October 14, 2025 • 41 mins
Adi Jaffe, who shares his journey from addiction to recovery and discusses the founding of Ignited Recovery. Dr. Jaffe talks about his books, "The Abstinence Myth" and "Unhooked," and offers insights on alternative recovery paths, harm reduction, and the importance of honesty in healing.
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(00:01):
Hello, sober town listeners.
Welcome to another episode of Sober Town Podcast.
I'm your host Michael, also known as MMC on the I Am Sober app.
If you're new to Sober Town, welcome, please take a look around.
We offer so much more than just podcasts@sobertownpodcast.com.
There are tools, resources, links for support schedules for online meetings, and ways to get connected.
(00:26):
I hope to see you around.
My guest today is Dr.
Adi Jaffe, EHD.
Dr.
Jaffe is a world renowned expert on mental health, addiction, relationships, and shame.
He is the founder of Ignited Recovery, was a lecturer in the psychology department at UCLA for the better part of a decade and has published two books focused on recovery from addiction and healing.
(00:50):
Dr.
Jaffe, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me on, Michael, it's a pleasure.
I understand your own personal struggle with addiction is what kind of started you on the pathway, uh, to helping others and this kind of.
Recovery.
Would you mind telling us a little bit about your past and getting into that? Yeah.
(01:12):
No, not at all.
I started drinking at the age of 14, which is a pretty common age for people to start experimenting.
I talk about this story in the book, but I discovered alcohol at Sleepaway camp.
I was always socially anxious.
I, it turns out, I hid it pretty well from everybody else, but I was always very socially anxious and introspective.
Never really felt like I was enough, and at a sleep away camp got introduced to alcohol.
(01:36):
I drank it because of social pressures and not really wanting to say no in the middle of a group of new friends.
20 minutes after I took a couple of sips of really warm, disgusting vodka one night, I felt normal.
I felt good.
I, I, I felt this anxiety that had been sort of clouding my reality for my entire.
(02:00):
Conscious life disappear.
And I could talk to people, I could talk to girls and not be nervous, and I loved it.
So from that point on, I started drinking every weekend.
Couple years later got introduced to weed.
By the time I was in college, I was drinking and smoking every single day, all day.
Pretty much had a breakup, depression, found harder drugs, and, and start experimenting with more and more drugs.
(02:22):
I moved from upstate New York to college at UCLA.
And by my last year there doing a lot of ecstasy.
Ended up doing meth through a friend for studying.
Really? I was doing meth for every finals every at the end of every quarter, then midterms and papers, and next thing you know, I was doing meth every day.
And meth became kind of the primary drug that I used.
(02:42):
I, I like to call myself kitchen sink user.
I'll, I'll use almost anything you put in front of me.
But meth definitely became a, a big one for me for about five or six years.
Towards the end of those last three or four years, I was using a lot of meth every single day, like an eight ball of meth a day.
I was down, I'm 165 pounds kind of sitting here in front of you.
I was down to 124 pounds.
(03:04):
Uh, skin and bones, you know, black circles all under my eyes.
I was sleeping every three days and, um, I had to sell drugs in order to be able to use the hundreds of dollars worth of drugs every day that I was using.
So that got me into the criminal world and yeah, just.
Like many people who've been in the depths of addiction at some point that just became my everyday life.
(03:29):
I would stop using about seven different times on my own, but every time I would wake up, say, you know, I don't need it, I would wake up in the morning and kind of feel okay.
After two and a half, three days of not sleeping and finally catching up, but then by three, four o'clock I would have a meth pipe in my mouth again and I'd be using again.
And so I kind of gave up on stopping.
(03:51):
Had a motorcycle accident in Beverly Hills.
I'd already been arrested there before, so they were watching me and, uh, they searched, my jacket found a half a pound.
I had broken my leg, so I had to go to the hospital, but I woke up.
You've probably seen this in shows or movies.
I woke up handcuffed to the bed with a, a big yellow note on my chest that said that this person is under arrest and incarcerated.
(04:13):
Don't let them leave the hospital.
And, um.
My parents came to visit.
I, I mean, it was, it was the beginning of the end was that arrest three months later because the police were trying to get me to, you know, half a pound of Coke.
They realized I probably knew some people who were selling really, really big quantities of drugs.
And so they kept trying to get me to give them names.
(04:35):
I wouldn't.
So three months later, and this is how the, the second book opens, um, the SWAT team came to my apartment and arrested me, and that was.
That was really the big, you know, waking up to about 12 police officers.
Running in my small, um, little one bedroom was probably one of the last big wake up calls before I entered recovery.
(05:00):
And the reason I went to treatment is because the moment I got a lawyer after I, I had a gun, I had a ton of drugs at home.
So I had about a million dollar, almost a million dollar bail.
Um, after spending about a week.
In jail and getting back out.
My lawyer said, look, if you don't go to rehab, you're gonna spend a really long time in prison.
And so that was all the motivation I needed to start going into treatment.
(05:25):
My treatment was certainly not a straight line, um, but once I kind of got my stuff together, found some recovery, found some abstinence, and then I had to go serve a year in jail.
Fascinating.
I, I see a lot of parallels in our stories.
(05:45):
For starters, I also at the social anxieties, and I hear that a lot in the recovery community, especially for people who start drinking and using at a young age.
A lot of times it's because we struggle in those social situations with that peer pressure, and that seems to be a common trigger.
Is to kind of numb those uncomfortable feelings.
(06:06):
We don't have good coping mechanisms, and that is that instant bandaid that helps sort of cover that.
That as we continue to use it, then we develop that physical dependence and you know, it just spirals into this lifelong problem.
Yeah, that's, uh, that's actually a big point of the unhooked book.
(06:28):
My second book that just came out is we look at the addiction and try to fix the addiction, but it's almost always an underlying condition that drove the addiction to start in the first place.
And you can stop the using for a little while, but if you don't approach and really understand and then resolve those underlying issues, at some point, it'll be a game of whack-a-mole, and you'll be right back where you started.
(06:52):
Absolutely.
I'm curious because so many people struggle with long-term recovery when they're forced into a situation to kind of get sober, which, which was kind of your situation.
You didn't Yeah.
So have a lot of choice, uh, in the matter to really do so willingly.
Did you feel like you had a lot of resentment initially in having to get sober, or did you struggle with a lot of anger around that? No, I mean, look.
(07:24):
I knew there were gonna be consequences to what I was doing at some point.
I mean, most people I knew who were selling drugs and using like I did, didn't fare well.
Like the, there weren't many people that were functioning well.
I was just, I was making a lot of money.
It started off kind of, I say innocent, but what I mean is I sold to just friends, but then it became friends of friends and the friends of friends of friends of friends.
(07:45):
And I got other people that would sell for me.
So kind of, it grew organically.
I kind of liked to joke, it was the first business I ever started, but actually that's not even true.
'cause I, I used to wash cars when I was a kid, so maybe the second business I ever started.
But it grew very organically and as my use escalated, it grew because I needed to sell more.
But we, you know, we got to a point where we were selling.
(08:09):
Thousand pills a week and pounds of, and cocaine, I mean everything.
So I knew when the consequences that there was gonna be a to, so I wasn't resentful from standpoint.
I wasn't committed to recovery.
I was committed to trying to not spend a decade in or two in prison.
And so what ended up happening was, and that's, I alluded to this earlier.
(08:30):
I stayed kind of sober my first month and my first rehab.
And by that I mean, you know, I still had a hard time sleeping.
So I would take Tylenol PM or whatever, just to kind of, again, anxiety, right? Still anxiety.
But I didn't wanna deal with it, so I just fixed it by taking something.
It was just Tylenol pm but it was still something.
And so it took me.
That month and then they released me to go to work.
(08:51):
But my work was a recording studio.
The closest thing to a job that I had had the entire time I was selling drugs was making music.
And then I found some meth and some other drugs in my recording studio started using within about a week I was using daily.
And so I, the last two months that I spent in that rehab, I was using every day.
Uh, they ended up testing me.
This was back in, you know, early two thousands.
(09:11):
So it took like a week and a half to get the results of the test back, but they got them back, kicked me out on the spot.
One of the biggest ironies, and I talk about this in both my books, was, you know, they kicked me out of treatment for using, which ended up working out for me.
Seems a little paradoxical, right? It's like you struggle with the issue that you came into the treatment to deal with, and when you show them that you really do have a problem dealing with your drug use, then they kick you out.
(09:38):
And they literally said to me, you know, come back if you can, when you can have 30 days sober, you can come back.
And I said, that's insane.
Like, that's literally the whole point of being here.
Went out this treat, you know, this is early two thousands.
The treatment was relatively expensive.
I think it was like $10,000 a month or whatever.
My parents were paying for it.
I didn't like that.
I'll tell a story in a moment when I left and I got kicked out, right? So it was like load your stuff from the rehab into, I had a Honda Civic that my parents helped me buy 'cause all my money was taken away.
(10:09):
And uh, I ended up having this moment with my dad and a phone call where he called, he used to call me every morning and he called just to check in on me.
