Demi Lovato’s Relapse and the Truth about Addiction
The news of Demi Lovato’s overdose reignited a national conversation about the enduring struggle of addiction and relapse — an often dangerous cycle that can end in tragedy for many people who struggle with substance abuse.In this episode, Dr. Oz sat down with renowned psychologist, addiction specialist, and former addict himself, Dr. Adi Jaffe to break down the anatomy of addiction, how to stop it before it starts, and what to do if someone you love is in danger. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I didn't know anybody that wasn't using drugs anymore.
I didn't know anybody that wasn't heavy into drugs.
And so I was in this cocoon, this environmental cocoon, where what I did seemed normal.
And it's crazy to think about it right now.
It's why I do what I do because I think I can relate to the experience people are having in the moment and also to the journey to get them out of it.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz.
And this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
The news of Demi Lovato's overdose reignited a national conversation about the enduring struggle of addiction and relapse, an often dangerous cycle that can end in tragedy for many people.
And you know, folks who are struggling with substance abuse, there's one out of three of you listening out there right now.
I know this all too well, but it is no longer a problem that someone else has.
It's affecting almost every family in America.
We've made a big deal about it on the show.
National Night of Conversation It's an effort to get families to talk about it.
But despite all that, we end up still hearing about these unfortunate celebrity overdoses and God knows how many folks that are dear to us.
Today, renowned psychologist and addiction specialist Dr. Adi Jaffe is here to break down the anatomy of addiction, how to stop it before it starts, and what to do if someone you love is in danger.
And he has a very, very provocative approach to this, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit.
It's a very different thought process that I thought I would ever talk about on this podcast.
But first off, I want to welcome him to the show.
His expertise in addiction goes beyond just formal education and training.
He was actually addicted to drugs himself.
He even worked as a dealer on the streets.
How did that happen?
How do you go from, you're born in Israel, Tel Aviv.
Yeah.
Come to this country, well-educated.
You're at UCLA, I think, at the time, right?
I was, yeah.
And what went down?
So, I mean, look, my substance use actually started pretty much right after we moved from Israel.
We moved right into high school, which is not a really recommended time for a kid to have such a transition, in my opinion, based on my experience.
Brand new group of friends, people I didn't know that well before.
My accent was off.
People are making fun of you.
And you know, you're a freshman in high school, so you're already at the bottom of the totem pole.
And I got together with some kids.
It was actually at a sleepaway camp for Israeli Boy Scouts.
And we all went away.
The boys and the girls were there.
At the end of the night, somebody pulled out some vodka.
I'd never really drank before.
You know, I tried a sip of wine here and there.
I thought it tasted disgusting.
But somebody offered it to me, and I was socially awkward and anxious, and And they gave me the vodkas.
I wasn't about to say no, because there's all these cooler than me kids around.
So I had a couple of swigs.
Exactly, right?
I mean, nobody's heard this story before.
And so I take a couple of swigs and it burns and it's disgusting, but I can't show the kids that because I've got to pretend like I'm cool.
And then 15, 20 minutes later, I feel better.
The anxiety melts away.
Everything feels normal.
I'm not shy talking to girls anymore.
And I really liked that experience a lot.
And so when we got back home, first of all, I drank the entire rest of that event.
But a lot of the kids did.
And when we got back home, all of a sudden I was cool enough to get invited into the parties where kids drank.
So this was 14. By the time I was 16, the same thing happened with weed.
And by the time I went to high school, I was 18. I wouldn't say I was a daily smoker and drinker, but it was pretty close.
And the quantities were going up and up and up.
And then I went through a serious depression after a breakup.
Everybody remembers, I think, their first bad breakup.
You know, the person you thought you were going to spend the rest of your life with.
And I went all out.
I just looked for anything to make me feel differently.
And I tried cocaine.
I tried hallucinogens.
I tried everything.
There was a move in there.
I moved to LA. And there I found a lot of ecstasy and a lot of meth.
And, you know, once the train kind of got started on substances can give me a solution to feeling the way I want to feel.
So ecstasy was great around girls because I was really shy around them again, and it was this touchy-feely drug.
And I just went as hard as I could, but the problem is drugs cost a lot of money.
