Embark on a journey into “The Language of Substance Abuse” (Ep270), where we decode the complex terminology and cultural shifts surrounding addiction. From exploring the perspectives of addicts to dissecting family dynamics, we delve into terms like recovery, relapse, and harm reduction. Join us as we navigate the evolving perception of addiction over the past two decades, addressing controversial topics like treatment methods and spirituality. This is an eye-opening discussion on addiction and the path to recovery.
Tune in to see the Language of Substance Abuse Through a Therapist’s Eyes.
Think about these three questions as you listen:
- Do you speak the language?
- How might you accept that there is a whole different world view that addicts have?
- Do you know what addiction is?
Links referenced during the show:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/109626
https://www.throughatherapistseyes.com/category/podcasts/addiction
Intro Music by Reid Ferguson – https://reidtferguson.com/
@reidtferguson – https://www.instagram.com/reidtferguson/
https://www.facebook.com/reidtferguson
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3isWD3wykFcLXPUmBzpJxg
Audio Podcast Version Only
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Episode #270 Transcription
Chris Gazdik: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Through a Therapist’s Eyes, and I am Chris Gazdik where we invite you to experience mental health through the lens of a therapist, knowing this is not the delivery of therapy. in any way. This is April the 18th. And we’re going to be talking about the language of substance abuse, which I will explain shortly, kind of a different self generated concept that I’ve always thought about, very curious to see and hear what the panel is going to be thinking about, which we have Mr.
John Pope hanging out with us and Ms. Victoria Pendergrass.
Victoria Pendergrass: What’s that?
Chris Gazdik: Ooh, a different little tone today. That’s a curious tone.
Victoria Pendergrass: I also want to apologize, if you can see my shirt on this on the video portion, I have a two year old. And he spilled his pouch all over me. Now, who
Chris Gazdik: would have known? I mean, it’s all over on YouTube.
Chris has
Victoria Pendergrass: made a [00:01:00] comment almost every time he’s passed by me. Oh, that’s
Chris Gazdik: so not true. Take that back. They’re going to think I’m mean to you.
Victoria Pendergrass: But I have a two year old and he spilled his pouch on me this morning and I didn’t have time to go home and change my shirt. That
Chris Gazdik: is parenting, baby.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So, what do I say in intro?
Subscribe. Your job, if you like the content that we do share, we really do need you to click the subscribe button. Share it. Click that little bell.
John-Nelson Pope: Five stars.
Chris Gazdik: What’s five stars?
John-Nelson Pope: Oh if you like our podcast that you would give us five stars.
Chris Gazdik: John gets upset with four stars. And what’d you say, Victoria? I said,
Victoria Pendergrass: Share it, send it to a friend.
Chris Gazdik: Makes a big difference for us being found. Contact at throughtherapisteyes. com is the way that you interact with us. Very excited. I will have books available, John, through a therapist’s eyes, volume two, re understanding your marriage, you becoming your best as a spouse that will be printed out and available out of the office
Victoria Pendergrass: [00:02:00] soon.
Chris Gazdik: Pretty excited about that. Didn’t forget anything yet. I got another piece.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Are
Chris Gazdik: you ready?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Victoria, what is this? The human emotional experience and we endeavor
Victoria Pendergrass: to figure it out together and this is not the delivery. I said that. No, you did not. Yes, I did. Most certainly. No, you did not play it
Chris Gazdik: back.
Red flag moment. We did it. We’ll do it. I did. All right, let’s get busy man.
John-Nelson Pope: Either way, you’ll Edit it. So it, it sounds like you did it. No, no, no. We don’t really edit on this show, man.
Victoria Pendergrass: It really is very
Chris Gazdik: little editing. Listen, we have limited manpower and energy for all that stuff. So what we say is what you get. We’re not going back unless we really have a major slip up or some sort of something, or we, we do have a current event, John, I decided to make the article you shot over the the current event.
Yeah. It’s almost. Akin would probably be better for dang it. I forgot my stopwatch, Neil. Okay. Thank you. For the rabbit hole down the rabbit hole at the end of the [00:03:00] month reviews, this would be a really good one. So I was thinking of Adam out there. He could have used this for down the rabbit hole, but I wanted to make it a current event and talk about it actually as our panel to look at this as a for a moment because I think it’s an important deal.
Did you read the article?
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Yes. Didn’t do it in depth, but I’ve, I read it.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. And Victoria, you don’t know what we’re talking about, so you’ll have
Victoria Pendergrass: to
Chris Gazdik: reserve your comments and see what you think about this. The article is titled the dark side of AI in mental health. What did you take from the, remember from the article?
John-Nelson Pope: Well, I remember from the article that it started off with I think this was on April. Medscape
Chris Gazdik: med page
John-Nelson Pope: today, mad med page today. And basically it, the, the gist of the issue is, is that there was somebody that reported, and I think it was a professional therapist reported that somebody was wanting his data or, or [00:04:00] data.
Oh, you’re right.
Chris Gazdik: It was a tick tock influencer that wrote in saying, Hey, what’s up?
John-Nelson Pope: Right. And the idea was, is that it was asking for the, the, the data of people’s notes. And so, well, there’s ethical issues there, obviously. Well, why would a therapist, you know, WTF,
Chris Gazdik: right? Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Very major. But the idea is, I think ultimately is that it develop a program where you wouldn’t need a therapist anymore.
You would have the, the
Victoria Pendergrass: AI, the algorithm,
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. And be able to have responses and then feed that into that. The idea of this is a diagnosis.
Chris Gazdik: So, so the way that, what this is, is. As I understand it, John, a playoff on to a one of many manifestations of the large language model programs that are out there.
That’s [00:05:00] called artificial intelligence and large language models. As I understand them are basically what you get with chat, GPT and other type programs that basically you feed a computer thousands upon millions and millions of data points, but essentially all of the internet, it scans and all at once it will, that’s how it sort of becomes human in an artificial intelligence way and spit things back at you.
Yeah. Right. And that’s my understanding of the way it works.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. The idea. And the thing is, is that it would be, therefore the algorithm would be designed that you punch something in. I said, I’m depressed. And it would respond appropriately.
Chris Gazdik: So that basically you would have an artificial intelligence bot therapy.
John-Nelson Pope: Right.
Chris Gazdik: Right. Yeah. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to take transcriptions of real therapy sessions. Right. They were asking for. Clinicians Victoria to offer for $50 a [00:06:00] transcription, your therapy transcriptions. They didn’t want the name, I guess, of the transcription, but you know, wow. This just screams all kind of ethical concerns for us.
’cause they were looking for millions of transcriptions to feed into this large language model to create a program that would do good. That would be a therapist, AI therapist. Service. Yeah. Wow. Crazy, right? Yeah, crazy. Exactly.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well first of all, what you’re outside of grad school, who’s even, who’s even keeping a transcript of their therapy sessions anyways.
Well, you be surprised to me you not a full
John-Nelson Pope: session. No, no, no. Just detailed notes. So Well, but
Victoria Pendergrass: yeah, but that’s still not like. Like if you read my notes, it
Chris Gazdik: doesn’t matter either. They’re taking the progress notes that you’re going to offer. I think they’re looking for session transcripts and yeah, full [00:07:00] videos.
And there’s, there’s I
Victoria Pendergrass: haven’t done any of that since grad school for 50.
