Hello and welcome to addiction truths brought to you by country road Recovery Center. I'm your host, Chris rosenbrin, in this podcast series, we delve deep into the profound impact of addiction on families. We share insights, experiences and advice on navigating this challenging journey before we begin a gentle reminder to our valued listeners, while we deeply appreciate your engagement and encourage you to reach out with questions, comments or concerns, please refrain from posting the names of family members who are currently in our program or who have been in the past. Your discretion helps us maintain the privacy and safety of all involved. We're here to offer support, answer questions, and build a community of understanding and healing. So let's start the conversation and bring some truths about addiction into the life. And we're live what's up? Derek,
00:53
what's up. Pierce, what's up, everybody, it's good to
00:57
be back. It's good to be back. We've been on like, what, uh, at least a month hiatus, 1012, weeks. Yeah? Well, as is the, as is the tradition of this podcast. We've had some technical difficulties with the computer that we were using with the microphones that we're using, so we've upgraded our set a little bit with these little, these little clip on mics. We're getting fancy, yeah, yeah, yeah. Super fancy. I'm excited about it to anybody that has joined us before. We're just going to have a conversation about what it's like to be a family member with somebody that's struggling with addiction. We, you know Derek and I know from our experience that sometimes the family can be they can struggle just as much, if not more. Yeah, struggling, and it's not always obvious in the same ways that it is with the person that's struggling with addiction, how the family members are also, they also have their own
01:52
Yeah, I don't even know if sometimes it's not even obvious to them that they're struggling as much as they are. Yeah,
01:58
yeah. Today we're going to be talking about the family rules, the different family rules, maybe they're the obvious rules, don't sneak out, you know, respect the house, clean up after yourself, pay your rent, whatever the case may be. And they may be some underlying rules that nobody has to talk about. Yeah, for example, loved one comes in drunk. You know, you know, you know, you know, the goal is to not talk to them and not engage them. Yeah,
02:27
the unhealthy social norms that happen in a family culture, for sure, yeah,
02:31
yep. And they turn into cycles or they they come from, like I said, they're never discussed, but they come from, oftentimes, some pretty painful experiences, yeah, yeah. But Derek, before we begin, how are you, buddy, we haven't gotten the opportunity to really check in with each other in a while. I'm good, yeah, life's good, bro. Yeah, you think you
02:55
knew? No, not really. I mean, nothing really changes when you're an adult, yeah, yeah.
03:02
I know you tried to sell me your Jeep the other day. I as
03:06
cheap gladiator for sale. If anybody's interested,
03:08
it's a really cool gladiator too. It's like, I'm not a real big fan of the Jeep Gladiators, but this one is really cool. It's big, blue, huge wheels,
03:17
yeah, I can use this as a platform to continue to try to sell my jeep. I'm totally fine. No shame,
03:21
no shame. That's a nice aftermarket shocks. I don't know they look like they're aftermarket.
03:27
Lots Yeah, lots of posts, post purchase. They're
03:30
huge. It looks like upgrades. We took a trip back when the Eclipse, yeah, yeah. We took a trip out there was about an hour and a half drive or something like that. And I don't maybe five minutes in, I knew, and I was sitting in the front seat, yeah, and the bumpiness of the truck, yeah, I knew in five minutes, I was like, Oh, dude, by the end of this trip, I'm gonna be so motion sick.
03:53
I'm trying to sell it, man, you're not supposed to tell people the woes.
03:56
Well, I get motion sick. It drives like a jeep.
03:59
It's supposed to drive. It
04:01
does that. And so at the end of our I actually had to switch seats with our with our buddy, Wyatt, yeah, and climb in the back and lay down with that. Lay down and close my eyes. Yeah.
04:11
Not everybody has the the intestinal fortitude to be a Jeep owner. I guess I don't stick with your Prius. My Prius.
04:26
Love that. You know one, one good thing about Heather Prius is you get some nice gas mileage.
04:31
That's one of the reasons I'm trying to get out of the Jeep. Man, the 45 mile commute every day is not easy on the
04:37
pocketbook. No, I'm sure it's not easy on that Jeep either. Jeep is not meant to, yeah, be a computer, right?