I was doing that thing that we do sometimes to cover up our tracks.
And I was lying to him about why I wasn't in the rehab anymore, and I was saying, you know, it's really far to work.
I need to move to a new place that is closer.
But then I actually stopped myself and I ended up telling him the truth.
(10:31):
I said, look, I'm, I'm lying.
Hold on.
I'm lying to you.
I, I've been using for the last two months and I just got kicked out of the rehab and my dad exploded.
And he wasn't the kind of guy who really yelled ever.
Not, I don't know about ever, but hardly ever yelled.
And he started just losing it on me saying, you know, what are you doing? You know you're gonna throw your life away.
You've just spent three months.
(10:52):
We're back to square one.
All the money all the time.
You're gonna spend decades in prison.
What's wrong with you? What? And then he ended it with this question, what do you want? What do you expect us to do now? And it was, that ended up being one of the first moments that I thought about the question, and I realized, you know what? There's nothing you can do.
I have to fix this.
This is my problem.
And in the past, my dad would've said, you know, don't move.
(11:14):
Let me find the next place, or let, let's figure something out.
And this time he was so outta sorts, he didn't know what to do.
And so I ended up taking responsibility, I think really for the first time that this was a problem I had to fix.
I had to solve.
So that's what I did.
I, I kept using for another two weeks.
Well, I had Kaiser Permanente Insurance at the time.
I was going to their outpatient two, three times a week and then looking for ano another place.
(11:36):
And I got connected with the sober living house.
That is where I ended up getting sober, uh, for the next eight months as I was fighting my case in court.
And so when I did end up having to go to jail for that year, I was actually sober for eight months, and then I stayed sober through jail.
So.
You know, it was just a little up and down journey of finding recovery and certainly slipping up multiple times.
(11:58):
Like I said, I used for two whole weeks in between rehab, one where I used for two months and the second rehab.
I think for me it wasn't resentment as much as just being able to recognize that I, I didn't really know what I needed to do, and I needed to pause for a moment.
(12:18):
Just take direction, take advice, listen to somebody else, and just have some humility.
And I think the first moment of humility really came with my dad on that phone call, admitting what was going on instead of what I've been doing the entire rest of my life.
And I was 25 at the time, the entire rest of my life.
I was always trying to look good, even when things were really, really bad.
(12:39):
And this time I just kind of put it all on the line.
I think humility is a huge part of recovery and that's not something we talk about a lot.
It takes a a huge amount of humility to look another person in the eye and say, I messed up.
And again, you talk a lot about breaking down the shame cycle around addiction, and we talk about that a lot in sober town as well.
(13:05):
There is so much intrinsic shame and guilt around addiction for those of us who slip up.
For those of us who use, again after a stretch of recovery, coming back and owning that is one of the hardest things for someone in recovery to do.
Breaking that shame cycle is really, really challenging.
(13:25):
And you know, we could talk for hours, I'm sure about what fuels that shame and where that shame comes from.
But I think an element of that is that that humility piece, right? We have this persona that we wanna put out there, that we have it all together, that we're doing everything well.
And I think you feel like you failed.
(13:45):
Um, yeah.
And I think that's another, by the way, I think that's another thing that doesn't get talked about much.
Shame now gets talked about a lot more because between Gabor, maybe, hopefully some of my work, even Johann Harvey and like some of the stuff that he's done out there, I think shame has entered the lexicon of what happens in addiction pretty well.
Uh, you talked about social anxiety and some underlying factors.
(14:08):
Another piece that I think you just landed on.
That I really learned after working with thousands of people.
It wasn't something I understood about myself that well until I saw it mirrored in so many other people is, you know, there's a stereotype that people who are addicts, people addicted, don't care about anything else, don't care about anybody else, they only care about the drug.
(14:30):
Uh, you know, almost like a sociopathic kind of attribution.
Right.
You know? And.
I can see why by the behavior, but what I learned is for many of us, it's actually this perfectionistic quality where we'll do anything to look good on the outside.
(14:50):
We'll do anything.
To pretend that everything is fine, that, that, you know, we're as close to good as possible, and as, as the train falls farther and farther off the tracks, that means a ton of manipulation, self, and other, right? We're fully manipulating ourselves as we're doing it because stopping and admitting, and this is what I talk about a lot nowadays, if.
(15:12):
We, we run so fast and so far from our demons and the things that truly hurt and bother us, that we're almost outrunning ourselves.
And the only thing to do is to stop, kind of turn around, face it and say, look, we've gotta, we gotta figure out how to live together, right? With all those internal demons, all the skeletons, you young would call that darkness.
(15:34):
The, the negative.
Thought cycles, the negative self-judgment, all that, right? It is kind of like we have to figure out how to work with the shadows and many of us run so far from them because we feel like that makes us imperfect.
And so it looks to other, like we're trying to manipulate them, but in reality we're almost trying to manipulate our entire reality to not confront tho those shadows.
(16:01):
Absolutely.
Well said.
So.
How did you get from getting outta prison, getting outta rehab, to getting your PhD and kind of getting into this where you are today? Yeah, so, you know, first of all, a lot of luck in circumstances.
I, I do have to admit that I got outta jail.
(16:21):
I had nine felonies on my record, and I also had a seven year suspended sentence, so I, I got eight years in prison technically.
But it was one plus seven.
So as long as I did my one year and didn't get in trouble, and then during my five years probation after didn't get in trouble for drugs again, I would never have to serve those seven years.
So the, the judge really did give me a gift around that.
(16:43):
So I got outta jail after a year almost with two years sober at that point.
But I had nine felonies on my record and I had no job history to speak of.
So, you know, you kind of.
If you pad your resume or whatever to try to make it look, look a little bit better.
But I had really no job since my third year in college, maybe four or five years off work, and I tried to get work for about nine to 10 months.
(17:10):
My parents were paying my rent, which again, a ton of privilege, right? A lot of people don't have that available to them, and and I did.
And so with my parents' help and support, after 10 months of looking for work.
Always getting really, really close, but then that background check would happen.
And you have to be honest.
So you have to check, yes, I've been convicted of a felony and give people an explanation, but it was drug related.
(17:32):
But when they saw nine felonies, they, I just, I never got a call back.
So over and over, all, all jobs, pizza, delivery, like anything I would go after, uh, I got rejected and after nine months I said, look, I, I need to find something that I can do just to move forward.
And the one thing.
That I could find that didn't ask that question was going back to school.
(17:57):
So I actually always swore when I got out with my undergrad that I wouldn't be back at school.
I kind of, I sort of looked down at it.
I kind of hated it.
I was smart enough, but I hated doing the work.
I was just not a very motivated student.
I graduated in the lower 50 percentile of my graduating class in high school.
I had like a C plus B minus GPA in college.
(18:18):
I was not a great student and so.
I did the next indicated thing.
I just put one foot in front of the other.
I said, look, the only thing I can do right now is go back to school.
So I went back, which is again, another humbling experience, right? Five years later, I'm going back to school.
I had to do some makeup classes.
Um, I had to, you know, after being a drug dealer and carrying a gun, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, I had to go listen to a teacher.
(18:41):
Again, a lot of humility that had to be involved just to do that.
And then I found out that I loved it because I was actually so motivated and committed to moving my life forward.
And I got paired up with this advisor.
His name's, uh, Dennis Fisher.
He actually retired recently, but he was a professor of psychology and he ended up doing, he was doing research with indigent homeless, um, drug users, injection drug users, doing HIV and hepatitis C research.
(19:08):
And so I, he took me under his wing and gave me a job.
He gave me a job at the research center.
So I got my first job and I was working, doing interviews and giving food in the food bank to.
These, uh, research subjects, these injection drug users, and I really liked it.
I really, really liked it.
I was incredibly motivated.
I showed up early, I did the work.
I, he kept giving me more and more work, and I kept doing well and excelling in it.
(19:32):
And so I ended up getting a scholarship in that school that I didn't even know I could apply to it.
Just like these things just kind of started, you know, I've learned this from my wife.
Now, the universe shows you the path by kind of when you hit the right vein, when you hit the the, the flow.
Things do oftentimes come in to support that path for you.
(19:55):
So that was the first job I could get after jail, about a year and a half in.
I really liked the work I was doing, and I did so well under him that he actually went to bat for me with the judge.
He went to bat for me with the professors at UCLA and helped me get into the PhD because honestly, with the kind of, with the adv, I was such a crappy student in college.
(20:17):
They, they literally told me at UCLA not to even bother applying.
He had had contacts and he knew people.
And so he got me back into UCLA for my PhD.
And I, you know, it wasn't, when I wrote my first book, I barely even realized it's like six, seven years ago.
But there were all these people that ended up playing incredible roles and just helping me find the path, right? Helping me, um, identify opportunities that I didn't, I didn't know of.
(20:49):
That's another piece of that perfectionistic tendency that I have at least, which is I'm gonna figure it out on my own.
'cause I don't like asking for help and I don't wanna look weak.
And so that's one.
