Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits!

You're listening to breaking the bottle legacy with Molly watts, Episode 21. Hi, I'm Molly, after a lifetime living under the influence of family alcohol abuse, spending more than 30 years worrying about alcohol and my own drinking, believing I had an unbreakable daily drinking habit, I changed my relationship with alcohol forever. If you want to change your drinking habits than breaking the bottle legacy is for you. My goal is to help you create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, past, present, and future. Each week all focus on real science and using your own brain to change your relationship with alcohol. Nothing has gone wrong, you're not broken, you're not sick. It's not your genes. And creating peace is possible. I'm here to help you do it. Let's start now. Well, hello, and welcome or welcome back to breaking the bottle legacy with me your host Molly watts, coming to you from a partly cloudy Oregon, which you know is par for the course in springtime here. So it's all good. I am so excited. today. I'm just buzzing with excitement because I cannot wait to share this podcast episode with you. I had the honor and privilege of speaking to Dr. DE Jaffe and he is a world renowned expert on addiction. He has written a book called The abstinence myth, which we're going to talk about. He also is the founder of an online recovery program called ignited that we'll share with you as well. And to say that I was just thrilled to speak to him and that he took the time to be on this podcast is a major understatement. Dr. Jaffe has been on the Dr. Oz Show on Good Morning America. He has a huge TEDx talk, which of course I'll link to in my show notes. But the fact that he was willing to take the time and speak with me, was just a gift. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Eddie Jaffe. Good morning. Dr. Addy, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me on the podcast today. I appreciate it. I know you're a very busy guy. So taking the time is just appreciated. Absolutely. love being here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. So you have done so much work in this realm. And really, everything that you talk about in both the abstinence myth, and in your program, your recovery program ignited stems from your own personal journey. I know you've shared it many, many times and many big stages. And I don't want you to go through the whole thing. But talk to me a little bit about especially driving into the abstinence myth coming from that perspective of of where you've been, and why you are so passionate about what you do. Absolutely. Absolutely. And thank you again for having me. I have told the story many many times, but I love I'll I liked the idea of focusing on how I got to this abstinence myth concept. Yeah. I found myself addicted to meth. I was addicted to meth for about three to five years. Well, I guess I was using it daily for about five years, pretty much and so by the last three, it just got insane. I was using it all day every day. And, you know, traditionally we, we know what to call people like that we know what ends up happening with them. They're obviously drug addicts, they, you know, they obviously need to go through all the things that drug addicts need to go through. And I did, I did all those things. I went to rehab got kicked out of the first rehab for using meth I found myself in the second one where I felt better success, spent eight months there. Getting as people call it in the field clean, I hate that word. But you know, I'm kind of following the narrative of how I got here. And then I went to jail. And I did a year in jail because of the criminal offenses that I collected during my my Matthews and I stayed sober throughout my jail sentence. And then when I got out, I stayed sober for another year or so a little bit more. So it was actually sober in traditional recovery in AAA and a kind of recovery for three years. And it totally worked for me. I had a sponsor, I had a community at a home group. My home group was the Pacific Group, which is a very, very strong minded dogmatic AAA, here in Los Angeles, and that just seemed to be the way that I was life was going to move past that point. It seemed like the only thing anybody thought I could do. And then going back to school because I couldn't get a job. And as I went back to school, I went to get my Master's in psychology. I'd already got my Bachelor's magically While using meth at UCLA. And so, in my schooling, what I realized when I was studying all these things about psychological concepts and abnormal psychology and addiction, et cetera, and it just kept, I kept coming to this place where none of the things I was learning in school were the things that were being applied to me in my addiction world. And the gap the chasm kept growing and growing and making me more and more uncomfortable, right? It was kind of like, why is this what I'm being told to do in my recovery when almost none of that is actually supported by what I'm seeing in the psychological world. And so I started exploring and thinking for myself a little bit more, and eventually decided to take what is called the AAA experiment, right to see if I can drink I plan for six months. It wasn't a an A quick one