September 13, 2025 • 43 mins
"At M2 The Rock, we fully respect the anonymity of all 12-step fellowships. In alignment with their traditions, we do not represent or speak on behalf of any of these groups. Our mission is to share hope, not affiliation."
About M2 THE ROCK - MICHAEL MOLTHAN:
I’m Michael Molthan, host of The M2 The Rock Show—one of the fastest-growing podcasts and shows on self-improvement, mental health, addiction recovery, and spiritual transformation. I’m so grateful you’re here.I started M2 The Rock in 2017 to bring you conversations designed to make you happier, healthier, and more healed. Through raw and unfiltered discussions with experts, celebrities, thought leaders, and athletes, we uncover new perspectives on personal growth, recovery, and overcoming life’s toughest challenges.
My Story:
What sets my journey apart is that there wasn’t just one rock bottom—there were many. From being a successful luxury homebuilder to falling into addiction, homelessness, crime, and eventually 27 mugshots and prison, my life was in absolute chaos.Addiction was my temporary escape from childhood trauma, but it only led to destruction.
It wasn’t until I hit the lowest point imaginable that I finally found true freedom, redemption, and purpose. After an unexpected early release from prison in 2017, I walked 300 miles back to Dallas to turn myself in—only to be miraculously pardoned and told to “pay it forward.”And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing ever since.My MissionI believe that rock bottom is not the end—it’s a stepping stone to something greater.
My goal is to redefine what "rock bottom" means by helping others rebuild their Spirit, Mind, and Body. On M2 The Rock, I speak openly about trauma, addiction, recovery, and the power of transformation. I don’t shy away from topics like:
✅ Trauma & Addiction – Understanding the root causes
✅ Self-Sabotage & Mental Health – Breaking negative cycles
✅ Codependency & Enabling – How relationships impact recovery
✅ 12-Step Programs & Spiritual Healing – Finding true freedom
✅ Religious Trauma & Personal Growth – Healing from past wounds
"Everyone Is An Addict."
Whether it’s substances, work, validation, or negative thinking, we all have something we struggle with.
But recovery is possible, and transformation is real.
📺 Watch my story on I AM SECOND (9-Minute Film): Watch Here
📩 To book me for speaking engagements or collaborations: Email m2@m2therock.com
🔔 Join the Movement. Subscribe to M2 The Rock and start your journey of self-improvement, healing, and purpose.
🔔 Don’t forget to LIKE & SUBSCRIBE for more powerful faith-based content!
🌎 Website: https://m2therock.com/
▶️ YouTube: @MICHAELMOLTHANM2
📸 Instagram: @m2therockshow
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-m2-the-rock-show-michael-molthan--3443849/support.
About M2 THE ROCK - MICHAEL MOLTHAN:
I’m Michael Molthan, host of The M2 The Rock Show—one of the fastest-growing podcasts and shows on self-improvement, mental health, addiction recovery, and spiritual transformation. I’m so grateful you’re here.I started M2 The Rock in 2017 to bring you conversations designed to make you happier, healthier, and more healed. Through raw and unfiltered discussions with experts, celebrities, thought leaders, and athletes, we uncover new perspectives on personal growth, recovery, and overcoming life’s toughest challenges.
My Story:
What sets my journey apart is that there wasn’t just one rock bottom—there were many. From being a successful luxury homebuilder to falling into addiction, homelessness, crime, and eventually 27 mugshots and prison, my life was in absolute chaos.Addiction was my temporary escape from childhood trauma, but it only led to destruction.
It wasn’t until I hit the lowest point imaginable that I finally found true freedom, redemption, and purpose. After an unexpected early release from prison in 2017, I walked 300 miles back to Dallas to turn myself in—only to be miraculously pardoned and told to “pay it forward.”And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing ever since.My MissionI believe that rock bottom is not the end—it’s a stepping stone to something greater.
My goal is to redefine what "rock bottom" means by helping others rebuild their Spirit, Mind, and Body. On M2 The Rock, I speak openly about trauma, addiction, recovery, and the power of transformation. I don’t shy away from topics like:
✅ Trauma & Addiction – Understanding the root causes
✅ Self-Sabotage & Mental Health – Breaking negative cycles
✅ Codependency & Enabling – How relationships impact recovery
✅ 12-Step Programs & Spiritual Healing – Finding true freedom
✅ Religious Trauma & Personal Growth – Healing from past wounds
"Everyone Is An Addict."
Whether it’s substances, work, validation, or negative thinking, we all have something we struggle with.
But recovery is possible, and transformation is real.
📺 Watch my story on I AM SECOND (9-Minute Film): Watch Here
📩 To book me for speaking engagements or collaborations: Email m2@m2therock.com
🔔 Join the Movement. Subscribe to M2 The Rock and start your journey of self-improvement, healing, and purpose.
🔔 Don’t forget to LIKE & SUBSCRIBE for more powerful faith-based content!
🌎 Website: https://m2therock.com/
▶️ YouTube: @MICHAELMOLTHANM2
📸 Instagram: @m2therockshow
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-m2-the-rock-show-michael-molthan--3443849/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So Hi, I'm walking again, grateful, recovering, alcoholic, can drug
add it. And I have a second honor, and that's
to introduce our next speaker. And it's kind of kind
of funny how we came to came to pass in
each other's lives and it goes, you know, and it's
no coincidence that he's talking about addiction in the family next.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So it's early two thousand. I want to say, I'm
in my addiction.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm putting together some relief, periods of relief, no freedom whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
In fact, then I didn't even know what.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Step one looked like, Okay, I won't smoke crack, I
can drink. Step two look like I believe inca think.
Step three looked like turn it over, I'll put some
money in the collection basket at church. Step four looked
like nothing. So I went to a meeting and it
was in New Jersey on the Jersey Shore, which is
where I hail from. And it's nothing like the show,
(00:57):
just so you know, And I'm in this meeting and
I've never attended an AA meeting like this before. Because
the gentleman speaking was talking about steps and was talking
about like doing them.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
He wasn't talking.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, he wasn't talking about hanging out in a diner,
and he wasn't talking about getting a tattoo, and he
wasn't talking about getting a girl.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
He was talking, and he wasn't talking about.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Putting a car on your driveway or putting six figures
in your bank account. He was talking about solution, which
I didn't identify it as solution that I.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Identified it as unwillingness. That for me. So I left
that meeting and said, you know, it'd be cool to
see him again. And I never and and I didn't
for a number of years.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And you know, fast forward, I want to say, two
thousand and nine, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
my cousin calls me up, and you know, and she's
been like more like a sister than a cousin, and she.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Has taken me to many a treatment center and dropped
me off there.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
And she called me and she's like, yeah, you know,
you're you know, at this point, I'm a clinician and.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I'm working at a center and she's like, yeah, I'm
dating this guy in AA.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I was like, really, who is he?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
And she said, Chris Chris S And I was just
like it just hit me. I had this like CD
and it was Chriss from Pottersville, New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I got it that day and I put it together
and I was like, I'm wondering if it was if
it could be him, And it was him, and you know,
the relationship kind of flourished, and you know, you know
now he's married to and you know when I crashed
and burned, you know, almost three and a half years ago,
I h you know, he like knew it, and he's
(02:53):
like calling me, you know how you doing.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I'm like, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
You know when I could speak, you know, when you
got that. Yeah, and he knew, you know, and he
never confronted me. You know, he told my cousin he
was like, he'll call when.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
He's ready, and that's exactly what happened. And he picked
me up.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
In Bradley Beach, New Jersey, and where I was living
in a studio apartment and successfully smoked eighteen thousand dollars
worth of crack in six weeks. And you know, I
I at that time, you know, I was like I'll
go anywhere, you know, and I went to detox. They
showed me a nice brochure with a beach, and that
that was all it took for me at that point
(03:32):
was a beach, and I saw a bedroom and that
looked good too, And I knew I had to get
well fast because.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I had people to help.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And I say that with sarcasm, because I needed.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
To go away for a long time.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
And I did what I thought was gonna be forty
five days turned into four months, and what turned into
four months turned into a two year suspension of my
clinical license.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And all I had everything I needed, even some of
my wants.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
But I got a chance to take a lot of
people through the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and in
doing stuff, I admire the mentorship and the friendship and
and the and the love that I've gotten from Chris.
