Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Time again for Doc Jack Your Addiction Lifeguard
Podcast.
I am Dr.
Jockey Burke, a psychologist,licensed professional counselor,
and addiction specialist.
You are suffering fromaddiction, misery, trauma,
whatever it is, I'm here tohelp.
If you're in search of help, tryto get your life back together.
Join me here at Doc Shock forAddiction Lifeguard, the
(00:22):
Addiction Recovery Podcast.
(00:46):
If you actually need real helpand you're in need of help,
please seek that out.
If you're in dire need of help,you can go to your nearest
emergency room or you can checkinto a rehab center or call a
counselor like me and talk aboutyour problems and work through
them.
But don't rely on a podcast tobe that form of help.
It's not.
(01:07):
It's just a podcast.
It's for entertainment andinformation only.
So let's keep it in that light,alright?
Have a good time, learnsomething, and then get the real
help that you need from aprofessional.
(01:51):
It's probably your leastfavorite emotion, but it's
probably the one that uh, infact, is the one that most of
you are running from.
Uh we used, we drank, you getdistracted by it, uh, because
sadness felt like a rip current,you know, it's just pulling at
you.
And it's something that it feelslike it you can't really get rid
(02:14):
of it.
You can't escape it.
And if you've if you sufferedfrom any kind of traumas, you
know, the sadness is justpermeating your soul.
So that's what I'm going to talkabout today.
What sadness really is, why itfeels so dangerous, and how to
experience it without letting ittake you under, take you over,
control you.
(02:35):
It's a tough emotion to dealwith, and it's one that every
addict I've ever worked with hasstruggled.
So let's talk about sadness andaddiction.
Um addiction, you know, it oftenstarts as an emotional way to,
(02:55):
you know, it's an emotionalmanagement of your pain using
it, doesn't matter what it is,drugs, alcohol, sex,
pornography, uh, the internet,you know, binge watching
television shows.
I mean, it could be anything,right?
You're just trying to manageyour your pain.
And you didn't wake up one dayand say, Hey, I'd like to
destroy my life.
(03:15):
We're just we were just feelingso bad that you just would
didn't didn't want to take itanymore.
So sadness is is anundercurrent.
It's it's the thing that kind offeeds the addiction.
It it drives it.
It's the thing you're feelingand you don't want it.
It's the hidden grief.
(03:36):
Guilt and shame and lonelinessare all part of it too.
Um it's kind of a process.
They all kind of go together.
So when sadness shows up, itkind of reminds you of what
you've lost.
Um, it's a reminder of thatloss.
It's it's re-experiencing thatloss.
And those losses, you know,relationships, um trust, time,
(04:01):
uh, your job, maybe even somepieces of yourself that you
lost.
And we each we each reach thatpoint where something has to
make it stop.
That's what we want.
I mean, that's that's where Iwas.
I certainly was feeling that waywhen I was using um that phrase,
like, you know, you don'tunderstand.
(04:23):
That's that's a phrase thatanybody would try to figure out
what's going on with me.
It's like, well, you don'treally understand.
And so after a while you get tothe point where you're just kind
of shutting down, you're noteven really trying to explain it
anymore.
So it's understand that whenyou're feeling sad, it's a it's
a normal reaction to situations.
It's not a defect, it's it'sinformation.
You're you're experiencing thethe information that you went
(04:46):
through.
It's the emotional warninglight, if you will, you know, on
your dashboard, just like thatlittle wrench comes up or a
little exclamation point.
There's something wrong, there'ssomething going on here.
So why does it feel so unsafe?
For a lot of people inaddiction, sadness just wasn't
(05:08):
allowed when you were growingup.
Or maybe the person who wassupposed to be comforting you is
the person who was also abusingyou.
So you had nowhere to turn.
I see a lot of kids in thatsituation.
Uh, maybe you were told, youknow, that you needed to toughen
up.
If you're a guy, it was, youknow, you're just being a baby.
And your friends kind of chimein with that too.
(05:28):
It's not just your parents oryour guardians that do that.
You know, we do that to eachother as men.
You might have grown up in chaoswhere sadness was a liability,
you know, it's a weakness.
So your your body learned earlythat sadness equals danger, you
know.
So you kind of put the twotogether, sadness and danger.
They go together.
And, you know, it's the ideathat somehow this trauma logic
(05:54):
of, you know, it it sadness isdanger.
So then your different part ofyour brain starts activating.
It's not the emotional brain,it's the survival brain.
The the uh the hippocampus um isthe feeling portion, but the the
amygdala is the part of thebrain that's the fight, flight,
or freeze, and so that getsactivated.
(06:14):
So it's it's not the truth.
You you know, the other thing isif you feel sad, you're never
gonna stop.
I can't stop feeling sad.
So I just want to push it away.
This is this is where we learnas as uh particularly children
of alcoholics, children who grewup with mentally unstable
parents or addict parents.
(06:37):
We learn that um, you know, ourway of of dealing with it is to
shut down or compartmentalize.
And so you get to where you youdon't know how to process
through.
So you feel like you can it'sgonna happen and you're never
gonna stop.
You start crying and it's nevergonna end.
Then there's the shame layer,you know, sadness gets twisted
(06:59):
into self-blame and and shame.
So you sort of asking yourself,well, what's wrong with me?
Why why can't why can't I feelsadness?
And then when I feel sadness, Ifeel like I've just gone off a
cliff.
And so what's wrong with meinstead of what happened to me?