There's a recommendation in my new book about we have to throw this notion of success out and realize that everybody who does anything meaningful does it with support and help from others.
(21:10):
Number one.
Failures often on the path to success.
And so, you know, I, I really certainly was one of those, I'll say kids, 18, 20, 22 year olds where I just never wanted to fail at anything.
And that becomes really protective and limiting.
And so that professor got me in and when I got into my PhD program, the final real thing that helped unlock, in my opinion, Michael, the, the path that I was on is everybody told me not to talk about my past.
(21:39):
That was certainly the recommendation from everybody.
All the professors I worked with, they said, you know, look, keep this private.
People don't need to know about this.
And something just felt wrong about that.
If anybody at a dinner party would've asked me, oh, you know what got you into the PhD, I would have to just make up a past.
And I'd spent years between rehab, sober living jail, my parents family learning how to not lie anymore.
(22:07):
The last thing I wanted to do was spend the rest of my life having to lie about a seven year period of my life right up.
I mean, I started heavily, heavily using drugs when I was 20 and I got outta jail at the age of 26.
You know, I got into my master's program right before I turned 27.
Pretty much.
That's like, what do I do, lie to people about seven years of my life in order to hide from the reality.
(22:29):
And so I kind of had to make this decision to just be upfront about it.
There's another piece to it, which is my recovery story is not common, and a lot of people in recovery have a problem with my recovery story.
So it's like I found myself in this weird place where people who didn't understand addiction struggled with knowing my full story and knowing whether they can trust me, and people in recovery kind of had a problem with the way my recovery story unfolded.
(22:57):
So I just have to stay the path.
Really interesting.
You know, one of the things that I love and, and I think one of the few benefits that came out of COVID is how the recovery community has connected online.
Because we are starting to see that there is more to recovery than just one or two pathways, and that's a big focus in sober town.
(23:25):
So unlike some other recovery communities, one of our big things that we preach is that there's no wrong way to Right, a wrong way to recover.
You know, because I've, I've certainly seen that a lot myself, is that there can be some areas that are very.
Can be very judgmental about another person or another person's pathway to recovery.
(23:48):
And sober town is very much against that standpoint as long as an individual finds their pathway to healing.
I'm not gonna judge what it took for you to get there.
It.
It's breaking down those fears and those misunderstandings, and it's not my place to tell you what is right or wrong for you.
So I, I think that's, it's unfortunate that you came up against judgment and criticism for, for doing things in a way that maybe was controversial.
(24:17):
And of course, I don't know why it was so, yeah.
I mean, look.
Yeah, it's, um.
Look, I'm fortunate, right? The movement to change, the narrative in recovery in terms of what qualifies as good recovery has been going on for longer than I've been working, right? It's been going on since the eighties, so it's been going on for 40 some years.
(24:39):
I've only been a part of that discussion for 15 and I had a lot of really great mentors in in footsteps to follow in some of whom I've actually gotten the pleasure to partner with.
I talk about this in the book, I think we're entering a new phase of the mental health understanding, but certainly recovery from addiction in broadening the definition of what recovery is, right? We used to measure it, and this is what the book, the Abstinence Myth is all about.
(25:03):
We used to measure it just based on abstinence, right? And the idea was, you know, when you ask somebody, how's your recovery going? That would give you how many days they have.
I don't consider that a great measure of somebody's recovery.
There are very miserable people with 8,000 days of recovery, and there are people who are doing much better with 120 days of recovery.
(25:25):
We have to measure recovery in a way that works for us, works for the people around us, and in my opinion, improves our quality of life.
Our quality of life is a huge aspect of recovery, but the old school methods of employing recovery, just kind of assume that abstinence would lead to that.
But even the people that I know who did recover in very traditional settings, but, and by that I mean 12 step settings, the ones who are doing really well, they also have a therapist.
(25:50):
They also have an exercise and physical practice.
They have a spiritual practice.
They have a purpose in what they do in their daily life.
They have great relationships that support them, so it's like their 12 step work certainly plays a part in their recovery.
I don't know.
For some of it, it might be 80%.
For some of them it might only be 30%, and the rest they rely on more, but that's okay.
(26:12):
Right.
Our addictions were individual in many, many ways, and it's okay for our recovery path to be individual.
Absolutely.
Totally agree.
Let's talk a little bit about, uh, ignited Recovery.
So that's, uh, the recovery program that you've founded.
Yeah, so I used to run a, an outpatient treatment center, and then in 2017 when that closed down, I decided I really wanna focus on technology, and this was pre COVID.
(26:40):
So the idea of being able to do recovery in this kind of format that we're talking about, like on Zoom right now, was really foreign to people.
I mean, nobody had heard of Zoom in 2017, and.
My idea was simple.
Uh, we haven't talked about it, but I think one of the biggest problems in addiction is that people don't access the help.
So there are about 40 million Americans that struggle every year with addiction, but only about two and a half that go to treatment.
(27:05):
That's less than 10%.
That's about 5% of people that get help.
And I think that's the biggest issue.
And what I realized was that we're never gonna solve that issue with in-person treatment.
There's just no way, like we literally just can't build the capacity, right? So, you know, there's about 13,000 treatment centers in the country right now.
(27:26):
We're not gonna have 130,000 treatment centers.
There's just not no, no time in the near future.
So I realized technology was gonna end up having to be a thing in about 2017.
And so I start experimenting with how do we do that? Literally with a laptop and a video camera.
Started running these online classes that ended up being ignited.
Recovery.
We used to do retreats and things like that in person as well.
(27:46):
But yeah, we've served over 4,500 people at this point.
We help a lot of people now getting outta jail and prison.
We're about to be in some jails in prison, which I'm really excited about.
But the idea is simple.
The idea is to make recovery easy to get on your phone, on your laptop, on a tablet or anything.
Which again, now doesn't sound that revolutionary.
In 2017, it, it was much different.
(28:10):
What we're putting the focus on right now is getting you personalized care at these levels.
And so what I mean by that is we just talked about having different paths.
Well, what does that mean for Michael when she's looking for help? Most people don't know.
Most families don't know, and the horrible thing to say is a lot of practitioners are good at what they do, and so no matter what you struggle with, no matter what's going on for you, they're gonna give you a lot of what they're good at because that's how it works.
(28:39):
It's also really hard to go to a treatment center and treat the clients that have trauma differently than the clients that have attachment issues differently than the clients that are addicted physiologically, right? So what we've decided to do is use technology, and we've been using AI since again, 2018.
So.
Long before everybody was talking about ai, but we've been using it to personalize the care.
(29:00):
So different people go to different groups based on what they need.
They get different workshops and different courses based on what they need, and they even get matched with different coaches based on the specific area that they struggle with the most.
And the idea is, even though it's one app, it's kind of like Netflix, right? You probably have a Netflix account.
I have a Netflix account.
(29:20):
When I go on Netflix, what I see on my homepage is probably completely different than what you see.
Because the technology is good enough to understand that you like watching things that you like, and I like watching the stuff that I like.
And so I wanna bring that to recovery.
I wanna bring that to the help world.
And so again, we've sort over 4,500 people.
We're now in, I mean, we're all over the states and the, and the in the world in terms of people, you know, Canada, England, all the English speaking countries.
(29:47):
But because of technology, we're now auto translating all our stuff into Spanish.
I mean.
Again, the goal is to reach as many people as possible, and technology is making that incredibly helpful and also cheap.
Like our cheapest program, I think is like a hundred and some dollars a month.
You can't get, you can't get a therapy session for a hundred some dollars a month.
Right.
I, I did my research on why people don't get treatment, and the goal of ignited was to remove all the barriers.
(30:13):
That sounds absolutely remarkable and yeah, absolutely groundbreaking to, to be ahead of COVID.
Like you said, we saw a huge push to move a lot of these services online once everybody was working remotely, but you were, you were ahead of the curve on that one, so that's phenomenal.
Yeah.
But it's, it's been nice to see.
(30:34):
I'll be honest.
It's been nice to see everybody come along because I feel like there's so many stereotypes of people who struggle with addiction.
Again, we've talked about they don't care about anybody else.
Their brain doesn't work, right.
Right.
They're damaged.
They have the genetic, uh, like they have the addiction gene.
Like all these things are essentially ways of telling us we're broken and there's something wrong with us as as humans.
But then the second piece is on the treatment side, right? We work with judges, we work with a lot of people that would say this, well, no, I can't trust a client if they're not sitting in front of me.
(31:00):
Well.
COVID made a way with at least a substantial portion of that because for a while you had to figure out how to talk to people on a screen.
And so I think there are hybrid ways there.
There are a lot of really cool things that we can do now that we never thought we could do before.
And then I also wanna touch on your books.
So I know these have come up a little bit in the discussion.
So the first one, uh, that you published was the Abstinence Myth that came out a couple years ago.
(31:25):
What was that? Yeah, that came out in 2018 and it kind of actually dealt with two different myths.
One we already talked about, I would argue even in 2018, but certainly before that abstinence was the number one measure of somebody's recovery.