Chris Gazdik: How about you do that? Yeah. That’s the point, right? It’s crazy. That’s not enough. That’s not
John-Nelson Pope: enough. What about informed consent to the, to the client to, I mean, there’s, there’s all sorts of issues. There’s client. There’s, this is massive issues.
Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Client consent, ethical considerations. You know, confidentiality, you know, right to care, you know, competency issues, you know, poor performance of the AI bot who, what board is going to oversight this. What are the, there’s just, there’s a plethora of things just off the top of my head and thinking about it.
It’s just amazing to me, the depths of the new world we’re beginning to live in, where people would
John-Nelson Pope: even consider. But you see, they live. They live in these influencers live in that world worldview and it’s remarkable. Yeah. And so they
don’t [00:08:00] understand what it’s like actually to have privacy or to have a semblance of of wanting to have privacy and, and also that
Victoria Pendergrass: because their world is so like put out there, right?
Like for without having, so
John-Nelson Pope: the, They’re diffuse. Their personalities are diffuse into the, into the ether, so to speak.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. So it’s, it’s just an interesting current event to kind of keep on the, the watch for, and the reality of online AI generated. Therapy, and I’m not trying to be a fuddy duddy and a and a boomer or I’m a Gen X or not trying to say, look, there are so many nuances in a powerful relationship between two human beings in a therapeutic environment that you can not replicate that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Mic drop. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s move on. Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t like it. What?
John-Nelson Pope: You are so articulate.
Chris Gazdik: Oh. Did I do something [00:09:00] wrong or right? No, no. You did well. All right. Here’s the three questions that we’re looking at. Do you speak the language, when we think of the language of substance abuse how might you accept that there is a whole different world view that addicts have?
And then, do you know what’s wrong? Addiction is, and I’m going to give you a forward on, we’re not going to spend much time on the third question, but I ran out of questions to think about. I put that one on there.
Victoria Pendergrass: You
Chris Gazdik: know what it is. If you see it addiction. Well, we had a, we had a long discussion about that and I want to refer, where did I put that?
Episode 222 is where you could go and check out our awesome conversation where it was a show designed for a totally different thing. And remember when we got into the discussion in the beginning that was meant to be segment number one, what is addiction? And it ended up being the whole podcast, right?
Victoria Pendergrass: Speaking of this is episode 270. [00:10:00]
Chris Gazdik: Oh, I know. Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: How crazy is that? That
Chris Gazdik: is nuts. That is nuts, man. I
Victoria Pendergrass: mean, we started, John and I started on episode 200.
Chris Gazdik: Is that a fact?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah That’s what you wanted you wanted to introduce the panel like on this like 200th episode and so
Chris Gazdik: Well, what’s funny? I thank you for remembering reminding me of that.
I will remember that now It’s a nice marker and and you’re right. I I did do that back then because timing kind of worked out well, it It’s it’s getting to me I don’t know neil how you feel about it. You don’t have your mic set up today, but You We’ve done a lot of these things and they just kind of keep on running on, don’t they?
Which I love doing the show guys. It’s the highlight of my week still.
Victoria Pendergrass: And end of May will be my two years.
Chris Gazdik: At Metrolina? Already? Man, time just blows by. Isn’t it? It’s disturbing. Turn
John-Nelson Pope: around and you’re
Chris Gazdik: a young
Victoria Pendergrass: girl. Oh, that’s not what I was gonna say.
Chris Gazdik: Turn around.
Victoria Pendergrass: I was gonna say turn around bright eyes. I usually know
Chris Gazdik: your songs, John.
I don’t [00:11:00] know that one. That’s an old one. Let’s get on to this. Like, What do we mean by the language of substance abuse? I think this is a show that I have in my mind, like, I think about that, that phrase, the language of substance abuse throughout my career. John, I’m really curious, being experienced in substance abuse, if you are, if you are Like minded in me, linking up with my brain in this word combo to see what it even means to you.
I’m curious.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, I’m, you know, when I was in the Navy, again, they made me go through, not they didn’t make me, I had a choice of doing this, going through the substance abuse process. Program with other people that were dealing with alcoholism. Okay, perfect. Yeah. And so I actually was participated. I was, I was in the groups.
I was a participant.
Chris Gazdik: Love that.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Best training. I was as well. I went to AA [00:12:00] meetings and you know all the family meetings and you know, as advantage of being able to be in a rehab, that was my graduate placement practicum, but what do you think? Okay. I’m asking, what do you think I mean by the phrase, the language of substance?
Well,
John-Nelson Pope: okay. I’m going to think in terms of for example, somebody that is immersed in religion, for example, and they have, we say they speak the language of Zion, which is of that of Christianity, for example, Judaism. So I would say the, the language is similar, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, there’s a, an adherence.
There’s a, there’s a sense that you were participating, not just in the, we use the term language, but it is, you’re immersed in the understanding experience. It’s a deep knowledge. Yeah. Had a deep experience.
Chris Gazdik: Exactly. That that’s absolutely on point as I suspected it would be. I, [00:13:00] I created this idea because I, I have a unique, I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well, John, and you will Victoria throughout time.
I would, I would anticipate. Where, when I’m working with somebody on substance abuse issues, I find myself doing an exorbitant amount of education,
Victoria Pendergrass: you
Chris Gazdik: know, in the beginning of, in addition to report building an exorbitant amount of education
John-Nelson Pope: just got through doing that to
Chris Gazdik: get you today. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
You know, this is what we do. And, and. There’s so many buzzwords, there’s so many facets, there’s so many pieces of information that are, that are really important to understand the experience of addiction and recovery. And then, I will do that, but then I will have sometimes the experience of, you know, people coming right out of, you know, Rehab and I’m meeting them for the first time
John-Nelson Pope: and
Chris Gazdik: they have, they have, you should see [00:14:00] John’s face on YouTube.
It’s great. Right. You know what I’m saying? They have the language installed while they’re in rehab. And furthermore, it’s really cool when I meet with them, but they all want
John-Nelson Pope: to become substance abuse counselors. Oh, absolutely. Because it’s so
Chris Gazdik: poignant. in their life. And then I have the unique experience as well of working with somebody before rehab.
They go to rehab and then they come back after rehab, which is what I just had. One of the reasons why I did the show that just happened a couple of weeks ago. The guy came back from his rehab experience after I had already started therapy with them. And again, you see the same thing. The whole language is installed.
So it’s such an important thing because family members don’t have that language, y’all. They just don’t. Furthermore, addicts themselves don’t have this language of something that their lives are wrapped around. The issue of
addiction. So this is an effort to kind of talk about some of the buzzwords this show.
Go down through them. If [00:15:00] you know anything or deal with a family member or you yourself, you will hear these words that we’re going to go through tonight. There’s
John-Nelson Pope: a. Semiotics is a, is a an understanding of language in a, in a certain way, and I’m mispronouncing it, but the idea is that each word has a profound meaning.
And so those buzzwords are actually so that a person could understand their experience. So if if one addict hears it from another addict, right, that they will know exactly what, what is. It’s, and so that, that’s a study of that.
Chris Gazdik: The symbiotic understanding of these concepts helps us do together what we cannot do alone, which is attain, more so maintain sobriety, right?
Yeah, so I thought a cool way to go about this, I approached Victoria, right? And, you know, you’ve talked about it on the show that your, your current [00:16:00] understanding and level of experience, particularly coming out of school and working, you know, however many years it’s been is limited in substance abuse.
