AllBetter

Rethinking Addiction: Dr. Stanton Peele on Alternative Approaches and Self-Determination

• Joe Van Wie • Season 4 • Episode 80

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Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Dr. Stanton Peele, the revolutionary psychologist, attorney, and addiction specialist who has spent decades challenging traditional views on addiction. In this episode, we discuss Dr. Peele's groundbreaking work, including his influential book "Love and Addiction," and his compelling arguments against the old disease model of addiction. Dr. Peele advocates for alternative approaches like moderation and emphasizes the role of raising independent, competent children in preventing addiction.

We redefine addiction and recovery, emphasizing the importance of engaging with life and enhancing self-capabilities. Dr. Peele shares his insights on the varying impacts of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the benefits of Buddhist philosophies in reframing addiction, and the critical role of community in recovery. We also explore the potential pitfalls of labeling addiction as a disease and the implications this has for personal identity and social stigma. For those interested in diverse recovery methods, we recommend resources like peel.net and lifeprocessprogram.com.

Discover the nuanced discussions of personalized recovery approaches in our discussion on harm reduction and alternative therapies such as MDMA. We dive into a Harvard study that categorizes different recovery experiences, highlighting the need for tailored strategies that enhance lif

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Speaker 1:

Hello and thanks again for listening to another episode of All Better. I'm your host, joe VanWee. Today's guest is Dr Stanton J Peel. He's a psychologist, an attorney, a psychotherapist and the author of books and articles on the subject of alcoholism, addiction and addiction treatment. Dr Stanton Peale was raised in Philadelphia, pennsylvania. Peale received his BA in political science cum laude on municipal and state scholarships from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, supported by a number of fellowships, including the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He went on to earn a PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1975. From 1976 to 2012, he maintained a private practice and consultancy while based in Morristown, new Jersey. After earning his JD from Rutgers School of Law, newark, in 1997, keel was admitted to the New York and New Jersey bars. He maintained a concurrent law practice, including two stints as a pool attorney at Morris County Public Defender's Office two stints as a pool attorney, Morris County Public Defender's Office and offered vital insights into the workings of American criminal justice system until 2012. As a psychologist and addiction specialist, he has held visiting adjunct academic positions at New York University, positions at New York University, bournemouth University, the New School, and he currently resides in Brooklyn, new York.

Speaker 1:

I read that from his Wikipedia. I don't use it for research papers but Wikipedia is great for intro, why I had Dr Pilon we talked about a little bit. You type into any large language model, give me the top 20 voices of addiction and he came up now as number four and I wasn't familiar with his work, which his book it was very successful called Love and Addiction. He's one of the more interesting guests I'm going to have, especially if you come from a background and found meeting in 12 steps. Dr Peel sits in opposition of them for the many populations that this might not work for. He wanted to be a voice and he makes that case clear and it comes from a position that is intelligent and opens a broader path for people. He began his critique of standard notions of addiction when he published Loving Addiction, co-authored with Archie Brodsky.

Speaker 1:

According to Peale's experimental environmental approach, addictions are negative patterns of behavior that result from an over-attachment people form to experience generated from a range of involvements. He contends that most people experience addiction to some degree, at least for periods of time during their lives, at least for periods of time during their lives. He does not view addictions as medical problems but as problems of life that most people overcome. The failure to do so is the exception rather than the rule, he argues. The view opposes the brain disease model of addiction In his book Non-Addictive Child-Rearing Addiction Proof your Child. It was in 2007, outgrowing Addiction with child development specialist Zach Rhodes that was published in 2019.

Speaker 1:

Peel argues that the best anecdote for addiction is raising independent children who are competent and will have pro-social, health-oriented values. These same profiles, along with socially privileged backgrounds, account for young people are able to overcome whatever addictive episodes they may have. When it was published, love and Addiction, though in 1975, predated by almost a decade of the notion of sex addiction and codependency, popularized by authors such as Patrick Carnes, who's out of the shadows work, sex Addiction came out in 1983, and Melody Eddy, who's codependent no more was published in 1986. Love and Addiction predated the current popular use of these terms sex addiction and codependency to describe the disorders of love attachment. These terms were not part of Peel and Brodsky's nomenclature. However, because of love and addiction, I was concerned with observing the same condition of addictive human attachments. It's been argued that this is the first book to be written on the subject of codependent relationships. It's the first book to be written on the subject of codependent relationships. Here's where it might become controversial to any 12-step friends I have out there his views on alcoholism. Peel maintains that, depending on the person, abstinence or moderation are valid approaches to treat excessive drinking. In a Psychology Today article which compared the Life Process Program, the Life Process Program's Dr Stanton Peale's program, this study compared that with his program, with the Disease Model Program. He also argues against the theory of proposed decades ago by modern physicians, mental health professionals, research scientists that addiction is a disease and the Diseasing of America 1989, he'll contest it.

