Connectivity Is The Key To Recovery

How we get past the use of arrogance to get into recovery is through connection and trust. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

It's time again for Doc Jacques, your addiction lifeguard podcast. I am Dr. Jacques Debruckert, a psychologist, licensed professional counselor, and addiction specialist. If you are suffering from addiction, misery, trauma, whatever it is, I'm here to help. If you're in search of help to try to get your life back together, join me here at Doc Jacques, your addiction lifeguard, the addiction recovery podcast. There are a lot of things that you can do that are going to help shape and form your personality and who you are as a person. And they can be good and they can be bad. Some of them are good. Uh, maybe we have a good experience in school or with friends or, you know, with our careers or, or, you know, uh, who we, we, uh, take on as, as, uh, people that we're going to help maybe we have a an entrepreneurial or a spiritual direction that we want to go that will help us determine kind of who who we are and how we see the world and they can be very positive we can also have some very negative experiences that shape us in a very negative way and those can result in things like a personality disorder or a level of agitation irritation Anger, resentment, contempt, all kinds of things like that. And you know what? That can be a real problem because then we become like social misfits or outcasts. And I think that what people see in their lives is something that eventually they have to learn how to cope with. And those coping skills can be completely skewed and thrown off by those experiences or our environment, our social structure around us. And so when we begin to really, in a solid way, understand who we are, we can really be influenced very negatively at times by people or situations or behaviors. And those behaviors are the things that other people see. So how we walk, talk, our body language, the friends that we make, the environment we're in. And sometimes those things are out of our control. I have had an occasion where I've seen people be in environments that were very, very positive environments. And yet they still continued to be very aggressive or hostile and act out in ways that were very destructive around them. Then there are times when there are people that are in very negative environments and they become very positive people. And that is kind of a strange one, right? Because you think, oh, they grew up in this neighborhood that was really crappy and They had all these negative influences around them all the time, but yet they seem to be these really amazingly positive people that will create things around them that are very positive. And it seems to not fit in the picture of what you would imagine they would be like. So is it the environment that shapes us? Is it nurture? Or is it what's in us, nature? Or perhaps is it a little of both? And I think it's a little of both. But what I wanted to address is the experience of being around somebody who has something that is so psychologically deep-seated that they become seemingly... They're normal people, seemingly. And yet they become very dysfunctional. Whatever that dysfunction is. I think of people like... Somebody probably nobody... really perhaps knows about if you're outside this country. But there's a gentleman, his name is Jesse James, and he's a fairly well known in the motorcycle community guy who He's very charismatic. He's very charming. He's like the guy that you would want to sit down and have a conversation with, maybe share a meal and talk about motorcycles. And he builds motorcycles and he builds cars. Now he hand makes firearms and knives, things like that. He was really popular in the late 90s into the early 2000s during the motorcycle craze. What we call the dad bike era. The fat, tired... Uh, chopper, you know, bikes that became all the rage back then with, um, the Tuttles and Orange County choppers and Billy Lane and, and, um, Jesse James, guys like that. And they were on TV and they became celebrities for their 15 minutes of fame. But this is a guy who he grew up in a really, really bad environment. He came from Long Beach, California. He was very poor. His mom and dad were divorced. His dad was an antiques dealer and a drug dealer. And his mom just kind of was an absent mom in Jesse's life. And so he grew up really in a rough way. He eventually got kicked out of his house and his dad when he was like 16 or 17 something like that he ended up living with his girlfriend's family and so he didn't have much and he came from not much and he was a scrappy kid who grew up in the in the 70s and early 80s and sort of a knock around kid that didn't have a whole lot seemingly came from a bad environment he should probably been a drug dealer or or you know something and uh been spending his time in jail and that would be the end of it and you never hear about him again um but instead because of his his personality and his charm and his uh drive and ambition um he took a different turn in his life seemingly and uh so he spent his time um playing football and then trying to just make his way through the world he became a security for concerts and so these hardcore metal bands would hire him to work security and he did that for a while until he got tired of it and got disgusted by what