Transcript:

Julie: Welcome everybody, this is episode 36, and we gave a great group of people with us tonight. I am so excited to meet all of you. So we are going to – as always – start with introductions, and we will start with Debs.

Debs: Well it’s lovely to be here, thank you for inviting me. My name is Deborah, I go by Debs or King13, and I belong to a community called I Am Sober. That’s where I met Julie and Steve, who are our hosts today. I am from Australia, from Melbourne. And I have been sober for 27 months. Life’s never been better. Just really happy to be here and looking forward to the conversation.

Julie: Great, yeah we’re really happy to have you here. And Debs has been on a couple of episodes previously, and is also a very dear friend of Steve and I, so it is very wonderful to have you here and see your lovely face. And next we’re going to go with Britt.

Britt: Alright, I am Britt. I am an interior designer by day and a recovery coach by hobby. I just released a new book, so that’s really exciting. Hopefully I’ll touch on that a little bit. And I’m from south Lake Tahoe, so we’re just now starting to enjoy some sunshine. So I’m feeling really excited and happy just in general because of the sun.

Julie: Awesome, I’m feeling jealous because we are buried in snow right now. It is the end of April and it snowed a lot today. So I’m jealous! (laughter) Anyways, for our listeners, we will include Britt’s links and everybody’s contact links in our show notes, so you can see what it is that they are up to and follow them on social media and get to know them if you want to. And last but not least, we have Doctor Andrew.

Dr. Andrew: Thanks for having me. It’s very exciting to be on another podcast speaking recovery. You know, I’m an emergency physician, I’m the director of an ER, I run the EMS trauma programs out in New Hampshire. That’s one hat I wear. Actually, that’s three hats. The most valuable hat I think I probably wear is my recovery hat. I’ve been sober over 5 years. I just celebrated 5 years on April 3^rd, this month.

Steve: Awesome, congratulations.

Dr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it wasn’t that difficult once I gave up the fight. It’s shocking. And maybe we’ll get into some of that. I’m a big advocate for recovery, destigmatizing the chaos that circles around addiction and substance misuse and behavioral problems. So I’m excited to be here and talk.

Julie: Absolutely, well we’re really glad to have you. So we all know life has its ups and downs, and if we’re lucky, most of the time they balance each other out. But sometimes it seems like we’re stuck in the dark, like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. For a lot of people, those times can start wearing them down and make them more likely to drink. So we’re going to talk about that tonight. What do you do when you’re stuck in the dark? What have you learned about handling it in a healthy way, so you don’t turn back to your addiction? Feel free to share some of your personal experience and what that has looked like for you.

Debs: I can start if you want, Julie. I did a bit of research of this before we got online, and it’s perfectly normal to have these thoughts. A lot of the population actually has them, research has shown. The amygdala part of the brain actually regulates our emotions and also our motivation. And 2/3 of your motivation is actually designed to focus on negativity, believe it or not. So we have to work pretty hard at staying positive, do you know what I mean? And in the end, when I’d decided that I’d had just enough, decided that was it for me, unfortunately alcohol does take us to a place where we get depressed and are full of anxiety. And I do feel like I was in a dark rabbit hole, and you do have to fight. But also, you have to ask yourself, what are these thoughts? Analyze them and ask yourself, are they permanent? Are they going to pass? And also, just listen closely to what is going on. Like, “How on earth am I going to get out of this? This is an impossible situation. I’ve been alone 40 years. It really is something that may need medical attention if it’s prolonged. But if it is just the natural thoughts that we have, there are ways – and I can go into a bit more detail later on – about how we can actually tackle this issue. So that’s the good news.

Julie: I had never heard that. 2/3 of our brain focuses on the negative, is that what you said?

Debs: Yeah, it’s the part that focuses on our emotions, the amygdala, and it’s designed to focus on the negativity. Why, I cannot tell you. I did not get that far into the research. Maybe Dr. Andrew can help us.