Speaker 1:

Dr George Valence, pro-disease Treatsy, the Natural History of Alcoholism. We dive in a lot on that and he has a new book out that we'll get to promote for him. I had a very interesting discussion. He has a new book out that we'll get to promote for him. I had a very interesting discussion. I asked that you keep an open mind so you can understand points, of views, framework and that our history with understanding the psychology, the neurology and the social, environmental factors of having such a disorder, a substance use disorder. It's an incomplete history and it's good to understand our own history in a meaningful, in-depth way. I really enjoyed this conversation and I want you to meet Dr Stanton Peel. So thanks for coming on. Do you know, when you search top 20 voices in addiction, say in the last decade to chat GPT you know the leading AI language, large language model your name comes up as number 12.

Speaker 2:

Wow, I'm impressed with me, thank goodness. Thanks for telling me Joe. Yeah, so you search the top top. What do you search for?

Speaker 1:

tell me that one more time I prompted a question, um because I was curious. I I've becoming slowly dependent on ai and also terrified of it. Um, all in the same kind of actions and thoughts. So I prompted question who are the top leading voices in addiction? And I was just curious one day and you came up as number 12 or 10.

Speaker 1:

And honestly, I wasn't familiar with your work. I started reading and watching your lectures on YouTube and it was quite refreshing because I'm coming from a background where I was introduced to recovery early on as Alcoholics Anonymous, a Minnesota model of treatment through Marworth from Scranton. My father got sober, then I got shoveled into the rooms almost as an act of discipline punishment at 16. Active discipline, punishment at 16. By the time I really felt defeated by my own addiction. It was hard because I was an atheist. I felt myself, at least, a critical thinker, but not in regards to how I was letting addiction soothe me and to watch your information. It was comforting that there was a voice like yourself out there and it takes a lot of brass and I guess I just want to talk to you about that today.

Speaker 2:

How did this scenario arise, that we could be so wrong in language as an approach and then you could get such pushback when you're talking about things that just make sense. Well, one thing I want to mention I've written a memoir called A Scientific Life on the Edge. My Lonely Quest to Change how we See Addiction and my career has been a fairly isolating one, as you can imagine. As you just described, when you go against the dominant way that everybody approaches addiction, you're not going to be very popular. And to answer the question well, how is it that we came to view addiction as a disease? I guess the top three answers are you know, america had national prohibition and that's part of its temperance tradition.

Speaker 2:

Italy has never banned alcohol. Do you know what I mean? Greece, france banned alcohol. Do you know what I mean? Greece, france, germany, they didn't think. You know what? We have a lot of problems in our society. Why don't we just ban alcohol? And, of course, national prohibition occurred around 1920, but we had also banned all drugs cocaine, marijuana, opioids a few years earlier, 1914, with the tradition of being highly suspect of substances. Who tend to blame substances for our problems. In other words, if you go to italy or greece and you say, oh, you know all our social problems are due to alcohol. They would look at you and like what are you saying? You know we have wine with our families. You know, on Sundays, right after we go to church. It's a kind of a cultural icon.

Speaker 1:

I'm glad, yeah, to start it that way. You know, from my own perspective, and I think others would share this, is that you're talking about community, community and that could also be an extension, say culture, and culture being just the software brain downloads. And that's how you start to approach this idea of addiction, or what we were calling addiction by being prohibition. Get rid of the agent. Alcohol has the spirit, alcohol is the demon rum, and I think that really finds its genesis in Calvinistic kind of approaches. I think religion still is the underbelly of poisoned ideas that evolved into the disease concept that you stood against this idea of how they're defining a disease.

Speaker 2:

And the second part of that, of course, locating it in the substance. I mean, there's been a movement in the last 50 years that I'm an important part of, where I wrote a book called Love and Addiction, to say you know why is it? We're just saying substances cause addiction. Here's a basket. There's substances drugs, alcohol, but like love, relationships of food, shopping, gambling, because you know people can get totally wound up in those things. How do we develop a basket and all the bad things in the basket are substances, rather than thinking? Well, addiction is a cycle where people get involved in something for some kind of gratification that actually worsens their life. If you describe it that way, then you're not thinking substances, you're thinking stuff. And you're thinking well, some people use the substances okay and some people don't use the substances okay, and what we're concerned about is the interaction between people who get hogtied by a particular experience to the detriment of the rest of their life. That's addiction.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And if you say, well, alcohol is addictive, then you go. Well, you know, my grandmother, you know, has a drink every night before she goes to bed and she's 94, and she seems okay. You know what I mean. And that happens a lot more if you're Italian, but it happens all over.