off for me, I I talked to my parents, I talked to my sponsor, I talked to my girlfriend at the time. And then one Sunday afternoon, my girlfriend at the time was a waitress, and she was off, we were sitting in Hermosa Beach overlooking the ocean, and she was having a glass of champagne, I reached over and I took it and I grabbed the glass. And I took one sip and I sat back. Because after three years in traditional recovery, I didn't know if my brain was going to write some weird cartoon moment thing or whatever. And then, two days later, I'd be under a bridge smoking meth again, that was sort of the sense, I will give you the punch line now so that we can move on with the rest of the conversation. But it's now 17 years later, I still drink socially, I'm fine. I'm fine. And when I saw my own recovery, take this very different trajectory. And I was learning all these very different things in my studies, and reading research, and just seeing a completely different way of thinking about it. I started recognizing that there was value in sharing that story, because there are a lot of other people who don't hear it. And look, you know, if you don't hear examples of stories other than the status quo, you believe that the status quo is all that is possible. And I think there are a handful of us in the industry that we're doing more and more to just lay out the following proposition before people, there are dozens or hundreds or 1000s of different versions of what recovery looks like. And that doesn't have to be the one you've been fed in TV shows and movies and the AAA rooms, it can look different for you, if that's what serves you and your well being. And that's why I wrote the abstinence myth. The goal was to make people understand abstinence should not be the gold standard by which we measure recovery. And it doesn't even have to be necessary for recovery for many people. And that's sort of my, my rallying cry at this point is everybody should be able to find a recovery journey, a method a an approach that works for them. And that's the only important thing in the end. Yeah, I love that. And I, I appreciate it so much. And we hear I don't talk so much about addiction and recovery, because that's not really where my journey came from. But I was a habit drinker and somebody that used alcohol on a daily basis and in an unhealthy way, far past any science based guidelines for moderation it was it was truly not a healthy relationship at all. And the thing that I love about your work is there is a focus on not focusing on abstinence, not focusing on actually what you're doing with the drinking, but focusing on the feelings that are really at the root of why you're drinking in the first place, or whatever it is, whatever your drug of choice is, or behavior of choice. Yeah, well, look, it's not that it never happens. But it is incredibly rare for somebody to only develop a drug, alcohol porn food problem with no underlying psychological, spiritual or physical issues. Right? It happens there are, there are definitely stories of people who had absolutely no problem in their life, went into surgery, got prescribed opiates, and then by sheer habit got so habituated, so dependent on psychologically and physically, that they've never been able to take themselves off. But we're not even talking single percentage points there, we're talking less than 1% of people exposed to drugs fit that mold. The vast majority people fit a very different profile. And the problem is that people have been trying to find the profile and I don't think that there's a profile for somebody who struggles with addiction or alcohol. There are many, again, dozens, if not hundreds. And the way I talk about it in the book is there are four factors we all know them biology, psychology, environment, and spirituality. And we all have a unique mix and your unique mix matters. And so you know what you're calling a habit drinker in the DSM five the way it's laid out right now may be a low level of substance use disorder issue. But the interesting thing is if you look at the diagnostic criteria, right, if you look at the factors that are used to diagnose their quantity doesn't make it anywhere near the list, it's out of all the factors, and you can diagnose somebody how much they drink is not actually part of the diagnosis. And weirdly, the only thing we care about in repairing and moving out of the disorder is quantity. And, you know, if you if you just really think about it for a second, if you define a problem one way, I tried to solve it a different way, you're going to have an issue, because you may actually be trying to solve a different problem than the one you're having. So I think we just have to get back to the basics and say, Well, what are the underlying issues? What are the struggles that are leading us to having a problem, let's go fix those issues. And look, like it or not what I've noticed with, I've not worked with hundreds, probably a couple of 1000 people over the last 1012 years. The drinking kind of resolves itself, not always fully, right. But most of the issues you struggle with resolve themselves when you look at fixing the underlying problems. And that's the work that I do. That's that's the focus I have, you know, let's understand what really needs to be done go after that. And the