Actually almost the only measure of somebody's recovery.
(31:45):
How are you doing in your recovery? Somebody would, oh, I've got a year and a half.
I've got seven years.
Oh, the seven years person is doing better than the one and a half years, right? The, the 30 day person is not doing as well as the 60 day person.
And, and that was the measure.
And what I argue is we have to stop measuring recovery only given absence.
It's not a great measure by itself.
And then the second myth was.
(32:05):
I believe strongly we have to stop demanding abstinence or commitment to abstinence from anybody who seeks help.
Because the research that I did when I was a postdoc at UCLA showed there are a lot of people who want help for their addiction, but they're not a hundred percent sure that they're ready to quit forever.
We need to find ways to help those people as well.
And I've found, you know, of the 4,500 people we've served.
(32:28):
Over 40 to 50% of the people come in are not coming in to look for abstinence.
And yet some of them find abstinence.
Some of them find moderate use, uh, and I'll say reduced use that is functional for them.
And if we want more people to get help, we have to stop putting up walls for them to get help.
So that was what the abstinence meant was about, and it really gave people pretty actionable tools to just find the earliest steps to their recovery.
(32:55):
But it makes me think of, uh, harm reduction, uh, which is a tool that I just heard of a few years ago myself.
Um, so yeah, again, kind of going back to that conversation of different pathways, slowly but surely starting to come out and changing the narrative a little bit around recovery.
We're getting there.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, absolutely.
I mean, harm again, harm reduction's.
(33:16):
Been around for 40, 50 years.
But it used to really be mostly associated with needle exchanges for heroin users or safe injection sites and things like that.
And that is part of harm reduction.
But the idea of harm reduction is simple, is how can I help you? Even if you're not ready to quit technically, even if you're not ready to use less, create a healthier life.
(33:39):
And I think what it creates is it creates a connection for all those people that are not willing to commit to abstinence, yet it creates a clinical connection with somebody who's a helper.
Then again, I've met many, many people that I've helped stop completely who didn't come in looking to stop because they realized later that they wanted to.
And so that's one angle.
But like I also said, I've also helped people who didn't wanna stop.
(34:03):
Fix their life and reduce their use by let's say 70, 80%.
And they're doing really, really well right now with that.
So opening up our minds to what is possible, and I'm not sober, just so it's clear, that's one of the things that really bothers a lot of people in recovery is I'm not sober.
Um, I probably only drink like once or twice a week, but I mean once or twice a month.
Um, you know, but I talk pretty publicly about some of the other experimentation with psychedelics and stuff like that, that I've done over the years.
(34:29):
So it's, those things used to be.
Um, exclusions, right? You couldn't even say to people that you were in recovery, they would fight you on it.
And, um, and so that was what the abstine that it was, was just opening up the conversation to what is possible, unhooked, uh, free yourself from addiction forever.
Yeah, I'm really excited about unhooked because what it does is it takes some of the lessons from the abstinence myth.
(34:54):
What I've been able to do is create a really basic model that a lot of people can follow if they wanna change their behavior.
The reason it's called unhooked is, you know, a lot of people say, I'm hooked on cocaine, or I'm hooked on this TV show.
I'm hooked on a video game.
I'm hooked on porn, I'm hooked on drugs.
And the point I make in the book is the real hooks are those underlying anxieties, depression, attachment, traumas, things of that nature.
(35:17):
That's the real hook.
And if you think you're hooked on cocaine, you'll try to quit cocaine.
If you understand that you're hooked on pain from trauma, you're gonna try to fix the trauma.
And when you fix the trauma.
Magically, the cocaine becomes less enticing, magically the alcohol becomes less necessary, and what I espouse and unhooked is true recovery, in my opinion.
(35:40):
It's kind of like this ongoing process of learning from negative outcomes, learning from mistakes, learning from failures.
Like we said before, failures are often.
What paves the road to success, and so learning from those, but then how to incorporate the learnings into your life so that you constantly are iterating, you're constantly making your life your state of mind, you're functioning better.
(36:03):
Absolutely fascinating and there are a million things we could unpack from this conversation and go go off into to pathways for hours.
But the removing of the fear element when you start bringing people in and giving them the option instead of just abstinence based recovery, just knowing that they can come in without.
(36:24):
That being their only option lets them open the conversation more.
I think that in and of itself is going to invite more people to feel welcome, to come and have the conversation than thinking if I'm going to an addiction treatment specialist, they're going to tell me I have to quit.
And that's it.
A hundred percent.
(36:44):
Yeah.
Couldn't agree more and.
First of all, we're making people lie to us.
We're we're taking people who are not ready to quit forever, and we're making them tell us that they're ready to quit forever.
So now we're starting the treatment episode with a lie, which is probably not the best idea when you're trying to get somebody to be honest and have humility and explore their inner needs.
(37:06):
And if they don't even feel comfortable enough telling you that they're scared that they may not be able to quit forever.
How are you gonna build better on that? So that's even for the people that are willing to lie to us.
But then a lot of other people say, I'm, I'm just gonna stay away.
I'm not doing that 'cause I'm not ready for that.
So that's number one.
But the other piece is actually for the practitioners because if I can, I think telling somebody that they have to not use is a little bit of a cop out for those of us who are in the helping side of things.
(37:34):
Because that's sort of like telling somebody who's depressed that they need to not be sad.
It's okay, but how? How do I get to that place? Right? I'm not using, like I said, I tried seven times to quit.
At least I was, I would wake up in the morning committed to doing it, and then I would fail.
(37:56):
So it's not that I didn't understand that I needed to either not use it all or use a lot less.
It's not like our brain doesn't work.
We understand that it would be great if we could stop, especially some of the harder drugs or we get it, but when we stop, our life falls apart.
Because of all the other hooks that are in us.
Right? And so I think for the practitioners, for the helpers, for the therapists, if I tell you to stop using and that I can't treat you, if you are using, then when you use, I get to blame you for not working.
(38:28):
'cause I can say, look, I gave them the the rules.
These were the rules and they used, but as an example I give in the book literally is.
If you went to a therapist for your depression and they told you, look, I'm, I'm willing to take you on, but you can't be depressed while we work together.
You'd laugh and walk out of the room.
You'd say, what the hell are you talking about? And so just like me getting kicked out of rehab, as long as I, I'm using, and I, if I can get 30 days sober, I could come back like a, that's like a cancer, like a, like an endocrinologist telling you that as long as you can take care of your own.
(39:00):
Thyroid issue, then they'll treat you.
Though we've been doing this to people for 80, 90 years in the treatment space, right? Oh, they relapsed.
That must mean they didn't really care about the therapy.
So I think both of us, both sides, the clients and the helpers need to understand.
(39:21):
The path to somebody's improved life is one of iteration.
It's, it's trial and error.
It's support, it's care, it's not judgment and putting up walls always.
Now, again, boundaries, safety, right? We do wanna maximize safety, but people would tell me before that, because I don't demand abstinence and I make it seem okay to try for moderation or something like that, that I'm gonna kill people.
(39:46):
And I said, Hey, people are dying every day.
95% of them are not getting help.
So I'm gonna argue that the current system is killing people by keeping them out of care.
And by being more inclusive, we get to bring more people in.
And I can, every bone in my body tells me that if we bring more people into care, we will save many, many more lives.
(40:11):
I would agree with you 100%.
We, we need to come at things with fresh perspectives and try new things.
And by the way, I'm obviously not the only one.
There are a lot, there are a lot of people that have new offerings.
That's actually what I say to people in the book is go out, explore, but like, don't only explore techniques to quit cocaine, right? Explore your inner trauma and then go read books, get therapy, do workshops and retreats or whatever that is, right to deal with your trauma or your depression or your anxiety, right? If you need medication, seek medication.
(40:48):
There are a ton of tools to deal with the underlying issues, and I think the moment you understand that, that is, um, a primary focus, at least I'll say, if not the only focus, all of a sudden there's this world of opportunity in front of you.
We agree.
J.
This has been an amazing conversation.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
(41:09):
We will definitely link to your books, United Recovery, your webpage, anything else that we can share so that people can connect with you who hear the show.
Are there any other closing thoughts, comments you would like to leave the listeners with? Yeah.
You know, it's funny this, there's this question that comes up in some podcasts, so now I'm just going to leave it as a, as a takeaway in the end.
(41:30):
A lot of people ask me, you know, what's, if there was one thing, one recommendation people can take away today to help them, and you could only give them one piece of advice, what would it be? Uh, and I've landed on stop line, stop Lying to yourself and other people.
As you heard in part of my story, it was the moment that I just started confronting the reality of what was happening for me.
(41:52):
That everything turned around, and I'm not gonna lie to you, it's painful in the beginning.
It hurts for a short period of time.
Then it clears everything much, much faster than any other tool that I've found.
And so if there's just one recommendation, if there's just one thing you wanna take on and try to adjust your life according to, in order to move forward, uh, in a proactive way that will get you where you want to go.
(42:17):
Stop lying yourself in others.