04:46
Rocks. Yeah, man, summer's been good, so it's fun,
04:50
yeah? Family doing well. Family's Great, great. Yeah, it's good to hear you. It's good to hear what's been your experience, what's been. Experience with with family members coming in too. Because you've you've owned private practice, you've been in the industry for a long time. You've come across a lot of people struggling with addiction, a lot of families that want their loved ones to get better. What's kind of been your when you when you first meet a family? What's kind of your indicator that, like, there may be something a little bit deeper going on. I
05:21
mean, the honest truth is, is, anytime family members end up in front of me in any professional capacity, there's probably a problem. You know, even if families, even families that are doing mostly the right things are reasonably well adjusted and have some stability when they have a family member that's in need of serious clinical services, residential drug and alcohol treatment, or Even like crisis mental health treatment, that's just not an easy thing to experience. And so I think the fact that people are seeking help is an indicator that there's a bigger family systems problem at play, or something's happening. And one of the things that I tell family members routinely before somebody enters treatment, and again, whether that's treatment or sometimes, you know, that's just treatment, because maybe somebody's struggling with thoughts of suicide, maybe somebody's having some psychiatric issues, and they need to be hospitalized for even 357, days. You know, for psychiatric stabilization is always tell family members. The best thing about that, the flip side of this is incredibly hard to do as a family, is I get some respite from the chaos, right? I know that my family members safe, in the case of our facility, I know they're safe. I know they're not using I know they've got a place to stay, a roof over their head, something to eat, and people that are there caring for them. I can not worry about that and try to get some interpersonal rest and do some things to kind of correct some of the unhealthy behaviors I have, if it's psychiatric care. One of the hardest things about dealing with family members that have serious, emotional or psychiatric issues is just, you're worried about their safety all the time. Well, if they're in crisis, care, you know they're safe, it's a good opportunity to get some sleep and to not you know, especially moms, I think, tend to worry all night long, when they're young people are out using or when young people, you know may or may not be safe and you know they're safe, take that opportunity initially and upfront to start getting some rest, because you've got a long road ahead in terms of creating some family change, and it's going To require some energy. Yeah,
08:00
I think, you know, especially if somebody's coming to our program, if the loved one is coming to our program, the family can kind of sit back and say, You know what? I know they're going to be safe for 90 days, yeah, a full three months. Yep, that's that often. Can provide a lot of initial peace, yeah? But then I think the initial piece may wear off. I know you, you know your loved ones in a safe place, but then what you know you then you may start to recognize there's a little bit of underlying depression going on, a little bit of underlying anxiety, of like, well, what are they going to do when they get out? What's going to happen? Are they going to be able to maintain long term sobriety? Are they going to be able to get out, get a job. When they get out, what's, yeah, what's their transportation situation look like? Are they going to be able to feed themselves? And they get out and those, and I think those all stem from, just from my experience. Those stem from a deeper issue. Yeah, can you speak on that? Yeah,
08:57
there. I mean, there's so many different I think talking about these things. Back when I was a younger and thinner man, we used to like do a lot of low impact caving in Arkansas, where we'd crawl into little bitty, tiny caves and see how big they got once you got inside. Oh, you are, you are. It was so much it was so much fun. And now, as a in my mid 40s, I look back and I'm like, That was dumb. Have you
09:25
seen those videos? Not to sidetrack us, but have you seen those videos of the guys that have a headlamp on, they've got a little rope trailing them, so they know and they are army crawling, head tilted to the side? Yeah. I mean crawling. I've done videos. Man, they gave me so much anxiety.
09:43
Yeah, there were some that were so small that sometimes we had to take our helmets off and push them in front of us because they wouldn't go through. But there's a particular cave in Arkansas that once you get in, there's like, 40 or 50 small holes. It's like, just switch cheese and you just pick one and go. Know? And this conversation reminds me of that, right? Because when we start talking about family trends and rules, it's like, man, we could make left and right turns all over the place and have productive conversations, you know? So I think there's lots of things that play in unhealthy families. There's, there's a lot of fear based things that happen, there's a lot of shame based things that happen. And there's every, each individual family member has their own set of character defects and emotional struggles, and all those things kind of combine to create this foundation of unhealthy family rules and patterns. So typical ones that I think we see a lot are even in even in fairly healthy and well adjusted families. I think we see them a lot. We see lack of emotional vulnerability, where people don't feel safe to talk about what's going on with them emotionally, or lack of the right kinds of language to have those conversations. Like, I don't know how to say how I'm feeling, so I just won't talk about it, right? And so that's a big one, because I think, I think even in my own family life and experience, there's patterns of, hey, we just don't talk about the stuff that's going wrong. We, you know, it's almost like this kind of toxic positivity, where it's like, Hey, we're only going to focus on what's going right, focus on the positives, we'll ignore the rest. And most of the time when you ignore things, things don't get better, you know? And so we see this, like, vulnerability that leads to, like, these common kind of unhealthy rules of, don't talk, we don't talk. We don't talk about dad's drinking, you know. We don't talk about this, I think that a lot of it's kind of tied together. Maybe it looks a little bit like a Venn diagram, or one thing's leading into the next, but we don't talk about things and then so there's not really enough emotional intimacy to develop trust in our relationships. So we don't talk to each other, then we start to not trust each other, right? And then in families, where patterns become really unhealthy, there's really this sense of we're not even allowed to feel like, No, you're not allowed to feel that way, like you
12:30
cannot feel hurt because of my drinking. Yeah, you even express that you're feeling any pain. The emotional backlash that you get from that is, yeah,
12:36
yeah. So it's almost like progressive. We go from this, we don't talk to we don't trust to, no, we don't even feel, we're not even going to feel that we're going to bury things. And that's a lot of times where we see families, by the time somebody's needing, you know, our level of care or having some serious problems, that's oftentimes what we see. I think, yeah, yeah.
