TMP-Ep192.2 - On the Nature of Addiction - Updated!

In this episode of the Meaning Project Podcast, Dr. Dan delves into the complex nature of addiction, sharing personal experiences and insights from his 25 years as a licensed clinical addictions counselor. He discusses the impact of relationships, trauma, and societal factors on addiction, as well as various treatment models and the importance of connection in recovery. The conversation emphasizes the need for a deeper understanding of addiction and the potential for healing through meaningful connections and alternative therapies.



Takeaways

• Addiction is prevalent in society and often linked to personal experiences.
• Relationships can significantly trigger relapses in individuals struggling with addiction.
• Alcohol and benzodiazepine withdrawals can be life-threatening.
• Many people seek to alter their reality through substances.
• The food industry contributes to addiction through addictive food products.
• Trauma in early life can lead to addiction later on.
• There is no one-size-fits-all treatment for addiction; various models exist.
• Connection and community play a crucial role in recovery from addiction.
• Understanding the science behind addiction can aid in treatment.
• Finding meaning and purpose can help individuals overcome addiction.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Hello, and welcome to the Meeting Project podcast. I'm your host,
doctor daniel A Franz. As always, it is my pleasure
to bring a little bit of meaning, purpose, resilience, mental health,
psychedelics in today's substance abuse. You know I owe you
an apology. Last week I recorded this podcast. I recorded

(00:43):
a podcast on the nature of addictions, but apparently I
didn't record it because there was no audio, just videos.
So for those of you listening to the podcast, that
didn't happen, and if you watch the video, I'm sorry
you just saw me moving my lips. Don't worry. I
have the entire production team on it trying to figure

(01:04):
out what the problem was and where that went to.
And by the entire production team, I hope I know
you realize that simply means just me. So that was
a loss, but maybe a good loss because I kind
of went back to my thoughts when I recorded that
and maybe did a little bit more work, maybe did

(01:26):
a little bit more research. The last one I recorded
was really more about kind of where I was feeling
after a rough couple weeks of sessions related to substance
abuse and addiction. Because it had certainly addictions in my
office a lot lately. I mean, I'm a licensed clinical

(01:47):
addictions counselor, so that kind of makes sense. Do you
find it kind of ironic? I do, Well, we can
talk through that. But I'm a licensed clinical addictions counselor,
have been for about twenty five years now. Wearing an
Indiana's Psychedelic Society T shirt. Also today big day. The
reason I'm warning this this is technically my what I

(02:09):
like to call my cap and gown. Today's graduation day
for the Integrated Psychiatry Institute Psychedelic Assistant Therapy Certification program.
By graduation, I mean this is our last major intensives
about eight hours of lecture today. Of course, there's also
twelve hours of supplemental material that needs to be gone over. Afterwards,

(02:33):
quizes to be taken, and then a two hundred question
final exam. Ideally I knocked that out here soon. But
it is interesting how I've learned the field of substance
abuse and addictions goes really well with psychedelic research. So
we'll see if we get to that here today. But
just a reminder, although today is the graduation from the

(02:56):
IPI program, I have now been offering my Academy in
my off for about five months with a oh Man,
so much cool success, a lot of good things going
on there. And I've studied intensely, studying intensely psilocybin, and
I'm a believer and I am open to working with

(03:19):
people in that medicine where it is legal. I've heard
some great discussion about journeys and therapeutic opportunities in Colorado
and Oregon, and there are new places opening up legislation everywhere.
So that's something you are interested in. Let's chat. But

(03:44):
last week and now today is about the nature of addictions.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Why.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
As I said, addiction has certainly been in my office
a lot recently, and one particular case really just rocked me.
I mean, I remember coming home and it was it
was rock young man came to my office intoxicated. It

(04:11):
was late in the afternoon and he was still intoxicated,
had been drinking for about ten days. And now you
know when Jimmy Buffett sings, I had been drunk now
for over two weeks, I've passed out and I rallied
and I sprung a few weeks. You know, I always
thought that was a cute challenge. Gee, that would be