And so at some point it crossed over to this threshold where we weren't wealthy.
My dad was a physician, but brand new in the States, so he was kind of still coming up through the ranks.
And I had to get his license again and all those things.
And so I was supporting myself.
They were paying for school and everything, but I was supporting myself and I didn't have money to do this stuff anymore.
And then I started getting entrepreneurial about it.
And so I said to my friends, you know, you guys give me the money for the drugs and I'll go get it.
And that gave me a discount because you buy it wholesale.
Everything works at wholesale, by the way, even all the way to the drug level.
And eventually, I gathered enough money to get such a discount on my wholesale drugs that I could actually make a profit selling them back.
And that quickly, it started my little career and You know, drugs are a...
It's a demand marketplace.
If you have them, people want them.
And I didn't realize how much that was true at the beginning, but eventually, within a year, we had about 400 or 500 people buying from us.
400 or 500 people?
Yeah, I was making $10,000 a week.
Your parents must have been so proud of you.
Yeah, they were really proud.
They knew nothing.
They knew nothing.
I mean, they knew I used, but I hid the drugs.
I had a recording studio, actually.
We were making music in LA, and my parents knew I partied because they knew that from high school and they weren't really happy about it.
They had no idea the extent until they got the call.
I got arrested.
SWAT team arrest, like a full-fledged 12 cops in all black in my bedroom.
How'd they find you?
I had a motorcycle accident.
They found about a quarter to a half a pound of cocaine on me.
During the accident.
And obviously when you're carrying around that much, you're either a dealer or you're connected to a dealer and they try to push me and squeeze me and I wouldn't talk.
So it's not a good idea to try to avoid the cops by giving them the wrong number.
They'll find you.
And I tried it.
It didn't work.
And they came to my house and You know, next thing I know, I have a $750,000 bail.
I'm in jail.
My parents get a call that their son's a drug dealer.
And my mom, I mean, I remember this to this day.
When we talked later, she said to me, I thought they had the wrong number.
Like, when somebody called and told me your son was just arrested for a drug dealer, she said, that's not my son.
And that began what would turn into about a three to eight year journey, depending on how you talk about it.
Of me really figuring out who I was again because I got completely lost.
You know, we were talking before the show about just how intense addiction can get for people.
I was lost.
I didn't know anybody that wasn't using drugs anymore.
I didn't know anybody that wasn't heavy into drugs.
And so I was in this cocoon, this environmental cocoon where what I did seemed normal.
And it's crazy to think about it right now.
It's why I do what I do because I... I think I can relate to the experience people are having in the moment and also to the journey to get them out of it.
So let's talk about the abstinence myth.
This is the book that Dr. Adi Jaffee has written, and it's an interesting concept.
When I first saw the title, I thought there was a play on words.
Again, the abstinence myth.
So where's the play on words?
Is it, you know, you have to be abstinence.
That's not the myth.
Well, that's not true.
It doesn't say that.
Yeah, it doesn't.
It seems to imply that the abstinence concept, the classic alcoholics anonymous, never drink again.
I'm an alcoholic.
I can never touch alcohol again.
Is it right?
And if you don't mind, I'm going to push you a little bit on this because I started talking about Damien Lovato's incident.
We've been trying to get her to come on the show.
I did something in Washington with her.
We did another event in New York together.
We've talked to this.
And now I'm starting to put the pieces together.
I think part of the reason that she didn't want to have a deep discussion with a doctor about her addiction is because she was still addicted.
And it was still a problem that she was struggling with, which I respect completely.
Sure.
And, you know, these are difficult choices, but if you think you're able to just hold on a little bit to the old life you had when you're trying to transition to the new life, it can be tough.
It can.
It can.
And so the first thing that I want to make sure, and please push me all you want on this, I didn't write this book for everybody to agree with me.
If you go on my Facebook page, you will see that that's wonderful.
Not everybody agrees with me.
So it's good.
I'm here to start a conversation.
That's why I named this.
You know, when I started writing, when I was a grad student, I would have these academic titles to everything that I wrote, you know, the possibility of including moderation.
Nobody reads that stuff.
Nobody cares.
So I realized you have to give a title that people will read.
That's why it's called The Abstinence Myth.