other issue just seem to kind of fix themselves. I think, too, that for me, I know, there was a lot of unconscious stories that I held on to from the past and things that I just wasn't, you know, we often as a psychology student, you probably recognize this too, we run a lot round a lot with our minds just really on autopilot. And we're not too aware of all those unconscious beliefs and self limiting beliefs that we've held on to for so long. And when we don't do the work to find those thoughts and find those beliefs and really uncover them, we are going to continue to struggle, whether it because and I know I appreciate this from your work so much to is, you don't want us to focus on how much we're drinking. Because if we don't figure out the root, cause we're gonna change it from alcohol to food to something else. 100% 100%. I love that you got to this because I think there's a major value in the conversation we're about to have here for everybody. So in our igniter program, we spend the entire first two modules a sixth of the program, is about making people understand the power of your underlying beliefs and your perception in the world. This is something that unfortunately, we don't get taught in the society at large, and yet is more impactful than almost anything else. And look, you know, Henry Ford said it whether you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're right. And the same is true for almost everything else in life. I am now literally to the point where I'm not even 100% certain that there is an objective reality out there, there may be one. But the point is the world you Mali interact with on a daily basis in the world that I interact with on a daily basis, and the one my wife and my kids interact with is a world made of our perceptions. And I mean that in almost always confirmation bias expectancy bias fundamental attribution error. Pygmalion Effect, there are a million names for a million different biases that are built in. You see what you know, to pay attention to you process what you already believe, instead of processing information that goes against your existing beliefs. And the people around you in your life do the same to you, which means that you end up finding yourself in the cycle of self fulfilling prophecies, no matter what you choose to call these things we know by now, what you believe is true will be further reinforced by the world around you and will dictate the behaviors, the choices and what you pay attention to in the world in which you live. This is one of the major reasons why I wrote the abstinence myth. Everybody keeps expecting abstinence to be what you need to go after, even though it rarely happens. And so that actually drives the story that quote unquote, addicts and alcoholics are failures and unmotivated, unreliable, that's not actually what's going on at all. And if we could just wrap our heads around the idea that there are actually a lot of people who struggle with drugs and alcohol and are doing incredibly well. Actually what they need instead of sort of, you know, stick whipping over the fact that they're not perfectly abstinent is some celebration of all the incredible changes they've already made. And, and maybe attention to some of those issues that have not yet been resolved. We will all recognize that actually addiction is not a Been as devastating for a lot of people as we thought it has been. And some people listen to this. And think I'm crazy, because there are absolutely people who have been heavily affected by addiction. But what I'm saying is this, part of the reason they're suffering so much from addiction is because everybody around them, expects their struggles with addiction to be chronic, ongoing and never ending. You talked about this oxymoronic reality you've gotten trapped in with your parents having an alcohol issue and you ending up with something similar later on. It's not oxymoronic, the script written in your head early on in life, about how people deal with problems involved alcohol at a deep level, right. And so whether you like it or not, when you ran into issues later on in life, you relied on the script that was written in your head. But once you rewrite that script, everything changes. Yeah, absolutely. And I say oxymoronic, because I consider myself like an intelligent person and somebody that's, I'd studied alcohol, so much like my whole life, trying to understand my mother's addiction, that it seemed illogical to me that I would knowing as much as I knew that I would work into this relationship with it, that I that wasn't at all beneficial or helpful. Yeah. But that's the thing is, it's not logical. It's not. It's very simple. I don't know if you've heard of Bruce Lipton, I love that man. He's amazing. wrote a book called The Biology of Belief. Anybody who doesn't know, Bruce, please go read his book. It's a pretty simple concept. You know, I'm holding a phone in my hand, we're doing this on a laptop, my computer's great, my phone is great. But it can only run based on the programs that have been fed into it. Yeah, I could want my phone to go make me coffee in the kitchen right now. But I don't have an app for that. Right. And so it's not going to do it doesn't matter how much I want it to, I can look at my phone and go, come on, I paid a lot of money for