(04:33):
interesting two weeks of intoxication. What would that be like?
I can tell you what I saw in my office.
It was heartbreaking, as most alcoholics do. This person had
been drinking vodka or you know, almost two weeks because

(04:53):
it was triggered by difficulties and relationships. And I talk
about this a lot in my men's group and with
other people strug with addictions and substance abuse, like, relationships,
in my experience, are one of the biggest triggers to relapse.
It's that one thing in our lives. You know. We
can't control other people, We can't control their reactions. All

(05:15):
we can control is ourselves, and sometimes relationships are one
of the greatest dangers to recovery, unhealthy relationships. That is so. Yeah.
I had been drinking vodka for a while just to
get the intoxication, but knew he had an appointment with
me that day and wanted to help, and so he

(05:38):
was trying on his own to tytrate down and had
been drinking wine just to get rid of the shakes.
So I mean he was intoxicated enough just to get
rid of the physical sensations of withdrawal. And looking across

(06:01):
the office at him and the look in his eyes,
the pain and the shame. What brutal, heartbreaking. That's me
as a person seeing that, Me as a clinician, knew
that we had to get this person to detox pretty quickly.

(06:27):
Alcohol and benzodiazepines xanax value out a van are the
only two substances that the woodrawal process can kill you. OPI.
It's heroin may make you feel like you want to die,
but alcohol withdrawal and benz pain withdrawal can kill you. Ironically,

(06:51):
we treat alcohol withdrawal by giving people benzi diazepines. That's
pretty jacked up in my opinion, but that's strangely what works.
So yeah, Okay, it's been an extra week since then,
and just thinking back to that look in his eyes
still kind of shakes me up a bit. It's when

(07:14):
you see somebody that genuinely wants help. It's hard, right
when they are struggling so bad against themselves, against their
addiction and really want to be better. Now, there are
plenty of people that come into my office that don't
want to be better. They're forced to be there. You know,
we have so many addictions available to us in our times, right, alcohol, marijuana,

(07:36):
the two legal ones, right, cocaine, heroin, opiates, shopping Amazon
dot Com, spending, gambling, porn food. Our food supply is
so addicted these days. I think I've told you about
a book, The End of Overeating. I believe it's by Kessler.
It's in my office right now. I've probably read it

(07:59):
twenty years ago, and it's horrifying, and I've told you
about it before. It's about the food industries intent to
sell more by making their food addictive. Man, I can
go down that rabbit hole for a while, But what
is the nature of addiction? Right? Talk about the gentlemen
in my office struggling with alcohol. A self proclaimed alcoholic.

(08:24):
Another person I've known for a long time since the
days in the adolescent treatment center, who's done better, kicked
opiate withdrawal, alcohol or opiate addiction, alcohol addiction AfterAll addiction,
but really struggles with gas station supplements. Right? These things

(08:53):
you can get that you know. Ten years ago it
was bath salts, right, people were they We didn't even
know what's in them. And now you can get other
natural supplements that you know. It can be uppers or downers,
but it can be sometimes hard to shake, and you know,
it's interesting to see somebody go from really hard addiction
as a young person to still struggling to find that

(09:16):
way to feel better today. And of course, sadly, I
see so much porn addiction in my office young people. People.
You know, at one time it was damn near a
rite of passage. It was an unhealthy, odd ride of
passage that you know, as a young person, you found

(09:38):
somebody's nudy magazine I think that's what we called them,
nudy right in an older brother's drawer or some you
know it. It was secretive and it was hard to find.
Today it's just as secretive, but it's so much easier
to find. We have our smartphones that we keep very private.