And with that, I'm gonna bring up Chris Schroeder, who's
gonna talk about addiction in the family.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Good after them, everybody, man, It's good to be here.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
What a wonderful place. This is, what a wonderful piece
of God's country that was found to place this, uh,
this particular treatment recovery center on Mark.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Thank you for the kind words.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Mark is one of those rare, rare clinicians who really
understands that what the real problem is, you know what
the real problem is for people who were addicted, who
are or who are alcoholic, the real problem is a
separation from God and from their fellow man. That's really
(05:04):
what addiction is more than anything else. And Mark is
one of those rare collinsions that understands that further, to
be true healing, there needs to be that connection to
God and there needs to be a reevaluation of relationship
skills that will allow us to go back out and
and be citizens and be family members and understand how
(05:25):
how we should comport ourselves on this particular planet. And
uh uh, it's really unfortunate, but that those those type
of clinicians are rare.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Uh And it's wonderful.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Monty's here, my buddy, Monty.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Monty and I go way back. We've done a whole
lot of things together. We've we try to go to
a lot of the addiction symposiums, and we've you know,
we've probably been in four or five states together doing
something and it's always a pleasure to to be in
his company. Chris and Pattier here, you know, that's that's amazing, right,
(06:00):
they're great friends of mine. Chris is probably done more
for carrying the messages of recovery in the English speaking
world than any other person, just because he's been tirelessly
flying around the planet, giving, giving uncompromising and unapologetic talks
(06:24):
wherever he goes about what the real truth is about
addiction and what the real answer is in recovery and uh,
and for him to be a be a friend, him
and Patty to be friends of mine, I consider that
a great a great honor. Jim Jimmy, Joe. You know, Wow,
what can I say? Uh? Turning a vision into an
(06:45):
actuality like this is you know, I can see, I
can see what's gonna happen here in the future. I
can see not only live say, but soul say many
of them. There's some people who are in the processes
of going through here or have just gone through here,
(07:05):
who know exactly what I mean. You know, you don't
just separate from whatever you're addicted to. You know, you
you come out with a complete change in your outlook,
your attitude, your perspective, the way you behave, the way
you think, the way you you view the world. It's
it's it's it calls this in the Big Book being reborn,
(07:28):
and a place like that offers the power for that
to happen. And that also is a very very rare thing.
So you know, when when I when I was asked
to come down and participate in this particular day, this
day of celebration really for for this wonderful center and
the people involved in it, I absolutely said yes. I
(07:51):
so like Dave. Like Dave who is a wonderful friend
of mine and does more behind the scenes work in
treatment centers and treatment processes and and helping out people,
I would in touch with a ten foot pole. Uh
you know, Uh, I'm serious. He goes to he goes
(08:11):
to some of these some of these places that you know,
I'm like, Dave, you you you you call this guy,
you work with this you work with this guy. Oh
my god, he's chirping like a squirrel. I don't even
I don't know what to do with this guy. Uh.
But you know, I was taught, I was talking I
was talking with with Dave that that it's unbelievably rare
(08:33):
in the world of addiction treatment for people to have
a clue. I hate to say this, but ninety eight
percent plus of the treatment centers out there don't have
a clue. They're working with the wrong tools. You know,
they're they're they're trying, they're trying to treat the flu
with architectures. You know, it's it's the complete wrong set
(08:57):
of tools to use, you know, for for addiction. And
I'll tell you what. Addictive illness is the number one
health threat in the country today. If you take heart
disease and cancer and put them on top on top
of each other, it won't come near the numbers of
people affected and afflicted.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
With addictive illness.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
And we're in the dark ages with most of our
treatment processes. People are throwing tons of money into stuff
that just is ineffective. Addictive illness is an unorthodox and
all unbelievably aggressive illness. It's unorthodox because of the way
it presents all right, So many people who are alcoholic
(09:43):
or who are drug addicts don't understand the enormity of
the problem. They are minimized. They do not understand how
much trouble they're in. That's that's an aspect of the illness,
to not understand how much trouble you're in. You know, Well, yeah,
you know, I'm I'm shooting heroin with a Turkey Baster.
(10:04):
But it's you know, it's not really it's not really
that bad. Yeah, I mean it's it's it really is.
It's a it's minimization at its at its best. And
so so, how addictive illness presents is it presents in
some really bizarre ways, and usually the sufferer doesn't understand
it's a symptom of addictive illness. I'll give you some
(10:27):
examples defective relationships. You know, having your boss always be
an idiot, having your family always misunderstand you, all the
police officers have a vendetta against you personally. You know,
your friends you're just disloyal. You know, the people that
(10:49):
you're in a relationship with just don't respect you enough
and they can't read your mind enough to know what
you want and need, so they're always disappointing you. And
you know, that's that's that's a big picture of defective relationships.
And there's a great quote in the Twelve and twelve,
which is the Twelve Steps and twelve Traditions that was
(11:11):
written for alcoholics anonymous, and it basically says, defective relationships
are almost always the cause of our immediate woes, including
our alcoholism. So That's why I believe defective relationships have
a lot to do with with addictive illness. Many of
the things Dave was also talking about, how we can
(11:33):
be misdiagnosed. You know, surprise, surprise. Listen, if you're drinking
yourself to death and every single night you're poisoning yourself
with alcohol, or you're doing so many drugs that you
haven't slept in a week, and you go in and
you put yourself in front of a physician or a psychiatrist.
Their job is to see what symptoms you had and
(11:56):
to and to prescribe through those symptoms. That's what they do,
that's what they've been trained to do. Okay that very
few of them understand addictive illness. There's an organization. There's
an organization called ASAM that's American Society of Addiction Medicine.
And there's some three thousand, six thousand physicians in America
(12:20):
that belong to this organization. And these are people who
have some additional training in addiction and alcoholism. A medical
doctor today only needs about four hours worth of study
in medical school on alcoholism, and usually that has to
do with the chronic effects of alcoholism, like cirrhosis of
(12:43):
the liver and esophageal verses. They learn about that, they
don't learn how to treat alcoholism or treat addiction except
in an acute framework, a medical intervention framework. They don't
understand what recovery is for most of them, and even
the ASAM doctors I've known a whole lot of them,
even even they don't really understand the spiritual characteristics of
(13:09):
the problem. Addiction and alcoholism have a monstrously large spiritual component.
Each sufferer is ill spiritually. I want to tell one
story that basically will show you from my own personal experience,
(13:30):
what is really the problem. What was really my problem
now had I had a period of drinking that lasted
about twenty years. Towards the end of my drinking, I
was drinking between a fifth and a court of hard
liquor every single night and going to work and then
on the next day, and on the weekends, I was
(13:52):
getting drunk, coming to starting to drink again, passing out,
coming to starting. I'd get drunk like five times on
the weeknd and somehow try to pull out of it
Sunday afternoon so that I could get to work on Monday.
It was it was a gruesome, gruesome existence. But what
would happen, What would happen to me is I would
get off of work and I would be line b
(14:14):
line to the liquor store, one hundred miles an hour
to the liquor store the second I got off work,
because I needed to buy my vodka or my bourbon,
and I needed to be about the business of drinking.
And that was that was my primary purpose. I was
focused on that, and I was heading in that direction. Now,
I remember this one time. I used to just be
able to walk into the liquor store and grab my booze,
(14:36):
pay for it, and go. I made sure that they
understood to never run out of my brand, you know.
And and it was I was very loyal to a
specific liquor store. Well, I went there this one day
and there was a woman in line talking to the
to the person who checks you out. And she's there
like what, you know, what kind of wine goes with tilapia?
(14:59):
And and I'm like what, And you know, I'm standing
behind her like you know, come on, come on, and
the guy's going, well, you know, there's a nice cabernet,
you know, from the from the from the California vineyard
regions that have a nice bluff. And I'm like, are
you kidding? Men?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Are you crazy that this lady's talking about wine. I
need to buy this vodcast and I need to get
out of here, you know, give her a bottle of
gallow and get her out of here, you know. I mean,
it's freaking out and I got a problem. I got
a problem. Move that lady out of here.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I got a problem. I'm somber. I'm somber now now
now thinking about this, think about this is my problem? Really?
Speaker 4 (15:42):
The alcohol, No, the I need the alcohol to soothe
the spiritual trauma I'm going through.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
You know, so so addictive illness. Addictive illness is an
It's monstrously bigger than just separating the person from the alcohol. Now,
in my in my first six months, in my first
six months, I felt like the guy behind the Telopua
lady for six months. Just I mean, I was squeezing
(16:17):
my fist. I was squeezing my fist constantly. It was
like it was like just an obsessive, compulsive thing. And
and when my hand would start to cramp up, I'd go, oh,
I'm squeezing my fist. I was out of my mind. Now,
you can't just go to group and treat that.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
You can't watch your Father Martin movie and be Okay.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
You need a lot more. You need a lot more.