13:03
There's this. There was this thought I shared with a friend last night, and it was about, it was about our own healing journey, because we get sober, right? I got sober, but I realized that this, that just in the initial of getting sober that wasn't going to solve all of my problems. I'm still left with real world problems. Yeah. And so one of the things that we talked about last night was one of the best, one of the best tools of healing is honesty, yeah, and that can be very, very difficult to cultivate, yeah, particularly when honesty has gotten you in trouble. Yeah, I
13:41
think that's the hard thing about honesty, right? Like, honesty is best and costly, right? Like, those are the two sides to that coin. Um, I think what people don't understand is dishonesty is more costly, just not immediately. Yeah, right.
14:02
First, you know, it could be a survival mechanism or something to protect me in that moment, to disengage, yeah, anger to disengage, heavy emotion and so it prevents the blow up initially. Yeah? But then there's the build up. Yeah, it's just one more lie stacking on top of one more. Yeah.
14:23
I mean, think about that in terms of just being emotionally vulnerable. It's like, I'm not going to be honest about how I'm feeling right now, which is has a payoff in the moment, but it's very costly the longer that goes on, because it builds resentment. It builds patterns of not being able to be intimacy, intimate with your partner, emotionally and all of these things and upfront honesty is costly if I'm going to be honest about how I feel, it might cause a conflict, right? But the cost is short and not as severe as the cost of dishonesty. In the long term for sure, yeah. But I think a lot of times, even in my own life, that's why I'm dishonest. It's because, like, I don't want to pay the price right now. The rest of it's future. Derek's problem, you know. And unfortunately, I think that's our mentality with a lot of things, you know. That's our mentality with even, you know, in group today, we were talking about, like, the pace at which we want to change. Like, you know, you come in, you get sober on day one, and on day two, you want to work a four step, you know, and it's like, let's slow down a little bit, right? Like, this is going to take a long time, but we want the immediacy. And I think the same thing is true when we're dishonest, is I want the immediate relief that dishonesty provides, but in the long run, just like with change and just like with other things, it's going to come back around and really bite me. It does,
15:49
yeah, almost inevitably, yeah. I have never told one significant lie without that significant lie coming back like a boomerang and cut me up. Yeah, it does. It really does. Whether that be, you know, my loved one finds out about the lie, and then I'm and then I'm labeled as dishonest. How could I be trusted again? That's a, that's a that's a heavy punishment, and but then there's, there's, then there's the more internal where that lie actually disconnects me from my from my people. Yeah, it disconnects me from my circle, and it disconnects me in a way that that maybe I don't see right away, but when I get around them, I know underneath I'm hiding something. And that can be that can be just as devastating as the emotional blow up that comes from. I mean, really, even it's exhaust,
16:45
it's exhausting. We talk about this concept in some of my groups called emotional labor, which is the energy that we spend pretending we don't feel how we feel, right? The example that I love to use because it's silly, is like, when you go on a on a work lunch or work dinner, and you have to, like, smile the whole time and pretend like you're enjoying it, and in the back of your head, you're like, I want to stab you with a fork. I like, I would never share a meal with you unless I'm being forced to in this situation, right? Um, that's what we would call emotional energy, and the piece of that we don't talk about enough is the added emotional energy of secrecy and deceit, right? And how exhausting it is to carry the weight of your own deceptions around constantly being worried about if they're going to find out, or what happens if they find out, or that like those anxious moments where you think somebody's about to say something and you're going to be outed and you're like and all of that is just so emotionally exhausting that it prevents us from being as healthy as we can be. You know, we this. The similar thing is true. I don't know if you can relate to this or not, right, but it's like, if I'm driving around with expired insurance or an expired license, I It's exhausting every time you see a police officer, you're like and you're tense, and your body feels it, and your heart feels it, and all of that cost me time and energy, like on a soul level, and when I'm driving around and I know there's nothing in my car that's not supposed to be in there, and I know my driver's license is good, I know my insurance is good, I don't have that worry. I don't have those fears. I don't I don't expel that energy, and I can shift that energy into healthier, more emotionally adjusted things. So yeah, I think it all piles on top of us. Yeah,
18:43
it does. Yeah. One of the most common thing, one of the most common things that I get, one of the consequences that I experience when I'm dishonest, is the idea that, man, if I'm not, I'm not who I say I am. And that can that is so hurtful to my soul, to like who pierces that that thought of I'm not who I say I am because of the lies that I've told is so devastating to my confidence. It's so devastating to my self esteem, especially if it's gone on for a longer period of time than a day. Can I, if I, if I go to sleep, and I think when I'm going to sleep? Man, today wasn't a good day. I just don't feel like I am.