You know, many times when I'm inin sessions with people, they'll
(07:19):
tell me their story, and it, youknow, sometimes they'll come
right out and tell me, likethey're reading it from a
biography page or two ofthemselves.
Um when I was in living in LA,people would have these one
sheets where it would be thefront would be the the
photograph of the you know, thethe good looking picture of
them's their headshot, and youturn it around and there's their
(07:43):
there's their biography of whoand what they are.
I and I kind of feel likesometimes clients should
probably come in with those.
Um, because then they could theycould explain it real easily.
And sometimes it feels likethey're reading from something
like that.
They just tell me justmatter-of-factly, this is where
I this is what I grew up with.
And you know, it's I almostthink sometimes it's because
(08:05):
they're trying to figure out ifyou know what they're gonna say
to me is gonna push me away andsay, oh, I can't handle that.
You know, this person's reallygot some deep-seated
pathological issues, probablyfrom all this.
But uh, that doesn't happen.
But it's the question of likewhat happened to me.
So I'll ask them as they'retelling me their story,
sometimes that they're you know,telling me all these
(08:27):
circumstantial things uh abouttheir life that have nothing to
do with anything.
Um, because they're just kind ofskirting around the issue of
what's going on, and after awhile I just kind of look at
them and I'm like, Well, whathappened to you?
And they they many times don'tknow how to answer that question
because the idea of somethinghappening to them never occurred
(08:50):
to them, they just survived it.
So they just you know, theymight tell me about their
parents not being there or beingan addict or the, you know, some
something they moved around alot or whatever, but I'm like,
what happened to you instead ofyou know, what's wrong with you?
(09:11):
Because they're telling mewhat's wrong with them.
But it's not weakness to feel,it's it's being a human.
We have a need to feel.
We use that term in therapy.
We talk about processing yourfeelings.
And when you're processing yourfeelings, really what that means
is you're just feeling yourfeelings.
But when you've been numb foryears, feeling anything can feel
(09:35):
like getting hit by a wave thatyou didn't see coming, you know,
person standing on the beach andthey're facing they're facing
the beach, the ocean is behindthem, and this big huge wave
comes and smacks them down, andthey weren't expecting it.
That's kind of what happens whenyou haven't been feeling
anything for so long.
And and that's why I preparepeople when they come into
(09:56):
therapy and I say, listen, it'sgonna get worse, you're gonna
feel worse before you feelbetter, because this process is
opening up older wounds thatdidn't heal right.
We're getting at the infection,if you will, and trying to get
it out.
So you're just understand,you're gonna feel worse.
(10:17):
And that's why it's importantalso to put the structure around
you, where you're not justseeing a therapist once or twice
a week for an hour at a time,but you're around other people.
So you that's why it's importantto go to meetings, get into
recovery community, get intorecovery groups, have a network
around you.
Because when you're feelingthings, you need to be able to
express it, right?
That's part of the feeling yourfeelings, process your feelings.
(10:40):
And the worst way to processyour feelings is in complete
isolation.
Although that's probably whatyou're gonna want to do because
that's what you're conditionedto do is to isolate.
So how do you safely feel?
How do you do it so you don'tfeel like you're drowning in
sorrow?
So um fighting against it.
(11:02):
You you're gonna panic, you'regonna, you're gonna, it's gonna
get worse.
Um the emotions can feel muchstronger when you're really, you
know, when somebody's somebody'sin that in that uh in that pres
in that present space with you,and um they're bearing witness
to your pain.
Maybe they're validating it foryou, like simple things, it's
(11:24):
things that I'll look atsomebody and go, that was really
wrong, what they did.
You know, when somebody'stelling me about, oh, my parent
did this, my cousin did that, mysibling did this, and I say to
them, wow, that's that wasreally that was really bad and
wrong.
Perhaps that is the first timethey've ever actually heard
somebody say that to them.
(11:45):
And it's quite interesting thereaction that I get when I say
that.
It stops them many times, andthey just like look at me,
they're stunned.
Um and and it's it's uh it's atough thing to experience.
Um but at the same time, whensomebody validates that they
confirm it, yeah, that waswrong.
(12:07):
Um but understand at the basisof this that sadness is
something that is survivable.
If you stop trying to run awayfrom it, it's it's going to
chase you.
You know, the faster you go, themore it's staying with you.
It's gonna stay with you.
Uh you can't outrun it, youcan't ignore it.
(12:29):
Doing that is kind of what's ledyou to the addiction in the
first place, isn't it?
So here's some let me give yousome tips.
Okay.
Um sadness is sadness.
Now, for men, I'm gonna say tothe men, sadness is not
something that we uh do verywell.
(12:51):
We are typically allowed toexpress two emotional responses
to almost everything anger andand funny humor.
That's it.
We're not allowed to be sad orfeel down.
Even feeling anxious can beconsidered a weakness.
Um, but you make a joke aboutit, you laugh it off, you'll
(13:14):
deflect, and you know, butstand-up comedian style.
That's most stand-up comedianshad horrible, tragic lives, uh
trauma-filled.
Um you're you're allowed to dothat, or you're allowed to get
angry.
So you might get explosive andyell at people and whatever, and
really what you're feeling issad.
You're just trying to shove itinto humor or anger, and it
(13:37):
doesn't really fit.
So just call it what it is: sadness, grief, loneliness. (13:38):
undefined
The worst thing you can do, andthis applies to the ladies as
well as men.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Okay, call it what it is.