You need a you need a transformation, you need you
need a spiritual awakening. You need, you need, you need,
you need the power of God to flow in you
and through you to be able to get past something
that aggressive. And for the most part, it's misunderstood. Addictive
(17:05):
illness is the most misunderstood illness out there. People. People
misunderstand the problem. And if you're not working on the
right problem, you're not working on the right solution. So
a lot of times these treatment processes or these good
good intention people or family members are working on one problem.
(17:27):
What do you think the problem is. They're working on.
Separate the individual from the drugs or the alcohol. Let's
get them sober. Okay, that's not the problem. Now, I'm
not saying that it's a good idea to keep using.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea to become abstinate,
and it absolutely is. But Bill and doctor Bob, you know,
(17:52):
when they were getting together in the first one hundred,
were contributing to the book Alcoholics Anonymous. The miracle of
that thing was they recognized that you don't fight alcoholism
with sobriety, and you don't fight drug addiction with being clean.
They tried that, it didn't work. It was always followed
(18:14):
by relapse. So what do you need? You need a
spiritual awakening as the result of the twelve steps. That's
what they learned. And they learned that through the occ
group and what they learned in the Oster group and
the spiritual exercises that they were taught in the ASH group.
They found out that by spiritual living one could change
(18:36):
their personality so significantly that they could stand behind the
tilopuolada in line and it was not a problem. You
understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Now.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Recovery is about two things. Recovery is about freedom, Dave
was talking about this again. And recovery is about power.
Now what is the freedom, the freedom from the bondage
of self. Standing behind the Telapia woman, I was in
bondage to myself. There cannot be a more self centered,
(19:13):
self absorbed individual than the alcoholic or the addict, because
it is so all about them. They're in the bondage
of self and all they can think about is what
they need and what's in the way of that, and
it's all about them. That's how That's how alcoholism and
(19:35):
drug addiction presents in its advanced stages. So the recovery
process has to be about freedom from that bondage of self.
And how it works basically is how it works is
you identify the problem, whether it's alcoholism or drug addiction.
(19:56):
You come to believe that there's a power greater than yourself.
There's a power that can work in you and through
you to relieve you of the obsession to use and
that unbelievably oppressive, uncomfortable emotional existence that you're living. You
can finally become comfortable with yourself and your environment and
not need anything outside to put in to change the
(20:19):
way you feel or the way you see everything. All right?
Step two, Step three is Okay, I believe there's a
power greater than myself. Step three is making a decision
to seek that power. Step four is inventoring the three
things that are blocking you off from the power being
able to work in you and through you, and that
(20:40):
is anger and resentment, fear, and your conduct how you
are comporting yourself, especially in an intimate relationships that needs
to be inventory. In the fifth step, the things that
you've discovered, the truth about your stock and trade, the
cause and conditions of your failure at life, are discussed
(21:02):
with another person. And then you become willing to have
God remove these defects of character. You humbly ask God
to remove.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
These defects of characters.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Then you become willing to make amends to the people
in the institutions that your character defects of arm. Then
you go out and you make amends to the people
in the institutions that your character defects of arm. This
is a revolutionary series of spiritual exercises. This will bring
(21:33):
about a complete change in attitude and outlook in the individual.
And this is where recovery really starts. There's sobriety, which
is just abstinence from alcohol or the drugs, which is untenable.
If you're really an alcoholic or an attic. You will
not be able to take that for long because you'll
just you'll want to kill yourself or you'll have to
(21:54):
use you won't be able to take it. But then
there's recovery, which is which is comfortable l abstinence. It's
that shift in personality, outlook, and h and behavior that
we see. We actually see this happen here. I've met
some of the people who've gone through here, and I've
met some of the people who've just started here, and
(22:17):
you can see the transformation. You can you can see
the selfish, self centered individual walking in here figuring out
why it's wrong and why everything in here isn't being
you know, handled right. And then you see the person
on the other end of the spectrum who's fill filled
with gratitude and compassion and just want to find somebody
to help, somebody that's suffering. They just want to find
(22:39):
somebody to help. And you see that transformation in a
place like like this. That's what recovery looks like. That's
what recovery looks like, and that's what freedom looks like. Now,
the power you get, the power you get from the
from these spiritual exercises, is just this. You're able to
do things like start up a center like this. I mean,
(23:00):
think about think about the courage it would take to
come up with an idea like this, pitch it to somebody,
put every card you have on the table, knowing that
it's gonna work, or you're gonna die. Try it and
go out and do it. You know, that's the kind
of power that you get exposed to in recovery. You
can be all that you can be. What is that
(23:22):
the army of the Marines or whatever, But it's true,
you can be all that you can be because fear
gets removed. What holds us back? We hold ourselves back.
We hold ourselves back because of our anxiety and our
lack of belief in what we can do and what
we can accomplish. All right, the recovery process removes fear.
(23:46):
We inventory fear and step four we share on step
on our fear and step five we ask God to
remove our fear in step six and step four we
humbly ask God in step seven to remove that fear.
And then we go out and we do the We
do the most courageous thing we can possibly do, and
that's make amends, go back and knock on doors. You know,
(24:07):
I'm here to set things right. That that takes an
enormous amount of courage. We get done with that, We
get done with that, and fear does not drag us
around anymore. We can we can go and be about
our business and God's business. We can go out there
and we're about that business without holding ourselves back. You
(24:27):
know what, think think of, think about think about what
a great deal that is. Most of us come into
a place like this just to separate, you know. Just
get me off the drugs, Just get me off the booze,
and I'll be okay. And then we realize in a
place like this that we're not gonna be okay. Yes,
the first step is get get off of those drugs
and get off of that alcohol. But to be able
(24:49):
to stay off those drugs and stay off that alcohol,
you need to be a new person. You need to
be a different person. And that's where the that's where
the the shift in perception comes. That's where the spiritual
awakening comes. As family members, what can we do? There
are ways that we can aid and abet the destruction
(25:13):
of our loved ones. Don't think that you can't kill
the people that you love with your behavior, because you can.
You can aid and a bet their destruction by not
understanding the nature of the illness and not understanding the
appropriate behavior to have in front of it. I'll tell
(25:35):
a story. There was there was this kid that was
coming around. I'll you know, I'll never I'll never forget him.
He he you know, at his best, he was a
very very cool kid. You know, he came from a
came from a family where the father's a brain surgeon.
You know, he had he had good stock, good breeding.
But he was he was a drug addict and he
(25:56):
was an alcoholic and that ran in his family. Every
single time he would relapse and blow up his world,
his mother would say, please come on back home. I'll
cook you a steak. You got a nice bed to
sleep in. You know, I know you're sick. Just stay
(26:17):
in there for the week or whatever and everything will
be fine. And she fed him, and she made sure
that she did his laundry, and she paid for his
summonses that he got, and she took care.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Of all the problems.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Now, if it was an addictive illness, if it was cancer,
that would be a very compassionate thing to do to
help somebody who's sick, that would be a very compassionate
thing to do. In addictive illness, that kind of behavior
kills because it enables the person to continue the life
(26:54):
cycle of addiction on and on and on. It makes
it easier for them to go back out the next time,
And that's exactly what happened this kid. Finally he was
drinking and he was on Oxy's, drunk on Oxy's, and
he did not wake up. He went to sleep and
he did not wake up. And you know, you know,
you can't go to a mother and say, you know,
(27:16):
this really is your fault. But it kind of was,
you know what I mean, like like like like why
did why did you know if you would have put
him out, it could have made things more difficult for him.
He might have sought a solution sooner. You know, I
I know I know an individual. I know an individual
(27:37):
very well who went to like thirteen reheats. You know,
the parents just kept paying. Oh okay, well you know what,
you know, where's the next place, Where's the next place?
You know, finally, when they were done, when they were done,
this is it. You know, we're putting you in this place,
but do not call us again. You know, go to
(27:58):
the halfway house, start rebuilding your life after this. You know,
you're cut off, You're done. That was the day the
individual was faced with the choice of basically engaging in
a recovery process or going on without any backup, any support,
or any money. Sometimes sometimes a family can, uh can do,
(28:22):
can take actions that are conducive to an individual finding recovery.