Try to just be brutally honest from this moment forward and see where it gets here.
Solid advice.
Thank you again for joining us Sober Town listeners, thank you for, uh, joining and listening today, and we will see you next time.
Hello, sober town listeners.
Welcome to another episode of Sober Town Podcast.
I'm your host Michael, also known as MMC on the I Am Sober app.
If you're new to Sober Town, welcome, please take a look around.
We offer so much more than just podcasts@sobertownpodcast.com.
There are tools, resources, links for support schedules for online meetings, and ways to get connected.
(00:26):
I hope to see you around.
My guest today is Dr.
Adi Jaffe, EHD.
Dr.
Jaffe is a world renowned expert on mental health, addiction, relationships, and shame.
He is the founder of Ignited Recovery, was a lecturer in the psychology department at UCLA for the better part of a decade and has published two books focused on recovery from addiction and healing.
(00:50):
Dr.
Jaffe, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me on, Michael, it's a pleasure.
I understand your own personal struggle with addiction is what kind of started you on the pathway, uh, to helping others and this kind of.
Recovery.
Would you mind telling us a little bit about your past and getting into that? Yeah.
(01:12):
No, not at all.
I started drinking at the age of 14, which is a pretty common age for people to start experimenting.
I talk about this story in the book, but I discovered alcohol at Sleepaway camp.
I was always socially anxious.
I, it turns out, I hid it pretty well from everybody else, but I was always very socially anxious and introspective.
Never really felt like I was enough, and at a sleep away camp got introduced to alcohol.
(01:36):
I drank it because of social pressures and not really wanting to say no in the middle of a group of new friends.
20 minutes after I took a couple of sips of really warm, disgusting vodka one night, I felt normal.
I felt good.
I, I, I felt this anxiety that had been sort of clouding my reality for my entire.
(02:00):
Conscious life disappear.
And I could talk to people, I could talk to girls and not be nervous, and I loved it.
So from that point on, I started drinking every weekend.
Couple years later got introduced to weed.
By the time I was in college, I was drinking and smoking every single day, all day.
Pretty much had a breakup, depression, found harder drugs, and, and start experimenting with more and more drugs.
(02:22):
I moved from upstate New York to college at UCLA.
And by my last year there doing a lot of ecstasy.
Ended up doing meth through a friend for studying.
Really? I was doing meth for every finals every at the end of every quarter, then midterms and papers, and next thing you know, I was doing meth every day.
And meth became kind of the primary drug that I used.
(02:42):
I, I like to call myself kitchen sink user.
I'll, I'll use almost anything you put in front of me.
But meth definitely became a, a big one for me for about five or six years.
Towards the end of those last three or four years, I was using a lot of meth every single day, like an eight ball of meth a day.
I was down, I'm 165 pounds kind of sitting here in front of you.
I was down to 124 pounds.
(03:04):
Uh, skin and bones, you know, black circles all under my eyes.
I was sleeping every three days and, um, I had to sell drugs in order to be able to use the hundreds of dollars worth of drugs every day that I was using.
So that got me into the criminal world and yeah, just.
Like many people who've been in the depths of addiction at some point that just became my everyday life.
(03:29):
I would stop using about seven different times on my own, but every time I would wake up, say, you know, I don't need it, I would wake up in the morning and kind of feel okay.
After two and a half, three days of not sleeping and finally catching up, but then by three, four o'clock I would have a meth pipe in my mouth again and I'd be using again.
And so I kind of gave up on stopping.
(03:51):
Had a motorcycle accident in Beverly Hills.
I'd already been arrested there before, so they were watching me and, uh, they searched, my jacket found a half a pound.
I had broken my leg, so I had to go to the hospital, but I woke up.
You've probably seen this in shows or movies.
I woke up handcuffed to the bed with a, a big yellow note on my chest that said that this person is under arrest and incarcerated.
(04:13):
Don't let them leave the hospital.
And, um.
My parents came to visit.
I, I mean, it was, it was the beginning of the end was that arrest three months later because the police were trying to get me to, you know, half a pound of Coke.
They realized I probably knew some people who were selling really, really big quantities of drugs.
And so they kept trying to get me to give them names.
(04:35):
I wouldn't.
So three months later, and this is how the, the second book opens, um, the SWAT team came to my apartment and arrested me, and that was.
That was really the big, you know, waking up to about 12 police officers.
Running in my small, um, little one bedroom was probably one of the last big wake up calls before I entered recovery.
(05:00):
And the reason I went to treatment is because the moment I got a lawyer after I, I had a gun, I had a ton of drugs at home.
So I had about a million dollar, almost a million dollar bail.
Um, after spending about a week.
In jail and getting back out.
My lawyer said, look, if you don't go to rehab, you're gonna spend a really long time in prison.
And so that was all the motivation I needed to start going into treatment.
(05:25):
My treatment was certainly not a straight line, um, but once I kind of got my stuff together, found some recovery, found some abstinence, and then I had to go serve a year in jail.
Fascinating.
I, I see a lot of parallels in our stories.
(05:45):
For starters, I also at the social anxieties, and I hear that a lot in the recovery community, especially for people who start drinking and using at a young age.
A lot of times it's because we struggle in those social situations with that peer pressure, and that seems to be a common trigger.
Is to kind of numb those uncomfortable feelings.
(06:06):
We don't have good coping mechanisms, and that is that instant bandaid that helps sort of cover that.
That as we continue to use it, then we develop that physical dependence and you know, it just spirals into this lifelong problem.
Yeah, that's, uh, that's actually a big point of the unhooked book.
(06:28):
My second book that just came out is we look at the addiction and try to fix the addiction, but it's almost always an underlying condition that drove the addiction to start in the first place.
And you can stop the using for a little while, but if you don't approach and really understand and then resolve those underlying issues, at some point, it'll be a game of whack-a-mole, and you'll be right back where you started.
(06:52):
Absolutely.
I'm curious because so many people struggle with long-term recovery when they're forced into a situation to kind of get sober, which, which was kind of your situation.
You didn't Yeah.
So have a lot of choice, uh, in the matter to really do so willingly.
Did you feel like you had a lot of resentment initially in having to get sober, or did you struggle with a lot of anger around that? No, I mean, look.
(07:24):
I knew there were gonna be consequences to what I was doing at some point.
I mean, most people I knew who were selling drugs and using like I did, didn't fare well.
Like the, there weren't many people that were functioning well.
I was just, I was making a lot of money.
It started off kind of, I say innocent, but what I mean is I sold to just friends, but then it became friends of friends and the friends of friends of friends of friends.
(07:45):
And I got other people that would sell for me.
So kind of, it grew organically.
I kind of liked to joke, it was the first business I ever started, but actually that's not even true.
'cause I, I used to wash cars when I was a kid, so maybe the second business I ever started.
But it grew very organically and as my use escalated, it grew because I needed to sell more.
But we, you know, we got to a point where we were selling.
(08:09):
Thousand pills a week and pounds of, and cocaine, I mean everything.
So I knew when the consequences that there was gonna be a to, so I wasn't resentful from standpoint.
I wasn't committed to recovery.
I was committed to trying to not spend a decade in or two in prison.
And so what ended up happening was, and that's, I alluded to this earlier.
(08:30):
I stayed kind of sober my first month and my first rehab.
And by that I mean, you know, I still had a hard time sleeping.
So I would take Tylenol PM or whatever, just to kind of, again, anxiety, right? Still anxiety.
But I didn't wanna deal with it, so I just fixed it by taking something.
It was just Tylenol pm but it was still something.
And so it took me.
That month and then they released me to go to work.
(08:51):
But my work was a recording studio.
The closest thing to a job that I had had the entire time I was selling drugs was making music.
And then I found some meth and some other drugs in my recording studio started using within about a week I was using daily.
And so I, the last two months that I spent in that rehab, I was using every day.
Uh, they ended up testing me.
This was back in, you know, early two thousands.
(09:11):
So it took like a week and a half to get the results of the test back, but they got them back, kicked me out on the spot.
One of the biggest ironies, and I talk about this in both my books, was, you know, they kicked me out of treatment for using, which ended up working out for me.
Seems a little paradoxical, right? It's like you struggle with the issue that you came into the treatment to deal with, and when you show them that you really do have a problem dealing with your drug use, then they kick you out.
(09:38):
And they literally said to me, you know, come back if you can, when you can have 30 days sober, you can come back.
And I said, that's insane.
Like, that's literally the whole point of being here.
Went out this treat, you know, this is early two thousands.
The treatment was relatively expensive.
I think it was like $10,000 a month or whatever.
My parents were paying for it.
I didn't like that.
I'll tell a story in a moment when I left and I got kicked out, right? So it was like load your stuff from the rehab into, I had a Honda Civic that my parents helped me buy 'cause all my money was taken away.
(10:09):
And uh, I ended up having this moment with my dad and a phone call where he called, he used to call me every morning and he called just to check in on me.
I was doing that thing that we do sometimes to cover up our tracks.
And I was lying to him about why I wasn't in the rehab anymore, and I was saying, you know, it's really far to work.