Speaker 2:

The second thing that contributes to us Americans just about more than anybody in the world like to medicalize things. If we medicalize something, we're happy. In other words, we've been medicalizing the disease of addiction for half a century or more. But when you think about it, things haven't been going that well the last 20 years. A famous guy at the NIDA wrote a paper Addiction is a Disease in Science Magazine, wrote a paper Addiction is a Disease in Science Magazine and at that time 6,000 people a year nationwide were dying from opioid use or drug use, and now it's up to 110. So you might say you know that approach hasn't been so helpful. So we like to medicalize things. And the answer most people still believe. You know, we're going to come up with a cure for addiction, we're going to come up with an antidote and then you go. Well, but most people who even take cocaine don't become. I mean, millions of people take painkillers, and so we're going to come up with an antidote for painkillers, but people take painkillers most usually because they're in pain. What about all them? And then the third thing that I think contributes to where we're coming I wrote a book called Diseasing of America, before all this.

Speaker 2:

We've reached a point in time where we seem to be so very alienated from some basic relationship I mean, I'm not, I mean I'm recently, since the pandemic, but before that with the people and the communities around us. And if there's an opposite, I have to give credit to other thinkers. The opposite of addiction is connection. It's not like when you say what does it mean that you become so addicted to something that you cut yourself off from everything else meaningful in the world? The other way to phrase that is why are you not connected to so many other things your family, your spouse, your community, your neighborhood, your walking in the woods, your work that you are susceptible for an addiction? And that gets down to a basic problem we have why, despite all the medications, despite all of the attention, despite all the therapies, why the hell are more and more people dying from drug use and more and more people becoming addicted? It's like we're totally tramping down the wrong trail. And so the other thing I've asked you to promote about me is called I have a Life Process Program, the lifeprocessprogramcom, and our approach to helping people deal with a variety of addictions you know, pornography, shopping, any exercise is to review with them every facet of their lives and connection to the world around them and to talk about how to enhance all of those connections.

Speaker 2:

The way out of addiction isn't to say, oh well, you can't, I'm going to stop shopping. You certainly can't say I'm going to stop eating. Most people are not going to say, well, I'm going to stop sex, going to stop eating. Most people are not going to say, well, I'm going to stop sex. And if you generalize that to alcohol and drugs, you come to a place where you say, well, the way we're going to approach all of this is to fundamentally enhance your self-capabilities self-capabilities, your control of your life and your engagement with work, with your health, with your family, with intimacy with your community, and that's the way we're going to lead you out of addiction. We're not going to lead you I beg your pardon that we're going to assist you to realize your full capabilities to avoid addiction.

Speaker 1:

Assist you to realize your full capabilities to avoid addiction. I like that you corrected lead, because that's right. Yeah, you shave your head next. I was just getting over. I just completed that synonym documentary. If you haven't seen it, it was great.

Speaker 2:

Right. But, do you see that you can look at some of these things? Did you ever?

Speaker 1:

have the feeling. When you were in AA, you know.

Speaker 2:

Now, Doc, I still go.

Speaker 1:

I'm addicted here I still go because it's my community and there's a group of us that are secular, should just say, in my region which isn't common because it's a predominantly Catholic area living back in my hometown that are very secular and it was driven. My critical lens to some of this was a lot of the things you just discussed, and I'm glad you mentioned Buddhism because it's not I'm not making the tenets of Buddhism true, but to have the perspective of the other half or the majority of the population of earth. That is a little, you know, 10,000 years old, this perspective that a soul wasn't deposited in you and that the soul comes from a pure place and drugs are polluting it, that there's not something wrong internally. I really think that's fundamental to some people's perspective to thinking puritanically, to some people's perspective to thinking puritanically, agents are corrupting me. Instead of a process, internally is happening, and you mentioned that.

Speaker 2:

That's a very good way of putting it. Is your AA group specifically connected with the religious group?

Speaker 1:

No, it's just. I think AA mirrors regions, like there's a texture or quality to AA that usually matches the religious and socioeconomic tones of that area.

Speaker 2:

That's true. Do you have any problem getting up and saying I am an addict, I am an alcoholic Um?

Speaker 1:

I don't know how to put this. I've never challenged it enough. I know my friends who do and are sober and are really I got. So I guess there's parts of me that are just scared to not be around my community, and so many of my friends are in there. I say I'm an alcoholic. Now I'm a drug addict of this variety, but I don't call my condition a disease. Don't call my my condition a disease. Um, and I I was really curious how you feel about the word disorder and it's a connotation that there's a process happening that it's closer to where I want to go, okay I'd love to be.

Speaker 1:

Where do you think we should be?

Speaker 2:

what about your adopting an identity?

Speaker 1:

yeah I.

Speaker 2:

You want to go to heaven or hell?

Speaker 1:

you have children. I have two children and I I don't believe in the afterlife. I, I mean, I have no I don't think it's relevant.

Speaker 2:

You're obviously not going too well in the catholic world, but let's leave that aside. Um, do you ever, do you want your children to ever have an identity of a disease? Is that something you dream about? No, of course not no I mean, if your child bites his nails, whatever yeah kids do and they're 8 or 12 or 15, you don't go. You're a nail biter. You go, you know, let's think about how maybe you won't bite your nails.