And I love that I’ve been able to say to her what I would say to any therapist listening, you need to go get training on this. This is. We have got to bridge the gap between Victoria does mental health counseling and she’ll refer to me to do substance abuse counseling. And I’ll refer to her to do mental health counseling.
That’s nonsense. I, it seriously, I know I may be stepping on some therapist’s toes with this, but I feel strongly that it creates a major blind spot. If you do not have an understanding of substance abuse issues you may have father to your client or. a spouse to your client that has nothing to do with substance abuse, but I’m telling you their lives are eaten up with this language that we’re going to talk about from generation to generation to generation.
Yeah. So Victoria was going to list out from your level of experience. And I’m curious. [00:17:00] What you’ll come at, come out with. These are buzzwords. These are parts of the language that she has heard of not having been specialized or depth, the training yet. And without
Victoria Pendergrass: looking at
I didn’t Google, Google, just out of your brain book. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So what I want to do is let’s go to your list.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay.
Chris Gazdik: Let’s go one through whatever, and tell us what your thoughts are. One is and John and I want us to kind of, you know, add to it so that, you know, we’re going to do a plethora of these other than what you have listed.
I’m pretty sure I have more and, and, and, and give you almost these definitions, these experiences so we could talk about substance abuse and you can develop a deeper understanding of it. So what do you got? Does that sound like a good plan? Okay.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Lack of control.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. That’s a big one.
Victoria Pendergrass: That was the first one.
You’re going to have to keep tracking. And that was only because we had, we had, we had. Talked about it. I’m gonna have to what?
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, well, you’re gonna have to keep track of where you are because that’s, that’s a, that’s a big one.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: [00:18:00] And that’s because of what you’re saying? Well, no,
Victoria Pendergrass: well, we, no, we had talked, we, that’s why it’s first is because we talked about it.
Yeah, but you
Chris Gazdik: said that in the hallway first.
Victoria Pendergrass: I did, I did. Yeah, that
Chris Gazdik: was your, that was your idea. What is your understanding of that?
Victoria Pendergrass: The lack of control is like the, where said individual feels like they don’t have, like, they, cause I also put loss of control, so I put those like two separate, lack and then like the total loss of it.
Oh
Chris Gazdik: wow, interesting, you differentiated that. Never heard that before. Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: so, but more the lack of control is just that like, Like you, like you have the want to be controlling, like to have it under control. You just can’t get to that point to where you are able to like not pick up the drink or like not pick up the whatever.
It’s
Chris Gazdik: weird, right? Yeah. Talking about an inanimate object exactly like your tea. Right. In this [00:19:00] cup. Which
John-Nelson Pope: is very, it smells
Chris Gazdik: wonderful. It’s hot
Victoria Pendergrass: cinnamon tea.
Chris Gazdik: That is delightful.
Victoria Pendergrass: From Target.
Chris Gazdik: How could something like that have control? Over you
Victoria Pendergrass: right it’s
Chris Gazdik: weird right
Victoria Pendergrass: that is kind of like a weird concept when you think about
John-Nelson Pope: right?
Yeah, I had a one of my professors actually Wasn’t was an alcoholic is an alcoholic is recovering.
Chris Gazdik: Okay,
John-Nelson Pope: but he He said when he got out of rehab and he thought he, cause he was in the military, he was a colonel and he was in the military at the time and he nearly lost everything. He’s out sitting out in front of a convenience store and he was debating whether to go in or not to get the, the whiskey that he wanted.
Struggling with cravings, all that. And he imagined himself drinking it and he found himself becoming inebriated. Just literally [00:20:00] felt the intoxication felt the intoxication
Victoria Pendergrass: by just imagining it. That’s
John-Nelson Pope: how powerful Yeah
Chris Gazdik: It is amazing. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that because I actually didn’t have on my list There’s probably so many I mean I spent some time on it.
You had cravings on your list
Victoria Pendergrass: Huh? Oh, okay. You’re saying lack of control. Oh, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: No, but I mean, that was where he.
Victoria Pendergrass: No, I don’t have cravings, but now that you mentioned it, then
Chris Gazdik: yeah, yeah. And you described John there, there’s, I don’t know how much I know about it, honestly, or understand it, but there is a biological reality.
You just described that a biological reality, micro chemically, if you will, in your body, Mm hmm. That that pulls out this experience when you’re having a craving that blows my brain apart a little bit to be honest with you, you know, I, I don’t understand how that could be what you just described. I mean, I take that at face value and people have described similar experiences, a real.
Like another one of [00:21:00] our, our, our drinking dreams, relapsed dreams, right? People wake up thinking they literally so vivid panicked that they just lost their sobriety.
Victoria Pendergrass: Cause they had a dream that they were drinking. Right. Or whatever. A using dream
Chris Gazdik: is what that is called. Wow. Yeah. And I’ve never even thought of that.
Those are fairly common. Very common. Yeah. That does make sense. Very, very common. Yeah. See, I just want to make the point out to you therapists or people listening. This is a very small sample size. Loss of control, cravings, using dreams. This is only a sliver of the whole language. In understanding what addicts go through and really experience both in active addiction and using years and then in recovery.
So there’s a, there’s a lot here. You might feel overwhelmed listening to the show. Understand you can listen back to it.
Victoria Pendergrass: Pause, yeah, take a break. [00:22:00] Pause,
Chris Gazdik: breathe through it, think through it. Come back later. Absolutely, which is one of the reasons why I think this is going to be a really cool show that I refer to a lot.
Yeah. To help people understand these concepts. Okay. I do want to spend a little bit of extra time on The Loss of Control because it’s so key.
Victoria Pendergrass: Oh, the fact, the difference between the fact that I mentioned loss versus lack?
Chris Gazdik: No, I never even thought about that. The way I would, I would conceptualize that, honestly, whether you, whether you meant it or not.
No, I wouldn’t. I think I see them as the same, but they could represent, you know, a, a, a lack of control is earlier stages of addiction, which is another buzz phrase, stages, early, middle, and late, basically. And a loss would maybe be later stages because there is a progressive nature to these things, which is another buzzword.
The progressive nature means it starts small and it gets bigger. It starts like a small snowball on top of the hill and every rotation, it grows bigger and bigger. That’s, that’s, that’s another one, isn’t it? [00:23:00] And I think that was even on my list. Progression. So many things.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Progression even, even when you’re in this, in a state of recovery.
Chris Gazdik: So go there. Use cigarettes as an example. It’s perfect.
John-Nelson Pope: No, no, no. No, you go ahead.
Chris Gazdik: Why? Okay, well, you don’t want to?
John-Nelson Pope: No,
Chris Gazdik: I don’t want to. So, what I think you’re referring to, John, is this other amazing thing about substance use that happens. Progression is like that snowball. It gets bigger, not smaller.
Ironically, even when you’re not using with addiction. The thing gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then you bump
John-Nelson Pope: in and
Chris Gazdik: you relapse. So an easy way to think about this is if you smoke a pack of cigarettes addiction, right? Right. And you’ve been smoking for 10 years and you stop smoking for five years and you pick cigarettes back up.
Victoria, you would think you would start off at a pack a [00:24:00] day, right? But that whole five years, what do you think happens when you pick back up? How much are you smoking? Pack and a half.
Victoria Pendergrass: Right. Okay.
Chris Gazdik: It’s, it’s so. In a relatively short period of time, it’s though you never stopped progressing.
Victoria Pendergrass: Gotcha. Okay.
Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Crazy. Also the physiological aspects of it with particularly with alcohol, alcohol, cocaine, nicotine.
Chris Gazdik: It’s not with all substances, this particular weird thing that we’re describing, but with most, I would agree. Adderall, stimulants, all of that. Yeah, that’s
John-Nelson Pope: why, that’s why one has to practice recovery or sobriety.
That’s why it’s important to keep one of the
Chris Gazdik: reasons why the only answer we know when we identify Addiction is Sobriety, that’s all another show
Victoria Pendergrass: What’s the
Chris Gazdik: next one? Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: This kind of got spiraling.
Chris Gazdik: Oh interesting. [00:25:00] What did you oh, this is fascinating What did you mean by that?
Victoria Pendergrass: I guess that’s not
Chris Gazdik: really a term.
I don’t think
Victoria Pendergrass: right. I’m not familiar with it. Yeah, I’m not either just like Describing like maybe it’s more of like an adjective like a descriptive word. It seems like it’s an adjunct
John-Nelson Pope: to Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: okay, I’ll just keep going then no don’t oh no, okay,
Chris Gazdik: here’s why
Victoria Pendergrass: as well honestly
Chris Gazdik: guys As we’re talking about this, I want you to realize I clearly, I didn’t spend enough time on my little brainstorming list because we’ve just had like seven of these.
And here’s another one that I did not have on my list. And I guess I didn’t spend a long time. Where I
Victoria Pendergrass: came from from it is I kind of imagine like when someone at the beginning stages, maybe when it’s like that lack of control, that the spiraling comes in because [00:26:00] it just like, Cause it’s kind of like that snowball effect.
Like it just starts and it just like, let me jump in
Chris Gazdik: and say, cause what I, what I, unless you have something there, John, I’m sorry.
John-Nelson Pope: No, I was just, I got the imagination of, of people going out to Rye bridge and drinking binge drinking and starting that process, going to parties. Yeah. And then it
Victoria Pendergrass: just going like taking off from there and then
Chris Gazdik: snowballs.
So the spiraling that I, that, that isn’t a term I don’t think that is typically used in this language. But the reason why I think it’s cool is because there is a term, I’m sure you’ve heard of this before, Victoria, hitting rock bottom.
Victoria Pendergrass: Right.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. And that’s part of the vernacular, the words, the understanding, the meanings of addiction.
And I don’t like that one actually. Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: I think you’ve mentioned that before. Okay.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, that’s one that I kind of rebuke.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: we’re Simpatico what we’re simpatico. We usually are brother. Yes, we noticed that that’s right I mean seriously like [00:27:00] yeah And and and the way that I think about this idea of you have to hit rock bottom before you spring back up You know is is it is not a terrible idea, but I think of it.
That’s where you came spiraling, like you spiral consistently downward towards, they say this ends in jails, institutions or death. And the idea that my mind is you can get off of that spiral at any point. Now, the progression that we just, when you jump back on that spiral, it’s not where you left off.
You’re actually, I’ve already spiraled down more,
Victoria Pendergrass: but that’s,
Chris Gazdik: that’s a, I think a better way of thinking about how this thing progresses, lifting
John-Nelson Pope: the bottom. Is that it? Are you familiar? No, I’m not. I did. It’s that you would, instead of the person going rock bottom, you do the intervention and you basically get them before they end up in the gutter, which most, most, the great majority of people never go to the, they’re functional.[00:28:00]
I like that.
Chris Gazdik: I haven’t, that is a little bit new to me. Lifting the bottom is part of the goal of treatment. Yeah, goal of treatment. Yeah, I love that. Or get off the spiraling down earlier.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay, the next one has to more kind of do with, like, the partnership. I listed, like, codependency.
Chris Gazdik: Perfect, yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I don’t think we’ve talked a lot about it.
We did a whole episode on codependency
John-Nelson Pope: itself. And it’s not unusual for families to dissolve after rehabilitation.
Chris Gazdik: Absolutely. And that’s
John-Nelson Pope: another show.
Chris Gazdik: That is another show. We, we’ve talked about family treatment and family dynamics. Guys, our shows do play off each other. So when you see
an interesting piece, rest assured at this point, because we have how many episodes?
Victoria Pendergrass: 200. This is 270. We,
Chris Gazdik: we have had a few. Honestly, not a lot of repeated content. Honestly,
Victoria Pendergrass: very few. Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: But we’ve had different pieces talked about in depth So just just [00:29:00] bank and understand that about our show.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay next I have Never satisfied like in quotations like that trying to reach the first high trying to reach the first like
John-Nelson Pope: Okay Yeah.
You lose, you lose that. Are you thinking in terms of more like amphetamines or cocaine or?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. I guess I am more than like the alcohol, like more the drug side of it. I love this. Are you just interesting in my thought process? I
John-Nelson Pope: am
Chris Gazdik: Victoria. We’re
John-Nelson Pope: going to figure out what drugs she uses. I really,
Chris Gazdik: no, no, no, no, no.
No, here’s why. Because I think it’s fair to say you are not a substance abuse professional at this point. Is that right?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, no.
Chris Gazdik: And there’s a part of what happens with that in, in, in framing up the understanding in a depthier way what these issues are. Because what did you just say? You said unsatisfied?
Never
Victoria Pendergrass: satisfied.
Chris Gazdik: So, so the idea in, in substance abuse treatment, [00:30:00] Is chasing the high.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. So that’s basically what I mean,
Chris Gazdik: right? So, so there’s some misunderstandings out there about what’s going on We have enough information out there where people kind of have some of the pieces but not quite right on it
Victoria Pendergrass: Right
Chris Gazdik: and so the idea here is and I don’t understand this one either john.
Maybe you do better than I Addicts will tell me all the time like the first time they get high Is the best time they’ve been high
Victoria Pendergrass: Right.
Chris Gazdik: Like that just blows my mind a little bit. You know, like I remember the first time I got buzzed up, it was pretty freaking cool. I was watching a pirate game in my basement, in my parents house, high school or something, right.
And it was a nice experience, but I can’t imagine chasing that
John-Nelson Pope: the way that it’s, but it’s never quite that, but I think that’s probably a physiological biochemical, physiological chasing the high, chasing the high, because it’s never quite. The same once you [00:31:00] hit that level, you don’t have the newness, the, the, the nerve cells, those neurons don’t, it just doesn’t, it’s something they’ve already experienced.
Yeah. It’s almost like you can re experience. Yeah. It’s almost like it’s burned into the, into the, Like a, like a LCD screen or something. It’s, yeah, yeah. You don’t, it fades and that’s what you’re chasing. You’re, you’re chasing it. Go back to the to can’t get intensity there. Yeah. You can’t get it back.
Chris Gazdik: Like addicts will say the first time was the biggest, best high that they had, and they want to have that again, but can never get it as a non-addicted person, Uhhuh, like I said, it’s just hard for me to understand that. Yeah. I don’t, you know. Well,
Victoria Pendergrass: yeah, I get it. Because it’s
Chris Gazdik: a biological thing,
Victoria Pendergrass: right? Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So it’s interesting that yeah, that’s a different play but same but
Victoria Pendergrass: same concept
Chris Gazdik: same Zip code. Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay numbing pain
Chris Gazdik: Awesome. [00:32:00] Love that. Love that.