But I want to start with a presupposition, and maybe that's something that we can kind of at least agree on, and then we can move from there.
We're pretending like the conversation is between people engaging in full-on abstinence, successful treatment that will make them abstinence for the rest of their lives, or try a version that doesn't require from them.
But that's not where the equation sits currently.
As we sit right now, 90% of individuals who meet criteria for addiction, it's about, actually now it's like 88% of people who meet criteria for addiction problems, don't engage in any formal version of treatment.
80% never enter a conversation either with a professional or in a support group about the problem.
So the situation we're really dealing with right now is that the vast majority of people don't ever do anything about this.
And if that's it, all I want to do with this conversation is not to build a better black box of treatment, but to get more people into the boxes of treatment we already have existing.
And the point that I make in this book is we have created a situation where abstinence is the guard at the gate for treatment.
Unless you're willing to commit to lifelong abstinence, nobody will help you.
Therapists will say to you, well, you've got to go to AA and quit or you've got to have 30 days before I'll see you.
Or when you go to residential treatment, you've got to commit to being completely abstinent.
And as we were talking about right before, you talk about Demi.
I'm not involved with her personally, but I've worked with enough celebrities and musicians and DJs to know this.
They do this stuff because it allows them to function.
In whatever context that is true for an individual, it allows them to get through the next day.
They feel weird around people, so they need to take a drug in order to feel better.
They have trauma that keeps them up at night, so they need to take something to sleep.
Whatever it is that it's doing, it's working for them.
And the way we've created the system up to now, they have to be willing to leave their sort of crutches, their wheelchair at the door with their broken legs.
Some of them are almost quadriplegic in terms of their mental functioning, right?
And we say to them, leave all your equipment at the door and then crawl over there.
And if you make it, we'll come help you.
And I say, let's flip that equation.
Let's just help them at the gate.
And you know what I find?
40 to 50% of the people who come to me for moderation and reduction decide to quit on their own.
Which is something people told me was completely impossible.
They said an addict will always hold on to their substance use no matter what.
Well, not if you actually start showing them that their life without it is better, without judgment, without presupposing where they end up needing to go.
A lot of people decide in the end, they go, you know what, that thing I dreamt about, that two to three drinks two to three times a week, which is what everybody always tells me they want to drink.
By the way, it's really funny.
I don't actually like that.
I don't like drinking like that.
It always goes overboard.
I'm just going to quit.
Now, are they successful in quitting or not?
That's an entirely separate question, and we need to deal with all the tools.
But I just want to bring them in.
I mean, you're a thoracic surgeon.
It's like in diabetes, in cancer, in hypertension, and any other chronic health condition, the equation is flipped.
90% of people who get diagnosed get help.
Here in addiction, we have the opposite.
I'm just trying to bring more people into the game.
We've got some more questions after the break.
If you look at food addiction, which is, I think, probably the most common addiction in America right now, you can't have abstinence.
You can't tell people you will never eat again, or you're not going to overcome your food addiction.
So, at least with food addiction, you work on giving them different tools to cope with whatever food is medicating.
The counter-argument that you made, and I'm just going to throw it up there, is that you have to have some food.
Right.
And so food is much more clearly on a gradient.
I mean, simple carbs aren't as good as complex carbs, but they're all nutrients.
So if you're really in need of nutrients, I mean, they all have, not nutrients, calories.
So if you need calories, you can get calories.
The argument about drugs is you don't need Eddie.
You're making the argument, Eddie, if I get it right, that some people actually do need their drugs.
And I'll share a little story with you.
So Whoopi Goldberg, who's a good friend, and the view used to be shot right next to where my show's shot.
Oh, yeah.
And we would see each other.
And there's a bus stop.
You might not know this.
There's a bus stop outside our studio, but in the back, where no buses can get.
It was only there for the smokers.
So the smokers would go outside.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
And Whoopi's been very honest about the fact she's had addiction problems in her life.
And for her, and I've heard this from many others as well, cigarettes were just a crutch.
You know, it's better than drugs, right?
Sure.
So she's absolutely quit, by the way, because, and we had her on the show, a beautiful story about seeing a cystic fibrosis commercial and seeing these two little kids, siblings, who couldn't breathe.