Speaker 2:

Sure, it's not who you are exactly all right, but it's not a good place to go and we want to go in a different direction. And you can go in a different direction because you're not a nail biter, you're a human being yeah, yeah, when did when did this occur to you and I?

Speaker 1:

you have, you know, an amount of work and I want to drive people to your site because there's there's still so many younger people that are not getting the connection they want in traditional places that I think can find an unbelievable resource with you. I want to say that first. But when did this become apparent?

Speaker 2:

What do you want to call uh what? Tell them what? Uh, I have uh two websites. I peelnet peelnet and the life process programcom.

Speaker 1:

And I. We're going to put both links into this show, um and I. I think people should check it out, read it, get curious, because there's many paths to recovery and I think the easiest ones are the true ones.

Speaker 2:

And let's just say I think it's fair one difference between now and when I was starting out.

Speaker 1:

I wrote.

Speaker 2:

Love and Addiction in 1975, is a lot of people have a sense that things aren't going that well. In other words, in the old days everybody sort of thought, well, aa's perfect. How they believe that, I don't know. Everybody's kind of aware that we're falling short of perfection. Now you know what I mean.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

So things have opened up. In the sense it's a little harder to go to somebody and say oh, you say that an alcoholic can drink again. You're ruining the world, which is called harm reduction. It's hard for people to go and say you're ruining the world now when aa has basically been in charge for 50 or 70 years and things are far from perfect.

Speaker 1:

It had a great head start and it's dominant to the culture that it gave birth to. It's mirrored it. I'm curious. The lecture I saw you give once you said when do we stop trusting our own experience versus information that we're being browbeated with? I guess I want to unpack what you meant by that.

Speaker 2:

Well, I have a couple of exercises I do which I think are funny. I describe them in my memoir. I go, I'm in a group of recovering people and I say what's the toughest addiction to quit? And usually to a person they'll shout out smoking smoking.

Speaker 1:

If you're suffering from a substance use disorder or your addiction is bringing your life to a standstill, call 1-888-HELP-120. That's 1-888-HELP-120. This hotline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Use evidence-based practice, crisis intervention and trauma-informed therapy to help you get to the treatment you need. End addiction now at 1-888-HELP-120. 1-888-help-120. 1-888-help-120.

Speaker 2:

That's the toughest addiction to quit. And I say, oh, really, that's amazing. And then I go has anybody in this room quit smoking? And if you're in a good recovery room, you know you're going to get 80% of the people you know. And then I'll say, oh, how many of you joined a support group or used some medication to get over your smoking? And, like in a room of 300, you know five people will raise their hand out of you know 200 who said they quit smoking. And I say, well, hold on a second. And I say, well, hold on a second. You've just told me the toughest addiction to quit was smoking and two thirds of the people in this room quit smoking and they did it on their own.

Speaker 2:

And then I'll call on somebody. I'll say, well, why did you quit smoking? And they'll say, well, I had gotten pneumonia and I started to get a cough and I said, am I crazy? Am I going to kill myself? Or somebody will say, well, I got pregnant. Or somebody will say I had a five-year-old and I was coming home and they were watching me smoke and I said I can't do this. And I said you know, all of those reasons sound like human being reasons. You know what I mean yeah they're not diseases.

Speaker 2:

They're like you figured out that where your values were what was important to you and that the addiction was interfering with that, and you opted for your more positive values, which is sort of like how human beings work. You know what I mean. They encounter problems and that's usually how they resolve them and I say but that doesn't sound like a disease to me. That sounds like a human being developing and functioning.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so would you say we table the idea of disease in regard, that this is not Parkinson's, this is not a neurological disease. But can we say, and would you be comfortable in this other field, where we're just calling it disorder? It's a cluster of symptoms that an individual has a relationship with either drug or behavior that has a short-term benefit, even though it has long-term consequences, and some of them become very severe. They're on a spectrum, right, and it's almost this for some what is replaced bonding and what you said, connection.

Speaker 2:

And I feel that for myself, to interject my own experience, Do you feel your addiction most satisfied, crucially satisfied, in your life?

Speaker 1:

I think the first thing I could notice, without articulating it, is that it got rid of fear, insecurity, anxiety, and that I felt alone. I felt like my brain went online and I was like others.

Speaker 2:

So let's say, for whatever reason, you were anxious, insecure and you felt alone and there was a substance that, for a time, could resolve that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it could generically give me the feeling I wasn't getting the connection or bonding, for various reasons, with other people. But I wouldn't call that a disease. I would call that a societal or cultural problem, almost.

Speaker 2:

We just said that connection is the opposite of addiction. Yeah, and you were saying you were using your addiction in place of connection.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

And you know, if you have no kid, that's a pretty scary feeling.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Being roaming around in the universe like it's some that old space space movie 2001 oh yeah, we're just floating around in space.