Julie: That feels like a fight or flight thing maybe. But right now I’m just feeling normal for how negative I tend to be. So thank you for saying that. (laughs)

Steve: Probably meant to just keep you safe.

Julie: That’s a really interesting fact, I’ve never heard it. So I tend to fight the negativity. I want to shut it off, like it feels wrong and I don’t like it. And I think I’ve been surrounded by people my whole life who are are like, “Oh, just buck up. Focus on the positive. Look at the bright side.” So I feel like all those negative emotions are inherently wrong, if that makes sense. That’s what I’ve been taught since I was little, so it always feels like the negative is the wrong. So then I get mad at myself because I’m focusing on the negative and that just compounds the whole situation. And then I just want to turn it off. I’ve gotten – obviously I don’t do that anymore – but that, forever, is what I would get stuck in.

Britt: I have a really fun, easy activity actually. When I start to feel like I’m going into a dark spot, and it’s really simple. But it’s really simple. I just have a jar, and it’s full of a bunch of activities that are there to take my mind off of whatever is putting me into a negative space. So I’ll pick up this jar and the energy… I’ll just shake it around and the energy from that is already uplifting. And then I’ll pull out whatever activity it is. And it can be anything from taking a few seconds to do some breath work, or going into coloring books and taking a minute to color. And all of these activities are so long, you can spend one minute to ten minutes, whatever you need until you feel like you can pull yourself back out of that space.

Dr. Andrew: When I think about negative emotions, I really think the way I look at it is, what lenses am I wearing? How am I interpreting the world? You know, humans we tend to interpret the world based off of what we knew as kids. So our experiences as children – and what I’m probably speaking to is the adverse experiences as children – that gives us lenses to kind of navigate life through. I’ll give you an example. I was raised in a perfectionist family. I was told I could do better. My parents were loving me when they said that because they wanted me to succeed. But to a little kid, continuously hearing that you could do better equated to negative self talk. I’m like, alright…

Steve: Not good enough.

Dr. Andrew: Yeah. And my thought addiction – and this is where my stance for recovery really is, we’re thought addicts at first. Things like not good enough, not loveable, not important. These are all thoughts we develop as children. And our limbic system, which Debs was bringing into – the amygdala and hippocampus and all of that. That’s our memory and our emotions are hardwired. And so it’s not shocking, I’d go out in the world even at 46 and I’d still have a limbic system of a five year old who thinks he’s not good enough. And so I interpret the world in a manner that satisfied in that manner. So does Steve. (laughter)

Steve: I raised my hand. I was like, yeah, that’s me.

