All Episodes
Previous Next
March 14, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:32
"OVERCOMING ADDICTION!" with Dr. Donna Marks
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
I'm here with Dr.
Donna Marks. Now, she is a specialist in working with individuals who have addiction problems and, boy, her book, Exit the Maze, is mind-blowing, not just in its scope and its depth, but the statistical rigor with which she coalesces the dark forces of addiction moving across the Western landscape of the mind is truly staggering.
Dr. Marks, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.
I'm very honored. So let's talk about addiction and its scope.
I know you mostly focus on the US. Let's talk about America.
What kind of issues is America facing with regards to the addiction crisis?
Well, just in the US alone, there's over 100 million people who are addicted to either drugs, and by that we're talking about tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, legal drugs, And then we also have food addiction.
We have sex addiction, pornographic addiction, which is part of sex addiction.
We have love addiction. We have work addiction.
We have exercise addiction.
People are even addicted to themselves, what they look like.
So it's just a never-ending list.
And I say in the book, there's just one addiction.
And it's really that void that all of those other things are covering up and trying to fill.
Okay, so let's start talking about some of the roots of addiction.
I think we can all understand that you actually left out smartphone and tablet addiction, which I think is one of the big things these days as well.
Social media addiction.
Well, we'll do a whole private therapy session with my social media addiction perhaps another time.
But let's talk about where it comes from, because it is a multifaceted issue that shows up in so many different dimensions as you talk about, but you're kind of going down to the tree roots of the common cause.
Yes, yes. And I think that's so important because I believe that we could eradicate addiction if we learn how to raise children, starting from really the moment of conception, to be loved and to feel loved and to not have those holes punched in their self-esteem, which creates that void, which needs the addiction to feel okay.
And so parenting is where it starts, in my opinion.
It is the most important thing.
There's always this argument between genetics.
Is it environment or is it genetic?
And of course, genetics play a role.
I mean, it's undeniable that if you have parents who have certain illnesses, you are more susceptible.
But there's no gene that says that you have to drink or drug or you have to eat or you have to do anything to make the bad feeling go away.
That is a learned behavior.
And it's either learned by what you're watching your parents and caretakers do, or it's learned Through you substituting or experimenting yourself and then becoming instantly addicted.
So let's talk a little bit about the bad feelings that addiction is designed to master.
I remember many years ago when I first came across the term self-medication, it kind of clicked for me in a very foundational way that the wounds so often inflicted upon children, particularly in early childhood, and particularly the wound of neglect, which I think is vastly underappreciated in its damaging effects, does lead people to just try and feel not better.
They're not chasing a high, they're chasing what most people would consider normalcy.
I think that's correct. I think that people feel so, people who become addicted, which is a huge amount of people, it's a sad 100 million people in the U.S. alone.
But when people become addicted, it's not because they're looking so much for excitement, that becomes the outcome, but because they hate the way they feel.
They feel depressed, they feel anxious, and the substitutes for feeling okay are overwhelming and overpowering.
And so it's So compelling.
Once you try something, like I did, the first time I had a cigarette, it was like all night long, smoking, smoking, smoking.
And I was, you know, I didn't know that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet.
But if I had loved myself and I didn't have that yucky feeling inside, those cigarettes would not have appealed to me to begin with.
And I would have went, ew, why do you want to do that?
That would be a normal reaction from a child who feels really loved and feels self-contained and feels good about themselves.
They would look at that cigarette like, that is poison.
Why in the world would anybody want to do that?
But those of us that don't have that poor self-esteem are very susceptible.
Not only to the peer, you know, the peer connection, which to me wasn't the big connection.
It was the way that nicotine, that hit, all of a sudden I felt calm.
I felt okay. I couldn't wait to get the next one.
Well, there is also, I think, something that is important to discuss with regards to addiction around the social conformity, social acceptance aspect of things.
If you are devoutly loved by your parents, by your family, if you have a really, really good circle of friends, those circle of friends aren't going to be like, hey, do you want to try some pot?
Hey, do you want to try some smoking?
Hey, let's get drunk. They're going to be looking out for what's best for your long-term interest.
But if you feel rejected or abandoned or neglected by Family of origin issues, then you are kind of hungry for a tribe.
And often the price of getting into a tribe is kind of conformity with lowest common denominator behaviors.
Yeah, you're looking for a tribe or you're looking for an escape from the loneliness.
And I think it's really important that you pinpoint a neglect.
I talk about it in my book.
You know, there's four kinds of abuse.
There's emotional, sexual, physical, and then neglect, which is also the emotional component.
So often I'll be working with a person in recovery or trying to become abstinent from their addictions.
And often, you know, they'll quit alcohol and all of a sudden, you know, they're on the digital, you know, social media or they're on pornography or something like that, or eating sugar nonstop.
And they've just substituted one addiction for another.
And I'll say, like, let's get a little deeper with this because you still have untreated addiction.
And I want you to have the happiness and the fulfillment that you're here to have, that you're born to have.
And I'll say, well, you know, nothing's really wrong with my childhood.
You know, everything was, you know, we had, like, my parents were, you know, my mom stayed at home.
My dad was a successful businessman.
And, you know, I don't remember wanting, and we had nice Christmases.
And then I'll have to kind of, you know, really go in a little deeper, like, okay, so what did you do as a family?
Oh, well, you know, we did this and we did that.
And how often did you, you know, have meals together?
Oh, we usually had meals together at night.
Okay. And how often were they talking with you and interacting with you?
And then what did you do in your free time?
I was in my room.
What were you doing in your room?
I don't really remember.
I remember feeling lonely.
You know, this is before you can bully somebody or get bullied on social media, you know.
And so often children were neglected in a way that, you know, they were told, you know, there wasn't food in the refrigerator and they were told, you know, they're not grateful or they didn't have quality time with their parents and they were alone a lot.
