Review the month of April with us. We discussed the highlights of our show on Male Sexual Abuse and the concept of Moral courage. These two alone are worthy of so much attention, however we also discussed the show on the language of substance abuse. Moral courage is one of the only topics we actually replicate content on as it is so important, however we should probably do this with Male sexual abuse as well, just because is is so very under focused on as an issue… shoot arguably it is not an issue at all as far as folks would like to admit. Finally, the issue of the language refers to all the confusing things discussed in the substance abuse field which can seem so mysterious to those not in recovery circles, we try to take the mystery out of all these topics. ]
Let’s figure this out together, through a therapist’s eyes.
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Episode #271 Transcription
Chris Gazdik: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Through a Therapist’s Eyes on 4 25 24 and we are doing the April month in review, but we have a very special and cool Re invigorated well and maintained. Are you’re a well oiled machine now, Mr. Adam Kloninger is hanging out with us again. Old
Adam Cloninger: change and everything. I’m back. I’m
Chris Gazdik: back at it.
So you had some medical stuff that you were dealing with and all as well, or still on board as
Adam Cloninger: far as I know, everything’s good.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. Glad to hear it. And I’m glad you’re back for sure. Thank you. Also, Neil comes out of the curtains and joins us for the month in review.
Neil Robinson: Hello.
Chris Gazdik: How are you doing, sir?
Neil Robinson: Good.
Got family in town. Join some time with my dad. So it’s been a good couple of days. All
Chris Gazdik: right. Yeah. It’s beautiful. Oh, golfing. That’d be a fun story to tell. Well, the problem is I told him
Neil Robinson: like, yeah, it’s mid seventies to the eighties. And then of course, you know, North Carolina, you get, you get up and it’s 40.
Yeah, he’s like, I just thought of a raincoat. [00:01:00] I’m like, well, that’s North Carolina. You get up at seven and it’s 40 and then by by lunch, you’re up to 70. I only brought shorts with me.
Chris Gazdik: You never know. You never know in this state around Carolinas. So, this is where you get insights from a therapist in your car and home but it’s not to delivery therapy services in any way.
We are YouTube. So, your job is to click, subscribe, please tell a friend. There’s a little. button on there that you click. All that stuff really helps us get found. You’ll get notifications when we come online and whatnot. John always really talks about how many stars we’re supposed to get, which is five, not four.
He’s very particular about that. Contact it through a therapist. Eyes. com is the way to email us. We respond with that. This is the human emotional experience, which we do endeavor to figure out together. Neil, you were going to give kind of an update on what we’re doing with shows and the schedule and that sort of thing.
And, and what happens so people can begin getting more aware of when to see our shows and stuff.
Neil Robinson: Well, if they come to YouTube, you’ll [00:02:00] see it live every Thursday because we’re live. But if you listen to it on Spotify or YouTube or iTunes basically we’re a little behind on there. So we’re doing some catch up.
We’re doing two shows a week doing some, the backlog. So if you, if you listen to it on those platforms, you should be getting a lot of downloads. And so in the next few weeks we’ll get everything caught up. We’re going to get back to a live on a Thursday and then like Tuesday, this show is going to be posted as a podcast.
So once again, if you really love the show and you want to catch up faster, check us Just go to YouTube, go to our channel, and just basically watch the previous live episodes. But if you still like your iTunes and Spotify, we’re catching up. So it just can take some time because, you know, some people say I do procrastinate.
So there you go.
Chris Gazdik: That’s the first time I’ve heard him. We’re going to give that update a few times. I wasn’t sure if the word procrastination was going to come into your spiel or not, but spiel, spiel, spiel. I love that word. I don’t hear anybody using the word spiel, but it’s a great word, isn’t it? I have a spiel every day that I sit down with a initial therapy appointment.
I have a whole spiel that I go through. It’s like, [00:03:00] that’s my thing. So that’s your shtick? My shtick and spiel. Those are similar. Are they in acronyms or synonyms or? No,
Neil Robinson: it’s just, just how about
Chris Gazdik: word? How about the Schwartz? The Schwartz. Schwartz. They’re
Neil Robinson: Schwartz is with you. Space Balls.
Chris Gazdik: I, I’m, I’m, I wasn’t hanging around you with may the fourth coming up.
So maybe When is that? That’s next May the fourth. I may be with you. You love that day coming up, don’t you? It’s my birthday. It’s like your day. Huh?
Adam Cloninger: It’s my birthday.
Chris Gazdik: May the 4th is? Did I not know that? I did know that. Yeah, Disney’s ruined it though. I totally disagree. We’ll have to talk about that off the air.
Love Disney’s knock off shows and stuff, man. No, no, no. Grogu came from this, man.
Adam Cloninger: But, yeah, I’m sure He’s the best character. I’m sure some of them are good, but
Chris Gazdik: Yes. Absolutely. Grogu was born.
Neil Robinson: As someone who loves Marvel, I would say that Disney’s kind of gone over the top with all these things that happen, and I think Star Wars is in the same boat.
They’ve just, like, saturated it. You know, I remember every year, it’d be like, the next Marvel movie is this big presentation, and I was like, every time I turn around, there’s a new show, new [00:04:00] episode, new movie. It’s like, oh my gosh.
Chris Gazdik: So did Star Wars.
Neil Robinson: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m saying Disney did the same thing to Lucasfilm and Star Wars as they did with Marvel. It’s, it’s over, over saturation.
Chris Gazdik: But
Adam Cloninger: he’s not letting me.
Neil Robinson: Trying to prove a point.
Adam Cloninger: But interesting enough. Have you seen the 50s YouTube videos they have where they’re doing movies, but they’re using AI to do it as if it was filmed in the 50s.
Have you seen this?
Neil Robinson: No, but that sounds fun.
Adam Cloninger: You gotta check it out. They have like, they have like Terminator, they have New Hope, Phantom Menace Lord of the Rings, but it’s all filmed as if it were filmed with actors in the 50s. It is spooky I’m telling you it’s it looks so real. It’s crazy. Now that
Chris Gazdik: we’ve lost half of our listening audience Okay, we have missed Neil what did we do with down the rabbit [00:05:00] hole I think I think we had one that was with I’m actually not remembering.
I remember one of them.
Adam Cloninger: Something about a hole or something. There was Mel’s hole
Neil Robinson: was one time. Yeah.
Adam Cloninger: And then y’all talk about Bigfoot on, I think on the same episode. Who was that guy anyway? That was
Neil Robinson: Jack. My buddy Jack. He lives up
Adam Cloninger: here and he’s, yeah.
Neil Robinson: I’m trying to think what the first one, cause I think Mel’s hole was the last one and well, I’m trying to think what the first one, I know the first one
Chris Gazdik: was the one I was thinking about.
It was where, you know, he had a really interesting question that I could have just gone in and it was. It was down the hole looking at, like, the psychological
aspects of, like, propaganda and Oh, marketing, the subliminal marketing. Subliminal marketing is exactly what it was. Yeah, so So we had a couple cool down the rabbit hole.
Sounds like you picked up on the Mel’s hole thing. Which, you know, down the rabbit hole and the Mel’s hole. That was I actually read about that after the show. I was like, wow, this is crazy stuff. Actually. Jack’s giving me a couple of things since then, man. He lives that stuff. Doesn’t he?
Neil Robinson: Yeah, that’s, that’s his, that’s his ADHD.
That’s the [00:06:00] Jack’s hole.
Chris Gazdik: He sent me one on the, like, you know, energy from nothing. Can’t, thing. And like, you know, there’s been a technology that’s been around for a while. And I’m like, wow, that sounds actually really convincing. Like, yeah, I’d love to spend a day in Jack’s head. Maybe that would be
Adam Cloninger: entertaining.
You’ll have to mention to him about the Orca new species that I mentioned to you before the show. Yeah. I’ll talk to him. I think that’s interesting.
