. Now, you definitely can change your identity, but it just takes more work. Why not say, I'm a person struggling with alcohol? It's a lot easier to stop struggling with something that is to change your identity. So that's number one. People don't think it's possible. The second piece, I already got to this before, but I'll just say it again. Change is not easy, man. It's not easy. And there's no shortcut. You can't, you know,

People are using GLP1 antagonists now and blockers to cut cravings for alcohol just like they're using it to lose weight. People always look for the pill that's going to fix it. There's no pill that makes you more resilient. There just isn't. There's no pill that gives you humility when you have too much arrogance. It takes work. It takes work to show up every day, say, hey, I've already improved, but I'm going to show up today to see how I can improve even more. I told you before, right before we recorded this, I went to a basketball game with my kid.

and he was having pretty bad struggles in school with grades. So we pulled him out of basketball for about three months so he can focus on the schooling and get his grades up. He started practicing again two weeks ago. Today was his first tournament that he played in in, let's say, three, three and a half months. And in the end, we left and he said, man, I was so tired at the end.

I barely felt like I could stand anymore, let alone run and really play. And I reminded him, I said, look, this is your first game back. The only way you get stronger so your body gets less weak is you keep pushing it. So on the days that you don't play, you have to keep pushing it and push it and push it. There is no amount of rest that gets you more fitness.

Now, addiction is what happens when you can't moderate, right? Like you lean on something that's supposed to make you better, let's say make you less anxious, et cetera, but you can't stop. You do it too much. So life ends up being about finding some sort of a balance. But what most people, I don't know how you feel about this. I actually want to ask you back, like, because you've interviewed so many people about resilience at this point. I feel like resilience is about proving to yourself that you can get up

again. Proving to yourself that no matter how hard you got punched in the face, no matter how bad you slept yesterday, no matter how crazy the latest challenge you've had in your life, tomorrow's going to show up and you have a whole other chance to do it again. And if you can just get that in your head, there's nothing until your last breath, until you die, there's nothing that can beat you. That's my view on resilience at least. Absolutely. And I couldn't have agreed more. Because I think the way, like I see it, is basically what you said,

the ability to bounce back, to learn to thrive using the idea of antifragile. I don't know if you've heard about it. So I actually like frame resilience as being anti-fragile where every stressor you have, if you have the right tool, right perspective, right insight, can actually make you strong. I think Ernest Hemingway says, and we all know this from breaking bones, right, but Ernest Hemingway says that we're strongest in the places we've been broken, right? And it's that same concept, right? But man, that takes, that's a whole shift in thinking, right? Because I think too many of us feel like, oh my God, I got broken. I don't want to try that again because I may break again. Do you think it is harder to take responsibilities for your actions or for what happened in the past or for giving yourself? for those actions.

That's a good question. The first thing that comes to my mind as I hear that question is that there are probably different people who have a different difficulty with each one of those, right? So like here's what's funny, right? I mentioned I was very independent, very independent.

I grew up, like I said, my parents were really not around in the middle of the week during the regular days of school, et cetera. So I became really resilient. So action comes relatively easily for me. For instance, like I mentioned, right, When I got arrested, all my lawyer had to say to me is, look, you're looking at 18 to 20 years in prison.

If I can't get you off of meth, if you show, I weigh 165 pounds while I'm sitting here talking to you. I was 124 pounds when I was using this. So 40 pounds lighter than right now. Black circles under my eyes because I didn't sleep. And he said to me, he said, if you look like this as we're going off in front of the judge the whole time, you're going to spend years in prison. Because he's just going to see that you haven't improved. He said, you've got to go to rehab so you can clean up your act. And when we go up in front of the judge, you look better and you feel better and he can see that you're making an improvement.

He said that. I checked myself in the rehab two days later because it was an action orientation. When you're talking about forgiveness, that means changing the way I feel about myself, changing the way I feel about other people. You know how hard I had to work at that? First of all, because I didn't admit to myself any feelings I had anyway. So in order to forgive people about the way I felt about them or what they did to me or how it affected me, I needed to first become honest with what it did to me and how it affected me. That took probably years.