Victoria Pendergrass: That is some more of like a reason why people do Say that they do things right they do that because it numbs the pain of the loss of the grief of the whatever So it’s
Chris Gazdik: certainly a thing the thing that’s interesting there that I think does have a lot of misperception about people that don’t have addiction with people that don’t understand addiction will say you’re numbing out pain and And you’re, you’re using to cope.
Now that is a piece of addiction. It’s also a piece of abuse. So it’s like a red flag. We don’t want to numb things out or cope with our distress through using, but addicts generally absolutely will do that.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah, that’s an, and it’s. And I don’t want to be unempathetic, but that’s an excuse was people dealing with chronic pain is that, yeah, because a lot of [00:33:00] times the, the use of narcotics such as morphine or, or.
Let’s it basically, it, that addresses more muscular skeletal pain as opposed to nerve pain where a lot of people with chronic pain, for example, it’s, it’s nerve pain, it’s neuropathy and morphine and opiates don’t touch that, for example, totally ineffective, ineffective. Yeah. Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Intrusive thoughts.
Chris Gazdik: Not at all. I don’t think that is a nice guess. I love that. That’s. Interesting that you would say that in a list of addiction language understanding, because I mean, everybody,
Victoria Pendergrass: I have intrusive thoughts and I’m not an addict, but Right. That’s, that’s
Chris Gazdik: a component of what we do in treatment with treatment models that we apply to working with addiction.
So maybe I just got a little confused. Basically cognitive [00:34:00] behavioral therapy, which is a staple of many therapists, deal with intrusive thoughts and the, the thought process and reframing those things. We do that with substance abuse, just like we would anxiety or depression or whatnot. But would you agree, John, not a part of the typical I’m not as worried.
Yeah. Okay.
Victoria Pendergrass: Withdrawal.
Chris Gazdik: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Withdrawal is the physiological piece that goes with the, the recovery or part of the progression and problem in actively using Some
John-Nelson Pope: people Use saying, I’m going to go and there’s going to be a word down there, detox and they’ll say, well, I’ll just reset everything and go back to using.
So they, let
Victoria Pendergrass: me just clean out my system and then I’ll go right back.
John-Nelson Pope: Like literally Victoria, that’s what people
Victoria Pendergrass: think
John-Nelson Pope: about. Yeah. That’s, they have no intention of doing the hard work. Let me just
Chris Gazdik: reset. So I can decrease my tolerance and you know, get, get going again. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: But
Chris Gazdik: along with withdrawal. Which, by the [00:35:00] way, a little bit more on withdrawal, is your body literally just gets so used to the substance in your body and being usually, except for weed fat, water soluble, it comes out of your body really fast, so ultimately your body gets shocked.
So when you go to detox, which is another one of those words, or the drunk tank is another one of those words from, you know. Old school. What you’re doing is they’re giving you like Librium. That’s what my client just had in rehab. They gave him Librium, a medication that tricks the body into thinking that you have those high levels of drug that come down slowly over the course of days, which helps your vital signs recover and not be
John-Nelson Pope: so shocked.
And interestingly enough, you’re more at risk from alcohol withdrawal. Then you are from, from other drugs except one, except one. Are you, you
Chris Gazdik: know what I’m thinking?
John-Nelson Pope: No, go ahead. Fentanyl,
Chris Gazdik: of course, [00:36:00] fentanyl is something you hear in the news a lot. Like that is a scary ass drug, y’all. It is killing a lot.
of people and you cannot regulate what you get on the street. It is lacing in with the stuff you’re getting. If you’re getting stuff, Oh, I understand the concept you’re saying. I agree with you
John-Nelson Pope: entirely on that, but that’s hard. But what do
Victoria Pendergrass: you mean by they’re most at risk?
John-Nelson Pope: Because it does more in terms of your disrupting your heart, your, your breathing.
Physically. Yes. Your
Victoria Pendergrass: physical health is more at risk. Much
John-Nelson Pope: difficult, more difficult to do that. Now fentanyl. Yeah. And all those. Yeah. There is that aspect. What, I think you have to be very careful and, and, and do that. I’m not a medical person, but other, let’s say morphine opiates, for example, it, you have to have that monitored, but not as intensely.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Well, I mean, like I had fentanyl when I was in [00:37:00] labor, I had two doses.
Chris Gazdik: Are you serious? Why am I so shocked at that?
Victoria Pendergrass: I had two doses before I, before I had my epidural. They offered me if I want, Fentanyl? Fentanyl, yes. And they clarified and made sure they were like, it’s not, it’s right, it’s, obviously, I have no idea, I don’t recall the dosage of it, but it works.
I mean, I was chillin for like, but it’s very short term, like, it only, for me, it only lasted about 30 minutes, and then I had to wait, like, an hour to 30 minutes before I could get another dose. And then at that point, I had one and then I had an epidural after
John-Nelson Pope: that.
Chris Gazdik: Propofol is totally different. Yeah, that’s a, that’s an anesthesia drug.
It’s wonderful, by the way. I’ve had Propofol when I got my colonoscopy. That was like taking a freaking nap. It was delightful. I mean, Michael Jackson abused it. Yeah, right. It was delightful, I can tell you. Yeah. But I was
Victoria Pendergrass: in labor and I am just utterly shocked.
Chris Gazdik: I’m I’m shocked
John-Nelson Pope: by that, too.
Chris Gazdik: Are you? Yeah. Let me just tell you this quick [00:38:00] story of why I have just this week, somebody was telling me, I was forgetting who that was.
And by the way, if you’re hearing the show, I apologize and remind me who you were, because I just couldn’t think of it. Their family member. Who drove truck
was at a truck stop. And as oftentimes happens at truck stops, if you don’t know, that’s true. Drugs are pretty rampantly shared or sold or dealt with there.
So a guy walked up to him with pills in his hand, opened his hand and said, Hey, I got, you know, gut stash. You want, you want some hit, you know? And guys like, nah, I don’t, I don’t want that stuff. That’s that’s, that’s fine. That, you know, and he went away. Guy doesn’t use stuff, but he was found overdosed behind the garbage pail at the truck stop the next day.
He overdosed. Now, thankfully he didn’t die. But he had fentanyl in his
John-Nelson Pope: system. They said that about from the hands, police officers, police officers. No police officers. [00:39:00] They have to make sure that they’re so gloved and, and that they’re not going to, to absorb it because you, or you get breathed the dust, it can, it
Chris Gazdik: can kill you over the fume.
It’s a dust. Yes. But like a fume, like that’s enough to kill people. So I’m, I’m surprised. I did not know that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. I mean I might be able to go back and look at my medical records to like, see how much the dosage was. That is remarkable. But, yeah, I wonder how much it costs, I need to go back and look at my bill.
You must
John-Nelson Pope: have been micro, micro dosed. Massive
Chris Gazdik: micro dosed. Yeah. In a safe way, but dang. Alright we need to move on though. The
Victoria Pendergrass: next is more like a, an effect. I wrote relationship issues. And then I also wrote, like, financial troubles. Like, I wrote those back to back.
Chris Gazdik: Okay, financial troubles, kinda, yeah.
And then relationship issues, not necessarily, like, platonic,
Victoria Pendergrass: or romantic, but also, I guess.
Chris Gazdik: Certainly.
Victoria Pendergrass: I guess that’s not necessarily, now that I’m thinking about it, that’s not necessarily a buzzword. What do
Chris Gazdik: you think, John? Is it or is it not? I’m, [00:40:00] I’m like
John-Nelson Pope: I think it’s very disruptive of families and it can, and certainly financially can destroy somebody, but I don’t think we talk about that in the same way we talk about codependency and families and, and that there’s, there’s a payoff sometimes with families where there’s an addiction issue and that actually The one of the spouses or the children actually get involved in
Chris Gazdik: ways that we do talk about it.