(10:00):
And for this gentleman, he found at a very young age,
probably came across it at ten o'clock, the eight or
ten o'clock, ten years old, the age at which many
young people are curious. Right. This happens if you're parenting
out there. Young people are curious about their bodies. But

(10:21):
our schools are giving them tablets and laptops too early,
because then they can look this stuff up, or they
can look it up on mom or Dad or whoever's device,
And I tell you what natural, developmentally appropriate curiosity turns
into insanely inappropriate and grotesque findings on the internet, And

(10:48):
for this person, it's led to well over a decade
of diction, feeding that need to feel better. You know,
human beings have sought to alter reality, right, to escape reality,
to relax a little bit, or to have spiritual experiences

(11:10):
for tens of thousands of years. But we've got some
serious problems today. So my history this is always fun
to account. I think I've gone through this before, but
so my history with addiction. I was trying to remember
why I got into the substance abuse field, and I
think this is the path. You know, when you get older,
it's kind of hard to remember how you wound up places.

(11:32):
I think I told you I had to ask my
dad why the heck they sent me off to college
because I wasn't a good high school student. That was
just a few years ago. But I took some time
to think about it, and you know, through college, undergrad
graduate school, I needed a couple extra bucks, wanted to
make some pizza money, wanted to make beer money, whatever
you want to call it. Need a job, wanted a

(11:54):
job in my field, found the job in my field,
went to work at an adolescent treatment center. At that time.
That adolescent treatment center probably helped about one hundred and
twenty people today, was set up with ten cottages. Each
cottage had a different age group, different gender, probably about
ten or twelve young people. Through my time there, I
became a supervisor and then a shift supervisor. And then

(12:18):
in my year long sabbatical after I didn't get into
grad school, I was really wondering what to do with life.
And you know, I eventually got into grad school as
to become a therapist. And this place was expanding to
serve three hundred people a day, and I got to
open this outpatient unit. And one of the things I

(12:40):
saw as part of my my graduate studies and part
of my internship, one of the things I saw was
there wasn't a lot of parntal involvement. Most of these
kids were court ordered and their parents didn't want to
be involved. So when I graduated and it was time
to move to the big city of Indianapolis with my

(13:01):
girlfriend who was going to become my wife at that time,
I found an innovative and successful adolescent substance abuse treatment program.
And the thing that appealed to me is it really
involved the family, and I thought that was all kinds
of And as I think about it, I don't think
I knew squat about substance abuse and addictions. We didn't

(13:27):
get much training in it in grad school, and so
I started to read whatever I could. One of the
books I read was George R. Ross's Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment.
Excuse me, George R. Ross spent some time in jail
because he wanted to help people so badly he ended
up kidnapping some kids. There was charge of kidnapping, sorry allegedly,

(13:50):
but that's the way. This was so innovative as it
employed the parents or the parents were responsible for housing
the kids after the adolescents with substance use treatment with
substance abuse issues, and it was pretty interesting. But boy
it led to some interesting odd situations. So I'm working

(14:13):
in this addictions treatment center based on Ross's models, several
other models, but also on the encounter groups. That was
a word I couldn't remember when I recorded last time
encounter groups of the sixties and seventies. Now, these encounter
groups were loosely based on psychology. They were mostly based

(14:33):
on weird practices of the sixties and seventies, and a
lot of them are the reason we had to have
licensing requirements. If you've ever watched Netflix, had a great series,
maybe just last year, part series from several young people
who went through some of these different adolescent treatment programs

(14:55):
much worse cruel in some ways. It's called the program
I Rose in Terror watching. I think it was episode
three of the program when they go through the history
of some of these treatment centers, and the analyst and
treatment center I worked in was listed there at on

(15:18):
one of the kind of the bottom rung of a ladder.
But there were some things about that treatment center that
weren't helpful. There were a lot of things that were helpful.
But one of the things I learned was a lot
about the twelve steps in the abstinence and that's I mean,
that was my introduction to substance abuse treatment, addiction treatment,

(15:39):
et cetera. And you know, I was kind of I
had to tow the line and prescribe the program, but
I didn't always agree with it. So you know, I
did other reading and research and the one thing, you know,
I was there for, I don't know a little less
than a decade, did a lot of management there and
things like that. One of the things I learned that

(16:00):
really struck me was when a parent, a mother, came
up to me and here I am, you know, probably
my thirties, pretty young, just starting out with babies on
my own, and hear this older parent with a teenager
comes up to me and says, mister Franz, and you
I believe what you're teaching, But you mean to tell

(16:22):
me that because my daughter had some problems at her
age now, and she had some pretty significant drum problems
enough to be in six to twelve months of adolescent treatment,
you mean to tell me that in five or ten
years when my daughter gets married, I cannot toast or
celebrate her wedding with a glass of champagne with her.