And then after that, I had to realize that knowing that somebody else hurt me is not enough because I'm still tethered to it. I now have to forgive or have compassion. So for me personally, that took a ton of time. There could be other people who have much less of a time processing the emotion. They have an easier time processing the emotion. But that because of their experiences, they don't believe in their own ability. to take action and create you know the book mindset the carol dweck book yes i yes i do so you know it's funny i

didn't read that book until after i wrote my first book and i really wish i would have because i would have had some other language to use in that first book but you know the idea of a mindset is for anybody who hasn't read the book it's the difference between a fixed mindset and a in a growth mindset yeah fixed mindset is believing the things are as they are and they will always be that way for you and in the world in general. What people get confused sometimes, so everybody can understand, if I say I'm bad at math, that's a fixed mindset. I think I'm not good at something, and so therefore I will never be good at it. That's a fixed mindset. We all understand that. But here's another difference. Thinking you're good at math is also a fixed mindset because it says, I'm good at this. I will never be bad at it.

That's very different than believing that you will continue to be better and you will continue to be worse at things you work at more or things you work at less. The whole point behind the mindset book is reward effort, congratulate effort, pay attention to the motivation, the intention that people put into getting better and growing, not into how they are right now. And I think for a lot of people listening right now, I want the metaphors I think of, and some of these are not from the book at all, but like think of laundry. Think of cleaning your house, making your bed. Think of dieting or exercise. You will never be done ever in your life with any of the things. things I just mentioned, right? There's no point. Like, it doesn't matter how good of a diet you've had until this moment in your life. And I'm not just talking about weight. I'm talking about health, right? Eating food that is good for your well-being. There's no moment in life when you could say to yourself,

oh, I've eaten enough good food. I'm now healthy. I can go eat whatever junk I want and put it in my body and I'm good. Never true. There's no moment in your life. Let's say you're a runner. I don't really love running, but maybe that's why it's a good example. Let's say you're a runner. And when you first started running, running a mile was really hard, really hard. I mean, you're sweating, you can barely breathe, right? You're falling over yourself. You start running a mile four times a week. Running a mile is not that hard. But now you've got to run a mile and a half or two. And you just kind of have to decide the point at which you're at the level you want to go at. So let's say you get to a place where you can run three miles a day and you feel really fit. Can't stop running though, because you're

Because if you stop running, you'll lose everything you just gained. You're not good at running. You're a runner. You run. Right? And people ask me, like we talked about the beginning, what made the change? I think one of the biggest things that made the change is when I realized, if I'm addicted to anything now, it's to self-improvement.

It's to constantly being able to look at myself as honestly as I can. And sometimes that requires other people in my life to give me feedback because we don't exactly see ourselves objectively. So to look at my life and say, am I doing the best I can? And if the answer is no, and by the way, it's normally no, then the question is to figure out, well, what can I do better? And I'll give one other example for my current life. In the last three years, maybe even four years, I've got three kids, 15, 13, and 7.

In the last three years, I've become very angry at home. My two teenagers would get me really, really upset. And I'm talking to the point where I'm yelling really loudly. It was bad. It was bad. And it would cause fights with my wife and I. It was a nightmare. There was a moment my wife and I were talking about this.

So again, I've kicked my addiction. I've had other addictions too. If anybody goes to read the book or my other stuff or sees me on social media, I've struggled with a handful of compulsive habits. It wasn't just that. But now my wife says to me one day, she's, man, you're just always angry. And I thought to myself, right? I've learned enough about self-change.

And this is me just, I'm sharing this experience to tell people, like how this work never ends. I don't know if you feel the same way, but if you want to stay resilient, you have to keep doing hard stuff. You don't get to say I'm resilient and then sit back on the couch and just binge watch TV all day.

That's not how resilience is maintained. So my wife says this to me. And again, my kids have been screwing up. I'm not yelling at them when there's no reason to get upset. But my wife says to me, you're always angry. And I thought to myself,

and I thought about this and I looked and I said, you know what, there's nobody else and nowhere else in my life where anybody would say that to me. You can say a lot of things about me. You can say, again, I don't have, I'm not very emotional so I can appear distant sometimes.

I can be very argumentative. I'm driven, right? You can say a lot of things about me. Maybe I'm a little OCD and a little ADHD. Like you can say a lot of those things about me. But essentially nobody in my life and I thought about this hard would say I'm an angry person.