I mean, if financial problems is a symptom for sure, and relationship problems are a symptom also for sure. So those are symptom ologies, which is probably what was in your brain,
John-Nelson Pope: Victoria, but, but you know, the, the thing is, is that it can affect you financially, but a lot of people, they don’t, They don’t there’s, they can lose their jobs and all of that, but there’s, it’s another symptoms, social, emotional [00:41:00] disruption,
Chris Gazdik: right?
You know, but so those are diagnostic things, but that said, I think so, which is cool to hear your list, honestly, it really
Victoria Pendergrass: is. And the last one I wrote, we’re down to the end is Which, now that, like, as we’ve talked about in other things I’ve talked about, I’m like, Oh yeah, duh, like, why not think of that?
Well, the same thing’s happening
Chris Gazdik: for me, right?
Victoria Pendergrass: Right. I put irrational behavior.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. And that might be more of
Victoria Pendergrass: a symptom again, instead of a buzzword. John, why
Chris Gazdik: are we laughing? You and I, I think.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, that’s, that’s true for everybody. I was going to say, I act irrationally sometimes, so, you know. But I could see that as someone had a family member that was a brilliant surgeon and was not a first degree relative, but was, would get, would make very rash decisions.
And his was, his drug of choice, of course, was alcoholism back in the 1970s.
Chris Gazdik: Impulsive, rash, for sure. [00:42:00] Right. But not as much part of the language. No. Yeah, okay. Because, because it’s, it’s, it’s. That’s why I’ve loved your list particularly towards the second half. It’s like the clinical issues are clear Let’s throw a clinical issue and maybe that’s a part of the language, but it’s because it’s the whole thing There is listen for you that don’t family member to understand addiction like what it why is my kid acting this?
way. The thing that you got to realize is the whole freaking thing of addiction and substance use issues are not rational, right? There is just no rationale that people would steal their freaking grandmother’s TV
Victoria Pendergrass: for a
Chris Gazdik: hundred dollar dose of pot. But that’s what Transcribed People end up doing there’s no rationale to it
John-Nelson Pope: and they know they’re gonna get caught Right.
They know they’re gonna get [00:43:00] caught.
Chris Gazdik: I mean, it’s just There’s it’s it’s amazing. Isn’t it John? Look, they’re working with people the thought process that people get in which goes back to the loss of control By the way, you know, this is gonna happen. It’s happened many times over but you still freaking do it The doctor tells you, you’re going to die.
Your liver’s blowing up. You get sober, you stay sober for a month and then guess what you do? Drink freaking alcohol. Like what is that? One of my, one of my, one
John-Nelson Pope: of my clients had he was on the, on the, getting a liver transplant. He was a very rational, he was an engineer, a very rational man.
organization where he had hundreds of employees, hundreds of thousands of dollars that he made. And he was to the point where he had to get a liver transplant and go through a process of being vetted to receive a liver because
when you’ve got [00:44:00] a alcoholism. For example, they’re not going to consider you as
Chris Gazdik: much.
You’re down at
John-Nelson Pope: the bottom of the list. For a very good reason. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: They know, we know, we understand that people relapse and they end up drinking and using that liver to continue drinking. Right. At the level that you Beyond the level.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Beyond the level that you stopped.
Chris Gazdik: Wow.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. It’s
Chris Gazdik: amazing.
John-Nelson Pope: So I had a guy come in and he’s just as, he was ja, jaundiced as he could possibly be.
Really? Yeah. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And jaundice means that you’re, you literally begin to turn yellow. Your liver and kidneys and you know, gallbladder and all are not filtering out yellow eyes and it comes in and you, you, it’s like poison. It’s amazing. When you have so much of, of this stuff, Victoria, thank you for, for doing that really.
Yeah. I
Victoria Pendergrass: told you earlier that it was just in my head and you were like yeah, please write that down. It’s what I had in my head, [00:45:00] but
Chris Gazdik: cause you would have lost half of it for sure. And I think the thing that I want to make the point again and why I’m so grateful for doing that is, is it, it really does help me understand the way people see this issue Right.
That haven’t been. To have some of the blind spots that really give me concern
Victoria Pendergrass: because what we’ve talked about before That I’ve been open about is like I have like indirectly had experience with Addiction.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah
Victoria Pendergrass: and substance abuse and use and all the things and I have a little bit more now that I’m here And I get a little bit more adult clients.
Absolutely. Well, in our
Chris Gazdik: conversations. Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: But also like mine has been more, my experience has been more indirect specifically having worked with mainly kids in the past. It’s usually not the kid, right. But it’s the parent. That’s the, that’s so the parents, not directly my client, but I’m having these interactions and having to deal with [00:46:00] the, the, the.
effects that it has on the child and like that kind of thing. So
Chris Gazdik: I would give you the listener the same suggestion that I’m given to Victoria about getting training. And I’ll nail that down a little bit more and say to you that it would be really advantageous to your career in working with people.
People in whatever career, by the way, you might work with people that you come across addiction, not just therapy, but clergy and teaching and whatever, spend the money to go to one of these conferences that are a two, three day conference, and you will get a nice rich flavor of the substance abuse language and treatment.
Did
John-Nelson Pope: you undergo the father Martin? A chalk talk? Oh, buddy.
Chris Gazdik: Listen,
Victoria Pendergrass: I love that you just, I love that
Chris Gazdik: you just asked me that John, cause I, that was where I started when I taught the DUI [00:47:00] class in 1997 after I graduated undergrad and
I’m sorry, 1995 I taught the DUI class over and over and over again. I probably watched Chalk Talk many more times than you ever thought.
John-Nelson Pope: I bet you did.
Chris Gazdik: I’m probably 150 times in. Yeah, it’s no joke, right? But what I’m so grateful because what that did is it gave me such an understanding that I wouldn’t have Any other way
Victoria Pendergrass: yeah, well i was gonna say my my license is up for renewal and go to a conference in june And I need to finish up with my continuing education Hours and so that’s what I was thinking about is like a you’ll get a big chunk B you’ll get
Chris Gazdik: good information And c you’ll have a nice trip because I amelia island has an awesome one And but the thing is you’ll be around a lot of people in recovery
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay,
John-Nelson Pope: a
Chris Gazdik: lot of people that are actually in recovery.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah, there’s a something about people that are in recovery [00:48:00] that are so beautiful, just spiritual folks. And we’re not talking about religious, we’re talking about spiritual interconnectivity. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: That listen,
John-Nelson Pope: genuineness, transparency, humble.
Chris Gazdik: You know, I love to tell this, this quick vignette that I heard on News Talk 1110 years ago with a guy that was just conservative talk radio is what I listened to on the way to work at that time most days.
And one day I happened to catch this guy, I forget his name but he, he annually on this Sober date, which is another buzzword, by the way, another language for sober date That’s the date upon which you got sober for the last time and maintained it anyway on his on his sober birthday, he He would go back and read his His his rehab notes his discharge notes And and and his admission notes from the facility that he went and got sober [00:49:00] I mean, I had no idea that he was an addict, but
time he started his show, he would say, Proof that you can come back from the living dead.