19:30
Is it? Let me ask you a follow up question next I find that really interesting, is it, is it more about the impact of feeling not congruent with yourself, or is there pieces of that that are about the ego shot and reality check that that's actually not who you are, is you're not honest and and I. I say that because I think even in my own life, it's so funny. We talked so much about this in group today, I do reflective readings at the beginning of all the groups that I do, just to kind of set a moment and give us something to think about, get our minds going. And the reflective reading that we did today, like touched on the subject of the thing that I see, the things that I see in the world, that I find most heinous, most ugly, most morally depraved, right are almost always a reflection of things that are actually inside of me somewhere, and that reality, while painful, do you is there a piece of you that finds it really necessary to, like, write your ship in a way, yeah,
20:45
yeah. I'll, I'll share a story in response to this so it there's a stoic idea that I don't know what's positive for me and I don't know what's negative for me because my mind is too finite to understand what's going to happen in the future. I can see into my past, my past. I can see retrospectively, and I can see like, Okay, this wasn't good for me. This was good for me. Well, what happens in the in the moment is I label things right away, negative or positive, and so this kind of is going along with what happens when I write my ship and and, and and so when something is particularly my addiction. When my addiction was happening, I did not see any positives in it. It was destroying my relationships with my family. It was destroying I didn't have a job. I was completely unemployable. I really didn't know how I was ever going to get out of it. It seemed like it was just I lived in the past. The present did not exist in the future was not coming, and I was living constantly with this idea that I'll change tomorrow, I'll change tomorrow, but tomorrow was two years ago. Yeah, tomorrow was so long ago that it doesn't feel like it's ever going to happen to me, like I'm going to change and in that is a lie that I'm telling myself, that I'm going to change tomorrow, that tomorrow isn't coming and and so what happened is that I I jumped into recovery. Eventually, when the pain got so bad, I jumped into recovery, and now my addiction is one of the most beautiful tools that I have, the pain. My pain makes me worth my weight in gold today, my past experiences, my past pain, is what allows me to do the job that I do so well. It allows me to sit with folks like yourself, with other professionals, and talk about what recovery means, yeah, you know, in a deeper way than just a speculation, yeah. And then also it allows me to sit down with that person that's still struggling and go, here's my experience. I can use the experience of my addiction today in a way, in a good way that I never expected. And so what was a negative in my past has now turned into one of the most beautiful blooming flowers that I could have ever imagined. And there's another example. Last year, on my birthday, I bought a car, nicest car I've ever owned, right?
23:09
Yeah, beautiful.
23:13
Great gas. No, it's not Prius. It's the best, it's the most. It's It's amazing car. It has a lot of trunk space for my drums. I can lay my seats down. It's, yeah, it's safe for my kids. It drives itself, which is really cool. Kind of kind of drive. The self driving is not that great, right? 2017 you know, but it's there. It has that, uh, that, that automatic cruise control, yeah, set cruise control, and it'll, it'll see the cars in front of me and match their speed, yeah. And I got this car, and I was so excited about it. Was such a positive thing that day, on my birthday, and I was really looking forward to driving it, and I pull off the lot, I don't know, about two hours after I pulled off the lot, the engine light came on, so I called the dealership, and I said, Hey, what's going on? You know? What happened to the car? And he said, Well, we just replaced the battery. And sometimes in those more advanced cars, there has to be a full computer, reset, to change, to write that, where you just reset the car all the way down to its factory settings. It understands that all that was was in your battery coming in. And so we did that, we reset the computer, and the car drove great for a little while, and the engine light came back on. And so I took it back, and they did it again. And then they told me, Well, there's a there's a couple sensors that are wrong, so let's replace those. So that was about $1,000 yeah, and then the engine light came back on. My finally, I was like, I'm not taking it to that. I'm gonna go take it to a Honda service place. Yeah, I took it to a Honda dealership, and they said, Yeah, your engines going out. And so another it was like $2,800 to fix, to fix the initial what we thought was wrong, yeah, and then the engine light came back on. I had to take it back, and I had to get a full engine rebuild. And so now I'm about $7,000 in repairing this car. So what was, at the time, a very positive. Thing to happen in my life turned out, I can see retrospectively that, yeah, there was a lot of negative consequences in a rational and in a very immediate decision that I need to go by car, right? Yeah, there wasn't a lot of forethought in it. When I did it, I just did it, yeah, you know what? My birthday, yeah. And so I look back and I can see these areas of my life that they didn't go exactly the way that I planned them to. And so what I do with with dishonesty now, like I said, it is one of the greatest tools in my recovery. Because what happens when I'm dishonest is I disconnect myself from God, I disconnect myself from my fellows, and I disconnect myself from my own recovery. Yeah, and I start to get in my head, and I start to feel all these things that we've already talked about, and what happens when I get honest with somebody, it completely changed. It almost immediately redirects my course and puts me back on the beat. Yeah, I get right back on the beam and and so that's, I'm not sure if I answered your question, but the ways that that I've been taught now, when I when I do feel that disconnect within me, maybe there's something I need to look a little bit deeper at and get more honest with, because only if I'm honest Can I bring that into the light, and I can bring it to somebody else and say, Hey, I don't know what I'm doing with this. This is what I've done. This is what happened to me. I don't know how to I don't know how realistically to solve this problem. All I know is that I'm just going to be honest with you about Yeah, and then in doing that, I allow, I allow myself to be helped. Because if I'm not ever honest with anybody, they don't know, yeah, they don't know what's going on, right? And they don't know how to help me, yeah? But as soon as I'm honest, I can get somebody else's experience.