Don't call it I'm fine.
It's you're not fine.
That's the that's the oppositeof what you are.
(13:59):
Um, don't absorb your sadness.
You can feel sadness withoutbecoming sadness.
Uh, Eckhart Tolley wrote a bookcalled Uh A New Earth, and what
he talked about was umdepression.
And his explanation in the bookuh was basically that he woke up
(14:19):
one day and realized that he wasfeeling depressed first thing
when he woke up.
So what he had become isdepression.
He became depression, and hetook a different approach to
dealing with it after that.
Sadness is kind of the samething.
You you can become sadness.
So you don't absorb it, but youcan you can observe it.
(14:40):
And that's again, you do that inthe presence of another person.
A therapist is a good place todo that.
Um so talk to your therapist,sponsor, you know, your
community group, your yourcommunity recovery community,
talk to God, but get it out ofyour get it out of your head,
and it's gonna stay there, andit's a horrible trap.
(15:04):
But you've got to let, you know,to to to let something else in,
you have to take something outof your head, because there's
only so much room for emotionalresponses.
So you have to let the comfortin.
And in order to do that, youhave to let the sadness out of
your head.
You don't have to isolate toheal.
Actually, it's the worst thingyou could possibly do is try to
(15:24):
isolate because that's what wedo when we're drinking, and
that's what we do when we'regetting high.
We isolate, bunker down in thebasement, and uh start drinking.
So you gotta to let the comfortin, you have to to let people
in.
So the other thing is avoidingemotional shortcut.
(15:46):
Drugs, drama, shopping, sex,internet, alcohol.
Those are all emotional fastfood.
You know, that's the shortcut.
I don't know if you have thisexperience, whenever I'm eating
fast food, I'll eat it.
And literally, like an hour,hour and a half, two hours at
the most later, I'm I'm hungryagain.
(16:07):
That's because it's so full ofsugar and nothing.
It's just uh just there'snothing in there.
So there's no shortcut.
But you're not broken forfeeling sad, you're healing.
Again, it's probably gonna getworse before it gets better.
Um for those of you who are juststarting recovery, um there's
(16:32):
these emotional shock waves thathit you.
When like if you had surgery umand you had anesthesia, when it
wears off, you're gonna feelpain.
It's part of the process.
And when you're using drugs andalcohol or anything else to to
kind of make the emotion goaway, the emotions come flooding
(16:53):
back.
That's part of early recovery.
Um, there's a thing called umwhen when you're through the
early part of recovery, you youthat lasts longer, it's called
pause, post-acute withdrawalsyndrome.
And um that can make you feelsuper sad, like ten times as
sad.
It's ten times bigger becauseyour brain chemistry is starting
(17:17):
to um uh recover.
And so it's trying to rebalance.
So you get this feeling of like,gosh, I just you know, it's been
like nine months, I can'tbelieve how bad I feel.
Well, that's pause.
And that post-acute withdrawalsyndrome can last for a year.
(17:38):
Maybe, maybe sometimes I've seenit sometimes longer when the
reality of kind of what has beengoing on and what you've been
dealing with depends on thecircumstance, but I've had
people that have had really,really you know, major big T
traumas happen, and it takesthem longer to recover from
that.
Um, so the pause might lastlonger than that.
But um don't don't mistake thatfor failure.
(18:03):
Okay, it's your it's your systemrebooting, it's your system
starting over again, and it'strying to learn how to process
emotion.
And again, I can't emphasizethis enough.
You can't really do it byyourself.
Please don't try that.
When you're feeling emotion, youhave to share it, you have to
speak it.
Um putting putting it to wordsmany times makes the power of it
(18:27):
just disappear, especially ifthe person you're talking to is
trained in trauma recovery, butalso the ability to um empathize
with you.
So um there's uh there's a floodof emotion that can happen.
So get hopefully you've beenable to work with somebody and
(18:48):
late, you know, in yourrecovery, hopefully early
enough.
I if you went to rehab, if youhad a good rehab experience, you
you probably would haveunderstood this part, but the
grounding tools, um movement,breath work, journaling, these
are things that you're doingwithin yourself.
This is within your body.
And when you're doing thosethings within your body, what
(19:10):
you're doing is you're you'reretraining your body to
experience the emotion, but doit in a in a healthier way.
Um dealing with the emotionalflood, all right.
Call somebody who gets it.
Get on the phone.
This is why you know sponsorsare so important, and people in
the recovery community are soimportant.
(19:31):
You have to have numbers to callwhen you're feeling bad.
And trust me, don't feel badabout calling them because
they've called people as well.
So they understand it.
People get it if they're inrecovery.
It's like I feel bad, and uh, soyou got a list of names of
people that can really help youout.
Um but you know, white knucklingit.
(19:52):
I'll get through this.
Oh gosh, that's terrible.
Remember, you know, just like inthe ocean, a wave comes and then
it passes by.
It always passes by.
No feeling is permanent.
I'm not gonna be permanentlysad, permanently lonely.
Um it comes and goes.
That's it's normal.
(20:14):
People feel up, then they feeldown, but they're you're gonna
aim towards the middleeventually in recovery.
So turning sadness intostrength.
Let's let's talk about that fora few minutes here.
Sadness softens you, right?
It makes you feel vulnerable,but it reconnects you with the
(20:35):
idea of compassion for othersand for yourself.
And that's what I do as atherapist is I'm working with
the person, I'm I'm getting themto accept the truth.