And she realized, these little children will never have the option that I have of breathing normally.
How can I possibly throw it away with smoking?
So to your point, that got her off her cigarettes.
But the history of medicine is full, as you know, of great clinicians who were addicts.
But they were functional addicts.
The world is full of functional alcoholics.
Most of us don't want to acknowledge that because you don't have to have any alcohol.
You don't have to have any drugs biologically to survive.
If I get you right, you're saying some people actually have to have that to deal with the pain.
You know, I don't have to as a really huge weight to put on this, but I would argue this.
Medication-assisted treatment, right?
So if you look at methadone or buprenorphine or something along those lines for opiate addicts, is weirdly controversial.
If you go to hardcore drugs, I'll say 12-step environments, but not necessarily just 12-step.
Hardcore, abstinence-focused places.
There are sober living homes that won't allow people on methadone or suboxone.
There are treatment centers that will not prescribe it.
The evidence base around methadone and suboxone helping reduce overdose risk, improving outcomes for people addicted to the opiates, is about as large as you ever need it to get.
Does somebody abuse suboxone and methadone?
Absolutely.
People abuse everything.
But the overarching evidence is that this stuff helps opiate addicts.
Why are we fighting about it?
We're fighting about it because there's a puritanical notion sometimes that exists, which is the ideal is nothing.
The ideal is full abstinence from everything, right?
I'm drinking some coffee right now.
I stopped my caffeine for a couple of months and it was nice.
I had really good energy without caffeine.
But something like 98% of the world's population consumes caffeine in some level for energy.
We've decided what is okay and what is not okay.
But at its core, I feel like for some, especially in the U.S., it doesn't exist in a lot of other countries that I know, but especially in the U.S., the puritanical approach is if you can do it without any help from anything outside yourself, that would be the ideal.
And I just don't feel like that's necessarily A, the right choice, but also definitely not the right standard by which to judge somebody who's actually struggling right now, which is making it to tomorrow with their head on straight.
You know, because the people I deal with I've gone through sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse.
They've been adopted or abandoned.
Their spouses have cheated on multiple times.
They have biological disorders that make it really difficult for them to regulate mood.
I mean, the number of things that they struggle with is intense.
And what we're saying to them is, look, we get it.
But the point I actually make in the book is there are a few different camps.
One camp says to them, well, you're completely out of control.
You have a disease.
You can't do anything about it.
Another camp says, well, your experiences have dictated that you are like this.
Pick yourself up by your bootstrap.
And a third one, and there are a lot of people actually now that are coming to this side, says it's the environment and the environmental stressors and traumas and things like that that you went through.
We need to address those.
They're not even in you.
They're in the society.
I'm saying let's stop the fight.
I'm not saying people always need medication to help God offer this, but as you said, some people would greatly benefit by not focusing on abstinence as their core starting point.
Other people cannot function and are at a risk of killing themselves, like tomorrow, if we don't get them to abstain.
But then, why not use a medication like Suboxone that blocks their ability to use and things of that nature.
I'm just saying I want us to get more creative with the solution.
So let's walk me through this.
Someone comes in to see you and they're a big time drug addict.
Yeah.
And they are at risk for themselves because of that.
Walk us through the process.
They're not interested in abstinence.
They don't think abstinence is going to be part of their future.
They can't even think that far ahead.
So how do you sort of get them from the dangerous place they are to using, I don't know, how do you use half of the ecstasy?
You know, you cut your crack cocaine down to a third.
How does that even work?
How do you even prescribe that as a doctor?
Yeah, I love it.
So first of all, PhD, I stopped my clinical licensure in the middle.
We can talk about why, but it has to do with my past.
So, actually what I would typically do is, the first conversation I would have with them is I would say, walk me through what your days look like.
I want to understand your internal struggles.
And inevitably, the stories that I end up hearing are either family-related stories, ongoing current relationship stories, or environmental and logistical difficulties.
like people who I don't unfortunately I mean I wish I would but I don't deal with a lot of people who just lost their jobs and things of that nature but there's current strife that people are immediately interested in resolving I have a client that I we were just mentioning right before the show and it's marijuana which I know is not a hard drug but really hard for people who use regularly to stop so he's been smoking for 18 years straight and when I first saw him the first thing you want to know is at the end of a session is how much should I smoke and I'm not
And I said, "Hold on, we're not quite there yet.