Or there's, you know, different kinds of neglect like that.
I have one patient I'm working with now.
From an extremely well-to-do family, and she said she was the worst-dressed kid in her classroom.
She was humiliated with the kinds of things that she, as a 7-, 8-, 9-year-old, were putting together out of her very minimalistic wardrobe because her alcoholic mother was passed out and her father was working.
And so that's neglectful.
So there's many different kinds of neglect which create that, what's wrong with me?
I'm not connecting here, and I don't like the way I feel inside.
It's a funny thing. You know, you just reminded me of, well, I've had so many of these calls with listeners who are trying to figure out what's going on, what's going wrong with their lives in the present.
And I'm always very sensitive because I don't want to have a theory.
Well, you know, it must have been something to do with your childhood and then just keep rooting around until I find it because that seems like almost confirmation bias.
So I'm very gentle and I'm very like, hey, it's your life.
You know, if nothing bad happened, don't let me tell you otherwise and so on.
But after 15 years, man, and thousands of these conversations, I'm batting a thousand.
So to me, when somebody says, my adult life is a mess, but my childhood was great, it's like going to the doctor with a broken arm and saying, well, no, nothing broke it.
It's like, hmm, gotta be something.
Yes, exactly. I agree with you 100%.
And sometimes it could be something that a lot of times the trauma happened outside of the home.
Maybe there was a neighbor or a priest or, you know, a trusted teacher who abused the child.
The child was told, if you talk about this, I will kill your mother.
Or, you know, you will suffer profoundly.
And so the child doesn't ever talk about it.
Or sometimes children will disassociate.
In other words, they've learned how to leave their body and check out while something's happening to them.
And then, as Freud says, it gets repressed into the unconscious and they're not even aware of it.
So, yes, I agree with you.
All of the cases I've worked with, which has also been thousands, I've always been able to identify something.
And sometimes it's like, I know something happened, but I can't remember it.
And that would probably be a dissociative disorder when that has happened.
Do you think that the barrier between the good inside family and the bad outside world is sort of talking about like the evil alien proboscis comes and snatches the child and so on.
I have a general theory that if the relationship is strong enough between the child and the parents, then the child will not be preyed upon because the predators kind of sense that to some degree that they have a strong mother or father or both.
Able to protect the lion cub so to speak so the hyenas don't come by.
Well, that's a good point, although there's not a 100% guarantee you can't monitor your child forever and always.
And even sometimes teenagers, when they're given more and more freedom, are susceptible.
And I think that what you're saying has validity.
That's why more parents are homeschooling their children.
They're keeping them more protected.
They don't let them on social media, and they monitor what's going on.
And they are much better.
The den is much safer from the outside world.
But there's no guarantees.
Things can happen.
It's not the trauma that's the problem.
It's the lack of healing the trauma, identifying the trauma, telling the child it's okay to talk about this.
Get it out. Get your hurt out.
Cry on my shoulder.
Let's talk about it. Let's learn from this.
Let's allow you to experience your pain.
It's not the trauma.
It's the pain that stays stuck inside.
That's what creates that, what I talk about, that invisible hole.
It starts drilling that hole in the psychic of the child.
And it grows and festers.
And so if they've internalized the trauma, it's my fault.
I've done something to cause this.
And my family isn't interested, or they won't let me get it out, or they won't let me talk about it, or they're the perpetrators.
That's when we have much more of a serious problem than the trauma itself.
Children are resilient, and they will heal from anything given the conditions for healing.
Well, that I think brings us to this very interesting topic, the false self and its relationship to addiction.
So, I mean, there's lots of different ways of defining it.
My sort of rough sketch of it is that if you don't experience love and support as a child, then you grow up and feel that you have to be someone other than who you are.
In order for people to like you.
I sort of first talked about this like a me plus thing.
I talked about this with Robin Williams that he had to be on all the time for people to like him.
And all that is doing is confirming that you and your natural state are not particularly likable.
Every show that people put on, and they can do a show of wealth or status.
They can do a show of sexual attractiveness.
They can do a show of being cool.
They can do a show of extreme fitness and so on.
Something that makes them stand out.
Something that makes them interesting and And I think that's all really tragic because it is covering up this hole where you weren't filled up by parental love and regard, and you kind of end up chasing this will-o'-the-wisp into the swamp.
Yes. You know, I think it's really important, and I approach all of my working with people to invite the whole family in, and I think it's really important not to blame.
But if we don't understand what happened, we can't correct it, and we can't heal it.
So it remains buried alive.
And burying a trauma alive is not good.
And I'm so glad that you mentioned Robin Williams because he's a perfect example of someone who had buried his whole life alive.
And you know, he went to treatment and he got sober and he was sober all that time, but he still had untreated addiction.
That hole was clearly still there.
And then when he got diagnosed with another major medical illness, He relapses and goes to treatment again and that pain underneath of everything apparently had never been treated properly or he would have had outlets to support him through that additional trauma.
And this is, I think, one of the things that people don't seem to realize, I think, as much as they should, which is that if you didn't get what you needed as a child, you'll never get it.
Like, you'll never be a baby again.
You'll never be a toddler again.
And the mourning of that, I think, is really important.
and I think addiction has a lot to do with somehow imagining that you can heal the losses of the past by gaining something in the present but you can't.
It's like if you didn't get enough food to eat as a child and you grew up to be, I don't know, two inches shorter than you otherwise would have been, eating more food as an adult doesn't help you with that.
I think we're avoiding the legitimate suffering of mourning that which cannot be fixed and people are instead running around trying to fix it in the present thus making things worse in the future.
Yes.
As a psychoanalyst, I I love, you know, Freud gave us all this information long ago and Many people like myself said, but when I actually studied it and became a psychoanalyst myself, you are so right.
He talks about how important it is to mourn what wasn't.