Like, what is the truth?
And from a Christianperspective, understanding that
truth, there's freedom in that.
Like, you know, you you thingshave happened to you and they
were bad.
Like I said before, it's likewhen I say to somebody, that was
(20:57):
really wrong, that's a truth.
Uh mislabeling trauma assomething that wasn't trauma,
and then getting told in atherapy process, hey, that was
really traumatic what you wentthrough.
That's terrible.
That's that's the softeningpart, right?
So it reconnects you withcompassion.
So you can have compassion foryourself.
(21:18):
If you let the sadness teach youinstead of torture you, you'll
discover empathy and gratitudeon the other side.
So let sadness be the teacher.
Um when we isolate, we're in ourown head.
How are you feeling?
I'm fine, and I'm drinking,drinking, drinking, nobody gets
it, you don't understand, allthat other nonsense that we say
(21:40):
when we're in our worst of ouraddiction.
You're not learning anything.
You're just learning that you'redisconnected and different from
other people.
The other part of what'sinteresting about when people go
to rehab or when they go into umrecovery groups, they start
hearing stories that are justlike theirs.
Um, and I'll tell you, I'm gonnado a podcast in the future about
(22:01):
my experience with that, whichwas it's kind of it's too long
for this individual podcast thatI'm doing right now.
But um, I had this eye-openingexperience when I realized I I
really had suffered childhoodtrauma, but I just didn't
understand that.
Um it was torturing me.
And when I started, it was arelief.
That was the really thebeginnings of my recovery from
(22:22):
from that.
Um, you know, what we teachchildren, little little
children, when they're firstlearning how to swim, we teach
them to float.
That's the first thing we teachthem.
We want to we want to make surethat they can float.
And by float, because babiesare, you know, there's a lot of
body fat on a baby, so they'regonna float anyway.
(22:43):
But, you know, you teach themthat there's safety in the water
here, that you're not out ofcontrol.
You're not gonna sink to thebottom.
And that's that's what peopledon't understand at first when
they're trying to learn how toswim, they think they're gonna
just sink to the bottom.
And, you know, you're in adifferent environment.
I put a child who is two orthree or four years old in water
(23:03):
where they can't touch the, theycan't put their feet on the
bottom, that's a completelyunfamiliar, different
environment for them.
And they they're of course,they're at first they're very
panicked because they're unsureof what's going on.
The more they're in the water,the more comfortable they are.
So if you're if you're trying tolearn how to how to trust um and
(23:25):
and not fight the water, you'regonna be held up by the water.
And that's what they learn.
And so it becomes a saferenvironment for them.
Now, could they uh could theydrown?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
There's no question at thatpoint, yeah, they they could,
because they don't know how toswim.
But you're not gonna learn howto swim if you're fighting the
water all the time and you'repanicked thinking that it's
(23:47):
gonna kill you, so you just keeptrying to avoid it.
So the same emotion that once,you know, made you made you
drink and get high can can helpyou deepen your recovery and
that emotion of sadness.
If you understand the truth, thetruth will set you free.
God didn't put you on thisplanet to suffer.
(24:09):
That's not his intention or hispurpose.
People can cause you to sufferbecause they're exercising free
will around you, but thatdoesn't that that doesn't mean
that that's what that has to befor the rest of your life.
But you can't heal what yourefuse to feel.
If you are allowing yourself tofeel it, then you can recover.
(24:31):
So sadness is not your enemy,it's your messenger.
Listen to it and learn from itand let it move you move through
you.
Let it move through you.
It's not it it is the the way tolearn.
It's or it's torture.
Your choice.
(24:52):
Um, what do you do when it showsup?
Well, don't don't run.
Sit with it.
You know, like I feel s oh, I'mfeeling sad.
Like get that I'm fine messageout of your brain.
Just experience it.
You know, Dan Siegel uh is a uhpsychiatrist uh that um does a
(25:17):
great job of explaining.
He said, you know, when a whenan emotion comes to you, it
comes to you, you feel it, andthen it passes past you, it goes
through you.
He sees emotions as those thingsthat come to you and they go
through you.
Just like a wind.
The wind, it hits you and thenit's past you.
(25:38):
And that's part of what you youneed to be able to do.
Sit with it and let it pass youlike a wave or the wind, and
you'll be surprised at howstrong you really are when you
withstand it.
The running and the hiding isthe weakness, it's not the
strength, and you're not alone.
And there are lifelines allaround you, all you have to do
(25:59):
is just take one.
So you're not by yourself, sodon't isolate.
And when you want to get intorecovery, you can do it.
Stay safe, stay grounded, andalways don't drown in someone
else's chaos either, includingyour own.
(26:20):
Keep your eyes on the shore.
Like, I want to be in thatplace, I want to be in that
safety of that ground because Idon't want to die.
Well, that's it for this episodeof Doc Chuck Your Addiction Life
Guard.
If you need help, please go torehab, go to a hospital, get
(26:42):
into the A rooms, the A A, N A,S A, O A, whatever A.
But don't kill yourself tryingto save your addiction.
That's just insanity.
If you do want to reach out tome for some uh extra help, I can
help you.
Um, I can help guide you from adistance.
But whatever it is, just go outand get the help.
(27:06):
And I I really hope you enjoyedthis podcast.
If you did, please like andsubscribe and listen to the next
episode.
And in the meantime, this is DocShock, your addiction lifeguard,
saying see ya.