Chris Gazdik: So where are we going, Mr. Cloninger? You got a, you got a down the rabbit hole. We have two statements usually. Oh, we stopped doing it.
Neil Robinson: Yeah, he stopped giving us a choice.
He’s like, I’m just gonna talk about this
Adam Cloninger: anymore. All right. Well, we got where we go This one’s I got I got off of a website called stat news and You know americans have been reporting more anxiety and depression and stuff over the last recent years. We’ve had Numerous episodes where he talked about different things.
And I’m going to ask y’all just to kind of throw a couple of things out, like reasons why we’ve discussed that’s this being the case, why are, why are we get seeing more reported issues and people seeking more [00:07:00] therapy and stuff?
Chris Gazdik: Everything seems to be on the rise, anxiety, depression, this type of thing.
The proposed notion is isolation, the effects of COVID. COVID, the the internet, social media. Yeah. Those are, those are the hires.
Adam Cloninger: You got any other ones you want though in there? Hmm. Upbringing upbringing. Okay. So. Family dynamics, abuse. Keep entitlement.
Chris Gazdik: Everyone got a trophy awareness. People are millennials get picked on
Adam Cloninger: people talking about it more.
All kinds of things. So with with all those things in mind on point out that now they’re having veterinarians are reporting a rise in Pets on Prozac and Zoloft.
Chris Gazdik: Gosh. Okay. Yeah.
Adam Cloninger: So that’s on the rise and I wanted to kind of see what y’all’s take is why that’s happening because I think most of the stuff we just talked about other than the social media.
No wait a minute. Actually, we probably couldn’t say social media because [00:08:00] I’ve seen these videos where they have like channels for dogs and channels for cats now. Dogs watching social media. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So. Okay, so that is a rabbit hole. I never knew what to expect with you, brother. You know where my brain goes first with that, honestly, is that the, like, when you go to a vet now.
I don’t mean to piss off the vets out there. I know where he’s going with this right now. Yeah, it, we we’re doing so much more care. I mean, you give an animal like X-rays and Right. And you know, cat scans and you have a dental plan, right? And you do all of these things. I mean, you know, we never used to do that for my kids.
Growing my dog, my kids , my dogs growing up, right? We did do that for my kids. Please no hate mail. But you know, I think that there’s probably. A little bit of follow through with that as well, because we’ve always had anxious dogs, you know, now we’ve, we’ve got nice physical therapy things for dogs, just as much as we’ve learned some of these neurological things and PT things for, for humans, like you’ll get a, a, a thunder [00:09:00] wrap.
It’s like a, a, a, a very tight body wrap for a dog that you can put in there and those thunder storms. Yeah. Your dog could probably use some of that. Oh, I had one
Adam Cloninger: before. Before she was way worse.
Chris Gazdik: Right. So I think there’s probably just as with awareness has, has risen with mental health, we’ve applied that to animals.
Like we’ve applied all the other medical treatments. So that’s my thinking. I don’t think I’ve subscribed to the fact that there’s increased anxiety for animals. I don’t know that I’m buying that.
Adam Cloninger: Maybe there’s not increased anxiety for humans. Well,
Chris Gazdik: then you go to the idea of increased identification of the mental health problem, right?
But I’m not so sure that fully applies either because of the new way we’re living and social media and all that kind of stuff. So you don’t get that effect with dogs. So let me get this right. This, would you say this come from stat?
Adam Cloninger: Stat news. Stat [00:10:00] news
Chris Gazdik: is saying this actually increases. Yeah.
Adam Cloninger: And the thing is that they’re, they really can’t give.
Accurate statistics on it. Where’s the data
Chris Gazdik: from? No,
Adam Cloninger: they really can’t because you know, the veterinary medical records chain through the United States is not connected, like, you know, humans. Well, I mean, you know, they’re not all interconnected. You can’t just, there’s no social security number for
Neil Robinson: a dog to tie it from one vet clinic to the next.
It’s gotta be
Adam Cloninger: hard to study. Well, plus, you know, dogs and cats not going to live as long as humans. So.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, but they have still some similar, some similar symptomology, I’m sure. Yeah, but I mean, you could observe anxiety. I mean, you could
Adam Cloninger: have a patient come to you for 30
Chris Gazdik: years. True. Well, sure. Yeah, so the long term study.
You’re probably
Adam Cloninger: not going to have a dog come to the same vet for 30 years. Longitudinal
Chris Gazdik: studies would be, would be hard to do. What do you think? If you did, it’s a good vet. I gotta see what you’re thinking, man.
Neil Robinson: What I would say to that is, what I think it’s, [00:11:00] it’s, An animal takes on the personality of its owners.
And if you have people who own animals and they have high anxiety, that animal is going to pick up on those characteristics and those vibes. So I could see cause it’s, it’s just like, you can have two of the same breed. Do you? Cause like I said, Our dog had a certain personality, even though it was a wee interior because of how we acted in our house.
That’s how he adapted. If he was at someone else’s house, he would have acted differently because of the anxiety, the emotions, the energy. I mean, dogs and cats are very sensitive to how we interact. And so you think about if someone’s already on high, are always high anxiety. Well, guess what? Their dog’s going to kind of always be slightly on high anxiety.
Chris Gazdik: So deeper into this whole. I love this, right? So, do dogs have a neuronal process in their brains and bodies and such? All
Adam Cloninger: animals
Chris Gazdik: do. Right? And they’re very similar to the humans that we’ve studied and we’ve [00:12:00] learned. Definitely a little bit more sophisticated and error Neurological process, but neurology has taken leaps and bounds to
learn about how this system works, and one of the things that we’ve definitely learned about is something called mirroring neurons or mirror neurons.
You ever hear of that? Okay. So Neil, like on point, because it is very reasonable suggest that human beings have increased in our mental health experience and the mirroring neurons in animals have picked up from the owners and such. I would really be curious if the stat play article that came from that if they studied animals in general, I suspect that’s only domesticated animals, which would further go into the idea that Mirroring neurons in the neuronal process of animals is the cause.
Adam Cloninger: Well, I mean, I, I don’t know if that, I guess it probably would be. ’cause I don’t think they’re gonna be like, [00:13:00] well, you could study primates, you could study
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. But it’s, you know, wildlife, but it’s gotta be birds and, and all kinds of different migration and things that animals do. But the animals for, for,
Adam Cloninger: for like treatment of stress and stuff had to be an animal that’s around them enough.
Chris Gazdik: Right. Well, domestic to know. Yeah. This has got to be, I would love to see a follow up research on. Apes and animals and even fish in
Adam Cloninger: but what about animals in
Chris Gazdik: zoos? Well, they would have mirroring neurons from humans for sure. And they won’t be domesticated. The, well, domesticated in the sense that they’re around humans.
Right,
Adam Cloninger: but I mean, you know, the lions and tigers and bears, oh my, you know, they’re not They’re probably
Chris Gazdik: not gonna
Adam Cloninger: be Right. But, I mean, you know, if you got a bear that’s freaking out, there’s a, you know, they might medicate him or something.
Chris Gazdik: Of course, then again, even lions and animals, right? Bears and such.
I mean, they’re close to the glass and they, they have a relationship with the public in that way. And you pro I would bet you would see zoo animals having a similar thing. That’d be cool to test. [00:14:00] Yeah, I, I, I think you’re right on, Neil, mirroring neurons.
Neil Robinson: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, like I said, we have enough, I just seen it with other, they say, you know, animals, you know, dogs start looking like their owners and stuff like that.
It’s, I know that’s a little bit different, but they say
Chris Gazdik: they
Neil Robinson: look like, you know, see those pictures of like the two people that the person, the dog and it’s like, they almost look exactly the same. It’s one of the further down this rabbit hole, that’s a whole nothing, but no. But no, it’s, it’s, it’s behaviors.