Speaker 2:

There's nothing scarier than that. And if you could take a pill that made you stop feeling that, yeah, you take it, yeah, yeah. And then if you got to a place where you felt a little bit more comfortable about yourself and you developed some better social skills and you said but, moreover, is what we do in the life process? You say to the person do you see that you have the capacity to replace the addiction with real connections? You know you can do that.

Speaker 1:

That's what happens.

Speaker 2:

Because if you believe that the disease has control of you, you don't believe that's possible. But if you believe that you can control your own existence, uh, the life process program is not a powerlessness model, it's an empowerment model yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So I believe in having power, um or agency. I like to use that word a lot when I'm I'm I'm talking with you're probably more.

Speaker 2:

You know you're trying to encourage your children to feel empowered and that they have agency. Because if they don't, there's 10,000 ways you can go wrong in this world. You know what I mean.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, oh yeah. So you began writing and putting these ideas. What were, what was some of the stigma you received in the pushback and where was it coming from earlier in your career? How'd you overcome it putting these ideas. What were, what was some of the stigma you received in the pushback and where was it coming from earlier in your career? How'd you overcome it?

Speaker 2:

joe, you, can you imagine if people's lives hinged around aa and you came out and you said well, aa isn't necessary for some people, it's detrimental. For some people, they can go back to drinking. Do you? You don't know? For some people, it's detrimental. For some people, they can go back to drinking. Do you? You don't know how some people would react to that? They, they, you, you like. You know hell's above, you know.

Speaker 1:

Actually you know, um, for for all the people that has helped, I'm not I don't want to disparage what might be meaningful to you, but a paid for a pretty substantial study with Harvard and a lot of the crosstabs you kind of look into. This research didn't look impressive for AA. But then there was this whole swath of people that got better organically that Harvard was tailing, that had no contact with AA and then resumed either a moderate life of drinking or just abstinence on their own, and then they started to get these metrics of people that did well in AA. But then there was this portion that AA made it harder for them. It stigmatized them.

Speaker 1:

So there's these three lanes, and the one lane can't claim this is the only path to helping people. Okay, you're helping a group of people that could have walk and lock step with each other. Another group when they try this, it harms them. And another group doesn't need you to bother them because they they reconnected with family or their community. It was, and when I read your stuff I'm like you had it, you knew this and when you speak up, you got attacked.

Speaker 2:

So, joe, the next time you go to a meeting, are you going to think twice before you say I'm an alcoholic?

Speaker 1:

I'm going to say you know what a guy said last night at a meeting. He goes, I'm a person in recovery. He didn't. He didn't say alcoholic. I noticed younger people are saying that at times. What do you think of that?

Speaker 2:

statement um did you ever go there we're getting into it. I don't even think I mean. Recovery is a term, everybody knows what you mean. Well, sort of Sure. In AA that means abstinence, but I don't talk about recovery. I talk about recovery means that your life is focused on your addiction and recovering from it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

You wouldn't want that for your children. You want your children to look at the world ahead of them and to think, well, how am I going to? Well? You want to think how are they going to develop? And you want them to think how am I going to progress in life to a fruitful place, good work, good relationship, good health. That's not recovery, that's looking forward in life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

It's harmony. I would call it a developmental model?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that would run along the lines of most models in psychology. Something keeps developing and equilibrium or a homeostasis arrives with you, your environment, or a homeostasis arrives with you, your environment, in the life model that you apply. Do some people choose abstinence? Do some people I have friends that benefit, they confess and report that they benefit from marijuana but they don't touch alcohol or opiates and kind of this model of harm reduction we, both you and I, believe in. I believe in anything that improves the quality and dignity of life. I sign me up, I I'm for it, for anybody who wants to do it, from the seatbelt to suboxone to sublicate.

Speaker 1:

But one idea like when you were talking earlier, when I started to connect, I stopped using narcotics, say, like cocaine. I was using MDMA without therapeutic kind of interventions, but the effect it had on me made the entry. I want it to be drug-free. I didn't want. I did not want to drink anymore. Entry I wanted to be drug-free. I did not want to drink anymore. Mdma made my landing. For the six weeks prior to I put everything down a lot easier. It got me in this place therapeutically and neurologically that I was open. I want to change and I started connecting with the people I really cared about. It was. That's a fact. That's a hard thing to share at a meeting.

Speaker 2:

How long ago was that?

Speaker 1:

That will be five years in the fall.

Speaker 2:

And you feel you're exactly in the same place now that you were then.

Speaker 1:

No, I don't.

Speaker 2:

For example, I know people well, you know people who haven't done their addiction in 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 years.

Speaker 1:

Sure.

Speaker 2:

They have a family, they stabilize and you're thinking, you know, if they go to a wedding and they had a glass of wine, I don't think they're going to run out in the street and give up everything to go back to alcoholics.