Time again for Doc Jack Your Addiction Lifeguard
Podcast.
I am Dr.
Jockey Burke, a psychologist,licensed professional counselor,
and addiction specialist.
You are suffering fromaddiction, misery, trauma,
whatever it is, I'm here tohelp.
If you're in search of help, tryto get your life back together.
Join me here at Doc Shock forAddiction Lifeguard, the
(00:22):
Addiction Recovery Podcast.
(00:46):
If you actually need real helpand you're in need of help,
please seek that out.
If you're in dire need of help,you can go to your nearest
emergency room or you can checkinto a rehab center or call a
counselor like me and talk aboutyour problems and work through
them.
But don't rely on a podcast tobe that form of help.
It's not.
(01:07):
It's just a podcast.
It's for entertainment andinformation only.
So let's keep it in that light,alright?
Have a good time, learnsomething, and then get the real
help that you need from aprofessional.
(01:51):
It's probably your leastfavorite emotion, but it's
probably the one that uh, infact, is the one that most of
you are running from.
Uh we used, we drank, you getdistracted by it, uh, because
sadness felt like a rip current,you know, it's just pulling at
you.
And it's something that it feelslike it you can't really get rid
(02:14):
of it.
You can't escape it.
And if you've if you sufferedfrom any kind of traumas, you
know, the sadness is justpermeating your soul.
So that's what I'm going to talkabout today.
What sadness really is, why itfeels so dangerous, and how to
experience it without letting ittake you under, take you over,
control you.
(02:35):
It's a tough emotion to dealwith, and it's one that every
addict I've ever worked with hasstruggled.
So let's talk about sadness andaddiction.
Um addiction, you know, it oftenstarts as an emotional way to,
(02:55):
you know, it's an emotionalmanagement of your pain using
it, doesn't matter what it is,drugs, alcohol, sex,
pornography, uh, the internet,you know, binge watching
television shows.
I mean, it could be anything,right?
You're just trying to manageyour your pain.
And you didn't wake up one dayand say, Hey, I'd like to
destroy my life.
(03:15):
We're just we were just feelingso bad that you just would
didn't didn't want to take itanymore.
So sadness is is anundercurrent.
It's it's the thing that kind offeeds the addiction.
It it drives it.
It's the thing you're feelingand you don't want it.
It's the hidden grief.
(03:36):
Guilt and shame and lonelinessare all part of it too.
Um it's kind of a process.
They all kind of go together.
So when sadness shows up, itkind of reminds you of what
you've lost.
Um, it's a reminder of thatloss.
It's it's re-experiencing thatloss.
And those losses, you know,relationships, um trust, time,
(04:01):
uh, your job, maybe even somepieces of yourself that you
lost.
And we each we each reach thatpoint where something has to
make it stop.
That's what we want.
I mean, that's that's where Iwas.
I certainly was feeling that waywhen I was using um that phrase,
like, you know, you don'tunderstand.
(04:23):
That's that's a phrase thatanybody would try to figure out
what's going on with me.
It's like, well, you don'treally understand.
And so after a while you get tothe point where you're just kind
of shutting down, you're noteven really trying to explain it
anymore.
So it's understand that whenyou're feeling sad, it's a it's
a normal reaction to situations.
It's not a defect, it's it'sinformation.
You're you're experiencing thethe information that you went
(04:46):
through.
It's the emotional warninglight, if you will, you know, on
your dashboard, just like thatlittle wrench comes up or a
little exclamation point.
There's something wrong, there'ssomething going on here.
So why does it feel so unsafe?
For a lot of people inaddiction, sadness just wasn't
(05:08):
allowed when you were growingup.
Or maybe the person who wassupposed to be comforting you is
the person who was also abusingyou.
So you had nowhere to turn.
I see a lot of kids in thatsituation.
Uh, maybe you were told, youknow, that you needed to toughen
up.
If you're a guy, it was, youknow, you're just being a baby.
And your friends kind of chimein with that too.
(05:28):
It's not just your parents oryour guardians that do that.
You know, we do that to eachother as men.
You might have grown up in chaoswhere sadness was a liability,
you know, it's a weakness.
So your your body learned earlythat sadness equals danger, you
know.
So you kind of put the twotogether, sadness and danger.
They go together.
And, you know, it's the ideathat somehow this trauma logic
(05:54):
of, you know, it it sadness isdanger.
So then your different part ofyour brain starts activating.
It's not the emotional brain,it's the survival brain.
The the uh the hippocampus um isthe feeling portion, but the the
amygdala is the part of thebrain that's the fight, flight,
or freeze, and so that getsactivated.
(06:14):
So it's it's not the truth.
You you know, the other thing isif you feel sad, you're never
gonna stop.
I can't stop feeling sad.
So I just want to push it away.
This is this is where we learnas as uh particularly children
of alcoholics, children who grewup with mentally unstable
parents or addict parents.
(06:37):
We learn that um, you know, ourway of of dealing with it is to
shut down or compartmentalize.
And so you get to where you youdon't know how to process
through.
So you feel like you can it'sgonna happen and you're never
gonna stop.
You start crying and it's nevergonna end.
Then there's the shame layer,you know, sadness gets twisted
(06:59):
into self-blame and and shame.
So you sort of asking yourself,well, what's wrong with me?
Why why can't why can't I feelsadness?
And then when I feel sadness, Ifeel like I've just gone off a
cliff.
And so what's wrong with meinstead of what happened to me?