We must mourn the pain that wasn't mourned then.
And then we are free to give it to ourselves now in a healthy way.
So if I didn't get the comfort and the nurturing from my mother, Which I am certainly entitled to as a baby.
I can't force other people to give that to me now.
I can't just ignore that that pain isn't there, but I can learn to nurture myself now.
I can wrap myself in a warm blanket in the morning.
I can commune with nature in the morning.
I can allow myself to just sit around and like a little child, look at, you know, a little child to sit out and look out the window and their imagination's going and they're hearing the birds.
And we can re-parent ourselves now without the blaming what the parents didn't do.
It's intergenerational.
I've made tons of mistakes myself.
I'm willing to correct those with my children.
And, you know, approaching it from the place of not blaming And being loved to each other, we create the conditions, a better chance of that happening.
But mainly, as a child now who was raised in that kind of environment, I have to give that to myself and be that for myself.
But I cannot do that until I feel that early trauma.
It's just putting a Band-Aid on a Band-Aid on a Band-Aid on a Band-Aid.
And anybody who's doing that is destined to stay depressed, anxious, or addicted.
There's an old saying that really struck me when I first read it, the boredom is rage spread thin.
And the relationship, I think, between anger and blame and acceptance and healing and forgiveness is so complex for me.
And that's where I think some of the richness is in this kind of journey.
But, you know, when I was a kid, if I was abused, when I was abused, I would get angry at my mother.
Now, of course, as an adult, I can look back and say, well, you know, she grew up in Germany, the Second World War, her mother was killed in a bombing raid.
And I can understand that, but the child's perspective doesn't have all of that history and all of that adult understanding of the etymology of this kind of dysfunction.
And I found that for myself, I really had to go through a pretty freaking angry phase, because if things went badly wrong, clearly it's not the child.
on the parents.
And for me, going through that process of being angry was very destabilizing because getting angry at a parent who's an abuser feels like you're basically pulling the pin of a grenade and stuffing it down your shirt.
Because if you did that as a child, you would generally draw more abuse onto yourself.
And that process of getting angry and feeling that your anger is legitimate, I think there's a lot of cultural imperatives around forgiveness and serenity and so on that I think can kind of interrupt that phase.
And you don't want to stay there forever, but that phase of, yeah, you've got some legitimate complaints and it's okay to be angry.
Absolutely. It's not complicated.
If you were traumatized, you definitely need to grieve that.
And the grieving process is you come out of denial, and then you allow yourself to be angry, and then you might be bargaining with yourself.
You might even be bargaining with the parent, like, what happened and why did this happen?
And so what children often do is they'll come at their parents with that anger, and the parents may or may not even know what you're talking about.
They get blindsided, and it just perpetuates Rage on rage.
And so what I try to do when I'm working with people is validate their experience.
There was trauma. And we don't need to blame your parents for that.
They are accountable. There is no doubt about it.
They are the ones that are accountable.
Whoever the perpetrator was is accountable.
But at the same time, let's work through your own pain as if right now you are that child and what happened and tell me about it.
And I validate you and I believe you and I encourage you to get your pain out.
And then I help people to understand that there is always fear underneath anger and guilt.
And so the fear is, the core fear for all of us is, I wasn't lovable, I wasn't okay, and I'm not lovable now.
And so that's where we have to learn how to be the love that we want for ourselves.
And I always invite the family into healing.
Not everybody wants to do that because, like you said, they're worried about a grenade going off.
And, you know, some parents will never get it.
They can't get it. They don't want to get it.
And, you know, in that case, sometimes the child needs to detach with love, you know, and I can't have a relationship with you that isn't authentic.
I'd rather, you know, have some arguments, and I'd rather get it all out and heal it.
But some parents cannot do that.
But you'd be surprised at how many parents are willing to do that, because in the back of their mind, they're wondering what's wrong with you, what did they do to cause it, and they really do want to heal it.
So it's really not complicated.
You have to validate your emotional experience from childhood.
Then you have to be willing to heal it on your own.
And then at some point, you can bring your mom or parents or whoever into it, either symbolically or We can use gestalt therapy, where it's symbolism, where you imagine the person's present, or you can actually bring the family members into the setting.
One complication is when you have three or four children in the same family.
One child says, oh, it was a horrible childhood, and the other three are going, what family were you in?
I'm fine. So that can get complicated.
And in that case, we just need to validate the personal experience of the one who's not okay.
The one who is symbolizing what wasn't okay in the family.
Have you noticed any commonalities in the people who, not everybody who was traumatized ends up as an addict?
And we can touch on perhaps some of the genetic issues, although that's usually beyond the realm of language.
But have you noticed any commonalities between those who do end up in the addictive lifestyle versus those who don't?
I think that some people, especially if they're raised with addiction, I think the statistics show that they either become addicted or they don't do anything.
And, you know, good for them that they're wise, but that doesn't mean that they don't have unhealed trauma.
And so I think the symptoms, how that shows up, it really doesn't matter if you're addicted or you have some other, you know, your relationships aren't working or you're not able to achieve your potential or you're just not happy.
It doesn't necessarily have to be addiction.
Right. Now, let's talk about the failure rates of treatment programs.
In your book, you mention between 40% and 60%, and some of it, of course, is very tough to measure because people who don't return to addiction, you don't necessarily always know if they've managed to stay sober or away from their drug of choice.
The recent statistic I got was up to 90% of people who, whether it's 12-step programs or whatever the form of treatment, Most of them do not stay sober for more than a year.
In the 90 percentiles, yeah.
Boy, that's not good.
I mean, to take a silly example, imagine bringing your car into a mechanic and nine times out of ten the problem gets worse.
That mechanic would not be in business for very long.
Assuming that you can hit numbers better than 10% of a cure, so to speak, what is the addiction industry getting so wrong that the numbers are so bad?
Well, I'm...