Some really great lessons are to be learned by the
real experienced alnas. I'll tell you a great, a great
story about an alan On that I know. Now, just
because you're an all On doesn't mean the person immediately
stops drinking, or if you're a Narna, they immediately stop
(28:44):
using drugs. It's more it's more about learning learning how
not to be tied into the dysfunction and emotional anguish
of the addictive cycle in your home. But this woman,
this woman, what would happen is her husband would get
really drunk up. The whole family would get upset, and
everybody'd be yelling at him, and he'd fall down. He'd
fall down on the floor and pretend to be dying,
(29:07):
you know, and then everybody go, oh, oh, what can
we do? What can we do? You know, Well, we're
sorry we were yelling at you. Okay, Well she started
to go to Alana. She starts to go to Alana
and the same thing happens. The kids are yelling at
the father and the father falls on the floor, pretends.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
He's dying, and she vacuums around him.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Okay, now that's a beautiful lesson. That's a beautiful lesson
of detachment. You know, sometimes we do need to detest.
Of course, we love the people who are in our family.
I'll tell you what a lot of times we love
them more. If we've got a straight a student that
(29:46):
does all the right things and is really perfect, and
we've got an addictive son that blows up the world
every five minutes, sometimes sometimes we pay a lot more
attention to the guy blowing up the world, and sometimes
our hearts are really with that person. Because people who
are out alcoholics and people who are drug addicts are
are remarkable people. Sometimes we've got a personality that's very attractive.
(30:08):
We can talk you into doing stuff that's crazy, you know, crazy,
you know, you know why alan Ons have this defurrow
drow up here. It's because of doing this all the time.
You want me to do what? So of course we
love these people. Of course we love these people, but
(30:30):
we cannot allow a family to get really the whole
entire family to get sick because of one person's behavior.
Sometimes we need to make the hard choices, and sometimes
those hard choices don't look right. Sometimes they go against
our parental instincts in a big way. They go against
our parental instincts. What we need to do is we
(30:53):
need to take the counsel of experienced people. And that's
not every counselor you know an addiction. Please, we need
to find people with a lot of experience and we
need to follow their council because they've especially the people
that have been through it. One of the things that
I love about people in recovery is they share their experience.
(31:16):
It's very rare that you'll hear opinions. You will, but
it's rare. More often than not, we share. We share
our experience, and experience is incredibly valuable. Opinions are not.
We learn in recovery. We learn not by advice. We
(31:36):
learn by experience, and we learn by practicing spiritual principles.
Those are always the right direction to go. I've been
working I've been working with alcoholics for almost twenty five
years now. There was a period of time where I
kind of just followed my own instincts and I did
(31:56):
what I thought was right, and so often were blowing up.
Things are not going well. People were drinking on me,
you know what I mean? And relapsed on me, making
me look bad. Well I got I got exposed to
a couple of very very influential Big Book workshops, some
(32:16):
people that were influential in the genesis of this place,
a couple of guys, Joe and Mark h and I
started listening to these guys and they actually used the
Big Book, not as a vehicle to share off of
at a meeting. They used the Big Book as an
(32:38):
instruction manual in spiritual living. And they were sharing their
experience using this book as a as a method of operation.
And I started to become inspired by these guys. These
guys spoke with authority. They spoke with authority. They you
(33:00):
could tell one hundred percent they believed every single thing
they said, and there was there was also some authenticity
with them. They sounded very authentic. So I started to
I started to believe what they were saying, and I
started to do some real amazing things. One of them
was there's a chapter in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. It's
(33:20):
called working with Others. I started to use that as
an instruction manual in working with others. Call me crazy,
you know what I mean. But I but I wasn't
before I was trying to encourage people to get better.
I was encouraging people all the time. Oh, here's my
phone number. I'll see it the looney NOONI you know, tomorrow,
(33:43):
you know, just call me if you feel like drinking,
you know, I mean I was, I was encouraging people
to tow the line and stay sober. Well, there's a
huge difference between encouraging somebody to toe the line and
stay sober and offering somebody a path to freedom and
power to the practice of the twelve steps in the
book Alcoholics Anonymous. So I started to pay attention to
(34:05):
this chapter. And in this chapter there's a huge amount
of instructions for working with people now, for the family
members in here. There's a couple of chapters that are
vital for you. One of them, one of them is
the chapter to wives. And you don't if you know,
if you're a husband, you know, don't not read it
because it says it's a chapter to wives. It should
(34:25):
really say the chapter to the spouse. There were just
there were mainly men alcoholics back in the thirties, not
that there weren't women alcoholics, they just, you know, this
is just the way the fellowship developed Nowadays, I think
it's forty eight percent of membership in aa as women,
which is, you know, about where it should be. But anyway,
(34:49):
there's a chapter to wives and it talks about how
you are to approach the alcoholic who's still drinking. What
are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to act?
What are you supposed to say to them when they
come up and they ask you to, you know, answer
the phone because it's the boss calling. You know, what
are you what are you supposed to do? And there's
some really really great advice in there, and there's even
(35:11):
there there's even a level of alcoholism that's very important
in the chapter to wise exact one, two, three, and four.
You know, the heavy drinker all the way through the
chronic low bottom alcoholic, and that information allows you to
identify how much trouble you know your spouse is it,
and that's very very important. Then there's a chapter to
the family afterwards. You know, how should the family behave
(35:35):
In the early days the meetings, if you showed up
without your wife and your family to the meetings, they
said go back home and get them, because this was
all about the family recovering all along with the alcoholic
you know, come to the meeting. I can't tell you
how many family members give me give me a hard
time about this. When I suggest alan On or I
(35:59):
suggest open meetings, they basically say, look, it's his problem.
You know. You know, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
miss prime time TV just because he's a Horse's be
done well, you know, listen, Addictive illness is unorthodox, and
you're always in more trouble than you think you are.
If you're a family member, you have become ill because
(36:20):
of the person in your family with the addiction. You
have become ill a lot of times. You don't even
know how ill until you start to recover from it.
Because it's happened over a long haul, over a long.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Period of time.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
You've become to a degree dysfunctional, to a degree selfish
and self centered. You have. That's what happens in an
alcoholic or a drug addict family. So so there's some
recovery that really has to happen on you on your side.
You know, your life may not depend on it like
the alcoholic or the drug addict, but the quality of
(36:56):
your life is going to depend on it. There has
to be some recovery processes. You know there has to
be some spiritual healing. You know there's a lot of
the spiritual life is broad, roomy and all inclusive. You
never exclusive or forbidding there those who seek will find
(37:18):
you know when when the when the student is ready
to teach, you will appear. These are all spiritual principles
that are absolutely true that when you're ready, when you're
ready to get better, to improve your spiritual condition, there
will be ways shown to you. God. God is good,
God is merciful, and God is generous. God will show
(37:41):
you a path toward your specific healing and what you
need to do. The worst thing you can do, though,
is no never. I don't need, I don't want. That's
not for me. You know that belligerent denial is the
only thing that can really sabotage your ability to engage
(38:02):
in something that's going to improve your quality of life.
Every single day that you live in an alcoholic household
or a household where drug addiction is concerned, every single day,
a little bit more the quality of your life gets
chipped away. It happens slowly and perceptibly, and you're so
sick you don't even know you're sick. By the time
(38:24):
it's time to put little Joey in treatment or whatever.
So as a family member, please be open, Please be
open to the different avenues that are going to be
afforded you for your own recovery, and be supportive of
the people who are in treatment. I want to talk
just for a minute about powerlessness, because this is the
(38:45):
most misunderstood characteristic of alcoholism or drug addiction. Powerlessness. We
see it on the wall. We admitted we were powerless,
but we don't fully understand what that means. And this
is what it means. You may want to stop using
(39:06):
drugs with every fiber year you being, you may have
sworn that you're never gonna do drugs again. You you
may know that if you do drugs, you're gonna have
a dirty urine and you're gonna go to prison for
five years. You may know that you're gonna lose your family,
you're gonna lose your job if you use one more time,
And you can be one hundred percent certain in your
(39:26):
mind that you are never gonna use again, and you
will tell everybody that, and five minutes later you're smoking
crap and you don't know what happened. That's what powerlessness
looks like sometimes you're not even there. People like people
like Nancy Reagan say just say no. Well, if you're
an alcoholic, you're in your attic, you know, just say no.