It’s learned. It’s all that other stuff. Cause I’d be intrigued to look at a house that has multiple dogs and have, like, you have the teenage kid who has anxiety and that’s like his dog and like see, or her dogs and see like how that dog reacts versus like the dad’s dog that just sits on the couch and just, they just chill.
Like I would really be intrigued to see how, how broken down that could get into when you look at, you know, who the dog hangs out with in the house. And see if it really creates that type of thing.
Adam Cloninger: I think it also, going along with what you’re saying, it’s not just the owners, it’s the visitors too. I’ll give you an example, and Chris can tell you this too.
The dog I [00:15:00] have, When you first come to see, can his name Marvin? Oh, I love Marvin . So when you, when you first meet Marvin, the thing is E everybody, including Chris, thought . Oh, you gotta talk to him. Oh, it’s okay. How are you doing, boy? I’m like, leave him alone. Just ignore him. He’s, he’s, oh, it’s okay, Marvin.
I’m like, Chris, just leave him alone. No, no. It’s okay, man. Don’t talk to him, Chris. Just leave him alone. You leave him alone. You ignore him. And then he’s like, Hey, what? What? You don’t. Think I’m a threat or what’s going on? He calms down if you it works leave dogs alone until they come to you It works. It
What kind of
Neil Robinson: dog is Marvin?
Adam Cloninger: I think he’s Jack Russell. Oh, he’s probably. Oh
Neil Robinson: god. Yeah, that’s gonna be. Yeah, just leave those things alone.
Adam Cloninger: He is an
Chris Gazdik: anxious dog. There’s no doubt
Adam Cloninger: about it. And he’s much calmer than he used to be. He used to be just crazy. Now, he’s just getting on. He calmed me down. It was worse.
Oh my god. Yes. Well, I met him years ago but. No, no, no. Back in like 2016, he was crazy. Oh, wow. He’s like a crack dog or something.
Chris Gazdik: How did he [00:16:00] do in storms?
Adam Cloninger: I don’t recall him having an issue with that, but I mean, it’d be like, now he’s getting like separation anxiety and stuff. Chloe’s not around the house as much as she used to be.
So he’s all sad and alone. He’s not getting his attention he was getting before. Aww, poor Marvin. So now he like whines and stuff when I go to work and
Chris Gazdik: So I’ve been thinking about episode 268. Eight a little bit to be honest with you in my practice this month. So this was male sexual abuse slash domestic violence.
And we talked about survivor mode. So the three questions, do you know what survivor mode is and where it comes from? And are men victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence is easy question. I hope you recognize that as an easy. Yes. You didn’t hear me. Yeah,
Adam Cloninger: I’m just sitting there imagining
Chris Gazdik: in a relationship.
Yes, I love your reaction. Go a little further. Are men victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence? [00:17:00] Lastly, do men handle being a victim
differently? But yeah, your reaction is puzzlement if you see on the live feed. So you’re talking like a
Adam Cloninger: boyfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend. Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: absolutely. All sorts of domestic partnerships and such.
But
Adam Cloninger: there’s a requirement. I mean, if something’s going to work, they have to be aroused.
Neil Robinson: But there’s also the physiology of your body’s going to react, whether you want to do or not, sometimes
Chris Gazdik: it does in sexual abuse. But in fact, a lot of times victims are freaking out about like, why am I responding to this?
Why is this happening? It, you know, do I like it per se and also, yeah, for sure.
Neil Robinson: Or, or it goes back to the idea. Cause I think I saw a video about that where this guy was talking about, like, Anytime he’s ever turned his like girlfriend down for like, you know, and like her advances because he’s just, he’s tired, doesn’t want to, whatever, like the emotional trauma that he goes through [00:18:00] because what she puts him through because she turned him down, he turned her down.
It’s like, but yeah, I mean it makes sense that it can happen. And once again, there’s a lot of, there’s women that are very controlled. Oh, so supposedly in Australia there was a power lifter girl that a robber broke into her house. She, she basically knocked him out and then pumped him full of Viagra and then had her way with him for like 24 hours or something.
Oh my gosh. And finally they like went to the, the cops because he broke in and like, what did the cops do? Like, cause he broke in, but then she did all this other stuff. And so you talk about We have medication now that technically you don’t have to be involved. But yeah, that’s something that I read about in Australia.
He
Adam Cloninger: deserved it. He broke in the house.
Neil Robinson: I don’t know. Well, to
Chris Gazdik: bring us into a little bit of levity with this, like, honestly, no one observes deserve sexual abuse or domestic violence, either emotional, physical or sexual. And, and the [00:19:00] reality of this is like, Absolutely. The answer is yes to the question. Do men experience this?
And this happens a lot of times for young men, young boys are, you know, affected by, you know, sexual abuse or violence in the home and all sorts of things are going on. And it’s curious because you went in a different direction, Adam, but I think a lot of times people are very confused and puzzled about how it is so that men could be victims of sexual abuse.
Domestic violence. Well, I mean, I can,
Adam Cloninger: I can see it with an older family member or something like that, but like their, their loved one, I’m having trouble with that one.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. I mean, the, the emotional abuse, as a matter of fact, I’ll, I’ll go to this, you know, where, where did we land? One of the things that is very, very strong and clear and a difference is even more so than women that are victims of different things going on, men are suffering in silence.
There’s not really an avenue or [00:20:00] venue to be able to recognize, yeah, you know what? I am yelled at and belittled. I am put down and controlled. I am not comfortable walking on eggshells and essentially living in terror. Now, there’s a little bit of a difference with the physical violence because it’s harder for men to be victimized in such a way where we’re dominated physically, because generally we’re stronger in, in, in stature and, and in just in development.
But even then, I guess if you got a power lifter in Australia, that’s not always the case. But even when it is. The fact of the matter is I have, I’m thinking of right now, literally somebody was talking about sandals being thrown at him and that, you know, what is he supposed to do? Go and jack her up and put her on the wall.
Like that’s not gonna fly. You can’t do that really in response. The age old childhood understanding in male world is you don’t ever hit a woman. So when you’re getting [00:21:00] hit, you’re getting punched. Pinched stabbed or items thrown at you. That is physically well.
Neil Robinson: Well, and here’s another catch when it comes to that.
If you’re going to try to restrain them to for your safety or their safety, technically they could get charged with kidnapping,
Chris Gazdik: kidnap. Yes.
Neil Robinson: If you restrain someone, you can get charged with kidnapping. So if she’s attacking him. And she, and he restrains her or does something to like put her in a room to keep her from coming after him if it’s against her will legally, she could then try to press charges as him kidnapping her and then charges
Adam Cloninger: for self defense too, right?
He can’t.
Neil Robinson: But then the question is in the courts, there’s still that issue of the man versus woman and it’s getting better.
Chris Gazdik: To to, to your point, Neil and Adam, your retort very clearly, the legal system has gotten better at this. I have had in my therapy experiences in the more recent years, men absolutely are calling the police or having the police called and the police are [00:22:00] doing an assessment.
They will separate you, talk to him, talk to her, and if there are marks on his body and there are not marks on her, she will go to jail. That’s gonna happen
Neil Robinson: good.
Chris Gazdik: That’s happening guys be the one that calls for real like, you know I mean really because the code of silence would say well, I’m not gonna call the police Why am I gonna call the police and the answer do you have an answer?
Why would a guy? Why would that be the case Adam
Adam Cloninger: because just the same reason he’s talking about she’s in that you put him that room to keep You keep yourself safe. She’s in a room now. She calls the police and says I put me in here
Chris Gazdik: You need to call it is about Protecting yourself legally. It’s also about getting a realization that this behavior that you’ve done, it’s, it’s just, it’s not okay.