I think that part is a little bit more complicated.
First of all, it's a new industry.
We've just started treating addiction in the past 40 or 50 years.
That's one issue. And I don't like to, for any people I'm working with, if they relapse, if they've been doing something, like if you're smoking a cigarette every 20 minutes and then you quit smoking, or you've been drinking around the clock and you quit drinking, I mean, that's a pretty implacable habit.
And so if you slip here and there, even if you do it 10 or 15 times, I don't want you to give up.
I'm here with you. We keep learning from this.
And then we understand what the triggers are, those reactions inside that trigger that behavior that I got to self-medicate again.
So I think that, you know, it's important that we don't shame people.
But treatment centers have got to do it better than what they're doing it.
Because what's happening is people are getting addicted to going to treatment.
Just like they're getting addicted to all their pills.
And now, because treatment has failed for so many people, now we have the medical-assisted treatment model, which will give you drugs to get off your drugs and will keep you on those drugs.
And those drugs are really hard to get off of if you've ever tried.
So I am really wanting us to get more to the basics of healing that poor pain underneath so that when you are triggered, That you understand it's probably not about this situation right now.
It's probably about more that childhood trauma that's unresolved.
And that's another layer of that trauma that's coming up for healing.
So let's work on that and not medicate it.
Then you feel bad and you still have the unhealed trauma.
So treatment sitters need to get much more trauma-based, which they're doing, except many of them are going to the medical-assisted treatment model, which I'm totally opposed to.
I think it's a travesty.
People have gotten sober over the years without getting on psychotropic medications, and so they can still do that.
But if someone has tried thousands of times and they're still failing, maybe in very rare cases, it makes more sense for them to go on to a I want to see them learn techniques on how to love themselves,
and then I want to see if they need it.
Well, that issue of a pill for every ill is part of our fast-fix culture, right?
Fast food, frozen food, and a pill for every ill, because the work to actually confront childhood demons is a deep—and we don't have the spiritual or religious context for most people, or for many people anymore, to sort of battle—we say battling your own demons and so on.
And, well, I mean, in the Christian context, that was actually a very real and vivid process.
We don't really have that anymore.
And people don't like the idea of going to that dark place, especially when they feel they've been battling it for years.
But going to the place that you fear the most seems to have a lot to do with getting better.
And I think people are just diving for these pills with the relief of, oh, I don't have trauma to deal with.
I don't have personal issues to confront.
I don't have to have difficult conversations with my parents or other people.
I just have a chemical imbalance.
And I can take a pill.
And you wouldn't suggest psychotherapy for a diabetic.
you just need insulin and there is this huge relief at being able to grab a pill rather than do the deep and dirty work of self-healing and I feel almost bad that this option is available because it is just so tempting.
It's really sad. And that's exactly what the parents do.
You know, here, eat this.
Go out and play. Here's your video game.
And they give them a quick fix answer to their problem.
The child's crying, you know, and, oh, these things happen in life.
Everything works out for the best kind of thing.
And go play. And pat, pat, pat.
You know, it'll be all right. And the child's like, you know, child needs to cry.
Child needs to get their pain out.
And so then they go to the doctor later because they're anxious or depressed.
Here's a pill. And so this quick fix mentality has programmed us not to go to the core issue.
And so there's almost a sense of shame.
What right do I have to go to this core issue?
And it's uncomfortable and I don't like it and I don't want to do it.
And so that's why I don't really, I think spirituality is fundamental.
I do, but I will use the word love because to me, God is love.
And so people do understand that word and you must learn to love yourself.
It is the only answer.
You know, you can be very religious, but if you don't love yourself, you are not going to manage to be able to work through the pain.
And if you don't love yourself, your relationships are not going to be loving.
And if you don't love yourself, your life is never going to show up the way you truly want it to, or even if you know how you want it to show up, if you don't love yourself.
Now, also, I think one of the things that's happening that's driving the addiction crisis is we're having this radical and unprecedented social experiment of a complete transformation of childhood from how we evolved.
We evolved, of course, in relatively small hunter-gatherer tribes, local communities.
Children spent most of their time with their parents learning the family trade with farming or shoemaking or whatever it was.
There was an extended family that could pitch in.
There were lots of other kids around.
And now we have this dramatically sealed childhood where neighborhood play has largely vanished.
They call them like bedroom communities.
You have kids separated from their parents, dropped in daycare, sometimes at six weeks of age for some moms or sometimes even earlier.
And you have a fragmentation of extended family.
I mean, you sort of go on and on with this list.
But we are not raising our own children anymore.
They're in daycare. They have babysitters.
They have teachers are often doing the child raising as best they can.
And two parents working means that parents aren't able to transmit moral or spiritual values to their children.
And I feel like we're sort of trying to patch people up in a war where the casualties keep increasing.
Yes, and all those things you named, I did myself as a parent.
I modeled some of the unparenting that I was given.
And so, unfortunately, and maybe people like you can change this, maybe we can do it collectively.
When a woman has a baby or even thinks about having a baby, wouldn't it be nice if they got a little manual on how to have a baby that is happy, fulfilled, and has a productive life?
And they are given those elements because even with all my psychology training, I didn't really get it and kind of pieced it together as I went along.
And so that's why we have to give it to ourselves now if we didn't get it from our parents.
It's never too late to have a happy adulthood.
But you are so right.
It is tragic.
And again, Freud talked about the importance of that maternal bond.
That baby is not really supposed to be...
They're going from the womb.
Into the mother's arms, onto the breast, onto the warmth and love and care, and the mother's looking at the child, and that child feels nothing but acceptance and love.
And when it's time later to discipline, it's done through explaining things.
And the children are way brighter than the parents.
They know truth. They know when something feels right or wrong.
They'll call their parents out.
I remember Hannah saying, you're not supposed to be fighting like that.
God wouldn't want you to do that.
