Isolation is a Lack of Trust

Jul 07 2018

Narcissism & Addiction

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to Expect in This Episode:

Selfishness VS Narcissism
Narcissism in Children
Our Narcissistic Society
Disconnection from Self
Equating Mental Health with Minimal Narcissism
The Scientific Endeavor
“I Hold My Beliefs in Suspense to Find Truth”
The Process of Recovery
Feeling Better When Becoming Less Narcissistic
Narcissistic State Without Drugs & Alcohol
Frustration

Narcissism is a very interesting term, you know. A lot of people confuse selfishness with narcissism, but they’re not the same thing, right. Selfishness is, I know you exist I just don’t care about you. Narcissism is, I actually don’t hold you and your reality as real and that what’s happening inside of me is more real than objective reality.

So, as an example, very young kids are extremely narcissistic. Right. Even if they might be fun and smile, etc., etc., they’re living inside the world of their own mind, which is perfectly healthy and perfectly normal as a very young kid, what does not come so healthy as we get older.

And so we live in a really self-reflecting narcissistic society where we’re disconnected from ourselves and hold our realities as truth and one could even say that you could equate mental health with minimal narcissism. What does it mean to be mentally healthy? It means to live out in reality, right so science is a great example of that, you know.

The scientific endeavor is the endeavor of attempting to discover objective truth, right. I hold all of my beliefs in suspense, so I can get in touch with reality, so the process of recovery is exactly the same way. I can’t trust my own mind and my own ideas and desires and I’m trying to get out of my own mind ideas and desires out into the world, so I can learn, change and grow.

The other beautiful thing about becoming less narcissistic is to begin to feel better because a narcissistic state, especially without drugs and alcohol is not a pleasant state to be in because life can be very irritating and if you put a lot of attention into that and onto yourself, you’re going to be constantly frustrated.

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Jun 26 2018

A Lack of Trust

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to Expect in this Episode:

Feeling Isolated & Alone
Communication Difficulties
Disengagement When You Don’t Understand Yourself
The Wall Between You and Other People
Coping & Self Medicating
Lack of Trust Going to Others for Help

Isolation is a Lack of Trust

So, when I was younger, I always had a sneaking sense that something was going wrong with me and in my life.

I felt isolated and alone and from that place of feeling isolated and alone

“I don’t understand myself and other people don’t understand me”

It’s hard to communicate.

It’s hard to engage in a conversation that can help you change because you feel like there’s a wall between you and other people.

And so, you find other ways of coping with your problems – it’s a lack of trust.

You don’t know how to trust, and you don’t know how to go and let somebody help you, or I didn’t and, so I found other ways to cope, and distract myself.

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We are Rooted in the Foundation of the 12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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May 04 2018

Recovery Is Not About Abstinence. It’s About Becoming Alive Again.

Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode

It’s always darkest before the dawn
Addiction keeps us disconnected from the beauty of Life
Recovery is about coming back alive

Recovery is Not About Not Doing Drugs…

It’s always darkest before the dawn breaks. We have to remember that so we don’t lose hope.

The thing about addiction is it’s a state of intrapersonal and interpersonal disconnection. We’re disconnected from ourselves, and we’re disconnected from those around us, and we’re disconnected from the world! The truth is, we’re asleep in our own lives! Recovery is about awakening to higher states of awakeness.

It’s about being alive to the music of the world the music of your soul the music of your friends your family all of this to stay awake to the symphony of life Recovery’s not about not doing drugs it’s about living to your highest potential and becoming part of the harmony of the entire universe.

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Apr 27 2018

Instant Gratification vs Gratitude

Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode

Addicted to instant gratification
Becoming attuned
A sense of belonging

Being addicted to instant gratification

Definitely, technology is an example of being addicted to instant gratification and to attempt to be gratified by making more accessible to you, more and more instant gratification, is like trying to put out a fire by pouring oil on it.

You have to change. So, you have to switch from the basis of my life is my ego desires in the moment, what I want, to something much broader. Maybe I can become gratified if I can become the person who I want to be.

Well, who is that person that I want to be? Well, I want to be a person that is in harmony with myself. I want to be a person that’s in harmony with my environment, and what is the result of becoming attuned and being more in harmony with yourself and environment?

A beautiful resonance, that we tend to call gratitude. A sense that I belong and really an actual feeling that we have inside of ourselves of being in the same song with the world, so to speak.

But that has to do with like getting out from these sort of narcissistic and isolated activities, whether that be drug addiction or technology addiction pulling out of that and being much broader – really seeing – and there’s a pain, there’s a pain in that transition, we call it detox.

One way or the other, right. If we wean ourselves off of some small narrow focus that worked for a while, but no longer is working to satiate our lives and we’re no longer growing from it, when we first pull off of that thing, there’s a painful detox. In the case of drugs and alcohol, it’s a physical detox. In the case of other behaviors, it’s like a moral spiritual detox.

What’s it like for me to disconnect, step away, and then reconnect to the larger whole, there’s a pain involved in that, but then there’s a freedom and a relief involved in that, and suddenly I’m not in myself anymore on my phone. And a funny thing to me is like when you’re walking to a Starbucks and you see 30 people at their tables, on their laptops, clicking away.