(16:44):
And I thought, man to prescribe to a seventeen year
old abstinence for life, that was a tough pill for
me to swat. I wasn try. I agreed with it,
and personally for me, you know, that's because of my
my personal beliefs. I enjoy kraft beer, I enjoy a
glass of bourbon or Scotch every once in a while,

(17:05):
but I also know my limits. I'm also going beyond
my limits before too, and so understand that. It really
put me down a path of trying to research and
read everything I could about the nature of addictions and why,
and eventually I went to went on to teach addictions

(17:30):
at the satellite for Indian University a couple different places really,
but I was teaching graduate addictions and the text one
of the textbooks that I was prescribed to use in
the first chapter said we want you to introduce the
class to your first day with your students, use this video.

(17:54):
So okay, cool. What's this video? It was a Saturday
Night Live clip from the seventies with the with a
great cast, right, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Jim Belucy,
that group, and it was it was Steve Martin as
Theodoric of York, the medieval barber. Again. I'm setting the

(18:19):
tone for sixteen weeks of graduate school education and addictions
with the nineteen seventy Saturday Night Live video. In the
video shows Steve Martin, He's the medieval barber. Barber's back
then were also your physicians, right, you know, on the
fifteen hundreds, and what was their favorite prescription leeches leading,

(18:40):
take some blood, take a pint. No matter what they
came in for, it was take a plint, take a pint.
Bill Murray comes in classic Bill Murray style. You know
I was drinking to do too much meat at the
vernal equinox. You know, got ran over, buddy Oxy. Sorry,
that is probably a terrible Yeah, I shouldn't do that.
On the podcas cast, my wife hates it, but yeah,

(19:03):
he gets run over. Both his legs are crushed, and
Steve Martin says, takes some blood, and Bill why, says
I think I've given enough, so then he hangs him
upside down. They do all these weird things, right, People
are dying in the barbershop, in the medical place. And
at the end, Steve Martin says, but wait, maybe I
can employ the scientific method. Maybe I can do research
and find what works and then share it with other people.

(19:24):
And he says, no, why in the world is this
textbook asking me to share this to graduate students, Because
in that textbook that was the nature of addictions. We
don't know what we're talking about with. We don't know

(19:45):
for sure every chapter in that textbook, and it's back
here behind me somewhere had a fascinating evidence based practice
while trying to be an evidence based practice because at
the end it said, we're not sure if this is
going to work. It needs more research and more money
involved in it. And here I was teaching young therapists

(20:06):
good luck, and so I had to start formulating my
own ideas. Right. I The AA twelve step model worked
somewhat for some people, but not always. And I just
kind of naturally started going more of a cognitive behavioral
approach as I studied Loco therapy and Frankel, I started

(20:28):
to sprinkle in, meaning it made sense to me. A
lot of addictions start. Many people tell me, young people.
I was bored, and this was something to do even adults. Right.
One of my favorite books, Oh my God, you gotta
read it, Johann Hari recounts, and I can't remember who
did the research, the famous rat park research of decades ago. Right,

(20:51):
You put a rat in a cage by himself. You
give him two bottles, one bottle of water, one bottle
of water with heroin in it. What's the rat going
to do? It is going to consume that heroin until
it dies. Somebody else came along and said well, that's stupid,
because human beings aren't rats in a cage. Human beings