Speaker 1:

I think that could be true. Do you think it's true that some would do that? Do you think there's a mental health component to certain people? I'm not saying it's the demon alcoholism. I'm not saying it's the demon alcoholism. Would you say that there's some people that have underlying conditions that alcohol would aggravate it severely, that they could lose control of their life?

Speaker 2:

There are people who quit drinking because their doctor says you know X or Y, you know what I mean. You're 60 years old, I mean okay so we're talking that's fine, but that's not a response to alcoholism. That's a response to your body is, for one reason or another, intolerant of alcohol yeah and not that you know that's different from building your life around taking in alcohol as a way of solving your emotional needs. Those are two different things.

Speaker 1:

Feel how hard it is to like if your audience, for the decades that have resisted, resisted or gave you pushback. There's such an indoctrination of thinking, there's a disease that they can't really define. If you pin someone down, they just give you the like this I cannot drink alcohol.

Speaker 2:

Well, your job is in the life right. Your job isn't to argue with people no, no, I I just your job isn't to argue with my, our coaches and life pros and pros. The job isn't to argue with people.

Speaker 2:

You should do or not, do x or y yeah that's within your control and it's based on your point of view of where you are in life. And if worse comes to worse and you started drinking again, you said you know this is going in a bad direction, then you can say you know how you quit before for five or ten years. God bless you. You can do it again. You're always. That's called relapse.

Speaker 2:

You're always in charge of which way you're going yeah I always use as an example um, um, there's that famous actor, uh who, uh, he also was a singer, the the Irish actor. He was in that series about witches and all like that, and he was a famously covered alcoholic. He came on the Johnny Carson show and he hadn't had a drink in 14 years and everybody cheered. And then he said you know, when I got to be 70, I went back to Ireland and I went to. You know, when I got to be 70, I went back to Ireland and I went to the local pub and I thought all of my dead relatives, they're going to say he's alive and he's not having a Guinness. So I go to the local pub and I have a glass of Guinness at night. A 70-year-old man and a 50-year-old man are two different people, oh yeah. And to say to yourself well, my life forever is going to be this one way is to deny your own humanity and deny your own choice for it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

The addiction and how you remedy it. Ultimately, nobody's going to make a rule. Well, they do have rules about what you can do and not do with drugs, but ultimately, whether you go to AA or therapy or a rehab or not, it gets down to you making some kind of personal decision and choice. It never, there's no other way around it.

Speaker 1:

Your last work and and how would you summarize um your last book?

Speaker 2:

let me uh put my earphones in one more time.

Speaker 1:

Repeat that question one time how would you summarize your last your, your last book available now?

Speaker 2:

well, my last book is my memoir and I talk about how I I answer some of the questions you're asking, which is how did I come to have a particular view of the world? How did I come to value self-determination so much? How did I have the for want of a better word courage and critical thinking and independence of thinking to go about being willing to bear all the assaults that I did? And so my brief answers to that are one my parents were they're Jewish. They drank alcohol, you know, ceremonially, like you know, on holidays, and so alcohol wasn't a big thing. And we had a person on our block who came home drunk every night and I thought why would he put himself in a situation like that, where he wasn't in control of himself? And I actually began thinking about that when I was five and I asked my mother and my mother said you're thinking about alcoholism and you're five and I, you know.

Speaker 2:

Then, when I was 12, my father was an extremely apprehensive man, very driven by anxiety, very driven by anxiety, and I read an article in the paper about a guy who had gone to rehab and his wife had moved in the interim and when he came home he saw a bunch of boxes all around the apartment and he took one look at them, he turned around, he went out on a binge and I said, at the age of 12, well, I know what was going on in his mind. You know he was overwhelmed by something he felt he couldn't deal with like my father would be, and he'd start screaming anxiously. I mean, he didn't hit us, but it's a dysfunctional response to a situation that could be managed better if you remain calm. And so I said well, those things are. I know that experience, I'm aware of it. It doesn't have to do with alcohol, it has to do with a way of cloaking your emotions.

Speaker 2:

And then the third thing I thought about was when I went to college, I had a college roommate and he was 22 and he was dating a girl, a freshman in college, who was 19. And he said to us well, now that I can be with her, I don't want to spend any time with anybody else, and you know, when you're in college, that sort of makes sense. He went to graduate school in Berkeley and she found out that there were a lot more options than him. I mean, she was 19 when they got married, and so she came home one day she started an affair. She came home one day and she left a tape recording saying bye.

Speaker 2:

And I said well, they weren't in love, they were addicted. They each lived to fulfill a certain need the other had. When they didn't fulfill that need, they were nothing. They were, like you know, giving up smoking Boom, I don't need you anymore. And so I wrote a book called Love and Addiction. They were, like you know, giving up smoking Boom, I don't need you anymore. And so I wrote a book called Love and Addiction. But I didn't.