We talked for a few hours and we realized that when he started smoking, it was because, like me, all his friends smoked and it was a way to fit in.
After school, he used to be an athlete.
And he had no way to fit in anymore.
And so smoking weed with his friends in college was a thing.
Started gaining weight.
Partially because of the weed, partially because he stopped exercising.
And so he became more awkward around girls, hasn't had a relationship in years, feels really bizarre about that.
So that created a porn addiction, by the way, on the side, along with the social awkwardness.
And by the time he came to see me, he was socially isolated, felt strange going outside, smoking weed all day, which was causing real disturbances around his work.
I just didn't choose to focus on the weed right away.
So, okay, well, what is it that makes you awkward?
And we started really delving into the fact that this guy feels like he's so overweight, no girl's ever going to want to talk to him, that he can't relate to anybody unless he's stoned, but then when he's stoned, he's so anxious that he can't talk to anyone.
And we worked for a couple of weeks just on getting his head around the fact that if he became more like the person he imagines that he wants to be, lost some weight, gained a little self-confidence, etc., We're good to go.
Now, all we did was really inserted, with a lot of effort, we inserted some exercise into the middle.
You want to know what technique I use?
Please, yes, I'm curious.
This is really funny.
By the way, this is something that could be useful for a lot of listeners now because when you're having that intervention with your loved one, because you think you're drinking too much or they're smoking or whatever they're up to, it's usually just stop.
That's the recommendation, stop.
Well, I mean, my goodness, the behavior started off adaptive, I mean maladaptive, but it becomes adaptive pretty quickly.
Yeah, people get adapted to everything.
I mean, that's what makes us human.
I mean, we're really good at that.
So, first of all, he was able to totally stop for a couple weeks and had a really good time with that, actually, but then something happened at work and it flipped him back on and he started smoking again.
He got really down on himself because he thought, oh my God, I'd quit, but here I am back again.
So here's what I did.
He rolls actual joints.
So here's the tip that I gave him.
What happens to a lot of people is the behavior becomes automatic, right?
It becomes habitual, and you start just engaging in it without even paying attention.
My first work, and this is important for anybody listening right now who's struggling, was to find the trigger and then the immediate behavior and thought that comes after it.
And so for him, he wasn't aware of the thought yet, but he knew that before he used, he always rolled himself a joint.
I said, okay, that's your point that we are going to start focusing on.
Forget whether you smoke the weed or not.
I want to interrupt at that point.
So the way we started was literally just before you roll, I needed to go do something else.
You can go walk the dog, you can do five push-ups, you can do whatever you want, but I need you to interrupt the habit in the middle at some point.
It took him a couple of weeks, but it became consistent.
So before every time he rolled a joint, he did something.
It started with literally five push-ups, walking the dog, taking a break, going to get some water, just to cause an interruption of the habitual thing.
Over time, we've built up to the point where now he essentially exercises in the middle between each one of those things.
Now, he rolls about five joints a day, so what that required for him was five times a day that he exercises.
But he got better at the exercise over time.
So now it's 50 push-ups or 50 squats or something like that.
Within three weeks, we got this guy to the point where he's exercising about 15 to 25 minutes a day in between.
And what's amazing is it blocked away some of his time.
So now one of those times that he smokes...
He doesn't have anymore because more time got taken up.
My goal with these people, especially I deal with a lot of difficult clients, is to start showing them that there are numerous ways, like you can reduce and not quit.
Now his goal is still to stop at some point, but I'm helping him kind of gain the control back.
It's important to say that It's good to have guidance along the way for somebody who's doing this because for most people who are dealing with it, family members and the other people that are in their life, there's too much weight.
There's too much baggage.
It's such an uncomfortable conversation that it feels judgmental to the person undergoing it.
You need sometimes an outside perspective to get help.
There's lots more when we come back.
So if you are one of these folks who's going to try to do...
What's the word?
Moderation?
What's the phrase you use?
I mean, I use anything.
Moderation, harm reduction.
Harm reduction.
That's good.
So harm reduction.
So you're not going to abstain, so I'm not going to push for it.