(39:50):
That that that completely misunderstands what alcoholism and drug addiction is.
Power list is power list. Yes, our ego wants us
to believe that we've changed our mind and we went
to the cop man. Okay, but think about it, that's
completely insane. You've just told everybody you're never to use again.
(40:13):
You swore to everybody, you know all the consequences. It
would be completely insane to use again. But your ego
wants to tell you that you've changed your mind. Doesn't
make any sense. Lack of understanding is not our problem.
Lack of motivation is sometimes not our problem, you know,
(40:34):
lack of meeting attendance is sometimes not our problem. What
our problem is is Our problem is lack of power,
the power, choice and control over putting the substance back
in our body in an unrecovered state. We don't have
At times, we don't have access to this power, this
(40:55):
choice and control, and we use again. We let everybody down,
and everybody's pissed out of it, and they think what a loser.
What I would like everybody to know is, instead of
using all of that energy on being upset with yourself
or the person who used, use that same energy to
(41:18):
try to direct somebody into a recovery program where they
can be exposed to spiritual principles that will bring about
a complete spiritual awakening, wherein God can work in and
through them and prevent them from using drugs or alcohol,
because that, at certain times is the your only hope.
(41:40):
You need to be prevented from using alcohol and drugs
by the power of God. And there's a certain way
you can access that power through the spiritual living and
spiritual exercises that are inherent in the twelve steps in
the recovery process. Thank you. We need to understand better
(42:06):
as family members, we need to understand better what's going on.
These people aren't bad. They're not morally you know, they're
not liars and cheaters and thieves. They're lying and cheating
and stealing, but they're not liars and cheaters and thieves.
That's that's that's a symptom of the addiction. A lot
(42:30):
of times, every once in a while, you do get
liars and cheats of teas. I'm not saying that you don't.
But for the most part, the people who are really
alcoholic and who are really drug addicts, they have consciences
that when they do something wrong, they are pained by it.
Now I've worked I've worked with a couple of sociopaths.
You know what a sociopath is. A sociopath is somebody
(42:52):
that would that could pull out a gun and shoot
you and not ever think about it again, never even
think about it again. Okay, that's like a sociopath. We
are not sociopaths. Every single thing we do negative out
there in the universe impacts us and it comes back
to us and we feel shame, guilt, remorse. That's what
(43:16):
happens because we're em that's part of our emotional illness.
We need to understand what alcohol is. It is, we
need to understand what addiction is so that we're working
on the right problem. If we really understand the problem,
we'll be about the business of the correct solution. That's
(43:37):
all I got.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Text
So Hi, I'm walking again, grateful, recovering, alcoholic, can drug
add it. And I have a second honor, and that's
to introduce our next speaker. And it's kind of kind
of funny how we came to came to pass in
each other's lives and it goes, you know, and it's
no coincidence that he's talking about addiction in the family next.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So it's early two thousand. I want to say, I'm
in my addiction.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm putting together some relief, periods of relief, no freedom whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
In fact, then I didn't even know what.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Step one looked like, Okay, I won't smoke crack, I
can drink. Step two look like I believe inca think.
Step three looked like turn it over, I'll put some
money in the collection basket at church. Step four looked
like nothing. So I went to a meeting and it
was in New Jersey on the Jersey Shore, which is
where I hail from. And it's nothing like the show,
(00:57):
just so you know, And I'm in this meeting and
I've never attended an AA meeting like this before. Because
the gentleman speaking was talking about steps and was talking
about like doing them.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
He wasn't talking.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, he wasn't talking about hanging out in a diner,
and he wasn't talking about getting a tattoo, and he
wasn't talking about getting a girl.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
He was talking, and he wasn't talking about.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Putting a car on your driveway or putting six figures
in your bank account. He was talking about solution, which
I didn't identify it as solution that I.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Identified it as unwillingness. That for me. So I left
that meeting and said, you know, it'd be cool to
see him again. And I never and and I didn't
for a number of years.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
And you know, fast forward, I want to say, two
thousand and nine, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
my cousin calls me up, and you know, and she's
been like more like a sister than a cousin, and she.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Has taken me to many a treatment center and dropped
me off there.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
And she called me and she's like, yeah, you know,
you're you know, at this point, I'm a clinician and.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I'm working at a center and she's like, yeah, I'm
dating this guy in AA.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I was like, really, who is he?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
And she said, Chris Chris S And I was just
like it just hit me. I had this like CD
and it was Chriss from Pottersville, New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I got it that day and I put it together
and I was like, I'm wondering if it was if
it could be him, And it was him, and you know,
the relationship kind of flourished, and you know, you know
now he's married to and you know when I crashed
and burned, you know, almost three and a half years ago,
I h you know, he like knew it, and he's
(02:53):
like calling me, you know how you doing.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I'm like, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
You know when I could speak, you know, when you
got that. Yeah, and he knew, you know, and he
never confronted me. You know, he told my cousin he
was like, he'll call when.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
He's ready, and that's exactly what happened. And he picked
me up.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
In Bradley Beach, New Jersey, and where I was living
in a studio apartment and successfully smoked eighteen thousand dollars
worth of crack in six weeks. And you know, I
I at that time, you know, I was like I'll
go anywhere, you know, and I went to detox. They
showed me a nice brochure with a beach, and that
that was all it took for me at that point
(03:32):
was a beach, and I saw a bedroom and that
looked good too, And I knew I had to get
well fast because.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I had people to help.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And I say that with sarcasm, because I needed.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
To go away for a long time.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
And I did what I thought was gonna be forty
five days turned into four months, and what turned into
four months turned into a two year suspension of my
clinical license.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And all I had everything I needed, even some of
my wants.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
But I got a chance to take a lot of
people through the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and in
doing stuff, I admire the mentorship and the friendship and
and the and the love that I've gotten from Chris.
And with that, I'm gonna bring up Chris Schroeder, who's
gonna talk about addiction in the family.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Good after them, everybody, man, It's good to be here.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
What a wonderful place. This is, what a wonderful piece
of God's country that was found to place this, uh,
this particular treatment recovery center on Mark.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Thank you for the kind words.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Mark is one of those rare, rare clinicians who really
understands that what the real problem is, you know what
the real problem is for people who were addicted, who
are or who are alcoholic, the real problem is a
separation from God and from their fellow man. That's really
(05:04):
what addiction is more than anything else. And Mark is
one of those rare collinsions that understands that further, to
be true healing, there needs to be that connection to
God and there needs to be a reevaluation of relationship
skills that will allow us to go back out and
and be citizens and be family members and understand how
(05:25):
how we should comport ourselves on this particular planet. And
uh uh, it's really unfortunate, but that those those type
of clinicians are rare.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Uh And it's wonderful.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Monty's here, my buddy, Monty.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Monty and I go way back. We've done a whole
lot of things together. We've we try to go to
a lot of the addiction symposiums, and we've you know,
we've probably been in four or five states together doing
something and it's always a pleasure to to be in
his company. Chris and Pattier here, you know, that's that's amazing, right,
(06:00):
they're great friends of mine. Chris is probably done more
for carrying the messages of recovery in the English speaking
world than any other person, just because he's been tirelessly
flying around the planet, giving, giving uncompromising and unapologetic talks
(06:24):
wherever he goes about what the real truth is about
addiction and what the real answer is in recovery and uh,
and for him to be a be a friend, him
and Patty to be friends of mine, I consider that
a great a great honor. Jim Jimmy, Joe. You know, Wow,
what can I say? Uh? Turning a vision into an
(06:45):
actuality like this is you know, I can see, I
can see what's gonna happen here in the future. I
can see not only live say, but soul say many
of them. There's some people who are in the processes
of going through here or have just gone through here,
(07:05):
who know exactly what I mean. You know, you don't
just separate from whatever you're addicted to. You know, you
you come out with a complete change in your outlook,
your attitude, your perspective, the way you behave, the way
you think, the way you you view the world. It's
it's it's it calls this in the Big Book being reborn,
(07:28):
and a place like that offers the power for that
to happen. And that also is a very very rare thing.
So you know, when when I when I was asked
to come down and participate in this particular day, this
day of celebration really for for this wonderful center and
the people involved in it, I absolutely said yes. I
(07:51):
so like Dave. Like Dave who is a wonderful friend
of mine and does more behind the scenes work in
treatment centers and treatment processes and and helping out people,
I would in touch with a ten foot pole. Uh
you know, Uh, I'm serious. He goes to he goes
(08:11):
to some of these some of these places that you know,
I'm like, Dave, you you you you call this guy,
you work with this you work with this guy. Oh
my god, he's chirping like a squirrel. I don't even
I don't know what to do with this guy. Uh.