It’s not okay. And a police officer taking a woman to a cell and and filing a charge You will have to answer to that charge and that can really reconcile like hey Like I need to stop this because it [00:23:00] is such a difficult thing for anyone to experience these types of experiences In in life, but for a man, it is really really difficult Like just this code of silence is just so, it’s so much for a woman experiencing domestic violence or sexual abuse to not tell anybody it’s doubly or triply.
So, you know, for a dude, you know, who are you going to talk to Adam? If you have sexual abuse as a 10 year old boy, I mean, are you going to mommy and saying, you know, something happened? You’re not going to tell your friends, like, right. What are you going to do? You know, particularly if it’s, you know, male on male, which oftentimes is the case it’s, it’s such a terrible, terrible world.
I feel compelled to point out that this will not defeat me, Neil. We, we had a Chris on the show talking about that, which we developed a program. You want to kick that?
Neil Robinson: I thought you did a good job, but yeah. So we. [00:24:00] Talk to Chris. He talks about his story and basically it’s giving you the tools to, you know, to get past, you know, previous sexual abuse.
It’s this will not defeat me. com. It’s a, there’s a, there’s a basically a, an intro section you can watch, see what you think about it. You know, the, the idea is it gives you a, a starting point, you know, if you’re not ready to feel comfortable talking to other people, you can go through this, watch the intro with this and do it at your own pace, you know, kind of open up and help you start out.
Processing what’s going on. So it’s definitely not the full blown answer to a lot of stuff, but it’s a great opening, opening way for people to deal with this and the safety of their own home that in their own time. And those are the, so yeah, so this will not defeat me. com. Go, go check you know, like I said, go sign up for the free intro thing just to see what you think about it.
Chris Gazdik: And you said, Chris, we mean, Chris Davos is the host of the whole program that we went through. And he did, yeah, he, he was. Absolutely courageous in sharing rather extensive sexual and physical and violent abuse that he endured as a [00:25:00] kid and then kept inside his whole self and his, you know, for, you know, 25 years of policing was, was one of the things that he got into as an adult and didn’t tell anyone about any of this until more recently in his life.
And he’s totally come out, gotten well. And is helping the world as a result. So pretty cool stuff. This will not defeat me dot com. Yeah. How else do men handle this differently? And then I want to talk about some of the recovery stuff. You know, I can’t tell you how many times I’m dealing with in therapy men that have endured some type of sexual.
You know, misbehavior and offense. And do you know, they very commonly will question their own masculinity because of what we were kind of talking about before you do respond to when people are engaging you sexually, even if you’re an unwilling participant, you will have the physical experiences as though you’re having sex in every, in every way.
[00:26:00] And it makes people really begin thinking, wow, dang, am I gay? Is, is, am I, is my oriented, did I just not know that my orientation is such a way? Also, your sexual appetite is really changed into what you’re drawn to. And you begin to experience porn, which kind of has that tendency anyway. And you get a lot of twisted feelings and orientation and thoughts about self because it’s never even been identified that you’ve endured sexual abuse.
Which is another major factor that is the way that it operates differently. I think most of the time, is it fair to say that women kind of know in their own mind’s eye, though I want to be careful, not all the time at all. There are many women that have had sexual abuse and don’t even realize it. That’s absolutely a thing, but I think that probably is more so the case for men.
There are men that are married in their middle ages right now that are [00:27:00] enduring abuse of some kind and don’t even categorize it or realize it. So the level of lack of insight about this for themselves is a huge component that I think is not specific to men, but accentuated for men.
Neil Robinson: I think part of it when in those long term relationships, it’s like the frog in the pot of water that starts, they turn it on and the frog does, the frog doesn’t realize it gets boiled because they’ve been in this relationship and just like in any relationship, you have to work on it.
So if you, if one of the people starts having that hyperactive, like controlling personality that just, Expounds on itself, you might not realize it over the course of five years, you could go from happy couple to now she’s controlling everything he’s doing or vice versa. And it’s just kind of slowly happened.
It was, you know, she told, you know, you can’t go hang out with the guys one night and then it’s like, Oh, Don’t look at women or don’t do this. Or like it could be just slowly triggered on by the time is done. He’s just, he goes to work,
he comes home, he does whatever [00:28:00] she asked him to do. Like he can’t do anything on his own.
Like it could easily be for the domestic violence and that’s it. It can be a. Frog in a pot of water kind of situation. It’s a
Chris Gazdik: gradual, progressive nature to the relationship and the dynamics going. Now, that happens with women also, but I think you’re right. And, and, and more so for men leading to the ignorance of that being an issue because it just gradually grew.
Yeah, it you know,
Adam Cloninger: it sounds like this show is more toward just like Abuse in general and not what like I took it when you first mentioned sexual abuse I’m still having trouble with the sexual abuse by your partner Yeah, what do you mean for the man having sex being sexually abused by their their woman?
I’m still having problem with that
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, well,
Adam Cloninger: I’m not saying doesn’t happen, but I don’t think it’s gonna be
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, I mean, the myth is that men always want to have sex like rabbits and they’re never really interested in saying no and that type of a thing. I, I [00:29:00] think, you know, when you, when you really get into a sexual relationship, you can, you can really term it even sexual abuse to a certain extent.
When, when a woman is very manipulative about the sexual relationship and denying versus forcing. But if a dude says, I’m not interested, They’re very much not interested. No still means no. But can a guy say, no, I don’t want to do this. You know, it’s like there’s weird gender norms that go into that, but, but this can also be a denial of, you know, and, and that, that’s a very harsh thing to, to, to do or bargaining.
You know, you’re going to have to do this and this and this. And I mean, now we’ve got fetishes that are developed with subdom relationships. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that are kind of going on.
Neil Robinson: What about the guys who maybe there’s a girl that’s hyperly obsessed, maybe they’re not in a relationship yet and she wants.
Something and he doesn’t, you know, that’s that same idea. Cause I’ve heard stories about guys who just slept with this [00:30:00] person because they, the other person just kept pushing, pushing, pushing, you know, it doesn’t mean they wanted it with that particular person. Cause yeah, guys are pretty much tuned to, we have to procreate, but when it comes down to the grand scheme of things, it’s, it’s, it’s.
Just because you do it doesn’t mean you really want to, you know, well, or, or the, you know, high school boys that are manipulated by their teachers, you know, that kind of situation has become a big thing. Now the age
Chris Gazdik: differentials are a big deal that are starting to happen regularly. And I’m talking about 40 year olds getting together with high school seniors.
And we’re supposed to be excited about that. We’re supposed to be happy about that. You know, we got the Mary Jane and all this kind of thing. And I got young men do not feel good and safe in those relationships that I would maintain that very clearly
Adam Cloninger: that help with some thoughts. Yeah, but I’m still, I’m still thinking that in 99.
Neil Robinson: 9
Adam Cloninger: percent of time in a relationship, the man [00:31:00] can stop it if it’s the. And I guess,
Neil Robinson: I guess the, I guess the deciding fact differences would be sexual abuse would be more kind of outside of relationships or domestic violence is right in the relationship. But when he
Adam Cloninger: first mentioned it, he mentioned sexual abuse.
And I’m like thinking totally different than most of the stuff that y’all were talking about now, or just domestic abuse, like, you know, demeaning him and everything else is, hasn’t very little to do with. What I thought you were talking about. That’s all I was saying.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s, there’s a lot there to go on with how there’s differences as well.
You know, there’s, because of the idea, part of what you’re talking about, I think fits with this difference too. You know, men are really considering themselves.
Major complex and insecurities around weakness, you know, to your point, Adam, if this is happening in your home and you’re suffering with the code of silence about it, it’s like, what kind of a wimp or other bad words, right?
What kind of a wimp am I? Like I am, I can’t even stand [00:32:00] up for myself. I, I get the idea that my buddies, I mean, I get jokes all the time. Like, you know, what am I supposed to do with this? Because I don’t know how to, now that the water’s got really hot, Neil, and I’m the frog in the pan, I don’t know how to deal with this.