I just want harm reduction.
I don't want you dropping dead, destroying your career, your relationships, everything else.
Conceptually, I get it.
So what happens to the Demi Lovatos of the world?
Yeah.
Here's a woman who...
A lot of people helping her...
Good-souled individual, knows what the issues are, smart, insightful, talented, and yet she almost hurt herself.
She did.
And this is not the first time, right?
So Philip Seymour Hoffman, same sort of thing, right?
Ongoing relapse that nobody had been paying attention to for a while.
Here's the problem.
There's this thing called the abstinence violation syndrome.
I don't know if you've heard of it before.
The abstinence violation syndrome is what happens to people who are committed to lifelong absence or committed to the paradigm under which that is the route to success.
And then they slip up.
They take a sip of alcohol or they smoke a joint or they take a pill.
And in their head, they have just moved from the white box of success to the black box of failure.
So they might as well go all the way down.
And the shame that it induces is so deep that they can't share it with anybody else.
Especially, I mean, you look at Demi and...
Her character, her persona became about her recovery.
So to come forward and say, hey guys, I know I've been talking about my recovery forever and my sobriety, but I started trying some molly.
I don't know what she actually used.
Trying some molly at some parties, I just wanted to let you know, would be a huge shift.
Again, part of what I'm trying to say in this book is, look, let's ease up a little bit.
I think, I know it sounds crazy to so many people when I say this, but I think That our overemphasis on there is only one way to get better is actually causing a problem.
And the reason it's causing a problem is when people slip, as they inevitably almost always do, they don't feel comfortable talking about it because they know the story.
We know the story.
They're now failures.
And we talked about this before.
There are so many examples of celebrities who made it out.
But once you make it back out, you stay mum.
You don't want anybody to really remember that you used to be the guy who was in court every week for cocaine.
I want us to start telling these stories.
The stories of the people that I tell in this book, right?
The people who, yeah, you know, one of my clients came to me to drink less, and she's now abstinent.
But her version of abstinence is when she goes to a wedding, she has a couple of drinks.
That happens like four times a year.
We're told that cannot happen.
And I'm not saying it can happen for everybody.
What I'm saying is there are millions of people out there who aren't even trying recovery because they think there's only one way.
Let's let them in, and I can guarantee one thing.
Some of them will find a way that works for them instead of just sitting on the sidelines of suffering.
Harm reduction plan.
What do you think, Lisa?
I like it.
I'm stunned by your numbers that 88% of people never entered the door because abstinence doesn't seem to be in their future right now.
I mean, I did a study at UCLA, a longitudinal study looking at online treatment seeking, and there were four barriers.
There was obviously cost, because rehab can be expensive.
There was logistics.
I mean, I see how busy you guys are in your life.
Imagine somebody telling you you've got to take 30 days off of life and go on a retreat.
That's near impossible.
I saw you comparing rehab to a prison.
A little bit.
I mean, I went to rehab.
I went to two rehabs.
I got kicked out of one, but I was in one for three months.
Where else does an adult get told what time to go to sleep, what to eat, what room you're supposed to be sitting in?
It's a little prison-like.
It's got a pool.
So it's not that great.
And then the other one is abstinence.
One of the other barriers that I found is abstinence.
And then shame.
So with Ignited Recovery, which is kind of the thing that I'm now trying to do on the heels of this book, if I know that the barriers are shame, abstinence, logistics, and cost, what can we do to just kill the barriers?
Let's just make it as easy as possible to get help.
And the book is one of those ways.
I mean, you know, it's somebody who I've never met in my life, read this book, and It's only even available this moment on Kindle.
Hopefully by next week it'll be available in softcover.
But they wrote me and said it's the best $9 I've ever spent in my life.
And I'm buying copies now to give to my entire family because they come from an addict family.
I just want the message to be out there that there's hope.
So what advice do you have for family members who may have a loved one that's struggling with addiction?
Maybe they are looking for help or not looking for help.
But if you are a family member or a dear friend, what do you do to help them?
Okay, so first of all, I'm pretty biased towards the kind of stuff that I do, and I have an online course that parents are still engaging in as part, so they sit in on the group meetings we have with addicts, and they talk, and they change their perspective, and a couple of these people, one of these women joined because her son, who's living with her, because she didn't want him to be on the street or somewhere out there using, was heavily drinking at the house.