you. And, and I really love you what you please make me some coffee, it's not even going to respond because it doesn't understand what I'm talking about. And we're very similar. If you don't have a program for dealing with your stressors, your anxieties, your fear of being less than your imposter syndrome, the trauma you dealt with a childhood if you don't have programming and how to deal with that in healthy ways. And instead of your all your programming is how to rely on alcohol or unavailable partners or whatever it is in your life, right? Well, it doesn't matter if you want it to be different, until you get that program installed, you're going to be running on the old program. Yeah, oh, I love this for me. And your book was a part of this process for me, because I used a whole bunch of different tools, I am an analytical person. So I love the science behind understanding the science of alcohol and neuroscience, especially. Because one of the things that I didn't really understand or didn't never learn, because we don't learn it in school, is that my brain, my own human brain, I had the power within it to choose what I wanted to focus on and think about. And by doing that, I could create different feelings in myself, when I chose to focus on, you know, the negative things that I felt terrible. And I love also what you said about beating ourselves up and whipping stick, right? It's about having compassion and curiosity with ourselves to learn why we are doing taking the action of drinking or using whatever we are, because without understanding that, and without really, truly wanting to know ourselves, the first principle of ignited is radical acceptance. Right. So that idea, I love that, because so we actually the first the first one is honest exploration. The second is radical acceptance. And the third is individualized. Acceptance. I think acceptance is one of the biggest contributions we're making to the field. Yeah, because a lot of people explore a lot of people try to find out what happened and then they gotta fix it. Right. I think there's a very big step in the middle. You can't try to fix parts of yourself that you have written off as evil or, or bad or broken. Sick. Okay. Yeah. And kind of forever, you know, scrutinized and demonized. And so the acceptance part, to me is an incredibly important part of the equation. And it really sort of rests on this notion. You're going to have yourself there with you forever. Even the most terrible traumas, the most upsetting childhood experiences, the things you wish more than anything could be rewritten. They can't be. We don't have a time machine, right? You can't go back. And if you spend any part of your life, any part trying to run away from those aspects, what you're actually doing is running away from yourself. And the reason acceptance is so important is it is guaranteed like in the United program, I guarantee people have Following thing, you're going to uncover things you hate when you honestly explore what's happened in your life. Yeah, I know, the and the reason is simple. If you didn't hate them, you wouldn't have been running away from them for so long. You hate these things, and you do not want to acknowledge them, I want to honor and respect that. And you're gonna have to accept it. So once you uncover them, there is a period of time some people get over it, and a couple of days or a week, some people take months or a year to sit there and go, Well, how do I, how do I come to terms? How do I accept that there was incest in my past? How do I accept that my mother committed suicide when I was nine? How do I accept that I felt like such a failure my entire life. And I did nothing. And I'm now 35 years old hating my past. It's a tough prospect. I'm not saying it's easy. That's why I laugh when people say that we offer people the easier softer way to recovery. I go, That's bullshit. We offer them the deeper, more important way to recovery. Because when you can accept the things that I just mentioned, and you never have to run away from them again. Yeah, the impetus to pick up a bottle and have a drink a whole bottle of alcohol, it just doesn't make sense anymore, because I'm not running from anything. Yeah, this is a tool that helped me and I, that I really talk about too, because I again dealt with my mother's alcoholism for 40 years, she she ended up succumbing to her alcoholism, but not until the age of 81. So that's a pretty dedicated drinker. For Stinson recovery. One that was nine months long for the reluctant to recover at 77 years of age, which I guarantee you, there aren't too many people in recovery at age 77. And she drank three weeks after. And it was because I firmly believe that she never was able to address the underlying psychological dependence on what you know, it was always she wanted to believe that she had an disease, because it was easier, you know, there was something wrong with her. If she kept focusing on that, then she didn't have to address all that other stuff. And whatever fed that feeling in her that she didn't want to face. For whatever reason. For me, what I've learned is that the past today only exists and what I think about it, I can't go back there and change anything. So it only exists, the past only exists in what I think about it today. So I can choose