Speaker 2:

Obviously I didn't mean to say love was a disease. I meant to say, well, think about the destructive relationships you've had, why you had them and how you dealt with it and how you went on in life, hopefully to have a better relationship. That same process is possible with any addiction, and indeed I mean. One line I use is when people quit heroin or smoking, they don't usually kill themselves, but a certain number of people, most people, aren't aware of this. The number one source of drug deaths in America is suicide. It's not cops murdering people, it's not murder, it's suicide. More than half of gun deaths are suicides. A lot of people commit suicide and one the biggest reason people commit suicide is as a result of love relationships. A certain number of people, if they're deprived of a lover, they just feel like this isn't worth going on. I say consider that withdrawal I mean quitting smoking is uncomfortable, but most people aren't going to blow their brains out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that goes to the heart of what you started discussing. You've always been discussing connection and that severed connection is like an artery being cut.

Speaker 2:

Addictions and other Because it's so essential. People feel that they can't live without their loved object and, to some extent, when you were, what was your primary addiction?

Speaker 1:

Alcohol, cocaine.

Speaker 2:

Did you feel you could live life without cocaine? I mean leaving aside your addiction to it. I did If you sat there. You thought you could live without cocaine.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it would be dramatic for me to describe that. I didn't, but you hear that language when you go to meetings a lot. I knew I didn't have to. I just felt it was so intolerable. But I'm going to have to face off with this or the consequences are going gonna get more severe. But I almost felt like I knew at one point I was losing a little hope, getting jarred. Am I gonna run out of time? Is tragedy gonna meet me? And that that motivated an action. It motivated people around me that cared about me to really intervene and say what's going like, what are you gonna do?

Speaker 2:

because it can't be this let's, let's, let's talk about this because then you uh, you're a friendly guy, you had people around you I did, I did and that was after you felt very isolated. So you had already begun, yeah, turning the corner into being able to form relationships yeah, I fell in love at the end of my addiction.

Speaker 1:

That's hard to share it with people it.

Speaker 2:

It doesn't sound common. Oh, you fell in love after your addiction.

Speaker 1:

No, before it ended, right at the tail end of it, I was doing little bouts of abstinence. I wasn't going to meetings and I was taking psychedelics. I mentioned MDMA, but I was taking LSD at times, hoping it would provoke some kind of momentum, because I'm secular no that's become a big therapy.

Speaker 2:

now You're aware.

Speaker 1:

I was and I was then I'm like I was doing this, you know, unmeasured, with no guidance, in my house. Most people would go to at least a park.

Speaker 2:

I was sitting up in my attic were you already with your wife at that time, or?

Speaker 1:

no, no, I crashed into her accidentally and then, two months later, after the beginning of the courtship, I was it. I was done drinking, I didn't want to drink and I did return to AA. It did and we all do respect, I didn't want to drink and I did return to AA, so vote to get your addiction. It did, and I really, we hope to respect Fuck AA. I can't say that because I have friends, my communities. I have really good friends, lifelong friends at Alcoholics Anonymous.

Speaker 2:

But in your own mind. The event that caused you to stop drinking was your love for your relationship with your wife.

Speaker 1:

I would say it was the event. I do find value in the inventory process of writing down and putting an analysis on my relationships.

Speaker 2:

Hey, joe, to do that, you know how to write things down.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

How many AA meetings, how many AA meetings have you been to?

Speaker 1:

I can't even count, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

How many years?

Speaker 1:

On and off since I was 16.

Speaker 2:

So you know how to write things down.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know how to take it. I write, I write down. You know how to write things down. Yeah, I know I take it, I write, I write down. You know if something's lingering or I feel you know a rumination happening, um, it's not often. I try to blame others. I don't let myself get that sick. I just find that I'm desiring something too much. What does this mean? Why would I? And meditation rituals? I do just a plain Vipassana exercise 10 minutes in the morning. I just observe. What is this mind I'm calling will Just things popping into?

Speaker 2:

it Does your wife drink alcohol or no?

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, she did it for two years, and then, after her second baby, she'll have a glass of wine when she's over her mom's.

Speaker 2:

Well, god bless you. So that shows you A are open-minded and B you're not coercing other people.

Speaker 1:

Never.

Speaker 2:

And your wife doesn't think oh, I can't drink a glass of wine because that's bad for him. No she has her own life.

Speaker 1:

No, she can do. She has no addiction issues, um, and she's had fun in the past, um, but she's not. I had a deep emotional problem and, like you said earlier, I, I, I I call it identity, but a crisis that I felt trapped at certain times in my life by my own life. I felt without agency and connection and then I just make a willingness to let my guard down. I think it's me confusing the idea that what I am is my ego. I don't know what caused this.

Speaker 2:

I have an idea. You're still in flux in terms of your views of addiction, would you say you're still I changing yeah, they're open, because I I think it's an incomplete story.

Speaker 1:

I look at addiction as a coping mechanism to having disconnection. I think it could happen as subtle, as pre-verbal, like the first two years of your life, if the emotional life of your caregivers are in crisis or disconnected.