So when my wife said that, that instead of fighting her on it, after I thought about it, and I said that to her, you know, nobody else would say that about me. I've now learned, I can blame everybody else in the world. I can look at my kids and I can look at my wife and I had to look inside and say, why is that? She's not wrong. I only yell at home and I'm only yelling at my boys. So why is that happening? And what I realized is a lot of the stuff that I learned in childhood only started coming up now because they're teenagers. And when I was a teenager, I was screwing up. And so my parents yelled at me a lot. And I had to recognize, oh my gosh, here's a new opportunity for me to learn how to be different.

Because my relationship with my dad was ruined from the age of essentially three till 26, 27. I don't want my kids to hate me until they're 30, you know. So it's my job to become a better dad. It's not their job to become better kids. It's my job to be the dad they need. And then they're going to do what they're going to do. So that's my next load of laundry, right? Like the next load of laundry for me is to go figure out how to be a better dad.

And that's what I've been putting my work into in the last two years. Because I've worked my butt off in terms of success in all these other areas of my life. And it's going well. I don't need to put a ton of effort into that. Now this, the next mile run, the next thing that I need to do in my life is focus on this. And if anybody listening right now is trying to wonder, how do I know if I'm being resilient? How do I know if I'm doing the best for my own growth? Look around.

Just look at your life and say, where am I not satisfied? What areas of my life? Forget addiction. It might be addiction. You may say, oh, I'm using too much porn or I drink too much. That may be the area, but it could be something totally different. It could be not being intimate enough with your partner. It could be not succeeding enough at work because you're too lazy right now. Like it could be anything. Look honestly at your life. One of the things I recommend in the book is get your own personal advisory board, get other people who are honest and care about you and love you and ask them that question. How can I be better? And if you've got the right people, they'll tell you, they won't you say, oh, no God, you're perfect. Everything is great. You're not perfect. No matter how good you are right now, you're not perfect. Figure out how you can be better and then go do the work to be better. It may take a month, it may take a year, it may take five years. But when you're done with that work and you've now feel satisfied with this new version of you, you're going to experience a whole new life. And then just go, go keep repeating that cycle.

If you're young herself, then you can pick what age that is, could hear something from you right now. What would you tell them that will have changed things a lot sooner? You know, I struggle with this question because I really like my life now. And the reason I ended up here is because I got in the SWAT team arrest. It's because I had an addiction problem. And so I'm always afraid when I answer a question like this, I don't actually know. There are a lot of lessons that I wish my younger self learned. Like, stop taking things so personally.

Like, stop lying to other people. Just be truthful, be honest. you know share the good share the bad stop pretending um there are a lot of those lessons that i really really wish i could teach my my younger self at any age 14 10 8 25 well by 25 i started learning these things but here's the issue that i have with it if i would have taught let's say i would have taught myself that at a younger age i wouldn't have had the missteps and the falls that then created this version of me and i don't know and i don't have a guarantee that i would have liked the other version better, right? I don't know where that life would have led. So those would be the lessons.

The lessons were to stop taking things so personally. And stop taking things so personally, stop lying, and then stop looking for shortcuts. Just do the hard work when it's required. And everything will turn out better than you can imagine. Those are probably the three lessons. And the age is anything between eight years old and probably 25 is at any time. I could have use that advice. So for the listeners that want to learn more about you, learn more about your books, where can they go, where can they find them? Yeah.

So again, I'll just pitch this guy again, unhooked. It's available everywhere. So Amazon is probably the place where most people will get it. I did the audio version and there's a Kindle version. I think the soft cover is coming in the next month or so. Right now it's just available in hardcover. But Barnes & Noble's and the other bookstore also shows. be carrying it. That's the number one thing. I'm on Instagram. We're all over social media as

Dr. Adi Jaffe. That's DR. And then my name, Adi Jafi.f-E. And then I have a website at D-Jafi.com if people want to learn more or connect with me there. And I welcome anybody who wants to reach out and connect. I love connecting to people who are working on their own resilience, who are all about their own self-approvalued and especially people who are coming from the kind of struggles that I've had before. And if there's one thing, you want each listener to this conversation with what would it be i think because of the conversation that we just had here today the number one lesson is it doesn't matter how bad things have gotten i mean that it doesn't matter how bad things have gotten if you start putting the work in today not tomorrow not next week not

next month today you can change everything about your life thank you dr jay that was powerful insightful we are so grateful for you taking the time to share your message with us thank you so much for having me really, really appreciate this opportunity and I hope somebody heard something that helps them. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.