26:43
Yeah, all the same. Things are true, man, I think for families like there's a piece to family healing that requires families to have honest reflections of the reality that they're in. For families to be able to say that things are not okay, I'm not okay, family's not okay. There are some unhealthy things at play. And so I think that honesty, like certainly from a recovering person standpoint, becomes foundational, but I think it becomes foundational from the family standpoint as well, because it's the beginning, it's the it's the reality check, and the thing that breaks the delusion that they've got a problem with the family's Okay, no, that's delusional thinking too. They've got a problem. We've all got a problem. Let's fix it. Yeah,
27:34
yeah. Something else that is popping in, I'm going to get up real quick and grab my water.
27:38
Yeah. I uh, something
27:45
else I've been thinking while we're having this conversation is oftentimes a more subtle and not so obvious problem in the family dichotomy, especially when it comes to my experience with my own family and my friends too. All of my personal relationships is sometimes I want them to do something, but I'm not going to tell them exactly what I want them to do. Yeah, I'm going to set the stage for them to do what I want them to do. And what I've learned about that is that is manipulation. Yeah, that is a way of controlling the people around me to get them to do what I want them to do, and, and, and sometimes when that doesn't go my way, I get really hurt because, like, I can see, of course, with my with my all knowing mind, with my infinite wisdom, yeah, I can see what I think is best for that person, yeah. And so I'm going to set the stage for them to to be successful in the vision that I have for them. And so I'm maybe I tell them something that that is that I don't tell them directly what I want them to do, but I tell them something that leads them down that path. And maybe I get disappointed, maybe I don't what's you had any experience? Yeah,
29:12
I think families manipulated all kinds of ways. Man setting stages is a great way that we see that play out. I think the biggest solution to that is is again honest, but also direct communication about what you need and and what your expectations are. We don't talk enough about what our expectations are, what our needs are, what I need from you, giving you an opportunity to talk about what you need from me, and being honest on whether or not I can deliver on that, right? Like, it's one thing for me to communicate with with my wife, hey, like, here's what I need from you in this relationship, it's totally different thing for my wife to communicate to me, Hey, here's what I need for you and me to have the honesty to say I don't know if. Can do that, you know, not in a way that's going to like, break the relationship and things for fall apart, but there are certainly things that we have margin for and things that we don't have margin for. And a lot of times, what ends up creating conflicts in families on really basic levels are just people not owning the fact that they can't do something right, like, you know, she says, Hey, can you do this today? You know, I've got the day off. I'm like, Yeah, I can do that. When in the back of my head, I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to get that done. I've got so much else to do. Well instead, I should have just communicated honestly at the beginning. Hey, I don't know if I'm going to have time to do that or not. But if I do, you know, but we're, we're so people pleasing all the time and families that we just want to I don't, we don't. We don't want to be dishonest. But that's the end game, right? When I'm not clear about something that's really dishonesty. Dishonesty transcends whether or not I'm lying about something. You know, it's so much bigger than that. There's dishonesty in my behavior. There's ways that I create patterns of dishonesty just by not telling people how I feel. All those things are are wrapped up into that. And so, yeah, family manipulation happens all the time, and I've gotta check I think I've gotta check my ego, and I've gotta check my honesty and just communicate directly with people, and especially about expectations, is a big one that we see. What do we expect from family members? And I know there, there are lots of things in the field of psychology or counseling or health and wellness, especially in addiction, that there's tension like both both things are true at the same time, and they seem like they're opposites, but there's really just this tension between them. And this is one of those things. I'm trying to think of another example of what to Okay, here's another maybe recovery example. It's like I actually regain power in my life by admitting powerlessness over chemicals. Like that's a tension that doesn't make sense in my brain, but there's a tension, you know, between it. And I think this is one of those things that, like, I've gotta communicate my expectation with people, not, not because expert like, and that's where I was going with the tension thing. Because there's a lot of people in recovery who are like, don't have expectations. Expectations are premeditated resentments, you know, all of these things, and yes, I should temper my expectations of people and life and relationships, because it helps me avoid pitfalls. But at the same time, we expect certain things from you as our Director of Outreach, right? Like, that's not an unhealthy thing to expect you to reach out to somebody when we ask you to right? And so it's not as much that it's like these psychological expectations, but in families, we don't communicate those. And I end up being angry and resentful because an expectation wasn't met, but I didn't communicate that expectation, and now I'm the one that's angry about it. You know, a really funny example of that is when I got married years and years and years and years and years ago for the first time. I grew up in a family where my dad worked, and then my mom kind of was the manager of things, right? She was the house GM. She paid the bills, and she managed a checkbook, and she did all that kind of stuff. My first wife grew up in an environment that was her dad, like worked in stuff, but he also managed everything. He was the GM. And so about two, two and a half months into our marriage, we're living in this little duplex in Norman, and we happen to both be off on Mondays because of the jobs we had, watching TV at 230 in the afternoon, all the lights go out. I'm like, well, that's weird. And I'm like, Hey, did you pay the OG and E bill? And she's like, I thought you were supposed to pay the ogini bill. We had never talked about any of that, right? I had an expectation that she was going to do it. She had an expectation that I was going to do it. And because that wasn't communicated, there was a problem, right? And it would have been silly for me to be like, to be angry because I never told her I expect you to do this, right? And so I think a big part of what prevents manipulation is just kind of as families laying all of our cards out on the table and saying, Hey, here's where I'm at with this. Like I kind of. Right? In my relationship with my spouse, I expect certain things. I have an expectation of honesty. I have an expectation of kindness, even in the midst of conflict, right? Some people aren't like that, right? I've got I've got friends. I'm not quite sure how it works, but it works, right? And I think you see this on TV shows a lot, um, like me and my wife don't like rag on each other, like bros do, right? Like we treat each other kindness and we say affirming things. I've got friends who are in relationships, and they treat their wives and their wives treat them like I treat my buddies like ragging on each other and teasing each other. And I'm like, that would never work in my relationship. You know, seems to work in theirs, but we have to communicate about that, because if one person thinks that something is working and it's not working for the other person, you end up with these really deep seated resentments that cause you big times problems in the future.