But you know, I was taught, I was talking I
was talking with with Dave that that it's unbelievably rare
(08:33):
in the world of addiction treatment for people to have
a clue. I hate to say this, but ninety eight
percent plus of the treatment centers out there don't have
a clue. They're working with the wrong tools. You know,
they're they're they're trying, they're trying to treat the flu
with architectures. You know, it's it's the complete wrong set
(08:57):
of tools to use, you know, for for addiction. And
I'll tell you what. Addictive illness is the number one
health threat in the country today. If you take heart
disease and cancer and put them on top on top
of each other, it won't come near the numbers of
people affected and afflicted.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
With addictive illness.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
And we're in the dark ages with most of our
treatment processes. People are throwing tons of money into stuff
that just is ineffective. Addictive illness is an unorthodox and
all unbelievably aggressive illness. It's unorthodox because of the way
it presents all right, So many people who are alcoholic
(09:43):
or who are drug addicts don't understand the enormity of
the problem. They are minimized. They do not understand how
much trouble they're in. That's that's an aspect of the illness,
to not understand how much trouble you're in. You know, Well, yeah,
you know, I'm I'm shooting heroin with a Turkey Baster.
(10:04):
But it's you know, it's not really it's not really
that bad. Yeah, I mean it's it's it really is.
It's a it's minimization at its at its best. And
so so, how addictive illness presents is it presents in
some really bizarre ways, and usually the sufferer doesn't understand
it's a symptom of addictive illness. I'll give you some
(10:27):
examples defective relationships. You know, having your boss always be
an idiot, having your family always misunderstand you, all the
police officers have a vendetta against you personally. You know,
your friends you're just disloyal. You know, the people that
(10:49):
you're in a relationship with just don't respect you enough
and they can't read your mind enough to know what
you want and need, so they're always disappointing you. And
you know, that's that's that's a big picture of defective relationships.
And there's a great quote in the Twelve and twelve,
which is the Twelve Steps and twelve Traditions that was
(11:11):
written for alcoholics anonymous, and it basically says, defective relationships
are almost always the cause of our immediate woes, including
our alcoholism. So That's why I believe defective relationships have
a lot to do with with addictive illness. Many of
the things Dave was also talking about, how we can
(11:33):
be misdiagnosed. You know, surprise, surprise. Listen, if you're drinking
yourself to death and every single night you're poisoning yourself
with alcohol, or you're doing so many drugs that you
haven't slept in a week, and you go in and
you put yourself in front of a physician or a psychiatrist.
Their job is to see what symptoms you had and
(11:56):
to and to prescribe through those symptoms. That's what they do,
that's what they've been trained to do. Okay that very
few of them understand addictive illness. There's an organization. There's
an organization called ASAM that's American Society of Addiction Medicine.
And there's some three thousand, six thousand physicians in America
(12:20):
that belong to this organization. And these are people who
have some additional training in addiction and alcoholism. A medical
doctor today only needs about four hours worth of study
in medical school on alcoholism, and usually that has to
do with the chronic effects of alcoholism, like cirrhosis of
(12:43):
the liver and esophageal verses. They learn about that, they
don't learn how to treat alcoholism or treat addiction except
in an acute framework, a medical intervention framework. They don't
understand what recovery is for most of them, and even
the ASAM doctors I've known a whole lot of them,
even even they don't really understand the spiritual characteristics of
(13:09):
the problem. Addiction and alcoholism have a monstrously large spiritual component.
Each sufferer is ill spiritually. I want to tell one
story that basically will show you from my own personal experience,
(13:30):
what is really the problem. What was really my problem
now had I had a period of drinking that lasted
about twenty years. Towards the end of my drinking, I
was drinking between a fifth and a court of hard
liquor every single night and going to work and then
on the next day, and on the weekends, I was
(13:52):
getting drunk, coming to starting to drink again, passing out,
coming to starting. I'd get drunk like five times on
the weeknd and somehow try to pull out of it
Sunday afternoon so that I could get to work on Monday.
It was it was a gruesome, gruesome existence. But what
would happen, What would happen to me is I would
get off of work and I would be line b
(14:14):
line to the liquor store, one hundred miles an hour
to the liquor store the second I got off work,
because I needed to buy my vodka or my bourbon,
and I needed to be about the business of drinking.
And that was that was my primary purpose. I was
focused on that, and I was heading in that direction. Now,
I remember this one time. I used to just be
able to walk into the liquor store and grab my booze,
(14:36):
pay for it, and go. I made sure that they
understood to never run out of my brand, you know.
And and it was I was very loyal to a
specific liquor store. Well, I went there this one day
and there was a woman in line talking to the
to the person who checks you out. And she's there
like what, you know, what kind of wine goes with tilapia?
(14:59):
And and I'm like what, And you know, I'm standing
behind her like you know, come on, come on, and
the guy's going, well, you know, there's a nice cabernet,
you know, from the from the from the California vineyard
regions that have a nice bluff. And I'm like, are
you kidding? Men?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Are you crazy that this lady's talking about wine. I
need to buy this vodcast and I need to get
out of here, you know, give her a bottle of
gallow and get her out of here, you know. I mean,
it's freaking out and I got a problem. I got
a problem. Move that lady out of here.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I got a problem. I'm somber. I'm somber now now
now thinking about this, think about this is my problem? Really?
Speaker 4 (15:42):
The alcohol, No, the I need the alcohol to soothe
the spiritual trauma I'm going through.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
You know, so so addictive illness. Addictive illness is an
It's monstrously bigger than just separating the person from the alcohol. Now,
in my in my first six months, in my first
six months, I felt like the guy behind the Telopua
lady for six months. Just I mean, I was squeezing
(16:17):
my fist. I was squeezing my fist constantly. It was
like it was like just an obsessive, compulsive thing. And
and when my hand would start to cramp up, I'd go, oh,
I'm squeezing my fist. I was out of my mind. Now,
you can't just go to group and treat that.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
You can't watch your Father Martin movie and be Okay.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
You need a lot more. You need a lot more.
You need a you need a transformation, you need you
need a spiritual awakening. You need, you need, you need,
you need the power of God to flow in you
and through you to be able to get past something
that aggressive. And for the most part, it's misunderstood. Addictive
(17:05):
illness is the most misunderstood illness out there. People. People
misunderstand the problem. And if you're not working on the
right problem, you're not working on the right solution. So
a lot of times these treatment processes or these good
good intention people or family members are working on one problem.
(17:27):
What do you think the problem is. They're working on.
Separate the individual from the drugs or the alcohol. Let's
get them sober. Okay, that's not the problem. Now, I'm
not saying that it's a good idea to keep using.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea to become abstinate,
and it absolutely is. But Bill and doctor Bob, you know,
(17:52):
when they were getting together in the first one hundred,
were contributing to the book Alcoholics Anonymous. The miracle of
that thing was they recognized that you don't fight alcoholism
with sobriety, and you don't fight drug addiction with being clean.
They tried that, it didn't work. It was always followed
(18:14):
by relapse. So what do you need? You need a
spiritual awakening as the result of the twelve steps. That's
what they learned. And they learned that through the occ
group and what they learned in the Oster group and
the spiritual exercises that they were taught in the ASH group.
They found out that by spiritual living one could change
(18:36):
their personality so significantly that they could stand behind the
tilopuolada in line and it was not a problem. You
understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Now.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Recovery is about two things. Recovery is about freedom, Dave
was talking about this again. And recovery is about power.
Now what is the freedom, the freedom from the bondage
of self. Standing behind the Telapia woman, I was in
bondage to myself. There cannot be a more self centered,
(19:13):
self absorbed individual than the alcoholic or the addict, because
it is so all about them. They're in the bondage
of self and all they can think about is what
they need and what's in the way of that, and
it's all about them. That's how That's how alcoholism and
(19:35):
drug addiction presents in its advanced stages. So the recovery
process has to be about freedom from that bondage of self.
And how it works basically is how it works is
you identify the problem, whether it's alcoholism or drug addiction.
(19:56):
You come to believe that there's a power greater than yourself.