Andrew: This isn’t unique to me, by the way, but I’m reframing recovery in this manner because it’s a lot more palatable for a guy like me. To say look, my thoughts and my feelings are skewed, often. So when I’m in a dark space, I have a choice. I can choose to distract from it, which sometimes I have to. Because if I am in a very dark place, it’s very life saving to distract. I go up on a mountain, I go back country skiing, I distract from it because I don’t want to go back to the behaviors I had in the past. That being said, there’s opportunity in darkness. There’s opportunity to walk into darkness and say, Why? The Whys of recovery are the most fascinating things to a guy like me. I’m always trying to find answers. I literally chose a profession that is perfect for me, right? It’s emergency medicine, I need answers, I want to know I did it right. What better profession to beat yourself up all the time though. Being an ER doc, getting it right 100% of the time is an expectation from the general public, but it’s not practical. (laughter) So if I was a baseball player, batting 700, I’d be a hall of famer. I actually subconsciously chose a profession that would satisfy the little kid in me. So I think that when I think of… I ask myself, what lenses am I going to wear today? Am I going to wear the lenses of darkness? And if so I’m going to see darkness. If I’m going to wear the lenses of light, I’m going to go and walk into light. And that doesn’t mean I can wake up and say, “Hey, I’m just going to find happiness today.” Because that’s one of the biggest breakdowns for humans is that we feel like we always have to feel happy and always have to feel good. That’s what our parents say. Just feel happy. I tell my kid, let’s look at when you’re sad, let’s look at when you’re angry. There are no negative emotional states. There’s survival. There’s a reason why we have anger. Now I would say there’s adaptive behaviors and there’s maladaptive or problem behaviors, and I learned that quite well when I saw what drinking and drugs did to me. And I used a lot of behaviors. I’ve gotten rid of this concept of substance use disorder when I do talks. I really focus on the thought that this is an upstream thing. This is a behavior and emotional break down. Then there’s behaviors that are associated with recovery. And substance misuse, we chose substances to quiet the storm in our brain. That’s that. Now I can’t go back and drink today. There’s no way that I’m going to get so emotionally sober that I can go drink. I know that. My brain has a circuit that was fired up around 30 years of age and that’s it. It’s a reward circuit. We’re dealing with powers and dealing with evolution here. But which lenses am I choosing to wear? And walking into the pain is where I find possibility. It’s not always fun, but it is necessary. That part our brain to, what Debs is saying, this is called neuroplasticity. By staying accountable to the fact that I’m responsible for my thoughts and feelings, every time I do that and I out myself and I use the world to feel not good enough, I am reshaping that part of my brain that wants to keep in me in that five year old state. And that’s brilliant.

Steve: That’s the part where you walk into it and ask yourself the why and say, okay this is okay that I’m here. This is okay that I’m here right now. Let me explore this really crappy feeling and find out where it’s coming from. That’s the opportunity to rewire because that’s when I’m sitting in the uncomfortable. This is where I don’t want to be. I understand that this is where I am, and if I can sit in that and figure out the why. I can understand that I’m there. The one thing that Julie’s always said to me, she said this to me once, “It’s okay that you’re there.” This was the first time I’d ever heard this because I was trying to fight it so hard. Right? It’s okay that you’re there. You just can’t stay there for too long. And she’s absolutely right. I can stay there for a day or two and it’s not going to be detrimental to my performance or anything like that. I’ll have a couple of bad days, but I can’t sit there and hang onto that like a shield, and use it as protection. It’s not doing me any good, its not doing anything, I’m not trying to find that why. As long as I’m still trying to work through that why, I’ll be okay. And sometimes like you said, Andrew, I’ve still got to distract. I’m not finding the why this time. I’m just not going to find the why this time. And I call myself out when I’m there and it’s difficult to call yourself out when you’re there because that’s the time when I generally want to isolate. I don’t want to tell someone the crazy crap that goes through my mind. At the same time, if I give that stuff a place to live outside of my mind, it gives me a lot greater chance to work through it.

Julie: So listening to you guys talk, I have two different versions of being stuck in the dark, I think. I have like this acute version of like crushing hopelessness where… there’s heavy stuff in life, right? There are just certain things that I carry around with me that are just heavy. My whole life isn’t perfect. And nobody’s is, and for the most part that’s fine. And then every so often it just feels like this stuff becomes crushing. It’s so heavy, I can’t handle it. Curled up in a ball crying on the bed because I just can’t do life. And that feels like this acute version of being stuck in the dark. And when I’m at that point, there’s no wading into that darkness. Versus…. like I just have to hold on for dear life. That’s generally when I sit there with somebody on the phone and just cry. I don’t know how to get out of that. I almost… like, I can bring up the… I know the positive tools, I’ve been doing this long enough I know. Change the lens that you’re looking through, switch it, get somebody else’s perspective, all these things. When I’m in that place, I’m just not interested in any of that. I just want to cry and be sad or be angry or whatever it is. And the only thing that works when I’m in that place is reminding myself that this is going to end. That little fact was new for me in recovery because I never gave emotions a chance to end when I was drinking. I just drank them away, right? Or I didn’t even drink them away, I just drank until they finally did go away. And somehow in my brain, I was convinced the drinking was what was making them pass. Turns out they just pass on their own. That was news for me. (laughter) For me, that is the only…. when I’m in that really awful, gut wrenching soul twisting place, all I can do is lay there and feel that shit, and remind myself that I’m not going to feel that way forever. A lot of times it’s just put myself to bed, and wake up, and hope I feel better the next day. And then there’s that other like, almost depressive version of darkness, where I can really dig in and I can