I need to move to a new place that is closer.
But then I actually stopped myself and I ended up telling him the truth.
(10:31):
I said, look, I'm, I'm lying.
Hold on.
I'm lying to you.
I, I've been using for the last two months and I just got kicked out of the rehab and my dad exploded.
And he wasn't the kind of guy who really yelled ever.
Not, I don't know about ever, but hardly ever yelled.
And he started just losing it on me saying, you know, what are you doing? You know you're gonna throw your life away.
You've just spent three months.
(10:52):
We're back to square one.
All the money all the time.
You're gonna spend decades in prison.
What's wrong with you? What? And then he ended it with this question, what do you want? What do you expect us to do now? And it was, that ended up being one of the first moments that I thought about the question, and I realized, you know what? There's nothing you can do.
I have to fix this.
This is my problem.
And in the past, my dad would've said, you know, don't move.
(11:14):
Let me find the next place, or let, let's figure something out.
And this time he was so outta sorts, he didn't know what to do.
And so I ended up taking responsibility, I think really for the first time that this was a problem I had to fix.
I had to solve.
So that's what I did.
I, I kept using for another two weeks.
Well, I had Kaiser Permanente Insurance at the time.
I was going to their outpatient two, three times a week and then looking for ano another place.
(11:36):
And I got connected with the sober living house.
That is where I ended up getting sober, uh, for the next eight months as I was fighting my case in court.
And so when I did end up having to go to jail for that year, I was actually sober for eight months, and then I stayed sober through jail.
So.
You know, it was just a little up and down journey of finding recovery and certainly slipping up multiple times.
(11:58):
Like I said, I used for two whole weeks in between rehab, one where I used for two months and the second rehab.
I think for me it wasn't resentment as much as just being able to recognize that I, I didn't really know what I needed to do, and I needed to pause for a moment.
(12:18):
Just take direction, take advice, listen to somebody else, and just have some humility.
And I think the first moment of humility really came with my dad on that phone call, admitting what was going on instead of what I've been doing the entire rest of my life.
And I was 25 at the time, the entire rest of my life.
I was always trying to look good, even when things were really, really bad.
(12:39):
And this time I just kind of put it all on the line.
I think humility is a huge part of recovery and that's not something we talk about a lot.
It takes a a huge amount of humility to look another person in the eye and say, I messed up.
And again, you talk a lot about breaking down the shame cycle around addiction, and we talk about that a lot in sober town as well.
(13:05):
There is so much intrinsic shame and guilt around addiction for those of us who slip up.
For those of us who use, again after a stretch of recovery, coming back and owning that is one of the hardest things for someone in recovery to do.
Breaking that shame cycle is really, really challenging.
(13:25):
And you know, we could talk for hours, I'm sure about what fuels that shame and where that shame comes from.
But I think an element of that is that that humility piece, right? We have this persona that we wanna put out there, that we have it all together, that we're doing everything well.
And I think you feel like you failed.
(13:45):
Um, yeah.
And I think that's another, by the way, I think that's another thing that doesn't get talked about much.
Shame now gets talked about a lot more because between Gabor, maybe, hopefully some of my work, even Johann Harvey and like some of the stuff that he's done out there, I think shame has entered the lexicon of what happens in addiction pretty well.
Uh, you talked about social anxiety and some underlying factors.
(14:08):
Another piece that I think you just landed on.
That I really learned after working with thousands of people.
It wasn't something I understood about myself that well until I saw it mirrored in so many other people is, you know, there's a stereotype that people who are addicts, people addicted, don't care about anything else, don't care about anybody else, they only care about the drug.
(14:30):
Uh, you know, almost like a sociopathic kind of attribution.
Right.
You know? And.
I can see why by the behavior, but what I learned is for many of us, it's actually this perfectionistic quality where we'll do anything to look good on the outside.
(14:50):
We'll do anything.
To pretend that everything is fine, that, that, you know, we're as close to good as possible, and as, as the train falls farther and farther off the tracks, that means a ton of manipulation, self, and other, right? We're fully manipulating ourselves as we're doing it because stopping and admitting, and this is what I talk about a lot nowadays, if.
(15:12):
We, we run so fast and so far from our demons and the things that truly hurt and bother us, that we're almost outrunning ourselves.
And the only thing to do is to stop, kind of turn around, face it and say, look, we've gotta, we gotta figure out how to live together, right? With all those internal demons, all the skeletons, you young would call that darkness.
(15:34):
The, the negative.
Thought cycles, the negative self-judgment, all that, right? It is kind of like we have to figure out how to work with the shadows and many of us run so far from them because we feel like that makes us imperfect.
And so it looks to other, like we're trying to manipulate them, but in reality we're almost trying to manipulate our entire reality to not confront tho those shadows.
(16:01):
Absolutely.
Well said.
So.
How did you get from getting outta prison, getting outta rehab, to getting your PhD and kind of getting into this where you are today? Yeah, so, you know, first of all, a lot of luck in circumstances.
I, I do have to admit that I got outta jail.
(16:21):
I had nine felonies on my record, and I also had a seven year suspended sentence, so I, I got eight years in prison technically.
But it was one plus seven.
So as long as I did my one year and didn't get in trouble, and then during my five years probation after didn't get in trouble for drugs again, I would never have to serve those seven years.
So the, the judge really did give me a gift around that.
(16:43):
So I got outta jail after a year almost with two years sober at that point.
But I had nine felonies on my record and I had no job history to speak of.
So, you know, you kind of.
If you pad your resume or whatever to try to make it look, look a little bit better.
But I had really no job since my third year in college, maybe four or five years off work, and I tried to get work for about nine to 10 months.
(17:10):
My parents were paying my rent, which again, a ton of privilege, right? A lot of people don't have that available to them, and and I did.
And so with my parents' help and support, after 10 months of looking for work.
Always getting really, really close, but then that background check would happen.
And you have to be honest.
So you have to check, yes, I've been convicted of a felony and give people an explanation, but it was drug related.
(17:32):
But when they saw nine felonies, they, I just, I never got a call back.
So over and over, all, all jobs, pizza, delivery, like anything I would go after, uh, I got rejected and after nine months I said, look, I, I need to find something that I can do just to move forward.
And the one thing.
That I could find that didn't ask that question was going back to school.
(17:57):
So I actually always swore when I got out with my undergrad that I wouldn't be back at school.
I kind of, I sort of looked down at it.
I kind of hated it.
I was smart enough, but I hated doing the work.
I was just not a very motivated student.
I graduated in the lower 50 percentile of my graduating class in high school.
I had like a C plus B minus GPA in college.
(18:18):
I was not a great student and so.
I did the next indicated thing.
I just put one foot in front of the other.
I said, look, the only thing I can do right now is go back to school.
So I went back, which is again, another humbling experience, right? Five years later, I'm going back to school.
I had to do some makeup classes.
Um, I had to, you know, after being a drug dealer and carrying a gun, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, I had to go listen to a teacher.
(18:41):
Again, a lot of humility that had to be involved just to do that.
And then I found out that I loved it because I was actually so motivated and committed to moving my life forward.
And I got paired up with this advisor.
His name's, uh, Dennis Fisher.
He actually retired recently, but he was a professor of psychology and he ended up doing, he was doing research with indigent homeless, um, drug users, injection drug users, doing HIV and hepatitis C research.
(19:08):
And so I, he took me under his wing and gave me a job.
He gave me a job at the research center.
So I got my first job and I was working, doing interviews and giving food in the food bank to.
These, uh, research subjects, these injection drug users, and I really liked it.
I really, really liked it.
I was incredibly motivated.
I showed up early, I did the work.
I, he kept giving me more and more work, and I kept doing well and excelling in it.
(19:32):
And so I ended up getting a scholarship in that school that I didn't even know I could apply to it.
Just like these things just kind of started, you know, I've learned this from my wife.
Now, the universe shows you the path by kind of when you hit the right vein, when you hit the the, the flow.
Things do oftentimes come in to support that path for you.
(19:55):
So that was the first job I could get after jail, about a year and a half in.
I really liked the work I was doing, and I did so well under him that he actually went to bat for me with the judge.
He went to bat for me with the professors at UCLA and helped me get into the PhD because honestly, with the kind of, with the adv, I was such a crappy student in college.
(20:17):
They, they literally told me at UCLA not to even bother applying.
He had had contacts and he knew people.
And so he got me back into UCLA for my PhD.
And I, you know, it wasn't, when I wrote my first book, I barely even realized it's like six, seven years ago.
But there were all these people that ended up playing incredible roles and just helping me find the path, right? Helping me, um, identify opportunities that I didn't, I didn't know of.
(20:49):
That's another piece of that perfectionistic tendency that I have at least, which is I'm gonna figure it out on my own.
'cause I don't like asking for help and I don't wanna look weak.
And so that's one.
There's a recommendation in my new book about we have to throw this notion of success out and realize that everybody who does anything meaningful does it with support and help from others.
(21:10):
Number one.
Failures often on the path to success.