Hannah's my daughter. She's right here, by the way.
But anyhow, and so is my son.
It's beautiful to do this interview as a family, you know, inhaling ourselves.
And that's really the ideal is when we can all engage in this together.
But so that baby is supposed to feel that kind of love and connection.
And when they feel that, then they go out into the world and other people seem safe and, you know, other kids and they have their tribe.
You know, they aren't alone.
They aren't separated. Well, and I just wanted to point out, for those who don't know, that it was Dr.
Mark's daughter, Hannah, I assume, who first contacted me and suggested we have the conversation, which I'm very, very grateful.
Now, let's talk about, if you don't mind, the issue of unfixability.
The stories that you have in your book, and I'll put a link to the book below, Exit Demand.
Well, there's two books. I'll put links to both below.
The story that you have about Your friend from Harvard who lost his medical license and then ended up in the newspaper for driving his car into something and threatening his friend and the people who just keep drinking, the woman who drank to the point where your husband says, hey, you come home drunk one more time and I'm changing the locks and she did.
Three o'clock in the morning, come home and the locks are changed.
The people who, like, it doesn't seem to matter how many negative consequences accrue to them.
And I couldn't really understand this in the past.
I did a presentation on the destruction of America's mental health care system where they talk about one of the first things to go with mental illness, maybe even with addiction as well, is the sort of third eye, the observing ego, the part of you that looks at yourself and say, okay, what am I doing relative to better behavior, relative to good goals, right?
The part of you that's able to analyze and course-correct your behavior sometimes can go, and that can be like, it can be like you sprain a finger and, you know, you put it in a splint or whatever, it gets better, or it can be like your finger is removed and sort of flushed in the toilet, never to rejoin your body.
How much have you seen people going beyond the tipping point to no return?
Yeah, well, in my opinion, there's never a no return.
I never give up on anybody.
And so what's happening in those kinds of cases, it's called repetition compulsion.
That whenever they felt good as a child, something bad kept happening.
And so now they're stuck in that pattern of whenever things are going good, they have to do it themselves because if I do it to myself, then I have control and nothing out there is going to happen to me, outside of me.
I have the control. And so the least little thing can trigger them.
They feel resentment or their boyfriend or girlfriend hurt them or they feel abandoned or their bosses, blah, blah, blah.
And that triggers that old thing.
So before the punishment comes to me, I'm going to do it to myself.
Again, it's all about that root healing, that early healing.
Gotta happen, or someone can stay sober.
Although some people do stay sober, but then they just transfer their addiction from one thing to the next.
They may not drink again, but they may...
I think I talked about the case where, you know, someone goes off of food, and then they start drinking.
But they've never dealt with that underlying wound, so they just keep medicating, going from one thing to the next.
I remember many years ago a plaintiff letter from an ex-smoker saying, you know, I didn't smoke that much, but now that I've quit smoking, I'm gaining weight.
Is it better for me to be a smoker or is it better for me to be 20 pounds overweight?
And it's like, hmm, there's an addict's question.
You know, there's no column C, which is neither.
It's like one addiction or the other.
That's all I've got to work with.
Now... What about codependence?
You touched and you actually quoted a very interesting conversation, a girlfriend-boyfriend talking about her boyfriend.
Codependence is one of these terms that's kind of tossed around a lot and I myself have been guilty from time to time.
Can we get a bit more of a technical or detailed understanding of codependence, which I think is quite closely related to addiction?
Right. I call codependency an addiction because you have to be the way I want you to be or I'm not okay and I'm going to keep trying to get you to be that way in spite of the negative consequences.
So in my book, addiction is anything a person keeps doing in spite of negative consequences.
So you're not doing what I want you to do, and I'm going to keep forcing you to try to do that, and you're not going to do it, or maybe you tell me you are, or whatever, but I keep getting through that same cycle of an addict.
I might get a temporary fix, or you're agreeing with me, or I think I've made headway with getting you to do what I want, but it's really not changing, because nobody can be controlled.
I can't control you any more than I can control my addictive drinking, my addictive eating, my addictive anything.
So if I'm trying to do that, I'm addicted and I need to bring back my healing to myself.
In most cases in codependency, we're really trying to heal a parent or a caretaker.
There's this illusion that if I could get this woman or this man to act a certain way and grab ahold of them, get them to love themselves, get them to do this differently, they could be so much happier.
I'm really talking to that parent.
Well, and I think this is, I remember in a relationship once when a woman kept wanting me to change, a woman kept wanting me to change, and she's like, well, you just, you seem unable to control your behavior, at which point I said, well, you're unable to control your nagging.
And this idea that if you can just get out of the people to change, everything is going to be just hunky-dory is one of the great delusions.
It's like this giant shark that eats up the swimmers of relationships on a regular basis.
Well, here's the gift.
If somebody that I love is doing something that isn't good for our relationship, or I see them destroying themselves, when I come from love, it's a totally different conversation.
It says, this is what I see you doing, and I'm scared.
I'm scared of the effects on you, and I'm scared of the effects on a relationship.
Now, if it's a romantic relationship, and I see you drinking, or I see you on porn, or whatever it is, That is not allowing us to have a completely intimate and fulfilling relationship.
And that's what I would like to have.
And is there something I can do to help with that?
And if you don't want to change that, I love you, I respect you, but I want that type of relationship.
So I'm willing to do what it takes, including telling you what that brings up for me about my own unhealed wounds.
And you can maybe go deeper in your process, too, And we can actually heal our past in the present by being different than our parents were and by bringing love and healing into this scenario.
That takes a great deal of courage.
It takes a lot of practice.
Sometimes people have to do it again and again and again until they get it right.
But the power in that is unbelievable.
And when both people come together in that honesty and trust and truth, and they're willing to keep working at it, And keep making the progress.