35:59
You're not talking about what our what our roles are going to be, what our expectations are of one another, and that that can lead to, that can lead to kind of what we're talking about from the beginning where, yeah, it was never, it was never clarified what each other's gonna, you know, the expectations for one another, yeah, and So now we're, we're so far down the resentments that no you know,
36:25
but sometimes it's irreversible, right? Um, I actually had that experience. I'll talk about it vaguely. Um, some of it might still be a little fresh, actually. Um, but I had that experience where I lost what I thought was a really valuable friendship, because I grew up in an environment with friends, you know, with sports small town where guys treated each other with disrespect, almost as like a way of bonding. Does that make sense? Yeah, the person that I had this friendship with was also a guy, but he didn't have that experience growing up right culturally was from a very different scene, and so we had this friendship. And in my mind, I'm treating this person like I treat the people I care about, mostly from a friendship level, but his interpretation of that, to be quite frank, was that I was being an asshole, right? And because we didn't communicate through any of that, it went on year after year after year until this person was like, Man, I'm not going to be friends with you, because you don't treat me with respect and you don't treat me like a friend, yeah, and in my mind, I'm like, I treat you like I treat my best friends, right? Like something's missing here, right? I love you very much, right? 100% take a bullet, you know. Wouldn't take a bullet for him, you know, and so. But so much of that has to do with not, not feeling safe enough to be honest about what's actually happening in a relationship, and not not communicating these expectations of behavior, right? And and the reality is, neither one of us were wrong, right? Neither one of us were wrong and how we were treating one another, both of us were wrong and how we were communicating, because we weren't communicating right. And it ended up costing us a 10 or 12 year friendship, and we, I mean, to the point that it's, it was unreconcilable. You know,
38:36
I'm that friend. It's funny because I'm that friend that does not take sarcasm, well, yeah. And so you get it, you get it, you get it. I I see sarcasm is passive, passive aggressive comments where you're saying one thing, but really underneath you mean something else. Yeah, that's how I that's how I interpret sarcasm. And so I have friends that are very sarcastic, but I'm just upfront with him, and I tell him, Hey, that'll work for me. I don't do sarcasm well. And what and how I feel when you say something like that is I feel like you're making a passive aggressive side comment to me. And typically, when I do that with my friends, it might take a couple times of me saying but change i i don't feel like I don't feel right when you say something like that to me, because I don't take sarcasm Well, you know, I put it back on me, and I let them know it's nothing you're doing wrong, necessarily. It's just the way it affects me. Yes, is that I view you differently when you say things like that. And so it hurts my feelings. And so, you know, right up front, typically, when I when I come across somebody that is sarcastic, and I can because I've gotten better at it, I can see it, and so I just like, hey, let's let you know up front. You know, that's something that hurts my feelings, even though I know you don't mean to, but
39:52
that's a skill you probably had to learn. It is because there were times where you didn't feel vulnerable enough to offer. That up, and then you get into the development of resentments that are going to be relationship ending in the future, yeah,
40:05
especially in that, in that, in that common idea of an unexplained rule, yes, the underlying rule that men are are fairly sarcastically with each other, make fun of each other and and that's that's a way of building companionship amongst men, and it is, but not
40:29
for all men, but not for all but that's what we don't understand, right? Like, because my experience, you know, through like, culturally, through my younger years, was that it was all men, right? Because nobody had ever either felt safe enough to talk to me about it, right, or weren't vulnerable enough to talk to me about it, whatever the case may have been, where to say, like, hey, you know, not everybody's like that. Like that might have been how you and where you grew up, that's how things were. But that's not everybody's case, you know. So, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things on both sides of that that I think people have to learn to communicate things and
41:13