You know, many times when I'm inin sessions with people, they'll
(07:19):
tell me their story, and it, youknow, sometimes they'll come
right out and tell me, likethey're reading it from a
biography page or two ofthemselves.
Um when I was in living in LA,people would have these one
sheets where it would be thefront would be the the
photograph of the you know, thethe good looking picture of
them's their headshot, and youturn it around and there's their
(07:43):
there's their biography of whoand what they are.
I and I kind of feel likesometimes clients should
probably come in with those.
Um, because then they could theycould explain it real easily.
And sometimes it feels likethey're reading from something
like that.
They just tell me justmatter-of-factly, this is where
I this is what I grew up with.
And you know, it's I almostthink sometimes it's because
(08:05):
they're trying to figure out ifyou know what they're gonna say
to me is gonna push me away andsay, oh, I can't handle that.
You know, this person's reallygot some deep-seated
pathological issues, probablyfrom all this.
But uh, that doesn't happen.
But it's the question of likewhat happened to me.
So I'll ask them as they'retelling me their story,
sometimes that they're you know,telling me all these
(08:27):
circumstantial things uh abouttheir life that have nothing to
do with anything.
Um, because they're just kind ofskirting around the issue of
what's going on, and after awhile I just kind of look at
them and I'm like, Well, whathappened to you?
And they they many times don'tknow how to answer that question
because the idea of somethinghappening to them never occurred
(08:50):
to them, they just survived it.
So they just you know, theymight tell me about their
parents not being there or beingan addict or the, you know, some
something they moved around alot or whatever, but I'm like,
what happened to you instead ofyou know, what's wrong with you?
(09:11):
Because they're telling mewhat's wrong with them.
But it's not weakness to feel,it's it's being a human.
We have a need to feel.
We use that term in therapy.
We talk about processing yourfeelings.
And when you're processing yourfeelings, really what that means
is you're just feeling yourfeelings.
But when you've been numb foryears, feeling anything can feel
(09:35):
like getting hit by a wave thatyou didn't see coming, you know,
person standing on the beach andthey're facing they're facing
the beach, the ocean is behindthem, and this big huge wave
comes and smacks them down, andthey weren't expecting it.
That's kind of what happens whenyou haven't been feeling
anything for so long.
And and that's why I preparepeople when they come into
(09:56):
therapy and I say, listen, it'sgonna get worse, you're gonna
feel worse before you feelbetter, because this process is
opening up older wounds thatdidn't heal right.
We're getting at the infection,if you will, and trying to get
it out.
So you're just understand,you're gonna feel worse.
(10:17):
And that's why it's importantalso to put the structure around
you, where you're not justseeing a therapist once or twice
a week for an hour at a time,but you're around other people.
So you that's why it's importantto go to meetings, get into
recovery community, get intorecovery groups, have a network
around you.
Because when you're feelingthings, you need to be able to
express it, right?
That's part of the feeling yourfeelings, process your feelings.
(10:40):
And the worst way to processyour feelings is in complete
isolation.
Although that's probably whatyou're gonna want to do because
that's what you're conditionedto do is to isolate.
So how do you safely feel?
How do you do it so you don'tfeel like you're drowning in
sorrow?
So um fighting against it.
(11:02):
You you're gonna panic, you'regonna, you're gonna, it's gonna
get worse.
Um the emotions can feel muchstronger when you're really, you
know, when somebody's somebody'sin that in that uh in that pres
in that present space with you,and um they're bearing witness
to your pain.
Maybe they're validating it foryou, like simple things, it's
(11:24):
things that I'll look atsomebody and go, that was really
wrong, what they did.
You know, when somebody'stelling me about, oh, my parent
did this, my cousin did that, mysibling did this, and I say to
them, wow, that's that wasreally that was really bad and
wrong.
Perhaps that is the first timethey've ever actually heard
somebody say that to them.
(11:45):
And it's quite interesting thereaction that I get when I say
that.
It stops them many times, andthey just like look at me,
they're stunned.
Um and and it's it's uh it's atough thing to experience.
Um but at the same time, whensomebody validates that they
confirm it, yeah, that waswrong.
(12:07):
Um but understand at the basisof this that sadness is
something that is survivable.
If you stop trying to run awayfrom it, it's it's going to
chase you.
You know, the faster you go, themore it's staying with you.
It's gonna stay with you.
Uh you can't outrun it, youcan't ignore it.
(12:29):
Doing that is kind of what's ledyou to the addiction in the
first place, isn't it?
So here's some let me give yousome tips.
Okay.
Um sadness is sadness.
Now, for men, I'm gonna say tothe men, sadness is not
something that we uh do verywell.
(12:51):
We are typically allowed toexpress two emotional responses
to almost everything anger andand funny humor.
That's it.
We're not allowed to be sad orfeel down.
Even feeling anxious can beconsidered a weakness.
Um, but you make a joke aboutit, you laugh it off, you'll
(13:14):
deflect, and you know, butstand-up comedian style.
That's most stand-up comedianshad horrible, tragic lives, uh
trauma-filled.
Um you're you're allowed to dothat, or you're allowed to get
angry.
So you might get explosive andyell at people and whatever, and
really what you're feeling issad.
You're just trying to shove itinto humor or anger, and it
(13:37):
doesn't really fit.
So just call it what it is: sadness, grief, loneliness. (13:38):
undefined
The worst thing you can do, andthis applies to the ladies as
well as men.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Okay, call it what it is.