And so I just get roasted. And the shame is, is even bigger as it relates to that. Also the, the, the doubt or fear or very big reality that just totally making this up and going with your example, Adam, if I, if I come to you as a buddy and I say this, you know, is going on in my house or are you going to believe me?
Like, how am I supposed to have that conversation?
Adam Cloninger: Sure. I believe you, but I’ll be like, Oh, why don’t you just stop her?
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. It’s not that easy when you’ve got a whole culture of relationship kind of involved in, in this. Same thing why we get so confused why a woman is a domestic violence victim goes from one abuse situation to the next, to the next, to [00:33:00] the next.
To me, that’s totally different.
Adam Cloninger: How’s that different? Well, because physically a man’s 99. 9 percent of the time is going to be able to prevent a woman from doing something. Not trying to be sexist or anything like that. I mean, but I mean, we’re physically stronger. We’ve got hormones and stronger tendons and ligaments.
It’s just a fact. It’s not like,
Chris Gazdik: yeah, I love that. That’s when we got
Adam Cloninger: separate sports. No, absolutely. Thankfully.
Chris Gazdik: I love that, that you’re, you’re going through this and I appreciate the conversation with it because it, it can, I think even more than I’m real realizing it probably is hard for people to believe, particularly other men to believe that men can be caught into these circumstances.
And I do see this in my therapy room. I wouldn’t say often in that way, specifically that you’re thinking about but that. Happens with some level of regularity and [00:34:00] you can’t deal with it because I’m not going to be a weakling and I don’t want to Feel the shame and get the jokes and be ribbed by the buddies and all this kind of stuff And so it just continues to be perpetrated into perpetuity I think a lot of people end up just dying with these relationships kind of going on all their life and and it’s sad it’s it’s it’s it’s absolutely terribly destructive So let’s let’s get on to like, you know, how do we manage this?
You know, how do we recover with with with this and And and also before I forget to mention it we did Kind of rave the show around survivor mode kind of as well. Did you remember at all, Neil, was that a new concept for you? The survivor mode, when we talked about substance abuse families and where that comes from?
Neil Robinson: No, no, it makes sense. Cause you, you adapt to deal with it. We’ve talked about it before with the family dynamics and stuff like that. So the idea is you, you figure out how do you shut it down. How do you deal with those things? So you’re not [00:35:00] triggered or don’t trigger the other person. So you, you live your life just basically, once again, you’re just trying to survive.
So, so,
Chris Gazdik: and we’ve talked about survivor mode on the show as well before, so I’m sure you picked up on, on that, that way. So how do, how do we deal with this? What, how do we recover is really kind of where we landed, you know, One of the things I really want to put out there is it’s really super important to exactly do exactly the opposite of what we’re talking about happens.
We just don’t be alone with it for sure. You know if you have friends that you can trust Adam, I think that, you know, Some of the things you struggle with, if somebody came to you, you know, that you trust and they trust you and you talk with them, is it true to say that generally people are not going to be belittling if you talk about some struggle that you’re having?
Adam Cloninger: Oh, I think so. I mean, like, if you, like I said, if you came to me and tell me, I’d be asking, well, why didn’t you stop her? You know, but I mean, I wouldn’t be saying, well, I wouldn’t be like that. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: But I mean, that’s what I think men are afraid of from the schoolyard
You would. Make fun of me. I’m giving you armament for jokes and you know slams and you’re never gonna forget this
Neil Robinson: I I think really when it comes down to breast tax If guys you really care about their buddies and if it came down to it You, they wouldn’t do that, but I feel like there’s a lot of guys, they don’t want to burden their friends with their problems or they don’t want to burn it.
Like guys really are go alone and I’ll just put some dirt on it and let’s go. I don’t want it. So, so I think there’s a lot of times when it’s not, I don’t know how much of it is ridicule. It might be 50, 50, but I think a lot of it’s like, I don’t want my body. I don’t want to burden my buddies with this.
Like, I don’t want to make a big deal about it. I don’t want to do this. Cause like I said, I think if, if. Any one of us came to each one of them and said, Hey, I have a problem. The three of us, while we kind of joke and play around, if it was serious, like we would sit there, we’d listen, we’d go through that process.
And I think a lot of guys are that way. You know, if you have your buddy circle, like [00:37:00] if something happened, they’d drop everything and do it. But then again, now you’re putting your burden on someone else. And as a guy, you carry burdens, you don’t pass them on to someone else.
Chris Gazdik: Right. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a powerful reality.
And I, I will point out, I know a lot of women feel that way too. I don’t want to talk about what’s going on because I don’t want to burden my friends kind of as well. But I think you’re right. We come together and solve solutions. I think you said it perfectly right at the end there. We
Adam Cloninger: figure this thing out together.
Chris Gazdik: Well, that’s the answer. That’s that’s the answer. Thank you. I love that. That’s many one of the many reasons why I love the opening of that show that way because You know, we do want to take care of burdens and carry them not share them and give them out to others What else what else came to mind?
Neil or adam in your brain that people can do You know in order to really deal with the recovery of this type of a thing You remember what we talked about or how that went?
Neil Robinson: No, I have the notes. So that helps
Adam Cloninger: too. Well, [00:38:00] I can say that, say this don’t think there’s not a way out.
Neil Robinson: Right. And I know the notes we have like make a plan, right?
Adam Cloninger: Sometimes the way to address it is instead of, instead of having counseling with that other person, why I just get out of it, yes, it’s hard, but. You can get out of relationships. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I, I was married before and divorced now. So
Chris Gazdik: right. You, you know that it’s a scary proposition to, to get out and you can feel very stuck.
You know, I’m going to lose all of my money. I’m going to have to pay alimony. I’m going to get, you know, railroaded in my industry. It’s going to look bad for me. What about the kids?
Adam Cloninger: Sometimes it’s worth it. Right. If I had to do it all over again, I would.
Chris Gazdik: So, so he says do you have thoughts, Neil? No. Okay.
Neil Robinson: I am happily married right now.
Chris Gazdik: He takes a fast usually therapy and [00:39:00] support groups, you know, in not doing it alone, but they definitely help with these types of life events in a group, small groups in church or neighborhood. Friendship networks. I mean, you know, definitely don’t don’t don’t be alone. I Thought that it’s an important thing to kind of highlight what we were talking about with the legal thing like to be sure and be Careful, there’s a leak there are legal ramifications of this you have to protect yourself Legally, you know so do call the police, you know, and, and that now you can begin to trust at least in the states.
I don’t know what it’s like in your country, but in most countries around the world, I believe it is getting better where authorities recognize men can be victims of these things kinds of kind of as well. But important for men, you know, make sure there’s evidence, you know, you don’t want to. You know, have this turn around and be the victim of violence and then be the victim of the law coming after you.
That’s a, that’s like a double whammy boundary management, focusing on forgiveness. [00:40:00] Violence is something that men can get into retorting
with. And you have to be careful. You know, if you do just pound out the lady because she’s thrown the sandal at you, you know, that comes back on you. So you really have to be careful about, you know, turning to the muscle system and the tendons and everything at them.
Right. We have, that just compounds the problem and makes it potentially worse. So, those are some things from a guy’s perspective. Yeah, I don’t know, we need, we need some we need to move on, I think, from, that’s a sad topic. It’s, it’s, it’s a sad topic.
Neil Robinson: Can, can, can I say one thing about a video I saw this week?
Chris Gazdik: Yes, please, hopefully it’s got some humor.
Neil Robinson: Not really, but that’s okay. So there was a YouTube short of a Vietnam veteran and he was talking about the difference between those that fought in World War II and those that fought in the Vietnam. Okay. And, and the recovery. So those that fought in World War II when they were done, they got put on a ship for two to three weeks with their buddies that were were in the trenches with them.