(21:12):
have things to do. They have lives, they have jobs,
they have partners, they have sex, they have food, and
so they redid this study. But they gave the rats
a rat park. They give them things to do. Are
the rats to fornicate with good food? Exercise, exercise equipment?
You know what they found out. They tried the heroin

(21:34):
water and they didn't like it. They found other things
more meaningful to engage in. That's part of my belief,
part of my my theory of addictions. My god, how
self important is that doctor Duran's theory of addictions. The
way I practice helping people is encouraging to find a
better rat park. We talk a lot about rat park

(21:55):
and Harris Harry's book is Chasing the Scream. I won't
say why it's called Chasing the Scream. It is a
important part of the book. Fascinating book, beautiful to listen to,
beautiful to read. But you know, as I was when
I recorded this previously, or didn't record it previously, a

(22:15):
lot of it was just kind of my personal thoughts.
I did some research, just research, I hopped online. We
can't call hopping online looking stuff up research anymore, right,
research is actually double blind stuff whatever, look some things up.
And I was reminded, right. So, doctor Gabor matte m

(22:36):
at leading trauma specialist, has a theory and has written
prolifically that a lot of addiction is predicated by adolescent trauma,
deficits in the brain, a need for reward. And you know,
he worked in some of the worst places of Canada,

(22:58):
British Columbia, and you know his the attics he worked
with often, you know, went so far as to diet.
He thought significant early life trauma was a part of it.
I really like the theories of Lanthdotis d O d S.
It's a very cognitive, cognitive behavioral approach about triggers and

(23:21):
what the trigger is. And it's amazing. He talks about
how the trigger to use often happens hours before the
actual use, that there's an idea a lack of control,
a loss of control, somebody controlling you at some point
in the day that you go, man, I can't wait
to get home and have a drink or a snort
or a smoke. And for some people, when we talk

(23:43):
about that, when we work through that they get to
that point. One of the things I teach just ask
why why are you having that drink? Why are you
having that next drink? Why are you lighting up that joint?
Why are you cutting up that cocaine? What's the why?
You know? His Frankele teaches us between stimulants and response
is the ability to pause and think and to ask yourself.

(24:08):
My friend and colleague who really has no idea who
I am? Doctor Jordan Peterson. He's got a great video
from his early days the Neurobiology of Addiction. A student
asking me is what is it about addiction? And he
reminds us, you know, when we engage in a behavior,
it strengthens the particular neural pathway, and every time you
engage in that behavior, it strengthens that neural pathway just

(24:28):
a little bit more, and then lesson is other neural pathways.
So if you repeat a behavior hundreds or thousands of times,
you have built and strengthened a strong neural pathway in
that direction. It's really hard to go I'm gonna have
a trigger at work and then go this other direction
where I'm going to go go for a walk in
the woods, or go for a run or go talk

(24:48):
to somebody. It's hard, it's possible. And that's where maybe
where the AA and NA model comes in, right, like
our powerlessness and having the will, turning our will over
to the care of God as we understood him or her.
It's an abstinence based model, and the twelve steps have
worked for a lot of people. Now ironically, and this

(25:09):
is not something but I want to get This is
watch out everybody. This is where doctor Dan gets canceled.
You know, it's pretty well documented that Bill Wilson, one
of the two founders, Bill w as he's lovingly called,
used acid, you know, had some very spiritual experiences. And
AA is definitely focused on spirituality, not religion, but spirituality

(25:32):
God as you understand him. And again, one more kind
of pat on the back of psychedelics that they off.
They they don't have the chemical books that get into
you that make it as addictive. Now you could get
addicted to the experience and want to do it over
and over. Well, that's not a good idea, but sometimes

(25:55):
a lot of times psychedelics can be healing. Bill w
is an example from AA and NA. I remember this
in my treatment center days, right, we have the disease
model that addiction is a disease and it needs to
be treated like that. There's the biopsychosocial model that this
comes from, part genetics, part nature and nurture. Where does