There's a power that can work in you and through
you to relieve you of the obsession to use and
that unbelievably oppressive, uncomfortable emotional existence that you're living. You
can finally become comfortable with yourself and your environment and
not need anything outside to put in to change the
(20:19):
way you feel or the way you see everything. All right?
Step two, Step three is Okay, I believe there's a
power greater than myself. Step three is making a decision
to seek that power. Step four is inventoring the three
things that are blocking you off from the power being
able to work in you and through you, and that
(20:40):
is anger and resentment, fear, and your conduct how you
are comporting yourself, especially in an intimate relationships that needs
to be inventory. In the fifth step, the things that
you've discovered, the truth about your stock and trade, the
cause and conditions of your failure at life, are discussed
(21:02):
with another person. And then you become willing to have
God remove these defects of character. You humbly ask God
to remove.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
These defects of characters.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Then you become willing to make amends to the people
in the institutions that your character defects of arm. Then
you go out and you make amends to the people
in the institutions that your character defects of arm. This
is a revolutionary series of spiritual exercises. This will bring
(21:33):
about a complete change in attitude and outlook in the individual.
And this is where recovery really starts. There's sobriety, which
is just abstinence from alcohol or the drugs, which is untenable.
If you're really an alcoholic or an attic. You will
not be able to take that for long because you'll
just you'll want to kill yourself or you'll have to
(21:54):
use you won't be able to take it. But then
there's recovery, which is which is comfortable l abstinence. It's
that shift in personality, outlook, and h and behavior that
we see. We actually see this happen here. I've met
some of the people who've gone through here, and I've
met some of the people who've just started here, and
(22:17):
you can see the transformation. You can you can see
the selfish, self centered individual walking in here figuring out
why it's wrong and why everything in here isn't being
you know, handled right. And then you see the person
on the other end of the spectrum who's fill filled
with gratitude and compassion and just want to find somebody
to help, somebody that's suffering. They just want to find
(22:39):
somebody to help. And you see that transformation in a
place like like this. That's what recovery looks like. That's
what recovery looks like, and that's what freedom looks like. Now,
the power you get, the power you get from the
from these spiritual exercises, is just this. You're able to
do things like start up a center like this. I mean,
(23:00):
think about think about the courage it would take to
come up with an idea like this, pitch it to somebody,
put every card you have on the table, knowing that
it's gonna work, or you're gonna die. Try it and
go out and do it. You know, that's the kind
of power that you get exposed to in recovery. You
can be all that you can be. What is that
(23:22):
the army of the Marines or whatever, But it's true,
you can be all that you can be because fear
gets removed. What holds us back? We hold ourselves back.
We hold ourselves back because of our anxiety and our
lack of belief in what we can do and what
we can accomplish. All right, the recovery process removes fear.
(23:46):
We inventory fear and step four we share on step
on our fear and step five we ask God to
remove our fear in step six and step four we
humbly ask God in step seven to remove that fear.
And then we go out and we do the We
do the most courageous thing we can possibly do, and
that's make amends, go back and knock on doors. You know,
(24:07):
I'm here to set things right. That that takes an
enormous amount of courage. We get done with that, We
get done with that, and fear does not drag us
around anymore. We can we can go and be about
our business and God's business. We can go out there
and we're about that business without holding ourselves back. You
(24:27):
know what, think think of, think about think about what
a great deal that is. Most of us come into
a place like this just to separate, you know. Just
get me off the drugs, Just get me off the booze,
and I'll be okay. And then we realize in a
place like this that we're not gonna be okay. Yes,
the first step is get get off of those drugs
and get off of that alcohol. But to be able
(24:49):
to stay off those drugs and stay off that alcohol,
you need to be a new person. You need to
be a different person. And that's where the that's where
the the shift in perception comes. That's where the spiritual
awakening comes. As family members, what can we do? There
are ways that we can aid and abet the destruction
(25:13):
of our loved ones. Don't think that you can't kill
the people that you love with your behavior, because you can.
You can aid and a bet their destruction by not
understanding the nature of the illness and not understanding the
appropriate behavior to have in front of it. I'll tell
(25:35):
a story. There was there was this kid that was
coming around. I'll you know, I'll never I'll never forget him.
He he you know, at his best, he was a
very very cool kid. You know, he came from a
came from a family where the father's a brain surgeon.
You know, he had he had good stock, good breeding.
But he was he was a drug addict and he
(25:56):
was an alcoholic and that ran in his family. Every
single time he would relapse and blow up his world,
his mother would say, please come on back home. I'll
cook you a steak. You got a nice bed to
sleep in. You know, I know you're sick. Just stay
(26:17):
in there for the week or whatever and everything will
be fine. And she fed him, and she made sure
that she did his laundry, and she paid for his
summonses that he got, and she took care.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Of all the problems.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Now, if it was an addictive illness, if it was cancer,
that would be a very compassionate thing to do to
help somebody who's sick, that would be a very compassionate
thing to do. In addictive illness, that kind of behavior
kills because it enables the person to continue the life
(26:54):
cycle of addiction on and on and on. It makes
it easier for them to go back out the next time,
And that's exactly what happened this kid. Finally he was
drinking and he was on Oxy's, drunk on Oxy's, and
he did not wake up. He went to sleep and
he did not wake up. And you know, you know,
you can't go to a mother and say, you know,
(27:16):
this really is your fault. But it kind of was,
you know what I mean, like like like like why
did why did you know if you would have put
him out, it could have made things more difficult for him.
He might have sought a solution sooner. You know, I
I know I know an individual. I know an individual
(27:37):
very well who went to like thirteen reheats. You know,
the parents just kept paying. Oh okay, well you know what,
you know, where's the next place, Where's the next place?
You know, finally, when they were done, when they were done,
this is it. You know, we're putting you in this place,
but do not call us again. You know, go to
(27:58):
the halfway house, start rebuilding your life after this. You know,
you're cut off, You're done. That was the day the
individual was faced with the choice of basically engaging in
a recovery process or going on without any backup, any support,
or any money. Sometimes sometimes a family can, uh can do,
(28:22):
can take actions that are conducive to an individual finding recovery.
Some really great lessons are to be learned by the
real experienced alnas. I'll tell you a great, a great
story about an alan On that I know. Now, just
because you're an all On doesn't mean the person immediately
stops drinking, or if you're a Narna, they immediately stop
(28:44):
using drugs. It's more it's more about learning learning how
not to be tied into the dysfunction and emotional anguish
of the addictive cycle in your home. But this woman,
this woman, what would happen is her husband would get
really drunk up. The whole family would get upset, and
everybody'd be yelling at him, and he'd fall down. He'd
fall down on the floor and pretend to be dying,
(29:07):
you know, and then everybody go, oh, oh, what can
we do? What can we do? You know, Well, we're
sorry we were yelling at you. Okay, Well she started
to go to Alana. She starts to go to Alana
and the same thing happens. The kids are yelling at
the father and the father falls on the floor, pretends.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
He's dying, and she vacuums around him.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Okay, now that's a beautiful lesson. That's a beautiful lesson
of detachment. You know, sometimes we do need to detest.
Of course, we love the people who are in our family.
I'll tell you what a lot of times we love
them more. If we've got a straight a student that
(29:46):
does all the right things and is really perfect, and
we've got an addictive son that blows up the world
every five minutes, sometimes sometimes we pay a lot more
attention to the guy blowing up the world, and sometimes
our hearts are really with that person. Because people who
are out alcoholics and people who are drug addicts are
are remarkable people. Sometimes we've got a personality that's very attractive.
(30:08):
We can talk you into doing stuff that's crazy, you know, crazy,
you know, you know why alan Ons have this defurrow
drow up here. It's because of doing this all the time.
You want me to do what? So of course we
love these people. Of course we love these people, but
(30:30):
we cannot allow a family to get really the whole
entire family to get sick because of one person's behavior.
Sometimes we need to make the hard choices, and sometimes
those hard choices don't look right. Sometimes they go against
our parental instincts in a big way. They go against
our parental instincts. What we need to do is we
(30:53):
need to take the counsel of experienced people. And that's
not every counselor you know an addiction. Please, we need
to find people with a lot of experience and we
need to follow their council because they've especially the people
that have been through it. One of the things that
I love about people in recovery is they share their experience.
(31:16):
It's very rare that you'll hear opinions. You will, but
it's rare. More often than not, we share. We share
our experience, and experience is incredibly valuable. Opinions are not.
We learn in recovery. We learn not by advice. We
(31:36):
learn by experience, and we learn by practicing spiritual principles.