yeah, one, one thing I'm I've been thinking about, what we've been talking is like, and you said it just a second ago, you alluded to it. You said you had to learn that. And the way that I learned that was pretty it was rubbing sandpaper on sandpaper, really, to get to that point where I was ready to talk about it. But another thing was, I had people in my life that I was willing to talk to about, yeah, and so it was a was a third party where I talked to them about it and and so I think step one in the 12 steps is admitting that we're powerless and our lives have become unmanageable. And what that means to me is that I have to be honest with myself and say that I don't have any power of controlling this. This isn't something that I have any power of controlling. And whenever I do try to control it, my life becomes increasingly unmanageable, and and part of that means, if I'm powerless, I've got to go find the power. I've got to go I've got to go find somebody that can help me find the power that is going to restore me to sanity. Yeah. And, and so one of the things that I have learned in my experience, is that oftentimes it's harder for family members to for one to accept that may maybe they even have a problem. Yeah, it's not so clear for family. Yeah,
42:33
that's the flip side of that coin. Is you had to learn through experience to communicate that, right? The same thing is true for people that are on that are on the flip side of that relationship, right? I had to learn from that experience that the way that I can treat one person is not always the the right way to treat everyone, yeah, you know. And that not all relationships are built on that weird dynamic, which is, it's a weird dynamic, and you know, and so there were character defects in my own life related to what do relationships really look like, right? Because a lot of times men do that as a way of masking vulnerabilities, because it's easier to build friendships in that weird dynamic of picking on each other and being sarcastic that's way more emotionally safe than looking at somebody and saying like, Man, I really value you, right? And so the flip side of that is for those of us that have my background and have grown up in my experiences, learning how to unmask ourselves and be comfortable just telling someone Hey, you really mean a lot to me. I don't need to be sarcastic or say anything stupid or make a joke about you. I just need to tell you that you're meaningful to me, right? And be okay with that kind of emotional ability, emotional vulnerability that we never have been, right? So there's a lot of things that everybody in relationships needs to be able to get honest about and say, like, hey, it's a character defect, maybe that I personalize everything. Hey, it's a character defect that I can't just tell somebody how I feel. I've got to make a joke about how I feel, because it feels safer, right? And then the beautiful thing about programs of recovery or programs have changed, even for people who aren't in recovery from addiction and alcoholism, we're all still messed up, right? The but the beautiful thing about recovery is it gives you opportunity to identify those things and create new patterns of being that are just much healthier.
44:36
Yeah. Yeah. So how does somebody how does it's for somebody that's struggling with addiction, the question How does somebody recover? Well, maybe they get therapy, or maybe they go to an outpatient program, or maybe it's so severe that they go into a residential treatment program like country road. Yeah. And but that's not so obvious with family. Family doesn't have an opportunity to go into a residential treatment program to learn what good coping mechanisms are.
45:09
What bad coping mechanisms? Can you imagine how chaotic the treatment center would be that house families? Yeah, I've heard of some. Oh, that would be wild. Yeah. That would be wild. Yeah. I think, you know, I've got some some friends that I've had this conversation with recently who have children who are struggling with different things, right, even as adults. And one thing I told them is that, and I've heard my mom say it about our family at times that especially for moms, the unfortunate reality is, as a mother, you're only as happy as your happiest or as your saddest child, right? If you've got a child that's really hurting, mom is only as happy as that kid, right? And the same principle is at play for families as a whole, families are only as healthy as their unhealthiest member. And so I think maybe we can demystify how families change by just saying it's about change on an individual level. I can't do much to change the unhealthy patterns in my family, but I can do a lot to change me, right? And I can do a lot to change unhealthy things that I do to change my own character defects, to learn to be more vulnerable myself, right? And if every person in a in a family is committed to that, the family is going to get infinitely healthier. Even if you're the only person in the family committed to that, the family is going to get healthier, because you're going to get healthier and at at a minimum, you're going to have a better capacity to deal with all the other families crap, right? The goal would be for all family members to work on individual change together. But the other thing that happens is one family member begins to do it. They motivate and spur on other family members to work on themselves too. So yeah, you can do family therapy, and you can do some of those things that are going to help, but the way to throw gasoline on the fire getting your family healthier is to focus on you and what you need to do different. And if everybody does that, it's going to happen pretty quick.