The level of intimacy is something mainly for the first time experience, because that's what they could have gotten from their parents, and they didn't.
So the child would be able to say, Mommy, when you took away my toy, or when you smacked me across the face, or the father, you know, or somebody who's abusing a child, and the child can say, that wasn't right, and the parent can hug the child and say, you're right, that wasn't right, I'm so sorry.
It's over! It's over.
But when those things keep happening and all that gets buried inside, then we become like our parents and we're reenacting inappropriate behavior.
And when the partner addresses it, from a nagging point of view, it just pulls us further away.
It's a shame-based thing.
It's a blame thing.
And that's why I say we have got to approach these conversations from the place of love and not blame.
Because it opens the door to healing rather than slamming you in the face saying, you're wrong and I'm okay.
All right. All right. Now, let's do a little bit of a history.
The great part of the book, a lot of great parts, the great part of the book is around history as well, the history of healing.
And I'm going to be kind of ridiculous about it, give you the sort of the one, two, three, four story arc and tell me if it sort of makes any sense.
So originally, you know, you had dysfunction, self-destructive behavior, addiction, and so on.
It's like Satan, you know, devil, demon, possession, you've fallen prey to the temptations of the flesh or whatever.
So there was this sort of theological...
explanation of these things.
And then they upgraded to, well, we're just going to put you in an asylum for a while.
And so you're crazy, right?
And then there was this kind of flash of self-knowledge post Freud through Jung, through Adler.
And then just when it seemed like the self-knowledge aspect was getting somewhere, in comes the airstrike of psychopharmaceuticals, of psychotropic medications.
And now it's like we've taken steps even further back to me than demonic possession, because at least that was a spiritual wrestling that had a language element to it.
And now it's just an attempt to rewire people's brains from largely imaginary illnesses.
in my opinion. This arc is really, really frustrating because it really felt like we were getting somewhere, and now it feels like we're just heading the wrong way.
Yeah, the whole existential movement said, you know, deal with your own demons and work on yourself.
And yes, now we've gone back to children even being, you know, Which is just mind-blowing to me.
The child has an emotional disturbance.
They get labeled, you know, attention deficit disorder.
Are there a problem in the classroom or whatever?
I have this happen with two of my own children.
You know, we think, you know, your child's daydreaming too much.
We think they have ADDH. Take them to the psychologist and get them on medication, you know, and I'm like...
I'll have my child tested, but no way are you putting pills in my kid's head.
That brain is a good brain, and he's probably or she's probably upset about something, and we're not going there.
Fortunately, I had the knowledge not to go there, but so many parents are like, doctor says, need the pill, take the pill.
And here's this brain that's developing.
You're giving three very defective messages to that child.
Number one, your brain's not okay.
Number two, you're not okay.
And number three, we're going to ignore what's causing the problem.
It could be, you know, loading them up on sugar and sending them to school and they're bouncing off the walls.
It could be that there's a troubled child going in the home or something happened and the child isn't talking about it.
And so it's me that's wrong.
It's not the environment.
And so it's just disastrous.
It's disastrous. I recently had, my daughter asked me to mention this case.
I recently had a woman, she wanted to bring in her daughter because the daughter had these bouts of screaming.
And it got so bad, she had to take her to the police station a couple of times, to the emergency room a couple of times.
How old was the daughter? This happened from like age five through nine.
So by the time she came to see me, she was nine years old.
She had had her all faith healers, psychologists, psychiatrists and everything.
I said, well, bring her and let me see what's going on.
So she brings her in, and the first thing, the daughter is crawling all over the mother.
I'm like, this child is starving for her mother's attention and affection, number one.
It was so obvious. And then she said she was going to...
What was happening is something simple, like she'd be brushing her hair, and then...
We've got to get ready for school.
And the child say, you know, I don't want you to brush my hair.
And the mother said, well, we need to brush your hair.
And she wasn't abusive or anything.
She was trying to... And the child would go off on these tirades.
Take the brush. Start hitting the mother with...
I mean, it was severe...
You know, just crazy behavior.
And it was freaking the mother out.
And of course, the siblings are running out of the house.
The dog's hiding under the bed.
And this is the nine-year-old.
She thinks she's demon-possessed.
So tell me a little bit about her history.
The child had surgery in her heart when she was a baby.
And then, I don't know whether she had medication or not, but they were walking that child from...
The time she got home from the hospital at three months to a year and a half, 24-7, never happened to walk the child around.
A baby can't communicate what's going on.
The baby could have been having nightmares.
The baby could have been having physical pain.
Something was happening.
So I said to the mother, next time that tantrum happens, tell her, I feel your pain.
I hear your pain. It's painful.
And just say that.
And so the child is immediately getting this connection that...
You can hear me. I can't talk, but you can hear me.
Now, next step is tell me where it hurts.
And so we worked from that level.
And a couple weeks later, she said, oh, it's not any better.
It's getting worse. And I said, well, just give it time.
I'm going to take her out to special testing in California and get her on medication.
She's bipolar.
She's bipolar. I said, I don't see that bipolar.
I saw a child that really needs your love and really needs that eye-to-eye contact and that empathy and that connection.
So keep working at that.
Anyhow, fast forward, the child did not get put on bipolar medication.
The child was doing exceptionally well.
Has connected with her friends.
Is actually living between the mother and father.
The mother moved closer. She'd been said to live with her father because her mother couldn't handle her.
Now she's going back and forth.
Smooth as silk. Kids happy.
Popular in class.
Da-da-da-da-da. Oh, it's...
I mean, the whole school issue, we probably could do an entire other show on the school issue, but what troubles me so much about it, Dr.
Marks, is... School kind of sucks.
You know, it's boring.
The whole formula of, you know, a teacher and a whiteboard and a whole bunch of kids, you know, especially given the stimulation the kids are getting at home with the video games or the internet and so on.
School is like really, really dull.
