"Reimagining Recovery" from The Terri Cole Show
“Reimagining Recovery”
Source: The Terri Cole Show + Dr. Adi Jaffe (Listen: 41 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
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“I want everybody to realize improvement is improvement. We need to celebrate people doing better.” - Dr. Jaffe
We all know someone affected by addiction—in one way or another. It knows no bounds and impacts every socioeconomic group.
This talk between Terri Cole and Dr. Adi Jaffe is simply a different way of looking at recovery. They both have personal experience with addiction, asking "What if we celebrated improvement vs. complete abstinence?"
From shadow addiction, half measures, and how we interact with someone we know who gets sober, it's an honest look at addiction and mental health, highlighting why most people never enter treatment.
Description: "Dr. Jaffe is a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction, relationships, and shame. He lectured in the UCLA psychology department for the better part of a decade and was the executive director and co-founder of one of the most progressive mental health treatment facilities in the country until he started his online recovery center. And it’s called Ignited. That’s how you pronounce it, but it’s actually I-G-N-T-D. So, Dr. Jaffe, through IGNTD is changing the way people think about and deal with mental health issues. His passion, ‘Is the role of shame destroying lives?’ is the philosophy behind IGNTD."
For more support and resources around substance abuse and mental health, visit SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration).
As always, take what you want and leave the rest.
“We double the rate of deaths from drugs about every decade, and I think unfortunately it’s not because quote-unquote ‘Addicts’ are getting worse, it’s because our system isn’t working and it’s pushing them farther and farther away from the help.” - Dr. Jaffe
(8:43) Dr. Jaffe: “Abstinence is the thing as you mentioned, you have to commit to before you can do anything else. First of all, we don’t do that in any other field. Imagine if somebody wouldn’t treat you for diabetes unless you committed to never eating a donut again. Or if they wouldn’t treat you for depression unless you made sure you were never going to be depressed again. Or think about suicide again. It sounds crazy when I talk about it in other areas of life, but we do that to people in addiction all the time. ‘Oh, you’re really serious about changing your drinking; well, you have to commit to not drinking. Wait, we haven’t done anything yet. How am I going to wake up tomorrow without the thing that I’ve relied on to function in life?’”
(11:23) Dr. Jaffe: “I started realizing that the things that I was hearing in the recovery community that I was in were very different than the things I was hearing in the psychology department that I was in. And then I started doing work with people who struggled with addiction… And what I realized when I started doing the work is, first of all, lifetime abstinence is rarely maintained. Hardly anybody meets that criterion. And to have people try for something that hardly ever is met seems to me like a fool’s errand from the beginning. So, to say to somebody, ‘The only way you succeed with this is you quit drinking now, and you quit for the rest of your life. Oh, by the way, only like 7% to 10% of people that are told that, ever achieve it.’ It feels like you just set the bar really, really high. Now we talk about it in these really condescending ways, in my opinion. You know they need tough love, or you have to be real with them, or you can’t coddle them. Nobody is asking you to coddle them, but I’m also not asking you to tell them that the only way to succeed is to achieve something that is rarely achieved.”
(15:25) Dr. Jaffe: “The drinking is the thing that makes getting to the problem harder, sure. But it’s not the actual problem. So why am I focusing all of my effort on fixing that piece? Why not come to somebody who has been traumatized, somebody who has poor attachment, somebody who has no skills at intimacy building and relationships and therefore feels lonely and isolated all the time, somebody who has beliefs about their low self-worth? It doesn’t matter. There is a myriad of reasons why this would happen. But why not go to them, start working on those pieces? Because if that is the force pushing on the drinking, if you reduce the force pushing on the drinking, you will get less drinking.”
(24:34) Dr. Jaffe: “I want everybody to realize improvement is improvement. We need to celebrate people doing better. Not only celebrate them when they’re perfect because what happens is they’re not perfect, and then they lie to us?”
(40:17) Dr. Jaffe: “We double the rate of deaths from drugs about every decade, and I think unfortunately it’s not because quote-unquote ‘Addicts’ are getting worse, it’s because our system isn’t working and it’s pushing them farther and farther away from the help.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST, HERE. (41 min)
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