Speaker 2:

How did being a parent change your life?

Speaker 1:

What I wanted wasn't really necessary. I felt like the steward of just limiting and creating the largest opportunities I can for their life to be abundant and, I don't know, balanced, enjoyable, satisfying.

Speaker 2:

So that's had a pretty big, I mean when you were in your addicted mode you weren't thinking about other human beings that much.

Speaker 1:

No, I was trying to treat discomfort or pain, emotional pain, with pleasure.

Speaker 2:

And now you're more concerned about your children's. You're concerned about your own, obviously. Their emotional well-being. It's a whole different thrust.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and when I'm concerned about myself, it's usually under the lens of living long enough to make sure I'm around for enough security to make them healthy.

Speaker 2:

So that's a whole, that's almost a whole different consciousness.

Speaker 1:

It is, it's just and it's uh, I don't know it happened. It seems like, when you look back, it's without effort, it's just something that happened or I allowed happened. It's not something I'm, I earned it, just it was well, you developed as a human being and cared about people.

Speaker 2:

It's it's normal. I mean, people become attached. Well, people becoming attached to their children. That's been going on for a long time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

The things that we're discussing. Are you allowed to discuss them in your AA meeting?

Speaker 1:

I don't think it's the appropriate space for it. I think you can. If there's three or four people in there, you'd have an open discussion, but when you've got like a room with 30 people, I think it's what AA's responsibility as a. If you're going to be an organization calling yourself the primary text of AA, you'd probably have to toe the line of what the steps are.

Speaker 2:

Have you ever attended a SMART recovery meeting?

Speaker 1:

I did. I really enjoyed it. They just don't flourish around here because there's just not enough people involved.

Speaker 2:

They're a more online operation at this point.

Speaker 1:

Dharma recovery.

Speaker 2:

They probably have lucid parameters where you can encourage, consider different ways of thinking without being worried about.

Speaker 1:

Great literature, Wonderful stuff I really, really embraced during COVID I went every morning to Dharma recovery and refuge recovery, not because I wanted to be Buddhist, but I really kind of embraced the Eastern lens of consciousness that I was having such trouble with any Western ideas of God or finding, you know, an open discussion of what I wanted to talk about being the problem, my emotional problems, my, my, my uncomfortable situation all the time when I was sober. Initially I think Dharma Recovery's approach helped me because I I liked that they're just acknowledging life is suffering.

Speaker 2:

Now what it's like I went from there. Joe, I'm going to have to leave pretty shortly.

Speaker 1:

Sure.

Speaker 2:

Do you have one or two other questions you might want to ask?

Speaker 1:

me yeah, where would you, where can people find you and get involved, or where would you well.

Speaker 2:

The life process programcom is my organization for coaches that help people, and we even have a program where you don't involve a coach, where you can just go through a pre-organized way of thinking and exercises. That's my main way of reaching out to human beings. You can actually Life Process Model of addictions actually in wikipedia and you get some idea of how you can go to the website yeah, and I encourage anyone to go and read any of my books.

Speaker 2:

Um, uh, I have a book, uh, you mentioned one called Recover. I have a book with Zach Rhodes. Actually, I have a few of them right here. You know what? I mean there's my memoir scientific life on the edge. There's the truth about addiction and recovery. There's seven tools to beat addiction. There's addiction proof your child. There's diseasing of a bargain. There's love and addiction. So I you know, uh you could pick up uh seven tools to beat addiction, or any of them. You can look my name up on Amazon. You'll see the books.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to put both websites and your Amazon link, and anyone in recovery I would encourage to read it, even if it feels uncomfortable. You love AA. I would be curious. Would this help someone you know? So I always stay open to the fact that not everything's for you, but you should know about it and you should encourage other people. It might be for them.

Speaker 2:

That's my pitch. You're a person who went to Dharma recovery.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, love it.

Speaker 2:

You obviously say there's value in a whole different way of thinking about things.

Speaker 1:

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

And even to this day it probably well, you say it it influences your whole way of dealing with life and thinking.

Speaker 1:

Yeah for the better.

Speaker 2:

All right, joe, I really, grant, I enjoy talking with you, I'm glad. Where are you located? Scranton, pennsylvania, home of the you, I'm glad.

Speaker 1:

Where are you located? Scranton, Pennsylvania. Home of the office. I'm from Philly Joe thanks for having me.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for introducing me to your audience, aloha.

Speaker 1:

Godspeed.

Speaker 2:

Aloha Bye now.

Speaker 1:

I'd like to thank you for listening to another episode of All Better. You can find us on allbetterfm or listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio and Alexa. Special thanks to our producer, John Edwards, and engineering company 570 Drone. Please like or subscribe to us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and, if you're not, on social media, you're awesome. Looking forward to seeing you again. And remember, just because you're sober doesn't mean you're right.