And so then teachers say, well, you know, the kid's not paying attention.
It's like, well, maybe you're boring.
Maybe you're just not a good teacher.
And sort of the analogy that I have in my head is something like, if I make a movie...
And people don't come because they don't like my movie.
They find it boring or whatever.
Do I then get to call them mentally ill and medicate them for not liking my movie?
Maybe I should just go make a more interesting movie.
That's so true.
The exact same thing happened with my son.
I was called in.
The history teacher said he's got ADVH or something.
We want you to go.
He's staring out the window at the bird.
And so he's not paying attention.
And I said, well, why are you staring out the window at the bird?
And he said, well, I was trying to figure out, like, how does the bird make the nest?
You know, where does it get the stuff to make the nest?
And why is it sitting on the nest?
You know, it was like, brilliant!
And I said, well, what was the teacher saying?
I don't know. It was so boring.
And so I even suggested to the teacher he might make the class a little more stimulating and interesting, like having the children dress up in costumes and actually do mock You know, trials, and it was a history class, and re-enact some, you know, get them involved, and he didn't like that.
Oh, that is really sad.
It's my medication, too.
Well, maybe put the teacher on some stimulants and you won't need to put the kids on stimulants, right?
But there's a funny thing, too, with the parent-child thing, too.
It's funny how all you need to do is empathize with the kids for the most part.
And empathy doesn't mean permission.
I think people get that kind of confused.
Like I was with a parent the other day and there was a conflict because the kid wanted candy.
And the parents didn't want the kid to have candy, right?
So the kid was like, I want, I want, I want, right?
And, you know, I mean, that's happened to me.
It happened to you. Kids want candy.
But the reality is so do adults.
I'd love to live on a steady diet of candy, but I'm in my 50s.
I can't have it anymore. But this...
It's an issue of, like, the kid says, I really want that candy.
And most parents are like, I'm going to put myself as a human shield between my child and the candy, and you're going to eat Brussels sprouts till you die.
And the kids kind of escalate from there.
But the truth is, you know, my daughter says, oh, I was saying to this parent too, like, your kid says they want candy.
You say, yeah, so do I. You know, I'd love to eat that candy.
I'd love to eat all those candies.
I'd love to go through this entire store, scoop up all the candies, put them in a bathtub with hot water and bathe in them and eat them.
Like, I would just love to eat candy that much.
And once you get down on the child's level and say, I would also love to eat all the candy that's here, I'd love to build a statue of candy and eat it all.
And once the kids understand, like, yeah, you as the parent also want the candy, but you kind of regretfully have to say no because blah, blah, blah, right?
And all the kid wants to know is that you and your child have similar, not always the same, but similar experiences.
And I think that's really, you know, if it's really, really rainy and the kid's getting a little stir crazy indoors and the kid says, I want to go outside.
And let's say you for some reason you can't facilitate that.
It's like, yeah, man, I feel complete cabin fever.
I feel like clawing my way out through this door with a shovel because I'd love to go outside.
And that relaxes kids once that they know you're kind of on the same page.
And so agreeing with a child's emotional experience is not the same as permitting the acting out of that child's emotional.
Just because you agree with the kid that you both want candy doesn't mean you go get it, but that really relaxes the tension between parents and children.
That's such a good point.
And using humor with children, children have wonderful senses of humor, and they love it when you bring yourself into reality and just being a human being.
But I would take it even a step further.
I would say, you see this jelly bean?
Do you know what this is made of?
It's made of sugar.
And you know why you like it so much?
Because the minute your brain gets that sugar, your heart speeds up a little bit, your brain gets a little bit of a kick.
And explain to them that that's Really, why that candy is so popular and why all addictions are so popular is because they're getting something in their brain.
And that thing is tricking their brain.
And I want you to have your own brain.
I want you to be able to eat food that's good for your heart, your stomach, your body, and so that you're healthy.
That will make your brain feel good all the time, not just that little hit that And then you need more and more and more of it.
And then you're not getting what your body and mind and soul need the rest of the time.
Of course, you know, depending on the kid's age.
But explain it to them at whatever age appropriate it is.
And they are so brilliant.
They will get it instantly.
And you can tell them next time, yeah, let's have a few jelly beans after our good food.
My oldest daughter calls it growing food.
And her children are very receptive to, you know, eating their growing food before they have their sugar food or whatever.
But really explaining, educating children.
Like, There's a lot of stuff out there that was very tempting, but I want you to understand why it's so tempting.
I don't ever want you to lose the ability to think.
I want you to be able to look at something and analyze it and make really good choices.
And because you're so smart, you can do that, but you need to have the information so that you can make those choices.
Oh, yeah. And get them involved in the moral crusade as well.
Because, I mean, I had the conversations with my daughter about, you know, the stuff your tongue likes, but your body doesn't like, and the stuff your body likes and your tongue doesn't like, you know, all of that kind of stuff.
But I said, you know, when we're playing a game, and I cheat, do you like it?
It's like, no, I don't like it when you cheat.
Not that I did it a lot. But you know, sometimes it's kind of funny to do.
Don't like it when you cheat. And I said, well, why do you think the candy is also brightly colored?
It's like, well, we like bright colors.
It's like, yeah, Yeah, yeah. But, you know, why do we like the bright colors?
And the answer, you know, we went back and forth.
And then the answer, of course, is because fruit is good for us and fruit is brightly colored.
And so we have a desire to pursue sugar and bright colors because that's what motivated us to climb to the top of the tree and eat the orange or whatever, but stave off scurvy or whatever it was.
So when they are putting lots of sugar in and they're making it brightly colored, it's cheating.
They're cheating because they're wiring into stuff which was good for us in the past, like getting fruit, and they're just kind of bypassing it.
And it's not fair.
It's like going into a running race with a jetpack or a motorbike.