And so, you know, I, I really certainly was one of those, I'll say kids, 18, 20, 22 year olds where I just never wanted to fail at anything.
And that becomes really protective and limiting.
And so that professor got me in and when I got into my PhD program, the final real thing that helped unlock, in my opinion, Michael, the, the path that I was on is everybody told me not to talk about my past.
(21:39):
That was certainly the recommendation from everybody.
All the professors I worked with, they said, you know, look, keep this private.
People don't need to know about this.
And something just felt wrong about that.
If anybody at a dinner party would've asked me, oh, you know what got you into the PhD, I would have to just make up a past.
And I'd spent years between rehab, sober living jail, my parents family learning how to not lie anymore.
(22:07):
The last thing I wanted to do was spend the rest of my life having to lie about a seven year period of my life right up.
I mean, I started heavily, heavily using drugs when I was 20 and I got outta jail at the age of 26.
You know, I got into my master's program right before I turned 27.
Pretty much.
That's like, what do I do, lie to people about seven years of my life in order to hide from the reality.
(22:29):
And so I kind of had to make this decision to just be upfront about it.
There's another piece to it, which is my recovery story is not common, and a lot of people in recovery have a problem with my recovery story.
So it's like I found myself in this weird place where people who didn't understand addiction struggled with knowing my full story and knowing whether they can trust me, and people in recovery kind of had a problem with the way my recovery story unfolded.
(22:57):
So I just have to stay the path.
Really interesting.
You know, one of the things that I love and, and I think one of the few benefits that came out of COVID is how the recovery community has connected online.
Because we are starting to see that there is more to recovery than just one or two pathways, and that's a big focus in sober town.
(23:25):
So unlike some other recovery communities, one of our big things that we preach is that there's no wrong way to Right, a wrong way to recover.
You know, because I've, I've certainly seen that a lot myself, is that there can be some areas that are very.
Can be very judgmental about another person or another person's pathway to recovery.
(23:48):
And sober town is very much against that standpoint as long as an individual finds their pathway to healing.
I'm not gonna judge what it took for you to get there.
It.
It's breaking down those fears and those misunderstandings, and it's not my place to tell you what is right or wrong for you.
So I, I think that's, it's unfortunate that you came up against judgment and criticism for, for doing things in a way that maybe was controversial.
(24:17):
And of course, I don't know why it was so, yeah.
I mean, look.
Yeah, it's, um.
Look, I'm fortunate, right? The movement to change, the narrative in recovery in terms of what qualifies as good recovery has been going on for longer than I've been working, right? It's been going on since the eighties, so it's been going on for 40 some years.
(24:39):
I've only been a part of that discussion for 15 and I had a lot of really great mentors in in footsteps to follow in some of whom I've actually gotten the pleasure to partner with.
I talk about this in the book, I think we're entering a new phase of the mental health understanding, but certainly recovery from addiction in broadening the definition of what recovery is, right? We used to measure it, and this is what the book, the Abstinence Myth is all about.
(25:03):
We used to measure it just based on abstinence, right? And the idea was, you know, when you ask somebody, how's your recovery going? That would give you how many days they have.
I don't consider that a great measure of somebody's recovery.
There are very miserable people with 8,000 days of recovery, and there are people who are doing much better with 120 days of recovery.
(25:25):
We have to measure recovery in a way that works for us, works for the people around us, and in my opinion, improves our quality of life.
Our quality of life is a huge aspect of recovery, but the old school methods of employing recovery, just kind of assume that abstinence would lead to that.
But even the people that I know who did recover in very traditional settings, but, and by that I mean 12 step settings, the ones who are doing really well, they also have a therapist.
(25:50):
They also have an exercise and physical practice.
They have a spiritual practice.
They have a purpose in what they do in their daily life.
They have great relationships that support them, so it's like their 12 step work certainly plays a part in their recovery.
I don't know.
For some of it, it might be 80%.
For some of them it might only be 30%, and the rest they rely on more, but that's okay.
(26:12):
Right.
Our addictions were individual in many, many ways, and it's okay for our recovery path to be individual.
Absolutely.
Totally agree.
Let's talk a little bit about, uh, ignited Recovery.
So that's, uh, the recovery program that you've founded.
Yeah, so I used to run a, an outpatient treatment center, and then in 2017 when that closed down, I decided I really wanna focus on technology, and this was pre COVID.
(26:40):
So the idea of being able to do recovery in this kind of format that we're talking about, like on Zoom right now, was really foreign to people.
I mean, nobody had heard of Zoom in 2017, and.
My idea was simple.
Uh, we haven't talked about it, but I think one of the biggest problems in addiction is that people don't access the help.
So there are about 40 million Americans that struggle every year with addiction, but only about two and a half that go to treatment.
(27:05):
That's less than 10%.
That's about 5% of people that get help.
And I think that's the biggest issue.
And what I realized was that we're never gonna solve that issue with in-person treatment.
There's just no way, like we literally just can't build the capacity, right? So, you know, there's about 13,000 treatment centers in the country right now.
(27:26):
We're not gonna have 130,000 treatment centers.
There's just not no, no time in the near future.
So I realized technology was gonna end up having to be a thing in about 2017.
And so I start experimenting with how do we do that? Literally with a laptop and a video camera.
Started running these online classes that ended up being ignited.
Recovery.
We used to do retreats and things like that in person as well.
(27:46):
But yeah, we've served over 4,500 people at this point.
We help a lot of people now getting outta jail and prison.
We're about to be in some jails in prison, which I'm really excited about.
But the idea is simple.
The idea is to make recovery easy to get on your phone, on your laptop, on a tablet or anything.
Which again, now doesn't sound that revolutionary.
In 2017, it, it was much different.
(28:10):
What we're putting the focus on right now is getting you personalized care at these levels.
And so what I mean by that is we just talked about having different paths.
Well, what does that mean for Michael when she's looking for help? Most people don't know.
Most families don't know, and the horrible thing to say is a lot of practitioners are good at what they do, and so no matter what you struggle with, no matter what's going on for you, they're gonna give you a lot of what they're good at because that's how it works.
(28:39):
It's also really hard to go to a treatment center and treat the clients that have trauma differently than the clients that have attachment issues differently than the clients that are addicted physiologically, right? So what we've decided to do is use technology, and we've been using AI since again, 2018.
So.
Long before everybody was talking about ai, but we've been using it to personalize the care.
(29:00):
So different people go to different groups based on what they need.
They get different workshops and different courses based on what they need, and they even get matched with different coaches based on the specific area that they struggle with the most.
And the idea is, even though it's one app, it's kind of like Netflix, right? You probably have a Netflix account.
I have a Netflix account.
(29:20):
When I go on Netflix, what I see on my homepage is probably completely different than what you see.
Because the technology is good enough to understand that you like watching things that you like, and I like watching the stuff that I like.
And so I wanna bring that to recovery.
I wanna bring that to the help world.
And so again, we've sort over 4,500 people.
We're now in, I mean, we're all over the states and the, and the in the world in terms of people, you know, Canada, England, all the English speaking countries.
(29:47):
But because of technology, we're now auto translating all our stuff into Spanish.
I mean.
Again, the goal is to reach as many people as possible, and technology is making that incredibly helpful and also cheap.
Like our cheapest program, I think is like a hundred and some dollars a month.
You can't get, you can't get a therapy session for a hundred some dollars a month.
Right.
I, I did my research on why people don't get treatment, and the goal of ignited was to remove all the barriers.
(30:13):
That sounds absolutely remarkable and yeah, absolutely groundbreaking to, to be ahead of COVID.
Like you said, we saw a huge push to move a lot of these services online once everybody was working remotely, but you were, you were ahead of the curve on that one, so that's phenomenal.
Yeah.
But it's, it's been nice to see.
(30:34):
I'll be honest.
It's been nice to see everybody come along because I feel like there's so many stereotypes of people who struggle with addiction.
Again, we've talked about they don't care about anybody else.
Their brain doesn't work, right.
Right.
They're damaged.
They have the genetic, uh, like they have the addiction gene.
Like all these things are essentially ways of telling us we're broken and there's something wrong with us as as humans.
But then the second piece is on the treatment side, right? We work with judges, we work with a lot of people that would say this, well, no, I can't trust a client if they're not sitting in front of me.
(31:00):
Well.
COVID made a way with at least a substantial portion of that because for a while you had to figure out how to talk to people on a screen.
And so I think there are hybrid ways there.
There are a lot of really cool things that we can do now that we never thought we could do before.
And then I also wanna touch on your books.
So I know these have come up a little bit in the discussion.
So the first one, uh, that you published was the Abstinence Myth that came out a couple years ago.
(31:25):
What was that? Yeah, that came out in 2018 and it kind of actually dealt with two different myths.
One we already talked about, I would argue even in 2018, but certainly before that abstinence was the number one measure of somebody's recovery.
Actually almost the only measure of somebody's recovery.
(31:45):
How are you doing in your recovery? Somebody would, oh, I've got a year and a half.
I've got seven years.