to reframe my childhood, and my mother's failed attempts at recovery and our relationship, and I could get really unhappy about it and disappointed and you know, or I can look back and choose to view it with empathy and wish that she met you and had the right tools and, you know, understood her journey and could have could have successfully come to a point in your life. But you know, it didn't happen. But I don't have to. I can choose to focus on empathy and compassion for her, as opposed to, which makes me feel better, you know? And if I feel better, I'm going to make better choices. Yeah, there's so much I want to say about everything you just mentioned. I've definitely I've worked with clients where the demons are too big, I'll be honest. And you see it. I mean, it's really painful, but you see it, right? The sexual orientation issues, people who've grown up religious their entire lives and have doubts about God. People who believe that who they are deeply inside is evil, and that if other people really knew them, they would run away, including their family members. And they hold on to those secrets, right? They just can't fathom acceptance, they can't fathom it, because so much in their life will change. And so they hide so deeply. And they have to cover up so enormously, that that but you know, you look at them. And you say, Well, other people look at them and say, Well, how do you drink a fifth of Scotch or they are vodka and I say, Well, you know, they're hiding in that bottle. They can't allow themselves to be sober, because if they're sober, they see what the world around them is like, and they hate it. And to me, that's the epitome of what I'm talking about. Right? And, you know, like it or not, oftentimes the family members who are themselves pushing for the change, have a very hard time accepting the change that would need to be coming. And that is, that's this reciprocal relationship that we have to get right. My wife and I have have had a 16 year relationship. We've gone through a lot of ups and downs. And through those peaks and valleys. Change is the only constant Yeah. And if she couldn't accept all the crazy changes I've gone through and if I couldn't accept all The crazy changes she has gone through, sometimes separating us and making us farther apart and sometimes getting us closer together. We wouldn't be here right now. And there are a lot of family members, maybe some listening right now maybe some of people who are listening right now, who say, I want you to change, right? You're drinking too much. Don't you see how your behavior is affecting all of us? And yet, are having a really difficult time changing their own behavior? To make the behavior that struggling with alcohol or drugs? Impossible, difficult? Or, or or challenge it in any real way? And I get it. We're all running based on our own script. So I've got zero judgment for you for doing that. You just You said it so well, about your your mom, there's a phrase we use in the relationship work I do all the time. Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy? Right? Yeah. And are you trying to prove the point to the loved one struggling, that they're fucking up because they know it, by the way, they don't, they don't need your your extra proof. They know, their life sucks. They're not unaware. What they need is hope that there's a different version of life. Because this is important. If your life sucks, but you have no notion, no hope, no anchor to suggest that there's a reason why it would get better, right? Why not drink or use drugs to the point of Oblivion until you die? It may seem crazy to you, but you're not living in their head. And if they can't see a reality in which this world they live in changes, being drunk all day and dying slowly from a bottle is easier than being alive every day and hating the life you live in. And that's an important thing for people to understand. You don't have to get the reality. But you have to get this concept. Yeah. So and you said earlier how your notion of reality and understanding that there isn't really just one reality anymore. And really our own perceptions of reality is what is true for us, right? It's the truth that we live in. It's our experience every day. And I think that's so important, because we also kind of, again, I hear a lot of people telling me, they seem to accept their lives on default. And as if they're if they don't hold the power, and I truly believe that, and you seem to agree with this in terms of helping people understand it, they have the power within them, it is always within our own brain and our own strategies at approaching life, that we really hold the key to our own change into our own. There is so much hope for anyone because we don't have to depend on you know, we're not powerless, God isn't going to step in and change it for us. We can do the work isn't going to be easy, necessarily. But it's the capability is within all of us to make that change. So much. And you first of all, let me promise it's not going to be easy. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy. I'm sorry to tell you guys this now it doesn't have to be painful, right? Because you can still have joy and purpose and, and see the progress and love it along the way. But it's going to take hard work. And again, I know it's gonna take hard work, because you're here right now. And it sucks and to dig yourself out of the hole is going to take some effort. So that's one thing and that's fine. It's not that big of a deal. Secondly, anybody can do it. Look, you're talking to a guy who was facing 18 years in prison, five years addicted to meth, I was 124 pounds. My parents would have been ecstatic. All they expected of me is to have a job, and just not go back to prison for the rest of my life. That would have been a victory. And now, I've been on every TV show, I've written a best selling book, I'm doing these podcasts. I've helped over 1000 people myself, like one on one in terms. The life I live now is magical. It's like it's it literally doesn't live in the same universe as the life that I came out of 20 years ago. And the same exact thing is possible for every person listening right now. Now I want to recognize some things. I'm privileged. My parents were able to pay my rent for eight months while I was looking for a job. That's not true for everybody else. I'm Look, I'm a white male. I may be foreign but I don't sound it now. So don't people don't associate me from as being from the Middle East. But as a white guy. I probably had an easier time fixing my issues and rehab and then only getting a year in jail instead of 18 years. I want to I want to own and recognize all that privilege because I don't want to pretend for a second. It was all me right? But given my place and station I then had to do what needed to be done. You In order to get to this place, it was very easy. And I almost fell back onto it to sell drugs to make money because I couldn't get a job. And I was lucky enough and fortunate enough to have my parents they'd be able to pay rent. But what I want to say to everybody listening right now is this, no matter your situation, and no matter your station, there is a route out of this, you just your job, if you don't know what it is, right now your job is to go find the path. And this is an example that this might be useful, actually, to a lot of people listening right now, we've all seen those mazes, right, those black and white mazes. And in newspapers are in those, we just kind of take a pencil and you get your way out. Imagine the most complex maze on the face of the earth that somebody could draw. It's like the size of a wall. And you've got a pencil and an eraser, no matter how complex that thing is, is there any question in your mind that if I just gave you enough time, and an eraser to erase mistakes and the pencil to deal with that, eventually, you could get your way out of that maze? Yeah, you could. It's not complicated. It's still two dimensional, it just writes left and forwards. That's all you got, right? This is your life. If the pencil start drawing a path out, if you hit a dead end, look and see if there's a turn to the right and the left, if there isn't turn around and back back up and erase that path. Your job is to find your way out of this maze, there's a way out. The problem is to me when we start getting comfortable with languages suggests there is no way out. Yeah, because there is, you know, the story that really comes to mind for me right now is like the Pandora's Box story. What people forget about the Pandora's Box story, is the aspect of hope. Everybody focuses in Pandora's box on the fact that you know, Pandora is just curious woman and, and she looked at the box and, and all the evils of the worlds came out of it. And, and it reinforces all those messages we have about you know, women as being Snoopy and not being able to control themselves. Like it's just a BS story. And we think, oh, you know, don't open up Pandora's box. That's the thing we always say about that story, because all the evils came out of that box. But that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is that after all those evils left and populated the world. The last thing that got out of the box is hope. And hope is that human emotion that allows you to know that there is the potential to overcome anything you're facing right now. And if that's the only thing you can hold on to right now, hold on to that. And don't give it up. Because I don't know what your path is. We've never met I've never talked to you. But there is one just like there was one for me. Oh, I won't go on because that is sort of a beautiful summary and a beautiful note to end on. So Dr. Adi, I will link everything in my show notes to ignite it into the abstinence myth, and to your TED Talk and everything else that I can find so that people can find you, as well as the book from Bruce Lipton so that people can find that as well. I just appreciate you taking the time. It's such a great conversation. And I know, this is a small but mighty group that's growing over here on my podcast, but your words are meaningful, and we've helped somebody today so I appreciate that. That's all that matters. Thank you so much, Molly. Thanks for having me. Thanks for everybody listening, go read Bruce's book. He's amazing. Thank you. Thank you for listening to breaking the bottle legacy. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Take something that you learned in today's episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol. Now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com