You had [00:41:00] two to three weeks to decompress, talk, relate, get it out of your system. And then when you landed here, when you landed in the U S two things that happened is one, you got it out. But three, how were the, the world war two veterans treated versus the Vietnam vets treated. So Vietnam, you went out there, you did all this atrocious, horrible stuff because The military told you to do it.
You’re on a plane ride back. You have 12 hours to basically deal with it. You land, not talking to anybody, not playing, right? And then you land and how do they treat you? They treat you like crap because of all the political stuff. So, and when I saw that, I was like, It makes a lot more sense why the great, you know, the, the great war, whatever it was, the, the people from that, the greatest generation, they had time to talk to someone, not be alone, you know, process it, you know, validate their feelings and see what’s going on and really go through that whole process.
So it was an eye opener because I’d never thought about that two to three week window as they came back. So going back to the trauma that you deal with this. Don’t be alone. Talk [00:42:00] about it. Chris Davos talked about once he started telling his story and getting out, it allowed him to process it. So just keep that in mind.
And I just, I just saw it. How do I fit this in? Cause I just want to bring it up. Cause it was a cool realization.
Chris Gazdik: And it’s, it’s, I never thought about it in that reverse. But I’ve kind of commented many times when I’m working with trauma in session, I will talk about how, when it regards to PTSD specifically, man, we learned so much about PTSD from the Vietnam war because we did everything exactly wrong that with our men and usually men at that point, there weren’t as many women that, that, that were in the military at that time.
And, and so, When now we do go as a group and you come back as a group, you have debriefing time in Kuwait, you’re riding jet skis and debriefing and whatnot, we now understand you’ve got to have that time. I never thought about it in World War II. That just happened naturally because your only mode of transportation was primarily boats.
Right, to
Neil Robinson: get that many people across. [00:43:00] Like I said, a two week, two or three week journey. And like
Chris Gazdik: what was happening on that boat is healing. Yeah, that’s awesome. Never thought about it that way, but that’s absolutely part of what we want to do with recovery. If you hadn’t gotten it, understand, don’t be alone for sure.
All right. Episode two 69, we banged into moral courage that the questions were, do you know what moral courage is? Do you think it’s hard to execute? And what are the challenges to live this out? This is actually something that is one of the very few things that I from time to time in content regeneration love and logic.
I may actually get into doing that next month in parenting stuff just because we haven’t talked about it for a while, but moral courage was one of the ones we did very early on in the history of the show. And I talked about it about a year ago and about. Now I wanted to recover it because it’s such a difficult reality to speak up and into difficult situations such as, you know, the male domestic [00:44:00] violence or, you know, your, your bestie girlfriend who’s dealing with something.
Do we step into a situation and execute how this goes? So do you think it’s hard to execute moral courage? Do you know what it is? And what are the challenges to living this out? Because of time, I don’t want to go far into it. And we’ve
redone this content. I thought we’d just spend a moment or two on the current event that we did that show on purpose.
Which was the James and Jennifer Crumley story. Did you happen to catch that, Adam? No, I did not. Oh, really? This was the, the parent of the mass shooter. In a school that essentially horrible parenting they’re being prosecuted. They got prosecuted for the kids actions in school. Yeah. Well, a little followup that’s completely unrelated, but I literally got interested.
Cause I heard a story on the way to work today where a fourth grader in the local area here in the Charlotte area [00:45:00] brought a gun to school. And it was a question. What do we do with the kid? And what he said, do we charge the parents? Was the question that nobody was answering at this point. But isn’t that a thing now, you know, a fourth grader takes a gun to school and the question comes up.
Do we charge the parents? It’s an interesting, I’m concerned about the precedent. I guess I’ll tip my hand as I throw it over to you guys and say like, what do you think briefly about, you know, that whole scenario that kind of went on and how moral courage kind of factors in, do we speak up, how do we speak up, do we charge the parents, how does this
Adam Cloninger: get dealt with charging the parents?
I can see that, but there’s a tippy toe on that. Cause it’s, At some point there’s got to be a cutoff
Chris Gazdik: a cutoff. What do you mean a cutoff? Well, I mean,
Adam Cloninger: you know, Now you’re getting the dot at some point, you know You set a precedence and you set another precedence, set another precedence. Before you know it, you got somebody [00:46:00] that’s 30 years old and you’re prosecuting a 60 year old parent because of what he did when his kid was 10 years old.
Well, obviously. That’s what I’m getting at. Yeah, obviously
Chris Gazdik: it’s minor children. Right. You are only going to be held legally liable.
Adam Cloninger: But, you set a precedence on the next thing you know, now you got a 17 year old. Well, yeah. Now you got a 19 year old. Well, I think, I
Neil Robinson: don’t know how old was Ethan. He was a teenager, but I don’t remember how old he was.
Chris Gazdik: Ethan was Crumbly’s kid. That wasn’t middle school, was it?
Neil Robinson: No, I don’t think so.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, i’m not i’m not sure maybe you can google it real quick and give us an answer for that because And i’ll ramble on a little bit about it’s great that people are speaking up on an event I’m not gonna have time to go into it because I want to get to the third show Just know it is really hard to speak your knowledge and to get involved in a situation Like the neighbors for the crumblies and people that may have known Ethan and you know speaking out, you know People might think oh, yeah, I would say stuff But we spent a lot of time in that episode and when [00:47:00] we do this topic to emphasize how difficult it really is Because it’s not my business I don’t want to cause a problem.
I don’t want to upset my friend. I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to get sucked into it. This is dangerous for me. Yeah. How would this blow back? You know, we have whistleblower laws to protect people and still people see bad things going on in corporations and refuse to say anything because I don’t want to lose my job.
I mean, this is hard. Very hard and even harder when it’s just an emotional thing I would maintain. So did you get an age or do you know he’s, he
Neil Robinson: was 15, 15. So, so I mean, once again, there was the judge kept saying, when did I talk about the verdict or the whole process? They’re like, this isn’t about bad parenting, right?
This is about negligence to prevent, because when you look at the track record, you look at this time’s up to this, he was having problems. They didn’t really get him help and on top of that, [00:48:00] they bought him the gun he used at the school like you, there’s too many things up to this point that it’s not just, Oh, I, you know, that wasn’t the gun supposed to have been for target.
Adam Cloninger: Practice only.
Neil Robinson: It was supposed to be something for me to do, but the idea is you still, because of the things they, they saw and they’re just like, Hey, you can get over this. You can, whatever. Like you don’t, if you think your son or daughter has problems with, you know, whatever, my sister, you know, wow.
But so say, you know, the think your kid has a drug problem, you don’t buy them more drugs and say, yeah, it’ll be okay.
Or you don’t buy them a 12 pack of beer when they have a substance abuse issue. Like, you know, if a kid has problems, And you know there’s something there, your first thing to do is not buy them a like that. You, you find other constructive ways. You take them on hikes, you get them out of the situation.
You maybe buy them
Chris Gazdik: a bow.
Neil Robinson: Yeah, but, but it’s just, it’s still the idea.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, but [00:49:00] there’s
Neil Robinson: no Katniss out there where they, you know, but But yeah, so, and that was the issue was, it was they didn’t have the, you know, they didn’t take the moral courage to actually try to address their kid’s problem. They tried to mask it with other stuff, and they tried to address this, and then, once again, who, you know, I feel like there’s almost more moral courage to prosecute the parents, because Of the stigmas that this could lead to.
It’s interesting. If
Chris Gazdik: we wanted to go down the rabbit hole a little bit with that, was this a case of moral courage to, to charge the parents or something else? It’s a interesting argument.
Neil Robinson: And it is one of those few things where, you know, the kid did that and he didn’t kill the, like we talked about Sandy Hook, that.