Oh, the seven years person is doing better than the one and a half years, right? The, the 30 day person is not doing as well as the 60 day person.
And, and that was the measure.
And what I argue is we have to stop measuring recovery only given absence.
It's not a great measure by itself.
And then the second myth was.
(32:05):
I believe strongly we have to stop demanding abstinence or commitment to abstinence from anybody who seeks help.
Because the research that I did when I was a postdoc at UCLA showed there are a lot of people who want help for their addiction, but they're not a hundred percent sure that they're ready to quit forever.
We need to find ways to help those people as well.
And I've found, you know, of the 4,500 people we've served.
(32:28):
Over 40 to 50% of the people come in are not coming in to look for abstinence.
And yet some of them find abstinence.
Some of them find moderate use, uh, and I'll say reduced use that is functional for them.
And if we want more people to get help, we have to stop putting up walls for them to get help.
So that was what the abstinence meant was about, and it really gave people pretty actionable tools to just find the earliest steps to their recovery.
(32:55):
But it makes me think of, uh, harm reduction, uh, which is a tool that I just heard of a few years ago myself.
Um, so yeah, again, kind of going back to that conversation of different pathways, slowly but surely starting to come out and changing the narrative a little bit around recovery.
We're getting there.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, absolutely.
I mean, harm again, harm reduction's.
(33:16):
Been around for 40, 50 years.
But it used to really be mostly associated with needle exchanges for heroin users or safe injection sites and things like that.
And that is part of harm reduction.
But the idea of harm reduction is simple, is how can I help you? Even if you're not ready to quit technically, even if you're not ready to use less, create a healthier life.
(33:39):
And I think what it creates is it creates a connection for all those people that are not willing to commit to abstinence, yet it creates a clinical connection with somebody who's a helper.
Then again, I've met many, many people that I've helped stop completely who didn't come in looking to stop because they realized later that they wanted to.
And so that's one angle.
But like I also said, I've also helped people who didn't wanna stop.
(34:03):
Fix their life and reduce their use by let's say 70, 80%.
And they're doing really, really well right now with that.
So opening up our minds to what is possible, and I'm not sober, just so it's clear, that's one of the things that really bothers a lot of people in recovery is I'm not sober.
Um, I probably only drink like once or twice a week, but I mean once or twice a month.
Um, you know, but I talk pretty publicly about some of the other experimentation with psychedelics and stuff like that, that I've done over the years.
(34:29):
So it's, those things used to be.
Um, exclusions, right? You couldn't even say to people that you were in recovery, they would fight you on it.
And, um, and so that was what the abstine that it was, was just opening up the conversation to what is possible, unhooked, uh, free yourself from addiction forever.
Yeah, I'm really excited about unhooked because what it does is it takes some of the lessons from the abstinence myth.
(34:54):
What I've been able to do is create a really basic model that a lot of people can follow if they wanna change their behavior.
The reason it's called unhooked is, you know, a lot of people say, I'm hooked on cocaine, or I'm hooked on this TV show.
I'm hooked on a video game.
I'm hooked on porn, I'm hooked on drugs.
And the point I make in the book is the real hooks are those underlying anxieties, depression, attachment, traumas, things of that nature.
(35:17):
That's the real hook.
And if you think you're hooked on cocaine, you'll try to quit cocaine.
If you understand that you're hooked on pain from trauma, you're gonna try to fix the trauma.
And when you fix the trauma.
Magically, the cocaine becomes less enticing, magically the alcohol becomes less necessary, and what I espouse and unhooked is true recovery, in my opinion.
(35:40):
It's kind of like this ongoing process of learning from negative outcomes, learning from mistakes, learning from failures.
Like we said before, failures are often.
What paves the road to success, and so learning from those, but then how to incorporate the learnings into your life so that you constantly are iterating, you're constantly making your life your state of mind, you're functioning better.
(36:03):
Absolutely fascinating and there are a million things we could unpack from this conversation and go go off into to pathways for hours.
But the removing of the fear element when you start bringing people in and giving them the option instead of just abstinence based recovery, just knowing that they can come in without.
(36:24):
That being their only option lets them open the conversation more.
I think that in and of itself is going to invite more people to feel welcome, to come and have the conversation than thinking if I'm going to an addiction treatment specialist, they're going to tell me I have to quit.
And that's it.
A hundred percent.
(36:44):
Yeah.
Couldn't agree more and.
First of all, we're making people lie to us.
We're we're taking people who are not ready to quit forever, and we're making them tell us that they're ready to quit forever.
So now we're starting the treatment episode with a lie, which is probably not the best idea when you're trying to get somebody to be honest and have humility and explore their inner needs.
(37:06):
And if they don't even feel comfortable enough telling you that they're scared that they may not be able to quit forever.
How are you gonna build better on that? So that's even for the people that are willing to lie to us.
But then a lot of other people say, I'm, I'm just gonna stay away.
I'm not doing that 'cause I'm not ready for that.
So that's number one.
But the other piece is actually for the practitioners because if I can, I think telling somebody that they have to not use is a little bit of a cop out for those of us who are in the helping side of things.
(37:34):
Because that's sort of like telling somebody who's depressed that they need to not be sad.
It's okay, but how? How do I get to that place? Right? I'm not using, like I said, I tried seven times to quit.
At least I was, I would wake up in the morning committed to doing it, and then I would fail.
(37:56):
So it's not that I didn't understand that I needed to either not use it all or use a lot less.
It's not like our brain doesn't work.
We understand that it would be great if we could stop, especially some of the harder drugs or we get it, but when we stop, our life falls apart.
Because of all the other hooks that are in us.
Right? And so I think for the practitioners, for the helpers, for the therapists, if I tell you to stop using and that I can't treat you, if you are using, then when you use, I get to blame you for not working.
(38:28):
'cause I can say, look, I gave them the the rules.
These were the rules and they used, but as an example I give in the book literally is.
If you went to a therapist for your depression and they told you, look, I'm, I'm willing to take you on, but you can't be depressed while we work together.
You'd laugh and walk out of the room.
You'd say, what the hell are you talking about? And so just like me getting kicked out of rehab, as long as I, I'm using, and I, if I can get 30 days sober, I could come back like a, that's like a cancer, like a, like an endocrinologist telling you that as long as you can take care of your own.
(39:00):
Thyroid issue, then they'll treat you.
Though we've been doing this to people for 80, 90 years in the treatment space, right? Oh, they relapsed.
That must mean they didn't really care about the therapy.
So I think both of us, both sides, the clients and the helpers need to understand.
(39:21):
The path to somebody's improved life is one of iteration.
It's, it's trial and error.
It's support, it's care, it's not judgment and putting up walls always.
Now, again, boundaries, safety, right? We do wanna maximize safety, but people would tell me before that, because I don't demand abstinence and I make it seem okay to try for moderation or something like that, that I'm gonna kill people.
(39:46):
And I said, Hey, people are dying every day.
95% of them are not getting help.
So I'm gonna argue that the current system is killing people by keeping them out of care.
And by being more inclusive, we get to bring more people in.
And I can, every bone in my body tells me that if we bring more people into care, we will save many, many more lives.
(40:11):
I would agree with you 100%.
We, we need to come at things with fresh perspectives and try new things.
And by the way, I'm obviously not the only one.
There are a lot, there are a lot of people that have new offerings.
That's actually what I say to people in the book is go out, explore, but like, don't only explore techniques to quit cocaine, right? Explore your inner trauma and then go read books, get therapy, do workshops and retreats or whatever that is, right to deal with your trauma or your depression or your anxiety, right? If you need medication, seek medication.
(40:48):
There are a ton of tools to deal with the underlying issues, and I think the moment you understand that, that is, um, a primary focus, at least I'll say, if not the only focus, all of a sudden there's this world of opportunity in front of you.
We agree.
J.
This has been an amazing conversation.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
(41:09):
We will definitely link to your books, United Recovery, your webpage, anything else that we can share so that people can connect with you who hear the show.
Are there any other closing thoughts, comments you would like to leave the listeners with? Yeah.
You know, it's funny this, there's this question that comes up in some podcasts, so now I'm just going to leave it as a, as a takeaway in the end.
(41:30):
A lot of people ask me, you know, what's, if there was one thing, one recommendation people can take away today to help them, and you could only give them one piece of advice, what would it be? Uh, and I've landed on stop line, stop Lying to yourself and other people.
As you heard in part of my story, it was the moment that I just started confronting the reality of what was happening for me.
(41:52):
That everything turned around, and I'm not gonna lie to you, it's painful in the beginning.
It hurts for a short period of time.
Then it clears everything much, much faster than any other tool that I've found.
And so if there's just one recommendation, if there's just one thing you wanna take on and try to adjust your life according to, in order to move forward, uh, in a proactive way that will get you where you want to go.
(42:17):
Stop lying yourself in others.
Try to just be brutally honest from this moment forward and see where it gets here.
Solid advice.
Thank you again for joining us Sober Town listeners, thank you for, uh, joining and listening today, and we will see you next time.
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