Don't call it I'm fine.
It's you're not fine.
That's the that's the oppositeof what you are.
(13:59):
Um, don't absorb your sadness.
You can feel sadness withoutbecoming sadness.
Uh, Eckhart Tolley wrote a bookcalled Uh A New Earth, and what
he talked about was umdepression.
And his explanation in the bookuh was basically that he woke up
(14:19):
one day and realized that he wasfeeling depressed first thing
when he woke up.
So what he had become isdepression.
He became depression, and hetook a different approach to
dealing with it after that.
Sadness is kind of the samething.
You you can become sadness.
So you don't absorb it, but youcan you can observe it.
(14:40):
And that's again, you do that inthe presence of another person.
A therapist is a good place todo that.
Um so talk to your therapist,sponsor, you know, your
community group, your yourcommunity recovery community,
talk to God, but get it out ofyour get it out of your head,
and it's gonna stay there, andit's a horrible trap.
(15:04):
But you've got to let, you know,to to to let something else in,
you have to take something outof your head, because there's
only so much room for emotionalresponses.
So you have to let the comfortin.
And in order to do that, youhave to let the sadness out of
your head.
You don't have to isolate toheal.
Actually, it's the worst thingyou could possibly do is try to
(15:24):
isolate because that's what wedo when we're drinking, and
that's what we do when we'regetting high.
We isolate, bunker down in thebasement, and uh start drinking.
So you gotta to let the comfortin, you have to to let people
in.
So the other thing is avoidingemotional shortcut.
(15:46):
Drugs, drama, shopping, sex,internet, alcohol.
Those are all emotional fastfood.
You know, that's the shortcut.
I don't know if you have thisexperience, whenever I'm eating
fast food, I'll eat it.
And literally, like an hour,hour and a half, two hours at
the most later, I'm I'm hungryagain.
(16:07):
That's because it's so full ofsugar and nothing.
It's just uh just there'snothing in there.
So there's no shortcut.
But you're not broken forfeeling sad, you're healing.
Again, it's probably gonna getworse before it gets better.
Um for those of you who are juststarting recovery, um there's
(16:32):
these emotional shock waves thathit you.
When like if you had surgery umand you had anesthesia, when it
wears off, you're gonna feelpain.
It's part of the process.
And when you're using drugs andalcohol or anything else to to
kind of make the emotion goaway, the emotions come flooding
(16:53):
back.
That's part of early recovery.
Um, there's a thing called umwhen when you're through the
early part of recovery, you youthat lasts longer, it's called
pause, post-acute withdrawalsyndrome.
And um that can make you feelsuper sad, like ten times as
sad.
It's ten times bigger becauseyour brain chemistry is starting
(17:17):
to um uh recover.
And so it's trying to rebalance.
So you get this feeling of like,gosh, I just you know, it's been
like nine months, I can'tbelieve how bad I feel.
Well, that's pause.
And that post-acute withdrawalsyndrome can last for a year.
(17:38):
Maybe, maybe sometimes I've seenit sometimes longer when the
reality of kind of what has beengoing on and what you've been
dealing with depends on thecircumstance, but I've had
people that have had really,really you know, major big T
traumas happen, and it takesthem longer to recover from
that.
Um, so the pause might lastlonger than that.
But um don't don't mistake thatfor failure.
(18:03):
Okay, it's your it's your systemrebooting, it's your system
starting over again, and it'strying to learn how to process
emotion.
And again, I can't emphasizethis enough.
You can't really do it byyourself.
Please don't try that.
When you're feeling emotion, youhave to share it, you have to
speak it.
Um putting putting it to wordsmany times makes the power of it
(18:27):
just disappear, especially ifthe person you're talking to is
trained in trauma recovery, butalso the ability to um empathize
with you.
So um there's uh there's a floodof emotion that can happen.
So get hopefully you've beenable to work with somebody and
(18:48):
late, you know, in yourrecovery, hopefully early
enough.
I if you went to rehab, if youhad a good rehab experience, you
you probably would haveunderstood this part, but the
grounding tools, um movement,breath work, journaling, these
are things that you're doingwithin yourself.
This is within your body.
And when you're doing thosethings within your body, what
(19:10):
you're doing is you're you'reretraining your body to
experience the emotion, but doit in a in a healthier way.
Um dealing with the emotionalflood, all right.
Call somebody who gets it.
Get on the phone.
This is why you know sponsorsare so important, and people in
the recovery community are soimportant.
(19:31):
You have to have numbers to callwhen you're feeling bad.
And trust me, don't feel badabout calling them because
they've called people as well.
So they understand it.
People get it if they're inrecovery.
It's like I feel bad, and uh, soyou got a list of names of
people that can really help youout.
Um but you know, white knucklingit.
(19:52):
I'll get through this.
Oh gosh, that's terrible.
Remember, you know, just like inthe ocean, a wave comes and then
it passes by.
It always passes by.
No feeling is permanent.
I'm not gonna be permanentlysad, permanently lonely.
Um it comes and goes.
That's it's normal.
(20:14):
People feel up, then they feeldown, but they're you're gonna
aim towards the middleeventually in recovery.
So turning sadness intostrength.
Let's let's talk about that fora few minutes here.
Sadness softens you, right?
It makes you feel vulnerable,but it reconnects you with the
(20:35):
idea of compassion for othersand for yourself.
And that's what I do as atherapist is I'm working with
the person, I'm I'm getting themto accept the truth.