Those are always the right direction to go. I've been
working I've been working with alcoholics for almost twenty five
years now. There was a period of time where I
kind of just followed my own instincts and I did
(31:56):
what I thought was right, and so often were blowing up.
Things are not going well. People were drinking on me,
you know what I mean? And relapsed on me, making
me look bad. Well I got I got exposed to
a couple of very very influential Big Book workshops, some
(32:16):
people that were influential in the genesis of this place,
a couple of guys, Joe and Mark h and I
started listening to these guys and they actually used the
Big Book, not as a vehicle to share off of
at a meeting. They used the Big Book as an
(32:38):
instruction manual in spiritual living. And they were sharing their
experience using this book as a as a method of operation.
And I started to become inspired by these guys. These
guys spoke with authority. They spoke with authority. They you
(33:00):
could tell one hundred percent they believed every single thing
they said, and there was there was also some authenticity
with them. They sounded very authentic. So I started to
I started to believe what they were saying, and I
started to do some real amazing things. One of them
was there's a chapter in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. It's
(33:20):
called working with Others. I started to use that as
an instruction manual in working with others. Call me crazy,
you know what I mean. But I but I wasn't
before I was trying to encourage people to get better.
I was encouraging people all the time. Oh, here's my
phone number. I'll see it the looney NOONI you know, tomorrow,
(33:43):
you know, just call me if you feel like drinking,
you know, I mean I was, I was encouraging people
to tow the line and stay sober. Well, there's a
huge difference between encouraging somebody to toe the line and
stay sober and offering somebody a path to freedom and
power to the practice of the twelve steps in the
book Alcoholics Anonymous. So I started to pay attention to
(34:05):
this chapter. And in this chapter there's a huge amount
of instructions for working with people now, for the family
members in here. There's a couple of chapters that are
vital for you. One of them, one of them is
the chapter to wives. And you don't if you know,
if you're a husband, you know, don't not read it
because it says it's a chapter to wives. It should
(34:25):
really say the chapter to the spouse. There were just
there were mainly men alcoholics back in the thirties, not
that there weren't women alcoholics, they just, you know, this
is just the way the fellowship developed Nowadays, I think
it's forty eight percent of membership in aa as women,
which is, you know, about where it should be. But anyway,
(34:49):
there's a chapter to wives and it talks about how
you are to approach the alcoholic who's still drinking. What
are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to act?
What are you supposed to say to them when they
come up and they ask you to, you know, answer
the phone because it's the boss calling. You know, what
are you what are you supposed to do? And there's
some really really great advice in there, and there's even
(35:11):
there there's even a level of alcoholism that's very important
in the chapter to wise exact one, two, three, and four.
You know, the heavy drinker all the way through the
chronic low bottom alcoholic, and that information allows you to
identify how much trouble you know your spouse is it,
and that's very very important. Then there's a chapter to
the family afterwards. You know, how should the family behave
(35:35):
In the early days the meetings, if you showed up
without your wife and your family to the meetings, they
said go back home and get them, because this was
all about the family recovering all along with the alcoholic
you know, come to the meeting. I can't tell you
how many family members give me give me a hard
time about this. When I suggest alan On or I
(35:59):
suggest open meetings, they basically say, look, it's his problem.
You know. You know, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
miss prime time TV just because he's a Horse's be
done well, you know, listen, Addictive illness is unorthodox, and
you're always in more trouble than you think you are.
If you're a family member, you have become ill because
(36:20):
of the person in your family with the addiction. You
have become ill a lot of times. You don't even
know how ill until you start to recover from it.
Because it's happened over a long haul, over a long.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Period of time.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
You've become to a degree dysfunctional, to a degree selfish
and self centered. You have. That's what happens in an
alcoholic or a drug addict family. So so there's some
recovery that really has to happen on you on your side.
You know, your life may not depend on it like
the alcoholic or the drug addict, but the quality of
(36:56):
your life is going to depend on it. There has
to be some recovery processes. You know there has to
be some spiritual healing. You know there's a lot of
the spiritual life is broad, roomy and all inclusive. You
never exclusive or forbidding there those who seek will find
(37:18):
you know when when the when the student is ready
to teach, you will appear. These are all spiritual principles
that are absolutely true that when you're ready, when you're
ready to get better, to improve your spiritual condition, there
will be ways shown to you. God. God is good,
God is merciful, and God is generous. God will show
(37:41):
you a path toward your specific healing and what you
need to do. The worst thing you can do, though,
is no never. I don't need, I don't want. That's
not for me. You know that belligerent denial is the
only thing that can really sabotage your ability to engage
(38:02):
in something that's going to improve your quality of life.
Every single day that you live in an alcoholic household
or a household where drug addiction is concerned, every single day,
a little bit more the quality of your life gets
chipped away. It happens slowly and perceptibly, and you're so
sick you don't even know you're sick. By the time
(38:24):
it's time to put little Joey in treatment or whatever.
So as a family member, please be open, Please be
open to the different avenues that are going to be
afforded you for your own recovery, and be supportive of
the people who are in treatment. I want to talk
just for a minute about powerlessness, because this is the
(38:45):
most misunderstood characteristic of alcoholism or drug addiction. Powerlessness. We
see it on the wall. We admitted we were powerless,
but we don't fully understand what that means. And this
is what it means. You may want to stop using
(39:06):
drugs with every fiber year you being, you may have
sworn that you're never gonna do drugs again. You you
may know that if you do drugs, you're gonna have
a dirty urine and you're gonna go to prison for
five years. You may know that you're gonna lose your family,
you're gonna lose your job if you use one more time,
And you can be one hundred percent certain in your
(39:26):
mind that you are never gonna use again, and you
will tell everybody that, and five minutes later you're smoking
crap and you don't know what happened. That's what powerlessness
looks like sometimes you're not even there. People like people
like Nancy Reagan say just say no. Well, if you're
an alcoholic, you're in your attic, you know, just say no.
(39:50):
That that that completely misunderstands what alcoholism and drug addiction is.
Power list is power list. Yes, our ego wants us
to believe that we've changed our mind and we went
to the cop man. Okay, but think about it, that's
completely insane. You've just told everybody you're never to use again.
(40:13):
You swore to everybody, you know all the consequences. It
would be completely insane to use again. But your ego
wants to tell you that you've changed your mind. Doesn't
make any sense. Lack of understanding is not our problem.
Lack of motivation is sometimes not our problem, you know,
(40:34):
lack of meeting attendance is sometimes not our problem. What
our problem is is Our problem is lack of power,
the power, choice and control over putting the substance back
in our body in an unrecovered state. We don't have
At times, we don't have access to this power, this
(40:55):
choice and control, and we use again. We let everybody down,
and everybody's pissed out of it, and they think what a loser.
What I would like everybody to know is, instead of
using all of that energy on being upset with yourself
or the person who used, use that same energy to
(41:18):
try to direct somebody into a recovery program where they
can be exposed to spiritual principles that will bring about
a complete spiritual awakening, wherein God can work in and
through them and prevent them from using drugs or alcohol,
because that, at certain times is the your only hope.
(41:40):
You need to be prevented from using alcohol and drugs
by the power of God. And there's a certain way
you can access that power through the spiritual living and
spiritual exercises that are inherent in the twelve steps in
the recovery process. Thank you. We need to understand better
(42:06):
as family members, we need to understand better what's going on.
These people aren't bad. They're not morally you know, they're
not liars and cheaters and thieves. They're lying and cheating
and stealing, but they're not liars and cheaters and thieves.
That's that's that's a symptom of the addiction. A lot
(42:30):
of times, every once in a while, you do get
liars and cheats of teas. I'm not saying that you don't.
But for the most part, the people who are really
alcoholic and who are really drug addicts, they have consciences
that when they do something wrong, they are pained by it.
Now I've worked I've worked with a couple of sociopaths.
You know what a sociopath is. A sociopath is somebody
(42:52):
that would that could pull out a gun and shoot
you and not ever think about it again, never even
think about it again. Okay, that's like a sociopath. We
are not sociopaths. Every single thing we do negative out
there in the universe impacts us and it comes back
to us and we feel shame, guilt, remorse. That's what
(43:16):
happens because we're em that's part of our emotional illness.
We need to understand what alcohol is. It is, we
need to understand what addiction is so that we're working
on the right problem. If we really understand the problem,
we'll be about the business of the correct solution. That's
(43:37):
all I got.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
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