Guy killed his grandmother who, then he took the guns. Like you can’t do anything about them. But yeah, it’s a really interesting thing. And who do you hold accountable? Like you said, moral courage. What is the moral grounds that we have to stand up to these situations? And, but then what comes out of this?
Okay. So they charged these two parents. Now they’re going to be in jail for 10, 15 years. [00:50:00] Like, what does that mean? What do you, what are, what is this, what comes from this? What, why are we setting this precedence? What’s going on with it? And so that becomes the next question as the next case appears. Are they,
Adam Cloninger: were they found guilty?
Neil Robinson: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah,
Adam Cloninger: they were. Well, and then on top of that,
Neil Robinson: the, the dad, like was caught on like jail recording, basically threatening the DA, like when he gets out, like, I’m like, okay, this guy’s just an idiot,
Chris Gazdik: but that’s good call guys. Good call. All right. We need to move on, but I want to mention. The idea of how do we build the ability to do moral courage?
So then we talked a little bit more on the show of, you know, this is the same as developing internal resiliency. Again, you hear a theme with is like, don’t go it alone. Get a group of people that can speak up. And I talked about the case of my dog my neighbor’s dog in my neighborhood in that. Episode 2 69.
So have a good source. Close friends wisely. You accumulate your five closest relationship, ask good questions, speak up, be a leader, not a follower, forgive yourself, make good choices. These are all [00:51:00] ways that you kind of develop internal resiliency and what not have honesty with self destroy the shame and guilt, improve self awareness, really focus on empathy, truly thinking of others from their perspective self discipline, learn how to handle negative people.
I’m trying to give you feedback so that when you do get busted, man, you’re tripping over there. What’s going on with the microphone? Adam? It like fail. I don’t know why. It’s like
Adam Cloninger: crashing. It like fell down. I was like trying to get it back up. I guess it’s close now.
Chris Gazdik: It’s good enough. Do you feel ridiculed?
I saw Neil like busting out over there.
Neil Robinson: He’s like,
Chris Gazdik: what are you doing over there?
Neil Robinson: I expect that from Chris. Chris is the fidgeter over there and he does it and he’ll catch it. I’m like, but Adam’s usually really good. So it’s like I didn’t touch anything though. It
Chris Gazdik: just all by itself, man.
Adam Cloninger: And this is what I’m hearing in my head and he’s, he’s already saying, hurry
Chris Gazdik: up, ma’am.
I have to switch over to hammer in a minute, anticipating stop talking a minute. The substance, the language of substance
Adam Cloninger: abuse. Yeah. What’s all [00:52:00] about? You mentioned it earlier. I, I, what are you talking about, Neil? Did you know
Chris Gazdik: what we were talking about before we? It’s a I purposely made it as a curious title, not for clickbait, but to get people’s brains to think about like, what does this mean?
Neil Robinson: I’ll tell you what, doing the show notes, I was trying to figure out what the heck you were doing, because I’m like, where’s more of the information? Because you just literally legit had like, 20 words and phrases just done. I’m like, how do I format this? Like, what are these things? Did he forget commas?
Like, it was really weird. But no, when I first saw it, it, I wasn’t sure what was going on with that. As far as what, where you were going for, like, is it the dialogue and how people communicate that are in situations of substance abuse or like the, the, the lay? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know. But then once you talked to him, I was like,
Chris Gazdik: Oh, right.
So let me do that for you, Adam. And the listeners in review, truly, this is one of the shows I told Neil, we do some shorts and we’re going to get back into doing reels and shorts a little bit to [00:53:00] give you good little digestible bites of some of the content and that particular show is going to be.
Fantastic. Because each one of those words, Neil, is a concept or a theme that operates in substance abuse. And if you remember as we were talking, I’m like thinking of all these other ones that weren’t on my list. There’s a plethora of, cool word too, right? Spill and plethora. My
Neil Robinson: wife hates it when I use that term.
I use it all the time and she hates it. Oh, really?
Chris Gazdik: The three amigos. Oh, come on, man. Plethora is awesome. Anyway, plethora means there’s a lot, a lot, a lot of these little phrases and stuff. So to clear this up for you, Adam, what this is, is what you learn and how to speak about or developing an acute understanding of the depths of what the whole world of substance abuse means, right?
So Neil’s showing him the list of words and Adam’s checking this out, right? And so what I found very early on in my career is that being a substance abuse professional and understanding these things and identifying substance abuse issues with you, [00:54:00] I would spend an exorbitant amount of time doing education.
Like it would be just like almost substance abuse 101. What’s this term and educating you about that and giving you information on this. I had all kinds of handouts and stuff that I would use. And so I would have to teach, just teach. Teach the language
Adam Cloninger: there and talk
Chris Gazdik: about it intelligently. What is withdrawal?
What is addiction? What does tolerance mean? What is a blackout? You know, I’m teaching all of these things. And so, when somebody goes to rehab, you get taught all of this information. I mean, they come out with like a binder, thick binder, full of all this information. And so, it was fascinating to me to meet with somebody before they went to rehab.
And then after they went to rehab and I pick back up with them because they know the language. It’s also much easier in treatment when I’m in therapy relationship with you and I’m meeting you for the first time and I know you just came out of Rehab because you’ve [00:55:00] been taught the language, you know, a lo
So it’s a really, really fascinating reality that I see that really is distinctly different for people that have experienced it. And people that haven’t, I thought you had a thought in you.
Neil Robinson: Well, I was just trying to think about like, cause the Lang understanding the verbiage and the language and having that education can make a huge difference on, on.
Chris Gazdik: Outcomes
Neil Robinson: right on the outcomes because you know that kind of thing about a the first steps admitting you have a problem Well, if you’re not educated enough to know what the palm is or what that means or the different things You know putting a putting a word to what’s going on kind of helps you understand it better, you know Why do I go through these?
Well, that’s that’s withdrawal. Okay. Well, what does that mean? Okay. Okay. I’m not crazy I my body’s revolting or you know, really like knowing putting that kind of stuff to it allows you now to you Name it, process it, digest it, go through that thing. And then once again, the more educated you are, the more you can put more logic behind it versus emotion.
Chris Gazdik: Do you at [00:56:00] least have the list that I created? Is that, is that what you were showing? Just read the list to give people a flavor today.
Neil Robinson: All right. So addiction. Well, yeah, if you, if you want more about addiction, go to episode two, two 22 just FYI. We spent a lot
Chris Gazdik: of time on what is addiction actually. And then good one to hit.
Neil Robinson: And then substance use disorder recovery, recovering or recovered, which I’m guessing there’s an interesting difference between those three terms detoxification or detox rehab, rehabilitation, rehab, 24 day treatment, IOP, intensive outpatient program.
Adam Cloninger: He still uses acronyms. Yeah. Yeah. What’s wrong with you, man?
It’s the
Neil Robinson: field, man! Anonymous Groups, Early Recovery, Long Term Recovery, Withdrawal, Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome, Relapse, Relapse Triggers, Relapse Prevention Tools. So that’s interesting that there’s three
different things about relapse as well. There’s a plethora of these terms. Dual Diagnosis, Abstinence, Codependency, Enabling Intervention, Spirituality, Higher Power, Harm Reduction, Lack of Control, Loss of Control, which, now I’m going through some of the ones that [00:57:00] Victoria brought up.
Yeah. Spiraling, Craving, Progression, Lifting the Bottom, get off the spiral, which are interesting, never satisfied, chasing the high, numb the pain, taking inventory, dry drunk. Those are some of the ones like, yeah, those are just the ones added. It’s a lot,
Chris Gazdik: right? And so interestingly enough, one of the things that we did is I actually asked Victoria who isn’t as much of a substance abuse professional dot, dot, dot yet, because if you’re a therapist listening to this, you need to get training on this and she’s going to do that and so she can understand and help.
people and identify this stuff because a lot of therapists do not speak the language. They do not understand substance abuse treatment is still super sad to me because it creates a major blind spot. I’m not trying to piss you off therapist listening, but it’s true. You have a major blind spot if you don’t allow yourself to get educated about this.