And she was really confused.
She signed up for the course hoping that he would do it, but he didn't want to.
So she stayed on.
And just this week, she sent me an email saying, look, he hasn't touched the course, but something about the different way that I'm looking at him, the different way that I'm responding to him, because she left Al-Anon for this.
She started, instead of doing Al-Anon, she's doing our groups.
She said, he's starting to own up to more of his responsibility.
He's He's starting to show up.
And it shows up in little, those of you listening right now with family members, it shows up in little things like just him mentioning that he cares that she's doing this for his benefit.
Him offering to help around the house with housework.
It sounds menial and small, but their relationship was so antagonistic for so many years and it removed that.
So that's one thing.
Secondly, there's a really great book, Getting Your Loved One Sober, which is a book that uses motivational interviewing techniques.
But for family members, it follows something called CRAF, which is community reinforcement of family training.
What that does is it teaches family members how to have these interactions in a way that is not antagonistic, that does not make you a police, because that never creates a kind of a family relationship you want anyway, but instead allows you to guide a person through kind of rewards and withholding of rewards towards the behavior that they want.
More than anything, I want to say this.
There's a story in our society that That people who are sick with this disease of addiction will be sick forever.
And that there is no way out.
I want to tell you that even if that is true, it's true to the same extent of cancer, right?
So there are people who had from melanoma to more egregious, aggressive cancers and are in remission for the rest of their lives.
You can say they're still struggling with cancer from the theoretical point of view, but they don't show any signs in the future.
The vast majority.
We're talking like 85-90% of people who at some point in their life struggle with addiction resolve their problem.
The vast majority do it without actual treatment and then the rest of the people do it either with one course or multiple courses of treatment.
This is NIA AAA research that has been around since the 80s and 90s.
Get the picture out of your head of somebody who has to struggle forever because what we know, and if you look at my TED Talks or any of the other things that I've done, the way we look at people through Pygmalion effect, expectancy bias, confirmation bias, all these things, the way we look at somebody else and the expectations we have of them alter their behavior.
I need the family members of those who are struggling to start recognizing that If you have hope, if you have support for them, if you start helping them look for tools rather than policing them and calling them sick, bastard, liars, etc., we're going to be able to find better and better solutions.
And in the end, we all have the same goal.
We all have the same goal, and that is to make sure that less people struggle with this and less people die from it.
What are your brethren saying?
What are the other experts, either people who have been addicts and learned about it for their or professionals, MDs, PhDs?
It depends on who.
So, like, Andrew Tatarsky, I don't know if you know him, but if you don't, you need to meet him.
He's a psychologist, an incredible harm reduction psychologist here in New York.
There's Stanton Peel, Tom Horvath, who's a great guy, started Smart Recovery, which is an alternative to a self-help group.
So there are big groups that are doing this now?
Well, there are groups that are doing either harm reduction based therapy or self-help around kind of easing up the pressure.
Look, there's more and more support for these sort of things.
When I opened up my old treatment center seven, eight years ago, we would get calls from people telling us we're going to kill people.
And the thinking was literally, this is really kind of funny, actually.
People, the rumor was that we had a bar in our treatment center.
Like the rumor was that people came to the treatment center and would drink during sessions.
I didn't find this out until after we closed the treatment center.
But look, there are millions, probably like 20 million people out there right now, right?
Because about 24, 25 million addicts in this country right now, only two and a half to three access treatment in any given year.
So there's 20 million people seeking help.
I say, let's throw them any bone we can.
Because...
Look, if you look at the statistic of deaths from addiction over the last 20, 30, 40 years, the slope is positive.
We are losing more and more people every year.
So it's not as if I'm going into a system that is working perfectly and helping every single person who walks in and saying, hey, let's fix it.
The system is broken.
And if we don't figure out a way to deal with it, we were talking about the people close to you and close to us that have lost.
We're losing 120,000 to 150,000 people just to direct overt overdoses every year.
We've got to stem the tide.
It's getting ridiculous.
And I think part of what we have to do is stop fighting about who's right and what the cause is and start offering solutions.