And I never knew what that meant. Until that day I happened to catch him talk about Rising from the living dead. The humility that people in recovery have, John, is just It’s
John-Nelson Pope: a spiritual resurrection, so, but, and, and so you’ll hear the, the term receiving the chips, making it like an AA, you just part of that, that, that milestone where
Chris Gazdik: you’re reborn.
A desire chip is the most coolest chip. The first day you go. That is a expressed desire to attain sobriety, which, by the way, is the only requirement for membership in AA, is a desire to, to, to be sober. Yeah, I, I guess I’ll read my list and, and, and we’ll kick on to what, like, we have left over and, and see what buzzes up in my [00:50:00] mind.
Is that right? Did you look at it? So I’ll read it back and we’ll go down through these, I think, and see where just take an inventory, which is another buster bird, right? Severe. My list was inadequate guys. I’m going to be honest with you. I feel like I’ve mentioned so much just in our conversation, but I don’t know, it’s wild.
So addiction, refer to episode 22 22. Substance use disorders, just what we call it nowadays. Recovery in and of itself is a word. Recovering versus recovered. We’ll definitely circle back and talk about that one. Detox we mentioned. Rehabilitation, or the term 24 day treatment. IOP, which stands for Intensive Outpatient Program.
I’m gonna say the anonymous groups and all of the mantras that are part of that. John, what’s your favorite re 12 step recovery mantra that is up there.
John-Nelson Pope: I’m I, even though I’m, I’m a man. I know you got one man of faith. It’s, it’s aa for
Chris Gazdik: me. Oh, that’s, is that what you’re [00:51:00] talking about? Yeah. Oh, that’s a mantra.
Mantra, yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: yeah. It’s AA for me. Yeah. That’s your favorite?
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, wow. Okay. I’m sorry. Here’s the one. What’s your favorite? I shouldn’t have asked you that because you’re going to turn it around on me. What is my favorite? Well, I don’t know how to answer that, to be honest with you. These are the ones that came to my mind, probably because they’re the top of
John-Nelson Pope: my list.
It works if you work it. I like that one. Easy does it, turn it over. Did you include that one? I didn’t turn it over. I would say
Victoria Pendergrass: it’s not one. But if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.
John-Nelson Pope: I don’t know that that’s an AA phrase. It should be. That’s you could write a new book. Well,
Victoria Pendergrass: it’s the, it’s what we use at my workout gym.
They say it doesn’t challenge you. It doesn’t change you. You could use, I feel like this could be used for that too. Big
John-Nelson Pope: book. You could use
Victoria Pendergrass: that. For the book that I write after I get my PhD, well, no, let’s talk about it. Book or my doctor or whatever book.
Chris Gazdik: Do you know what the big book is?
Victoria Pendergrass: [00:52:00] No.
Chris Gazdik: Okay, that is the primary text that Alcoholics Anonymous operates from.
Right? It’s called The Big Book. Got one right there. That blue one? Yep, that blue one. One Day at a Time, John. Principles Before Personalities. Right. I think principles before personalities probably is to answer your question
directly. What’s your favorite? My favorite 12 step mantra. Yeah. It works if you work it.
Don’t take another’s inventory. No major changes on the first year of recovery. Those are a few that came into my mind from 12 step.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. And I could also say, don’t get involved with a person that’s in rehabilitation together with you.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Listen, if you’re considering treatment and rehab, and you’re listening to this, don’t Don’t do that.
Listen to John. Say it again.
John-Nelson Pope: Don’t get involved with a significant other in the, I mean with another person that’s in treatment with you. Not because
Chris Gazdik: they’re bad people.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. No, they’re wonderful people. Absolutely. But they’re in the same boat as you are. Unstable. Unstable. You need stability and you [00:53:00] need it.
And I would say, more than just a year, I would say, A couple of years. Oh, do you? Oh, yeah. I
Chris Gazdik: stay with long term recovery being at least, you know, a year or so. And then you can move into like a year. Yeah, years. Yeah, right. Yeah. I guess it takes your
John-Nelson Pope: brain about 18 months to fully heal,
Chris Gazdik: which Post acute withdrawals is on my list.
I was going to throw that in Victoria, when you said withdrawal long term recovery, which we just kind of mentioned and the concept of early recovery, which is just very early on relapse, relapse, triggers, prevention, tools, dual diagnosis, abstinence, codependency. Victoria had mentioned enabling intervention, spirituality, higher power, harm reduction is where I want to end on a controversial topic.
But that’s just my list. And honestly, we we’ve talked about several of those. I
John-Nelson Pope: actually had a professor that, that believed in harm reduction. Yeah, there’s a lot of people do. We’ll, we’ll get to
Chris Gazdik: that. Let’s leave that [00:54:00] for the end. The controversy,
John-Nelson Pope: how about Gosh, what was it? Dry drunk. Oh
Chris Gazdik: yeah, that’s another good one.
What is that in the language of substance abuse?
John-Nelson Pope: Well, the idea is that you may not be drinking, but you’re acting and living as though you are still Intoxicated? Well, not intoxicated. It’s like you’re in withdrawal. You’ve got the de You are basically unstable. Because you’re not dealing with the emotional aspect of it and even some physiological.
Chris Gazdik: Not dealing with the emotional aspects of active addiction. It’s a good point. encapsulation there, which is interesting that you, you know, it doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, withdrawal or anything along those lines. It’s, you know, you’re just not getting spiritually well, meaning recovering from all of your still
John-Nelson Pope: angry.
You’re still resentful or you’re holding onto the anger. You’re not doing forgiveness. You’re not doing the whole, you’re
Chris Gazdik: [00:55:00] knuckling. Yes. Right. Yeah. That’s a term that’s wide. Yeah. You’re white knuckling it. You’re just grabbing your ass and holding on.
John-Nelson Pope: That’s what the founders of AA were doing. They were trying to rescue people, but they were not doing it.
themselves in recovery. They were not well.
Chris Gazdik: They were white knuckling it, you know? Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s another one. Dry drunk is, is there’s so many terms in the
Victoria Pendergrass: language, isn’t it? These lists,
Chris Gazdik: huh?
Victoria Pendergrass: It goes way beyond the list that.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, I, I did a, honestly, I did a very poor job with my list, but, but we’re talking about it and these things pop up into our brain.
Don’t they, John? Like, I’m just, you’re ingrained and you have the experience of what an active addiction is in recovery.
John-Nelson Pope: Don’t take another’s inventory. We, we. I would run into that in the group all the time. Oh, yeah. That I was
Chris Gazdik: Well go into that. What is that, do you know, Victoria, what taking inventory is referring to?
Victoria Pendergrass: I could probably guess, but, well,
John-Nelson Pope: that [00:56:00] basically what you do is you, you isolate yourself by, by making yourself the expert, you actually, well do the, well, let me do this, and you’re trying to fix them when you’re not dealing with your own pain or your own issues.
Chris Gazdik: So taking an inventory, Victoria, is part of the, the recovery process, especially in 12 step where you’re taking, you know, it’s, it’s literally one of the 12 steps, I think like step four or five, where you’re, you’re taking an inventory of your personality defects
Victoria Pendergrass: of
Chris Gazdik: character.
And also a lot of people in recovery, if you’re listening to this, that doesn’t just the negative pieces of your inventory, when you’re taking a good inventory and doing a good step. What did, which is John four or five? Yeah. So when you’re, when you’re doing a step five, if I’m right about the number and you’re taking your inventory, you want to list all your positives too, guys, you know, just list your negative
John-Nelson Pope: because the guilt and the shame is so much powerful.