So I asked her just to think about the terms and substance abuse and she listed as much as she could kind of brainstorm and we went through it. And it was interesting because the Dude, if I remember correctly, Neil, [00:58:00] she started out the list, right? And it was like, they were obviously kind of guesses and they weren’t really substance abuse terms.
Like I remember like three or four in a row. It was like, that’s not really part of the language, John. And I agreed, but, but, but we talked about the concepts behind it. So
Adam Cloninger: she was making up. It has to be agreed upon terms. Can’t be just ones that she knows and nobody else. No, it has to be, it’s not really agreed upon.
Is that kind of the point? It’s kind of like, It needs to be a universal term. When you, when you tell somebody what it means, you go to another therapist, they tell you the same thing. Oh, they all know.
Chris Gazdik: Everyone who’s a substance use professional who lives with substance use, they know what the relapse trigger is.
They understand one day at a time, and, and, and many of the things that we said. It’s kind of like cricket. Like, I don’t understand the game of cricket, do you? Okay, so, you could speak about the culture of the cricket. You could use a lot of the terms that are specific to cricket. And I’m lost. I got no idea what you’re talking about.
You love cricket, man. It’s awesome. It looks boring. I’m sorry, you listening in Australia. It’s a lot like baseball. It’s, [00:59:00] it’s, God.
Adam Cloninger: But you can run back and forth, multiple times. The scores are ridiculous, isn’t it? Yeah, you can, you can, like, you can score, score, score. One person can score over and over. So,
Neil Robinson: here’s a question I have about Cricket Media Crit.
Cause I’m gonna, like, don’t, aren’t these games like five days long or something crazy like that? Or is, are these composed of like different matches? A cricket game goes for
Chris Gazdik: days? It’s kind of crazy,
Neil Robinson: like, the high scores, and like, I feel like there’s multiple, I, I don’t know. It’s, it’s crazy, but. I
Chris Gazdik: didn’t know it was that difficult.
That involved
Neil Robinson: and I could be wrong because I don’t know cricket. I just know it’s an interesting thing. I learned it in gym, like in middle school, they were just, and it’s, it’s an interesting, it is an interesting sport. So I
Adam Cloninger: just played it as a kid next door neighbor. We played it. It’s
Chris Gazdik: really about having the fun.
full breadth and understanding of the depth of what goes on in the world of something so abnormal that addiction really is and in recovery from that, you’re coming out of that whole world. I mean, it’s [01:00:00] really hard. It’s not like anything else that I deal with in mental health and substance abuse. It’s very, very distinctly different with a lot of dynamics.
There’s so
Adam Cloninger: many characteristics
Chris Gazdik: of it. There really are. It’s so invasive in a person’s life.
Adam Cloninger: And the thing is, the person has to understand what these characteristics are to intelligently be able to ask for help because they, they are something totally unrelated. There’s a software, a programming software I learned years ago.
It sounds so adamant. Which one? Oh, Neil just joined. I’ll really sound old if I tell you. I wanna know. You have to know now. I use Access. Old. But, but, I can do stuff that y’all probably don’t even know is even capable of doing. Well, probably have. I probably know, but. I have no idea. You can do cool stuff with that.
Stop belittling
Chris Gazdik: him.
Adam Cloninger: Go ahead,
Chris Gazdik: Adam. I’m going to speak up for you because I have moral courage [01:01:00] to shut Neil down from his belittlement.
Adam Cloninger: So there was a type of software I used before that back in 98. It’s almost identical. And, so, I could pick it up really easy. I could understand how a lot of things are on it.
But the thing was, there was a guy I worked with that knew a lot about it. I would try to ask him questions and I’m like, didn’t know the terms and didn’t know you, you got to know what a field is. Yeah. You’re like, you know, the thing that you, you do
Neil Robinson: this and then that is, or access calls it one thing. Fox pro causes something else or SQL uses this.
Yeah. It’s, I had a conversation this week just with emails talking about like. Like contact user felt like, I mean this and they’re like, well, no, they mean that. I’m like, you got a huge, funny
Chris Gazdik: is you’re a car guy. I’m not. And I, you say stuff about the rims of the tires leading to the buckle belt of the axle system.
And I’m like, I have no idea what you just said to me, man. I can make this stuff up pretty good. Hey, he actually is pretty good about that.
Neil Robinson: He just grabs terms out of there.
Adam Cloninger: And he does his [01:02:00] site. He’ll say in front of his wife and I’m like doing.
Chris Gazdik: Buckle belt. I think I just came up with buckle belt of the axle system.
That’s great.
Adam Cloninger: Yeah, so yeah, how’s, how’s your buckle belt going on your your, but you’re putting on the transistor on the
Neil Robinson: How’s your equilibrium balancer? Yeah, yeah. That balancer. I just
Adam Cloninger: come up with stuff like that. I do. I’m
Chris Gazdik: a linguist, I guess. So So the language of substance abuse, I think I’ll, I’ll take us out by really kind of emphasizing to you listening and dealing with substance abuse issues, please definitely know and ask for honesty from your clinicians.
There are a lot of people that do not know this language and you need to have an understanding even if you’re working in you in therapy for depression and you grew up in a family of One person that has drug or alcohol addictions dramatically impacts your life. And if you, if you are bold enough to ask, and I would encourage you to ask your therapist if they understand those things.
If they don’t, [01:03:00] take no offense, you’re not going to hurt their feelings. But if it’s a primary issue or you think it might, because if you think it might, it probably is. Find somebody that does and therapist out there listening, please. I really advocate for you to get that training, to get that understanding about substance abuse issues, because you will see it in your office and not know that it’s there.
And that is an unfortunate reality because it’s such a destructive and, and all life encompassing reality that, you know, that blind spot misses an opportunity to help the primary issue that is probably going on with them. substance abuse, family dynamics, and substance abuse in that person themselves.
So get trained. Get information. There’s great training out there. Nice to have you back, Mr. Kloniger. I really enjoy you. Thank you for coming back. I’m glad you’re, you’re, you’re medically better and more, more, more, more oil worked around the rims there. That’s a
Neil Robinson: weird term. Don’t, don’t say
Chris Gazdik: that. Yeah, that came [01:04:00] out really wrong.
I really do usually do better with things like that. You know, when I, you know. Making something by car. Yeah, it’s, it’s car metaphorsizing into. Human body didn’t work right there. So sorry about that. Closing thoughts, comments, things you’re thinking about. Did we do a good job, Neil? I think so.
Neil Robinson: I think so.
And I want to emphasize on the substance abuse stuff with the, the therapist. I think you’ve hit on the head when you talk about a lot of people are probably affected by substance abuse more than they think. Like you said, it could be the family, could be your friend, could be themselves. Like there’s so many dynamics tied to it that almost everyone has at some point dealt with someone with substance abuse, you know?
So I think that’s an interesting thing that you just have to understand whether you’re dealing with the person dealing with it or experiences they’ve had with it. Okay. Almost everyone has some sort of, like you said, I agree with you that a therapist should know it.
Chris Gazdik: Alcohol, drugs, weed pot pills, gambling addictions, sex addictions, online video gaming addictions.
And I missed one. What did I just miss? Eating, gambling, sex, and [01:05:00] gaming. Yeah, so those four process addictions, but check out episode 222 because we took a deep dive on it. Closing thoughts, comments? All right guys, stay well. Thanks for listening. We will review the month of May with Adam Cloninger joining us back then, and we got some cool shows coming up for you in May, so stay tuned.
We’ll get back on track. Tuesday mornings, things come out. So thanks for hanging out with us. Stay well. We’ll see you
next week.