journal and I can reframe and I feel like that’s a working, functional version of the darkness for me, where I can really analyze it and learn from it and find the opportunity in it. But listening to you guys talk, those are two very… like I have two versions of dark times in my life. I’ve never analyzed this before. But those are two distinctly different…

Britt: If you feel yourself slipping into the darker version, is there a chance to catch that before it gets so far? I always try to break down the feeling from as far back to the beginning where it came from as possible. So I think it’s so important to figure out where these ideas are coming from in the beginning and where the root of the problem is. Hopefully the goal is to be able to stop it before it starts, right? The idea of riding the urge, catching the wave before it rolls over.

Debs: I was just going to say Julie, I think your reactions too – one is a very emotional reaction to the dark thoughts, and the other one is a physical reaction that the body needs. It needs to go through that process and that’s where you’re in the moment of change. Because you’ll find that once you do go through it, and you wake up the next day, very rarely do we feel exactly the same as we did that night. You may not be great, but you certainly won’t be exactly the same, I don’t think. And if you are, that’s when you need professional help. It’s a natural process. You need these releases, you really do. And I think my mom told me one thing. She said, Deb, you’re going to either control your mind or your mind is going to control you. Because that’s how powerful it is. And this is where the panic attacks that people have, and anxiety and depression – of which I’ve suffered all, and so did my family – the female side, very hypertension focused. I had to learn to change those pathways in my head. Just like Dr. Andrew said, all those neural pathways. The drinking ones, the thoughts, the triggers, everything. Basically, you know how I told you about the road? I’ve made a new highway in my brain. The old one won’t go away, and those thoughts, they’ll always be there, they’ll always return, that’s part of this disorder. But I am on that new highway now and I can override the old road, because I don’t want to go down the wonky old road. I want to drive on the nice smooth road. It took a lot of time to do that.

Steve; I know there was the one time not too long ago. I was probably on day 2 of a low, and I was driving home from work and I was just about to go to the grocery store and I drove past a cannabis store. And the thought goes through my mind, It’d be nice to smoke a joint tonight. And I’m like, what in the flying f*** are you thinking? Like seriously, you don’t even smoke the stuff. And then send a text message, look what just went through my mind. I understand now that I really need to dig in because I’m not really thinking that that’s going to be fun. I need to actually take a look at that thought and where I’m at and why I’m there. Because something has to change. Whether it’s just the lens, or I need to change something about what I’m doing because what I’m doing right now isn’t healthy. It’s not benefiting me. Right? It’s just… it was interesting how just out of the blue. You talk about the highway. I recognize that here’s an exit that I probably would’ve taken at some point in my past, but I’m just not going to get off on this highway anymore. Just keep driving. And I’m going to tell someone about that silly road named Cannabis and I’m going to carry on.

Debs: The escape. The exit escape routes.

Julie: And I should clarify, I don’t often even think about alcohol anymore. Which is good. That’s not something that ever crosses my mind. I still wish that I didn’t feel that way. But I don’t experience cravings, so to speak, when I’m in that place. It’s still just not fun to be there. And had I really hit some of those dark spots early on, if I was like two or three months sober, that could’ve been a really big danger zone for me.

