What Addiction (and Recovery) Can Teach Us About Change | Eric Zimmer, Being Well

[@dorishaus400]

Aloha- it’s hard to put in words how deeply this conversation touched me and my husband! We will be listening to it a few times! And we’ll be checking out The One You Feed podcast too! Mahalo to you Forrest and Rick for helping us change our path on this journey! We loved your book Resilient so much we bought a hard copy and one on audible! And we are faithful listeners to this podcast and Wednesday night meditation and talk with Rick. And we are doing the 2.0 Foundations of Well Being this year together, so we feel this conversation is the icing on the cake!! 😇❤️🤙🏼

[@ForrestHanson]

Wow, thank you Doris!

[@drsandhyathumsikumar4479]

Good people working together brings good vibes ! Lovely

[@marystele1197]

Thanks Eric, Rick and Forrest for this episode. Your experience and ideas and advice in exploring and discussing so many factors and issues was invaluable. Huge amount to think about. Having recently being involved .with an Alcoholic who was deeply entrenched in denial, made me realise just how.much deep shame he suffered with. Your podcasts are immensely helpful Forrest. All the best 🇬🇧👍🌟

[@danielbutcher4374]

Thanks so much for the support and encouragement. Your practical approach to recovery makes this journey seem a lot less daunting. Stay blessed.

[@hannahmoore9215]

This is such a great conversation! I appreciate the "personal responsibility" piece because it emphasized the middle way. It's so easy to go to the extremes of either "I have no agency" or "Everything is my fault." I was able to apply a lot of this episode to my current job hunt. There are aspects I CAN control (resume appearance, practicing for interview, networking, choosing job search methods, choosing to make job searching my job, asking for support) and that I CANNOT control (market conditions, hiring pauses, the other candidates applying for the same job, not being the right "personality fit" for a company, whether or not people respond to me, maybe another candidate has an "in" with a company, main lesson is: I can't force people to be interested or excited about me). So for me it's about not beating myself up over factors I can't control and over how non-linear job hunting is, and putting more of my energy into giving my best shot on what I can control. Easier said than done. Insight, Acceptance and Action is definitely applicable here too.

[@jgarciajr82]

Agent arena relationship is key here. How I see something in my environment literally matters. It has inherent meaning.

[@tfairy7499]

Really helpful & interesting conversation, thanks so much🙏💕

[@sigmarecovery699]

I’m in recovery. It’s been a journey. After a couple years, finally starting to see a glimmer of hope. It’s faint….but it’s there. Recovery is a war for inches. The quote from Frederich Nietzche is relevant: “I have been more of a battlefield than a man”. The disease model of addiction is very accurate. Addiction follows the exact same pathology. The cruel twist is that it’s a disease that convinces you that you aren’t sick. Everyone else around you sees it but for the addict? “Nah, it isn’t that bad, I haven’t used in a couple days, I got this”. If you discover you have a tumor, you will fly to the nearest physician to find a solution. With addiction, you know you have problems, you know it causes misery, you know you are hurting yourself and the people you care about, hell….you know you could die but the disease convinces you, “hey, let’s use just one more time”. For addicts, in simplest terms, we simply cannot regulate our use of drugs or alcohol. We have tried. “One is too many and a thousand is never enough”. I had a ton of underlying trauma that I had began in childhood and unfortunately, it continued into my adulthood…..drugs and alcohol made it all go away until it didn’t anymore. Like most people, I just didn’t want to unpack my nightmares. Addiction is just a form of flight response, a maladaptive way of responding to trauma. The gift of desperation is what inspired the desire to change within me. I don’t like the term “hitting rock bottom” because as an addict, when we hit rock bottom, we just dig past those rocks into the dirt below and keep going. It is insanity. We do recover. Deus vult.

[@FlorenceKoenderink]

Thank you very much. A really interesting conversation. To put in my two cents: in doing research for writing 'Understanding the Trauma of Children from Institutions. A training manual for case workers' I developed a theory that is relevant to 'how much of a choice you have'. It revolves around attachment and particularly not having opportunities to develop the brain areas involved in forming attachment, which can even make social interaction, loving and being loved not feel particularly pleasant. Because there hasn't been any positive experience around those things and the brain has registered that and developed accordingly. To get to my theory, it seems to me that human beings are wired to become addicted as a means of survival. This addiction is supposed to be to attachment, relationships and social engagement. Being addicted to that is a strong survival mechanism. If there are no positive experiences and brain development around that, this addiction will not develop. However, the brain is still wired to develop addiction for survival, so it looks for another addiction. If there is any truth to my theory, to escape harmful addiction, there would be a need to either support the catch-up development of attachment if possible, or if not to redirect the addiction to a more positive or less harmful one. Because as Eric mentions, there may not be a lot of choice there.

[@marystele1197]

I think you are absolutely bang on in what you say about brain development, attachment and the support that is needed for children to catch up. Good luck with your work 🇬🇧👍🤔

[@haysoundswrite2607]

Wow, I’ve been pondering on very similar thoughts on same areas and I think you are spot on! I wish Forrest read this and maybe they could invite you as a guest? This has been another incredibly enlightening talk and your comment, Doris, will make my brain spin for a while, in a good way! Haydee Windey

[@mxpants4884]

Personal theory of addiction: it is a maladaptive application of a bit of hardwiring that is overall useful to our survival, and that is the way we respond to life-threatening scarcity. I stumbled across a description of how we respond to scarcity in a podcast, where they described the mental effect as making the scarce resource extremely compelling and any future consequences more difficult to even consider, much less prioritize. That's exactly what addiction is like. This model accounts for several situations that don't make a lot of sense otherwise, including the patterns that I could anticipate in other addicts but would be repeatedly baffled by when I found myself repeating them. It also explains what I experienced with opioid maintenance therapy, and what separates that from addictive opiod use. Crashing from the high is misunderstood as a life-threatening scarcity. I don't think I had any idea how much time and energy I was burning up on the getting, concealing and recovering from drugs. I'm not going to claim that this insight cured me on the spot. I don't think I would have made the connection earlier in my own recovery. But it has given me a lot more understanding of the importance of building compassion for myself, and especially for my future self. (Which is why I'm going to get my butt in bed and get some sleep so I'm not exhausted at work tomorrow.) Hope some of that makes sense at least.

[@astartecrystalmoon2325]

It would be great if you talked with Howard Glasser about his Nutured Heart Approach! His techniques have helped adults and children alike, in schools and in their personal lives, to emphasize their greatness and shift depression and behavioral issues.

[@angelmossucco]

We all have the potential to feed the healthy or the unhealthy wolf. But our starting lines are different. If we are used to feeding the unhealthy wolf to survive (aka flee fawn fight or freeze) it takes longer to make a habit of feeding the healthy wolf until THAT becomes the default mindset.