was happening and he left that then he became a welder and he got hired and he you know rose up through that right and along the way he developed a drinking problem and he became an alcoholic but he's also very charismatic so he ends up on TV and he's building motorcycles and everybody thinks he's the greatest and then he marries Sandra Bullock and he blows that marriage up by cheating on her and then he gets married over and over and over and over again to multiple women each time cheating on them and I I'm not even sure he's married at this point. I kind of lost track of it after a while. I think it was on his fourth marriage, and that blew that up. And each time, he's got these women who are very ambitious, strong women that he marries, and then he self-destructs and implodes. And it was interesting because along the way, he ended up on the— the Trump TV show. I can't remember what it was called, where he would, uh, get celebrities to come on the show and try to raise money for charities. And then he, you know, you're fired. And that was his tagline. Um, he ended up on that show and he pointed out that, um, that he was, uh, in recovery and he's an alcoholic in recovery and, uh, and seemingly in recovery, but yet I, you know, his behaviors demonstrate that he wasn't actually in recovery, uh, So he grew up in a really bad environment and he was given some tools that he used and then abused and misused because he didn't have the good foundation of parental influence that was positive in his life. His dad was verbally and physically abusive to him. His mom was abandoning him and he ended up self-destructing over and over and over again. And I've kind of tracked with him over time. I've lost track of it over the last, I don't know, to 10 years or so. Um, But each time he would try to get a life going and he would seemingly get it together and then he'd blow it up. And I think that's probably the experience a lot of people have is that they do that. They get involved in these experiences in their lives that are very positive and they throw them away because they think they're not worth what they're getting. They're not worthy of it. Or they think that they can't have it. It's not real. And, you know, my life was like that in a lot of ways. There were things that I were given and... opportunities that were presented to me that would have been very helpful to me but I tended to not believe that it was real or the person had an ulterior motive because that was kind of how I grew up was everything had an ulterior motive with my mother and my father is very verbally abusive to me and so the experience that I was left with was that you know I'm not worthy and nothing's real so I developed the same kind of destructive habits and I'll bet many of you have done the same thing And it's a terrible trap to get into. Did I have a good foundation of seemingly a good family? Yes. But then at the same time, it was very abusive to an extreme for my sister, too. Very extreme physically at the hands of my mother. And so if these things are hidden from public view, which is In my case, they were. If they're hidden from public view, they are invisible to the outside world. And so what we're left with is we keep trying to find some validation or confirmation that what's going on is actually happening. Now, in my case, I grew up with nobody knowing that something was seriously wrong in my house. There were people that were parents of friends that I had when I was, you know, 10, 11, 12 years old when it really started escalating, they knew something was wrong. And I've been told this by them. They knew something was wrong, but they just didn't know what it was because externally it looked fine. And I think that we present to the world what we would like the world to think of us. We do that with addiction. And that's what causes all the, the Foundation of arrogance that goes on in addicts lives is the foundation of I can't show anything externally That's bad. So I'm gonna try to keep it. I'm gonna keep presenting something that seems normal When it's not so our pain and our suffering and the things that are going on with us that plague us become problematic because we don't want anybody to see them and so we hide and And it comes across to the outside world as arrogance because when we're hiding something, it's not there, right? Everybody thinks it's not there. It doesn't exist. But in reality, it actually does exist. So then if we do get called on it, like, hey, I see you or I'm concerned about you, it can be rejected. And so addicts become seemingly very arrogant addicts. in how they conduct themselves in public. And they'll push people away, keep people at bay. They start to manipulate. There's a whole psychopathology around that. But it's a false arrogance. It's interesting because they want help, but they don't know how to ask for it. They don't know how to receive it. They don't trust it, so they don't believe in it. they think that everybody is going to be against them and that there is no out. And it's not until you get to that place where you've either gotten to the point where you're about to lose something you don't want to lose and so then you start moving towards recovery or that somebody actually gets to you. Somebody actually is able to crack through that and get you to understand that they actually do see you and they're like, I see you. And