47:43
And throwing it on there means to to accelerate. Yeah, grow, expedite, expedite
47:48
the process. Yeah, I used to say that when I would do marriage counseling in my private practice, and I would have couples come in, I would say, hey, we can. We can come in and sit down and you can talk about her and everything that she needs to fix, and you can talk about him and everything he needs to fix. And you're going to make a tiny bit of progress week to week. But if you want to make a bunch of progress week to week, you need to come in here and talk about you and what you need to fix. And you need to come in here and talk about you and what you need to fix, own your own stuff. Focus on that, and you guys will change much faster. If I
48:23
am not the problem, there is no solution right if I cannot recognize myself as the problem, if I cannot recognize where I have been wrong, if I cannot recognize where I can make it right, and I continuously because all I have control of is this body that's sitting in the chair. Yeah, there's this mind, and I don't even have full control over my mind. You know that your body really? I mean, I have thoughts that come into my head that I don't feel like are of Me, you know? And it's just as that's just part of being a human. We have intrusive thoughts. But what I mean by that is I certainly can control them the way that I react. I have somebody in my life that I love very much, but they really get under my skin. And so what I had to do one day, and this, this served as a really, really good practice for me, and I'll explain why I wrote down on a piece of paper the personal boundaries that I will keep, that I that I will keep when I interact with that? Yes, it meant and some of the examples of that were no screaming, no yelling, no cussing, no throwing anything, no attacks on their character, no. Those are the main ones. Yeah, those are my main when I'm talking with that person, that is my main no visible anger and so and what, and what that one meant, means for me that I don't say anything out of anger. And when I get to that point where I'm angry, the boundary that I have with myself is that I separate, yeah, and so you. What happened to me and why it's so powerful that when I after I put it down on paper, it was like embedded in my mind the boundaries that I have to keep. And so when something would come up, when someone, when a situation would arise, and I started to notice that was I'm not perfect. Yeah, I'm not perfect at keeping these boundaries, these particularly of the the raising my voice, that's one that's really easy to do. I'm frustrated. I feel like I have a right to be frustrated. That person is is doing the thing that I deem frustrating to me, and that I feel like this attack on me. And so I feel like I have the right to be angry. And part of me being angry is I get a louder voice, start to yell, and so I I, but I noticed one time when I began to get angry. I thought back to that piece of paper that I wrote on about all my boundaries as I'm crossing one of my boundaries, it's they weren't. I didn't write the paper and say these are the boundaries that I'm not going to let them cross, although that can be very helpful, this was a this was a very personal to me. I'm not going to cross these boundaries, yeah, so, and what that did was it gave me back control over how I interact with that person. Yeah? And we have a relationship that is getting better and better and better every day, yeah? Because when those moments pop up, I'm not focused on them. I'm focused on the things that I can change. Yeah, I'm focused on the fact that I'm not going to yell in this conversation. Yeah, I'm not going to say anything that's going to be hurtful. And what's happened is, is the relationship has gotten better, inevitably, because I'm working on me. Yeah,
51:38
I think the one of the beautiful things, one of the beautiful gifts that the program of recovery gives people, even people like me that are just find a lot of value in recovery outside of drug and alcohol problems, is that idea of acceptance. And one of the things that we have to accept more than anything is the very small amount of control we have in our own lives. Yeah. I mean, I've got ultimate control over the choices that I make, how I communicate, how I feel with people, what I do with what's happening to myself, emotionally and cognitively. I only have some control over what's happening to me emotionally and cognitively, because I have intrusive thoughts, I have feelings I don't like. I can't choose not to feel that way. I have control over what I do with it. I would have some control over my body, because I don't control whether or not I get diarrhea or cancer or any of those things, you know. And then outside of that, you might have some control of like, like financial control and control over your home. You get to pick your furniture and that kind of stuff, right? But even ultimate control in any of those areas is impossible. My home could be gone in a tornado like that. You know, I don't think that we're any risk of this, right? It's happened to me at jobs in the past. So I could come into work tomorrow and find out that the owners have sold the facility to a national healthcare conglomeration, and everybody's gone zero employee retention that I don't even have control over my finances at that point, right? You know? So the key is operating where I do have control. What do I do with what I'm feeling? What do I do with what I'm thinking? How am I communicating with the people in my life? What kind of choices Am I making in spite of what I'm experiencing? And that's where we have to put all of our eggs, put all your eggs in that basket, because the rest of it can change, you know, in an instant.
53:51
Yeah, and I certainly celebrate the people that can figure this out on their own, that can fix these problems on their own, these problems with their own, with their own choices, with their own behaviors, with their own coping mechanisms, with their own ability to separate themselves from from situations that make them uncomfortable. I am, I mean, I celebrate people that can do that on their own, that is not the that is not common, and what I'm
54:24
super rare, even super outside of drug and alcohol related issues, I couldn't figure that out on my own.
54:30
Hey everyone, thank you for joining us in this month's podcast. The video was cut short due to some technical errors, but to wrap up the video, I want to let everybody know I'm going to be posting our phone number, my direct line and the facilities phone number in the comment section. Feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to get connected. I'm happy to get anybody connected to the resources they may need, whether you are a family member that does not struggle with addiction, that would like to get connected with some kind of family. Therapy or a or a recovery program of some kind, I'd be happy to do that. And if you do have a loved one that is struggling with addiction and you think they may need services that we provide here at country road or addiction services in general, please reach out to me, and I'd be happy to get you connected to the right resources. Until next time, I hope everybody has a great month, and we'll see you again soon. Bye, bye.