Dr Andrew: I think when I started recovery, I had a very limited emotional capacity. My capacity to tolerate emotional discomfort was very small. And I proved that because I readily used behaviors such as drinking alcohol, using drugs, over exercising, food, you name it. I used behaviors to quiet those storms down in my brain because I really didn’t have the capacity to feel discomfort. Emotional pain. I lied to myself by saying, this is okay. I shouldn’t have to feel this way. And as a result of doing this work, I call it the emotional sobriety work. I built this robust emotional capacity. I have the ability to sit in uncomfortability and be okay with it. And that’s not to say that I go out in the world to find sadness and despair. But I think of my work. We see a lot of trauma and chaos in the emergency department. And my ability to sit with students and help them through the process of what we’re seeing and educate and what not. My ability to be a father of teenagers that are dealing with their own chaos and do it in a manner that affords some adaptive changes for them rather than having them just distract, the way I used to. So the emotional capacity is a thing. And Julie, what you’re speaking to, that is building emotional capacity. Willing to sit in discomfort and Steve, what you’re speaking to is the ability to have the self awareness. How great is it that in your recovery, you have the self awareness first, so that you self regulated and didn’t go off the road. Because in active use, we have lost access to the part of our brain that allows us to make those decisions. The prefontal cortex goes offline and you’re operating off the reward circuit. So if you didn’t have that self awareness, you wouldn’t have been able to self regulate and you would’ve gotten off the highway to ride the THC train. I mean sometimes I grab the Oreo train, but it is what it is. (laughter) The overexercise train. I do that routinely.

Steve: It’s better to do that than some other trains for sure. But yeah, I was laughing at myself. I sent Julie a text message like, listen to this. Like, really? Really? I don’t even smoke the stuff, but there it is. The self awareness I think if we’re going to talk about self awareness in sobriety, it’s absolutely amazing when you give yourself a chance to actually listen to those thoughts, because a lot of listening to what goes on in my mind, and then giving it a place to make it real, allows me to have it reflected back. Whether it’s on paper (journaling), whether it’s talking to someone, it gets reflected back. I make it real, I stop telling myself anything else, and then I really get to look at it. Whether it’s the sadness whether it’s grieving my past self. Whether it’s lost time. A lot of, I think, the sadness especially in early recovery is that I can’t believe that I did all of this stuff to myself, beat myself up like that. And even at two years, I’m at just past two years and I just had a great experience with my mother where we talked about the past. And I got to grieve – I’m saying this like it’s a good thing – I got to grieve some more of my past. It came with tears and it came with that sadness, but I understand that where it all came from and it puts more pieces of that puzzle back there, it closes some gaps and it actually turns out to be freeing, even though it can be sad or angry or whatever that may be. If you can find that why or even give it a chance, then what a beautiful way to be able to change the lens.

Dr. Andrew: I tell people to focus on behavior. Especially in early recovery, it’s so key for us to focus on behavior that are t with living and connected with loving ourselves and others. Because the thinking mechanism that we’re now speaking to, and our emotional centers are all screwed up. We’ve proven that for decades. So if we focus on behaviors, regardless of how we’re thinking, what we’re thinking and how we’re feeling, we will progress in recovery. We won’t go backward. We will connect with others. So it’s really about the behavior. And it’s in the behavior that we’re going to find liberation from that problematic thinking and emotional circuit in our limbic system. The behavior of accountability. That is the behavior that is important, the fact that we are owning it. In real time. Saying hey, I’m using this situation. Do it with your boss, it’s awesome. I’ve done it with the CEO of a hospital. I’m using you right now to feel like I don’t do it right. Be transparent. Be radically honest. It’s fascinating to see how that affects changes in ourselves and others.

Julie: I love that. I don’t know, I find… they say you should never go through recovery alone. This isn’t something you do alone, this is something you do with connection. I’ve found that when one of those thoughts start, and if it just catches a little bit of momentum, it’s like a snowball, right? It can just build and build and build. And all of a sudden I’m digging into things I felt in my childhood in addition to everything that I’m feeling right now and it’s this giant thing. I lose complete control and it develops a whole life of its own and I think sometimes the useful thing there for me is just talking to somebody else who actually gets it. That’s where the recovery community comes in. That’s when if I go to a meeting and just dump all of the crazy stuff going through my head, somebody else can… Steve was saying, reflect it back and help bring it back into perspective and help pick out the little bits. Be like, let’s stop the snowball. Let’s maybe back it up a little bit. Let’s focus on what actually started it. Just gaining somebody else’s perspective and gaining somebody else’s understanding can be maybe the most powerful thing when stuff gets so big like that.