it's at that moment many times when, as an addict, you really start to feel felt. That's one of the reasons I'm constantly trying to get people to go into meetings. AA, NA, OA, whatever A, SA. But the 12-step process, not because I'm trying to force religion on you or faith, because there's a lot of God talk in the rooms, which... It's helpful and gives you a foundation for spiritual growth, which I'm all for. However, it gives you a sense of belonging, community that accept you, flaws and all, right? And so you can feel felt in the rooms. But the character development of arrogance is something that seems, with some people, could be sociopathic or even psychopathic. true um there's a lot of narcissism involved in all that and there's an extreme narcissistic tendency in our society today the narcissism is off the scales now but the other issue is that uh you can be accepted even with your flaws and as an addict when you walk into the rooms you know uh many times in the rooms arrogance reigns supreme and in rehabs we see it um but it's not It's not foundationally real. They're acting in an arrogant manner. The person is highly insecure, highly traumatized, but they're acting in an arrogant manner. And there's a differentiation between somebody who is truly arrogant and somebody who is an addict who's arrogant. I see them presented to me very differently in my office. When the presentation of arrogance in my office comes from somebody with no addiction... I know that there's an authenticity to that arrogance. There's a real psychopathology to the arrogance. When somebody is an addict and they come in arrogant, their presentation is arrogant, I move away from that. I see you're acting arrogantly, and that's the tool that you're using. It's not who you are. It's the tool that you're using to keep everybody at bay and to keep everybody questioning what's going on around you so you can use. But that's because I'm in the business, right? I'm in the recovery business. So I recognize that. Sometimes others who are like the loved ones, they don't get that. They don't see it as just a tool that's being used that will eventually be put down. Once the person starts working on their recovery, they see it as an actual long lasting, everlasting character flaw, which it isn't, but it looks like it is. So if it's a tool that you're using, you're using it for a reason and it's there for a reason. It's a very, very destructive tool, and like any other destructive tool, the user doesn't feel the pain or the impact of the usage of that tool, but the receiver does. So the family member, the loved one, the friend, whoever, who's getting blasted by this arrogance, it's very off-putting to them. But it's kind of like a shotgun. You're shooting a shotgun. The person who's shooting the shotgun, they don't get hit with any of the pellets. So they don't know what it feels like. They don't have that experience. But all they hear is the bang and they feel the recoil against their shoulder. But the person who's getting blasted by the shotgun, they're feeling all of it. And that's what's happening. So you as an addict, when you're using your arrogance, it's a very effective tool. at keeping people away, cutting the noise, destroying the things around you that are there to help you. It's very good at that, but it's very destructive to you. So what can you do as an addict? What can you do? If you don't trust, you come from a high degree of abuse, neglect, whatever's your background of trauma, what do you do? Because you don't believe anything, you don't believe anybody, you don't trust anybody. At some point, you're going to have to shift that. And I think one of the big steps is that human connection part, right? I'm here with you. I'm not here against you. I'm here with you. I'm here to witness for you your suffering. I'm here to engage and feel with you. You've got to get in front of somebody that is like that. And trust me, they're out there. If you step into the rooms... I promise you, you will find those people. Not every single person in there is like that. Of course, because there are varying stages of the recovery process. It's like there are varying stages on that spectrum of addiction. Recovery is a spectrum. So you're going to find people at different levels. Like if you're looking for it, well, there's probably somebody else in there looking for it too. So you can't count on that person to be that person. But somebody who's been in recovery for three years who's sitting there, they can certainly do that for you. And they will be that for you. But you have to be in the room. So get in the rooms. Go to meetings. Get amongst your peers. And that helps. To me, the experience is very much like when I go to church. If I go to church, I know that everybody in there is there. for the same general purpose, right? They want to learn, they want to hear, they want to be with God in that moment and they're there and they're doing the same thing I'm doing, right? But I know that the person standing next to me, this might be like their third time going to church. Maybe they're even questioning their faith you know is there really such a thing as God but I'm here because I want to hear this I want to I want to learn or explore this thing or the person on the other side of me might have been a church goer their entire life and they're in their 60s so that person I know is