Like, what is the truth?
And from a Christianperspective, understanding that
truth, there's freedom in that.
Like, you know, you you thingshave happened to you and they
were bad.
Like I said before, it's likewhen I say to somebody, that was
(20:57):
really wrong, that's a truth.
Uh mislabeling trauma assomething that wasn't trauma,
and then getting told in atherapy process, hey, that was
really traumatic what you wentthrough.
That's terrible.
That's that's the softeningpart, right?
So it reconnects you withcompassion.
So you can have compassion foryourself.
(21:18):
If you let the sadness teach youinstead of torture you, you'll
discover empathy and gratitudeon the other side.
So let sadness be the teacher.
Um when we isolate, we're in ourown head.
How are you feeling?
I'm fine, and I'm drinking,drinking, drinking, nobody gets
it, you don't understand, allthat other nonsense that we say
(21:40):
when we're in our worst of ouraddiction.
You're not learning anything.
You're just learning that you'redisconnected and different from
other people.
The other part of what'sinteresting about when people go
to rehab or when they go into umrecovery groups, they start
hearing stories that are justlike theirs.
Um, and I'll tell you, I'm gonnado a podcast in the future about
(22:01):
my experience with that, whichwas it's kind of it's too long
for this individual podcast thatI'm doing right now.
But um, I had this eye-openingexperience when I realized I I
really had suffered childhoodtrauma, but I just didn't
understand that.
Um it was torturing me.
And when I started, it was arelief.
That was the really thebeginnings of my recovery from
(22:22):
from that.
Um, you know, what we teachchildren, little little
children, when they're firstlearning how to swim, we teach
them to float.
That's the first thing we teachthem.
We want to we want to make surethat they can float.
And by float, because babiesare, you know, there's a lot of
body fat on a baby, so they'regonna float anyway.
(22:43):
But, you know, you teach themthat there's safety in the water
here, that you're not out ofcontrol.
You're not gonna sink to thebottom.
And that's that's what peopledon't understand at first when
they're trying to learn how toswim, they think they're gonna
just sink to the bottom.
And, you know, you're in adifferent environment.
I put a child who is two orthree or four years old in water
(23:03):
where they can't touch the, theycan't put their feet on the
bottom, that's a completelyunfamiliar, different
environment for them.
And they they're of course,they're at first they're very
panicked because they're unsureof what's going on.
The more they're in the water,the more comfortable they are.
So if you're if you're trying tolearn how to how to trust um and
(23:25):
and not fight the water, you'regonna be held up by the water.
And that's what they learn.
And so it becomes a saferenvironment for them.
Now, could they uh could theydrown?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
There's no question at thatpoint, yeah, they they could,
because they don't know how toswim.
But you're not gonna learn howto swim if you're fighting the
water all the time and you'repanicked thinking that it's
(23:47):
gonna kill you, so you just keeptrying to avoid it.
So the same emotion that once,you know, made you made you
drink and get high can can helpyou deepen your recovery and
that emotion of sadness.
If you understand the truth, thetruth will set you free.
God didn't put you on thisplanet to suffer.
(24:09):
That's not his intention or hispurpose.
People can cause you to sufferbecause they're exercising free
will around you, but thatdoesn't that that doesn't mean
that that's what that has to befor the rest of your life.
But you can't heal what yourefuse to feel.
If you are allowing yourself tofeel it, then you can recover.
(24:31):
So sadness is not your enemy,it's your messenger.
Listen to it and learn from itand let it move you move through
you.
Let it move through you.
It's not it it is the the way tolearn.
It's or it's torture.
Your choice.
(24:52):
Um, what do you do when it showsup?
Well, don't don't run.
Sit with it.
You know, like I feel s oh, I'mfeeling sad.
Like get that I'm fine messageout of your brain.
Just experience it.
You know, Dan Siegel uh is a uhpsychiatrist uh that um does a
(25:17):
great job of explaining.
He said, you know, when a whenan emotion comes to you, it
comes to you, you feel it, andthen it passes past you, it goes
through you.
He sees emotions as those thingsthat come to you and they go
through you.
Just like a wind.
The wind, it hits you and thenit's past you.
(25:38):
And that's part of what you youneed to be able to do.
Sit with it and let it pass youlike a wave or the wind, and
you'll be surprised at howstrong you really are when you
withstand it.
The running and the hiding isthe weakness, it's not the
strength, and you're not alone.
And there are lifelines allaround you, all you have to do
(25:59):
is just take one.
So you're not by yourself, sodon't isolate.
And when you want to get intorecovery, you can do it.
Stay safe, stay grounded, andalways don't drown in someone
else's chaos either, includingyour own.
(26:20):
Keep your eyes on the shore.
Like, I want to be in thatplace, I want to be in that
safety of that ground because Idon't want to die.
Well, that's it for this episodeof Doc Chuck Your Addiction Life
Guard.
If you need help, please go torehab, go to a hospital, get
(26:42):
into the A rooms, the A A, N A,S A, O A, whatever A.
But don't kill yourself tryingto save your addiction.
That's just insanity.
If you do want to reach out tome for some uh extra help, I can
help you.
Um, I can help guide you from adistance.
But whatever it is, just go outand get the help.
(27:06):
And I I really hope you enjoyedthis podcast.
If you did, please like andsubscribe and listen to the next
episode.
And in the meantime, this is DocShock, your addiction lifeguard,
saying see ya.
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