Steve; Yeah, there’s nothing that says that the lens through which I see the world through is clean. I just think it’s clean when I’m looking through it. And when I give it a chance to give it to someone else, they can wipe the lens off and I can see like, holy crap the lens in which I’m seeing this right now is actually pretty dirty. Because someone else got to take that and clean it up and feed it back to me through their lens, because they’ve healed through that trauma or whatever that may be, then I get to look at it through a different lens, with different words and I get to understand it in a different way and I get to ask questions about my own self through that. I’ve learned a lot about my self, my own biases, a lot of things, just by throwing it there, giving it to someone else. The recovery community is amazing for this because we all, we’re all a reflection of ourselves one way or another. Just to see it back there and see the flaw in the lens that I’m looking at life through.

Dr. Andrew: The stories we tell ourselves. More often than not, the stories I tell myself have no truth. In fact, they’re usually the opposite. When I say I’m not good enough, and I access that little five year old brain, that limbic system. When I actually inquire into the situation, the circumstance, usually I find it’s not the case. So I can spiral for days in the I’m not good enough circuit. The moment I own it, often, I find out that that’s not true. And that I am good enough. And if I look at the evidence – I tell my kids this – I say look at the evidence. When my kids have a breakdown. They’ll say X, Y, and Z, and I’ll say, what’s the evidence that there’s truth to this story? We talk. We talk about upbringing and trauma. It’s so important to acknowledge that our experiences as children affect us as adults. It’s how we navigate life. When I finally could see that I was the problem. It wasn’t the world. The world’s gonna be the same. They’re gonna do their world stuff tomorrow and they did their world stuff yesterday. But Andrew. It’s Andrew’s interpretation of circumstance. The he sees, he reads, he hears. That interpretation is where my breakdowns occur. I have to ask myself, if I don’t like what I’m seeing or reading or hearing, who do I need to be in the world to affect a change that’s adaptive for the world? Am I willing to show up for the world or am I going to just sit around and whine about it? There’s a lot of whining in me. I want to whine a lot because it feels good to be a whiner. Right? I’ve got people to rescue me, they cosign it. They say, “Oh you’re definitely…” it’s victim oriented.

Steve: (laughs) they cosign it!

Dr. Andrew: I can enroll people into the chaos that’s Andrew’s existence. Get all the people in the world saying, “yeah, you should be upset about that.” They’re not helping me, they’re enabling my emotional fragility. So it’s fascinating. But find the evidence. More often than not, the stories we tell ourselves – that reactive story when you get triggered, you read an email and you get triggered. You guys know what I’m talking about. That is a limbic system 101 when you were about five or six, and there’s probably no truth to the way you’re feeling and the way you’re reacting. Take a pause, take a deep breath. Don’t write back. (laughter) Don’t respond. Especially to the senior leadership of the hospital.

Julie: I think we’ve all learned that lesson at one point or another. Don’t respond. Take a breath. Take a breath! Yep, for sure.

Steve: Well, thank you guys for coming on tonight and sharing your thoughts. I really really liked the “find the evidence.” We talked a lot about our brain and our thoughts and where they go and a lot of the scientific part which was really cool because we don’t really often talk about that part on the podcast. So it’s really neat to see that we can rewire ourselves and that it is a lot of our inner child that creates that initial response. And then we have a chance to change that lens. So I want to thank you Britt, thank you Dr. Andrew, and thank you Debs for coming on tonight, and sharing with us.