very much ahead of the person on the other side of me right so I would get something different from either one of them but I know we're all in the church listening to the pastor and going through the the worship um before the service, it's like, yeah, you're all there for the same reason, right? I'm here to experience my faith and to express it. All right, it's the same exact thing in the rooms, right? But it's all about recovery. And so what you're doing is you're exploring your recovery. You're trying to go through that process of getting there. And so when you're there, procedurally, this is very important, right? You go to the meeting. You might show up right before it starts. Okay, every meeting is about an hour. Some go longer, but they're an hour. You go through the meeting, and the meeting's over. And then, what are you going to do next? And that's kind of the question is, what do you do after the meeting? Many people, they go to the meeting. The meeting's over. There's the door. Zoom, bang, they're out. And they go home. Other people will linger after the meeting and do what we call the after meeting meeting. And those are the people that are there to actually get something a bit more out of the experience than just in the moment of the meeting and being able to talk and maybe listen to a speaker. And it's that after meeting meeting that That's so vitally important to your recovery because that's where you're going to meet your peers. That's where you're going to start to confront the openness and your own distrust of others. And you're going to learn to trust people. And so when you go to meetings, it's the after meeting meeting that's important. So I'm saying that to also say that it is important in today's world. environment of meetings that you not only go to in-person meetings, or I'm sorry, if you go to remote meetings and you're doing them online, that you also go to in-person meetings. Even if it's just one meeting a week or every two weeks, in-person is important because the after-meeting meeting on a virtual meeting essentially doesn't exist. It's just a continuation of these experiences of just kind of Maybe you get somebody's phone number or something and you talk to them, but it's not the same at all. The human connection part is missing. I really strongly advocate for any meeting you can get to. If you travel, like I travel once in a while, and if I were traveling and I can't go to my normal meeting, I'd get online. And I tell my English-speaking clients, hey, listen, you know what? You've got meetings in different time zones. In the United States, we have four time zones. So you've got different times. Now, if you're beyond a time when you would find a meeting in your home country, well, hey, guess what? England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia, English-speaking countries. And there are English-speaking meetings in Holland, in Germany. Go to an English-speaking meeting online. Learn something new from a different culture. Just because you don't belong to that culture doesn't mean you're not going to get something from it. If you have a common language, then you're going to get something from it. It's going to be a different experience. So you don't have a reason for not going to meetings virtually. You also don't have a reason for not going to meetings locally. And so I'm big on any meeting you can get to, but I'm also bigger on... in-person meetings and virtual meetings, not just virtual meetings, because that's not going to be as effective. The other thing is that body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, eye movement, things like that are things that you pick up in meetings. Now, I've been to meetings where everybody faces forward. towards a single person. I've been in meetings where people are on opposite sides of the room facing each other in rows. I've been to meetings where it's a circle, which is typically what they demonstrate as the standard meeting. If you watch movies or TV, they will always show everybody sitting in a circle in a slightly darkened room, all holding a cup of coffee, sitting in chairs. And, um, that is very rare. I've not seen that. Um, Actually, I've never seen that in a meeting. Everybody's either sitting on chairs and couches and they're just kind of in the basement of the church or they're in the configuration I'm talking about where they're all facing the presenter or they're facing each other from opposite sides of the room. That's more commonly what you find. But I'm a big advocate of both. Because you need that experience of connectivity and trust. You need to feel felt. That's the most important part of meetings from my perspective. Oh my gosh, has it already been a half an hour? I hope you got something out of this. I didn't mean to talk so much that it seemed like a very short amount of time went by. Hey, listen, if you're trying to get into recovery, reach out to me. I can help. And if you don't want to reach out to me, go find a counselor. Go to rehab. But do something to work on your recovery because it is not worth ending your life to save your addiction. It's really not. Work on getting into recovery. Work hard, be consistent, and have a lot of resolve. But get the help, okay? But I have enjoyed talking to you about recovery. So, until the next episode of Doc Shock, Your Addiction Lifeguard, this is Doc Shock saying, see ya.