It's just cheating. And that way you don't want the kids, you don't want them to be susceptible to that manipulation.
You want them to fight back against that manipulation because, you know, they're kind of playing with you.
Maybe they can put pictures of fruit on the outside of some of these things, but it ain't fruit.
Exactly. And you don't want their brains to get hijacked.
That's the main thing. You want them to be able to keep their mind and to be able to be detached from those temptations.
That they can, you know, try certain things.
I mean, certain things that they try at once, they're probably going to be hooked.
Right. Okay, so let's close.
Great conversation. We could do parenting stuff all day.
But let's close off with...
What needs to happen?
Because, I mean, I view this addiction crisis and, you know, there's economic factors, sociological factors, familial factors, prevalence of drugs factors, cheapness of drugs, the fact that the marijuana of today is like 20 times stronger than the marijuana of the 60s and so on.
There's a lot of other factors, but I view it as this big giant tsunami that's kind of poised over us in the West because, you know, You have an addictive population.
You can kind of trundle along for a while, as you point out.
A lot of addicts are very high-functioning.
But at some point, the top of that wave curls over and there's going to be a big caboose as it all comes down on us.
I think when people hit their 50s and 60s in particular, it really catches up with them with the healthcare system and with their job performance and so on.
So what's your ideal scenario about...
I mean, it's a big question, of course.
Individuals and society as a whole, what should we be doing?
Well, here's the thing. One of the things we have to do is keep talking about it like you and I are doing right now.
And it's already, the tsunami has already gone over us, and I'll tell you why.
The number one causes of death in the world.
Number one, heart attack.
Number two, cancer. Okay, so what's that got to do with addiction?
Well, what causes heart disease?
Substances, bad food, sugar, bad fats, nicotine, smoking, drugs, alcohol.
What causes cancer?
So addiction is the root of almost all deaths and major illnesses.
So we have to change this conversation from addiction being over here with a few alcoholics and drug addicts to across the board of all the things that are causing people to malfunction, And to die.
And then we're up into the 35 million people a year die from heart attack, and cancer, and stroke, and diabetes too, and kidney failure, and all these things are directly related to someone doing something to the point that it has damaged their heart, damaged their kidneys, damaged their pancreas, or whatever's going on, because they're addicted to it.
And until we start treating medicine as a mental thing, it's all mental, And teaching people again, you are substituting all of these things for love.
You have to learn how to love yourself.
And I can't tell you every way to do that, but if you imagine again that you're a newborn baby, what would you need?
Starting with the time you get up in the morning.
You don't need a cigarette.
You don't need a cup of coffee.
You don't need jelly beans.
You don't need pornography.
You don't need to rush off to work right away in the rush hour.
You don't need anything.
You need Gentleness and healthy food and easing into the day and goes from there.
And each person needs to design what makes them feel truly loved, companionship, hugs, reaching out.
And another important thing, it's become the me, me, me.
And I like to talk about the we, we, we.
Life is a we program.
So when you're giving to others like you're doing with the show, it's fabulous of giving so much commitment to helping the planet.
You get great love from that.
You get it from others and you get it from yourself.
So this is where we need to shift our whole consciousness as human beings back to the tribe.
It's not just about me. It's about the well-being of the whole tribe.
And we can love ourselves and love each other and then we won't want to be addicted.
I think what I got most out of that beautiful monologue was I should have jelly beans and coffee for breakfast tomorrow.
That's my major takeaway from that, and I appreciate that.
No, and so the self-love thing is really fascinating because babies should be loved unconditionally.
They're not supposed to earn the love of the mother or of the father.
It's the existence love, right?
But here's the challenge.
So when you're an adult, though, There is a certain amount...
It's a dance, right? Because you do want to extend positive relations to yourself.
You do want to start to love yourself.
But you also can't be doing terrible things to yourself or to others and end up with self-love.
So even as an adult...
self-love, it does have to, there's a, you can start it that way, but it does have to have some element of, of good behavior of, of, you know, whether you're standing up for the world or just standing up for your family or just standing up for yourself, you do have to do like only a baby's love is unearned.
All other forms of love do have some objective component or some standard, I guess.
And a lot of people I think do fall into this.
I just have to figure out how to love myself without necessarily behaving in a, in a better way.
And that, you know, again, I think priming the pump of self-love is really important, but at some point you do have to change your behavior so that you're kind of worthy of it.
And that's to me how it ends up being sustainable.
It is self-love when you decide rather than eating a bag of jelly beans to fix yourself a nice bowl of fruit.
It is self-love when you think about drinking because you're upset, to do some journaling and get out your upset feelings or to call a friend.
Or to talk about it in some way.
Or to invite the person to have a healing conversation with whom you're upset.
I mean, you choose self-love rather than the addiction.
And you keep doing that.
You may not do it 100%, but you keep doing it until all of a sudden you're looking at that behavior that you used to do and you go, ew, no, no, no, no.
The thought of me taking a drink today is like, oh no, that's like having Drano.
Because that's the effect it's going to have on me and I don't want to do it anymore.
But it had to be like, you know, I had to get to that point and the more I act that way, then the more I get the self-love that is my divine nature.
All right. That's fantastic.
Beautifully put. All right. Well, the book is Exit the Maze.
I'll put a link to it below. It's actually nice talking to someone who's a Marx, but not M-A-R-X. I just did a debate with the communists last night.
So it's a different Marx, different Marx we're dealing with today.
The website is Dr.
Donna Marx, M-A-R-K-S. I'll put the link to that below, drdonnamarx.com.
I highly recommend the book, and you do take consultations.
There's a number there. And if you think she can bring some A big vat of healing in your direction.
I'm sure you could do quite well through it.
I really, really appreciate the time today, and I hope we can do it again.
We're also going to be doing webinars and seminars and public speaking and all kinds of good things.
So thank you so much for having me on your show.
▲
Export Selection