[00:57:00] What keeps I think people in their addiction cycle is to have that guilt and shame.
Chris Gazdik: And you know, one of the things I think even maybe more than guilt and shame keeps people in active addiction cycles. creating chronic relapse, grief and loss, grieving and not letting go of your involved relationship with
John-Nelson Pope: the substance.
Right. Does that sound crazy? No, it doesn’t sound crazy and I believe it very much and I think that’s the, so that’s complicated grief and so that’s where the dual diagnosis would come in and unfortunately there are some programs that don’t look at that they’ll look just at, in terms of the addiction, but not some of the, the issues of, you know, of grief, loss, depression.
You know where I got that
Chris Gazdik: understanding? I actually got that understanding from a conference very specifically on chronic relapsing. They called themselves specialists on [00:58:00] chronic relapsers. And it was basically, they identified this awesome grief process that we’ve talked about on the show before, but that’s where it comes from is substance abuse treatment.
Chronic relapsing dealing with grief and loss issues. It’s really pretty cool.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: so which one of these Victoria you look at the list That don’t make as much sense. You could help us In our time that we have remaining before we switch to the harm reduction IOP is, is a created program, intensive outpatient program, three days a week or four days a week, two or three hours a pop where people go intensively to treatment.
Oh, so much resistance. People are so often resistant. designed to prevent rehab or as a step down from rehab. My client currently is going to an IOP program in town because he’s stepping down from, from rehab facilities.
John-Nelson Pope: Here’s a, here’s a thought too. And I’m wondering because in in residents inpatient, so to speak.
And I, I don’t like to use [00:59:00] the term patient because you know, I’m from my counseling background, but it’s, it’s the idea of but the, it is inpatient and you’re in there and you go and you get 24 days or 28 days and then you go back into the world, right? And talking about rehab, rehab, but ideally. And for me, in, in, in a perfect world, a person would stay as they, they were dealing
with the homeless in the, in the military with veterans, for example, they would go in for, which was paid by the VA, by the way, for a full year.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they had much much higher chances for recovery,
Chris Gazdik: right? Yeah, there’s there’s halfway houses and long term facilities and sober living and different programs that are out there, isn’t there, which is a part of. You know, understanding the re the treatment part
John-Nelson Pope: of it. And I think social workers had a big hand in doing that.
So of
Chris Gazdik: course, give [01:00:00] yourself the
John-Nelson Pope: early
Chris Gazdik: social work group. Any of those Victoria that stick out that as you’re looking down through that, that, that are, that are different, that are weird. We didn’t spend a lot of time on relapse and relapse triggers and relapse prevention and tools for relapse prevention.
Those are, that is a set of things that are, that are a big deal.
Victoria Pendergrass: Honestly, these listed out, I have a pretty, at least like a relative understanding of them.
Chris Gazdik: I love that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like the only one that the post acute withdrawal syndrome, I’m not quite sure what that is.
Chris Gazdik: It is a part of that is little understood, honestly, in a lot of even professionals in substance abuse treatment, and certainly that clients do not get exposed to a lot.
Have you worked a lot with post acute withdrawal, John? No. Really? Yeah, that surprises me. Yeah, I have had good experience and training on that in that. Basically you get withdrawal, your body [01:01:00] freaks out, like we said a little bit ago, right?
John-Nelson Pope: Oh, okay. I
Chris Gazdik: know what you’re talking about. The post period of that can be, how long?
We used to say like several weeks, right, John, where your body is like foggy. No, it’s a lot longer
John-Nelson Pope: than you can have it come back any time. It’s like 18 months, as you said. Again, your brain has to heal. Right. You reconnect, make new relationships. Neuron synapses,
Chris Gazdik: terribly important for people that are trying to maintain recovery because it’s frustrating.
You feel a pink cloud, which is another term, by the way, the pink cloud that is excitement in recovery. Like, I feel good. I’m sober. I’m great. And then you hit the wall. And you fall out of the pink cloud and you realize like, wait a minute, my body’s still adjusting. I can’t think straight. I’m not, you know, sleeping well.
My body goes in and out of this withdrawal syndrome.
John-Nelson Pope: That’s right. And that’s the other, and again, as your, as your mind or your brain is [01:02:00] healing, the physiological aspect of your brain is, it’s going to be very tiring and stressful. And for you, and they talk about halt, hungry, hungry, lonely, tired. It’s another vernacular.
So and so fatigue is not an unusual side effect of all of this, just overwhelming fatigue.
Chris Gazdik: Listen, I hope that you listening are feeling a little overwhelmed. Because there’s a lot here that we’ve talked about and this show has been exactly what I wanted it to be to be honest with you a plethora of different concepts and pieces in the big Understanding that John you talked about in having a deep knowledge and understanding of the whole language the whole experience of both moving into active addiction and then and thereafter, like there’s, there’s a lot here.
So relisten to this one. This is, this is a good one to, to really go through slow and rewind and listen to [01:03:00] again and share with your family member if you’re an addict, because these are really poignant understandings that really get so confusing and misunderstood. I’m glad that we don’t have any. Time for the negative piece, but I’ll throw it in there.
Okay, very briefly John. We can’t go long on this
John-Nelson Pope: Okay,
Chris Gazdik: harm reduction. It’s a bit political where you have methadone clinics and Suboxone treatment and some people probably gonna be really pissed off with me in the field when I’m purporting John I’m a skeptic here What do you think about all of that?
John-Nelson Pope: Well, and, and I would say that therapists that, that end up doing that, that a lot of times they have to do that in terms of, of getting the work experience that they do. I have trouble with clients having that because it does maybe bring a little more normalcy. Yeah. They’re addicted to their lives, but they’re still addicted.
[01:04:00] They’re still very much in that process, and you take that away. They’re just at the same level. It’s a struggle. The idea is
Chris Gazdik: you’re supposed to be decreasing. I don’t,
John-Nelson Pope: I don’t. I’m supervising someone like
Chris Gazdik: that. That
John-Nelson Pope: doesn’t happen that much. They’re always asking for it to go up. I know, man.
Chris Gazdik: And I’ve worked with people on Suboxone for years.
Huh. You know, in there and I love them. Absolutely. And, and they get better and they’re doing some harm reduction and stuff. But yeah, I, you gotta check out the YouTube with John’s explosion there. That’s true. Cause I feel the same way. It’s like, Oh my, what are we doing here?
John-Nelson Pope: You’re just prolonging this because the best, the best, and, and being someone who’s not in their, in the shoes, but has experienced quite a bit of it in terms of having my training is that the best thing [01:05:00] having seen people in recovery and it’s always a process of recovery is that you, you, that is the goal.
There’s, there’s a wonderful, the thing in terms of people dealing with addiction and are in recovery are. Really exemplars for us so that we might, they teach us so much. And we need more of that.
Chris Gazdik: Couldn’t agree, John. That’s a perfect way to take us out. Listen, if you’re listening to this show and you have addiction issues, reach out, get help.
Sobriety is possible. If you know somebody, love them, support them. They are amazing, humble creatures that can get and stay well, even though it seems like all can be lost. I want this show to be a bit of a light to show you that there is a language and an understanding and that people do get well from this.
So love the show. Thank you guys for, for chatting with us. We’ll see you next week. [01:06:00] Take care. Bye.