(26:18):
it come from? How does it get treated? You know?
There's the self medication idea that you know, people are
looking for a reward, right. This goes along with the
reward deficiency model. Something in the brain doesn't find other
things rewarding. But these substances and these substances, a lot
of these substances and even pornography, can you know, again,

(26:39):
fire up that neural pathway in one direction and make
other things less appealing, right, if you're engaging in viewing
some obscene or obscure versions of pornography, it's really hard
to make normal intimacy, right, healthy intimacy the norm. This

(27:00):
goes for substances and shopping as well. These are all
addictive things. I've heard some people call this idea of
self medication right the easy button, and I just need
an easy button to feel better. Going for a runs hard,
talking to other humans is hard. Just hitting this easy
button and putting something up your nose or in your

(27:20):
stomach that goes throughout your body. It's predictable until it isn't.
For a lot of people, they know how it's going
to make them feel. That's where they keep going. Right.
So these are there's the stages of change. But almost
you got about that one right that you know human behavior.
The stage is a change to see if I can
get them now, right. There's the pre contemplation where there

(27:41):
we don't even know there's a problem, and then somebody's like, hey,
you got a problem, where we recognize there's a problem,
like I should do something about that. You think about it.
That's contemplation, right, and then eventually put together a plan
and you execute the plan, but still with that relapse
is always a possibility in those stages. These are just

(28:01):
a few off the top of my head that I'm
familiar with over the years, and we're researching more and more.
So what is the nature of addictions? As Steve Martin
tells us, we don't know. We do know, we shouldn't
be bleeding people anymore. That's not good. We don't always

(28:21):
know what will work. I've experienced the hardcore intervention strategies isolation,
cutting people off, we won't talk to you anymore, it's
never good for anybody. Harry h A. R I and
one of his most famous. He's got two great TED talks,
but his famous one the Nate you know what we

(28:41):
know about addictions is wrong. Go watch that. It's so
good spoiler alert. He ends it with this. You know,
the the healing in addictions is connection, and you know
through his book he researches the heck out of that,
and it's pretty dang accurate. Connecting people with other healthy people,

(29:03):
connecting them with the ones they love, connecting them with
healthier relationship can be incredibly powerful, finding other meaningful things.
We do not have a unified theory of addictions yet,
just that dozen or so I listed plenty. What I

(29:25):
know from my experience there's something out there that can
help everybody. Some people take more time than others, and
a lot of times people close to them rightfully so
get frustrated, get tired, get worn out, get angry, and

(29:47):
they need just as much support as the person struggling
with addiction. They need to unload their feelings to understand
new patterns of behavior. Addiction truly is something that packs
the entire family, whether it's spending, addiction, substance addiction, porn addiction,
gambling addiction. You can just imagine the ways everybody around

(30:09):
the person is effected and it requires treatment for everybody.
But again, even though we don't know the absolute nature
of addiction, we do know I know there's always something
that can help anybody. We just have to find what
works for some people. Maybe it's psychedelics, maybe it's aaana,

(30:30):
maybe it's abstinence. You never know until you try. All Right,
I am late for class, I'm late for opening remarks,
but I so wanted to share that with you. My god,
I hope this recorded this time. I test the equipment
before you can tell if you're watching the YouTube, right,
we went from the mixer and big mic over there,

(30:52):
to earbuds to now the very cheap what are these unlabeled,
unlabeled Amazon nine ninety five headphones, And I'll run this
through some AI it'll make what do they call that
magic audio, and hopefully it comes out well. I hope
you enjoyed this conversation about addictions. If you'd like to

(31:15):
have a conversation, man, I'm always up for that. Share
your ideas, post in the comments on YouTube, or share
the link whatever you know. Do that thing people ask
you to do on different podcasts where you promote it
and put it out there because you know, I'm pretty
thankful and I want to share this and get this
out with other people. I better get to class. As always,

(31:35):
thank you for this opportunity to bring a little bit
of mental health meaning resulting psychedelic substance of use, treatment
and all those other interesting things that we need to share.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Take care the se s somehow reas