I totally get what’s going on, at the same time, you wonder like wow, if this is your daily routine, what’s it like to kind of pull off of that? What would you see if you pulled off of that screen for a little bit noise and question, well what am I doing? What’s going on?

At first, it would be scary and frightening and painful, and then you’d go, wait a minute, hum, there’s a rich and diverse world in here and I’ve been so locked into this activity that I can’t see it.

One story that I had or an experience that I had, it was super weird for me, I was not a happy person and in fact, I didn’t know what happiness was. I remember somebody asked me, “Are you happy?” and I literally looked at them and I go, “What the fuck does that mean?” I just had no idea what that even meant, because I had never experienced happiness.

I’d experienced fun. I had experienced excitement. I’d experienced hyper-frustrated, angry, but never happiness. And my first moment of happiness was a deep moment of gratitude and I was driving with my daughter, I think she was probably five at the time. I was in a Cadillac, on Venice Boulevard going to Gloria’s Mexican Restaurant, (shout out to Gloria’s) and it was raining, it was nine at night. I was going to meet some of my friends and I decided I was going to bring my daughter along.

She was going to come hang with the boys. And I remember, I put my hand back on her head and all of a sudden, tears welled up in my eyes. I mean, nothing was going on. I was on Venice Boulevard driving to a Mexican Restaurant and all of a sudden, like these tears start coming and it went from “why am I crying” – right into my heart.

My heart opened up and I thought, what is that? I had my hand back here and I’m crying and there’s rain on the windows and I went, I’m grateful. It was love. It was happiness. It was gratitude, it… wasn’t words. I’m putting words to it now, but it was an overwhelming feeling of being filled up with love and care.

“It was an overwhelming feeling of being filled up with love and care”

And it was a really spiritual moment for me, in that my ego-mind says, “What the hell is going on here!” Then, “Oh, oh, oh, You’re grateful, you’re grateful…”

And I think, “what am I grateful for?” This is all in my mind and at first. You’re grateful for your daughter, you’re grateful to be a dad, to be with her and connected to her. And then it was – but my daughter didn’t birth herself, oh you’re grateful for your wife, the mother of your child.

But then I go, but wait, she didn’t come out of nowhere, and I thought, “oh you’re grateful for her parents, my parents…” and it just kept going out and out, in sort of concentric circles.

I realized I’m grateful for the orchestrator of this moment, the orchestrator of all of this that allows for moments of love and gratitude. And that for me, was a spiritual moment, it was a moment where I was connected to God, or whatever you would care to call that.

And it was a real shift in my recovery from like seeking and competing and wanting to do that – stuff, to – oh no, I need more of this. So that became a different kind of a drug for me.

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Apr 12 2018

The Secret Agreement To Treatment

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode

It’s hard to give up your freedoms
You need to trust others before you can trust yourself again
Recognize what capital F freedom is

The whole crazy interesting dynamics of treatment

You know, treatment’s nothing like the marketing on the website, you go on the website and there’s a picture of two people sitting by a swimming pool and it’s like, “Oh, a romantic, safe place, where all of your needs will be taken care of, with a chef!” Maybe there are Treatment Programs like that, but they’re not very effective.

Treatment has a whole crazy interesting dynamic that’s not good to market on your web site, which is part therapy, part jail. What do we mean when we say that? Well, people come into treatment because, you know, they don’t trust themselves.

Basically, they’ve been engaging in a behavior that’s harming themselves, they’ve made multiple commitments to stop themselves from harming themselves and they’ve continually betrayed themselves and don’t trust themselves anymore.

So, then they come into treatment and you do your Intake, you have your conversation, you come to see if they’re appropriate, and then you shake hands and you say, “Okay, you’re coming in here”.

But, underneath that handshake — there’s a secret deal. What’s the deal? The deal is the client comes in and says, “I don’t trust myself, so I’m going to give you some of my freedom, because I can’t make my own healthy choices and I’m going to let you make decisions for me, okay?” and now, it’s like any easy deal, if you’re a decent person like I am.

“You’re like great. I’ll take a little bit of your freedom for a short period of time until you can begin to trust yourself and then you know, onward and upward”.

But, the secret part of that is, “I’m going to give you my freedom because I need you to take it, because I don’t trust myself, but in three weeks, I’m going to be fighting tooth and nail for my freedom back, even though I still don’t trust myself”.

Giving up your “freedoms”

This is the interesting dynamic of treatment — where people are willingly giving up some of their so-called freedoms to be able to walk to Starbucks when they want or make a phone call when they want, because they don’t trust themselves, but they’re so addicted to those so-called freedoms the non-capital F for freedoms, lower cast freedoms, that they fight you tooth and nail later.

And the process of holding somebody through that, holding somebody through until they come to a place of higher recognition, until they come to a place of recognizing what capital F freedom is, what real freedom is, freedom from their self, you know, freedom from the ego-self, freedom from my addiction, the freedom to say yes, the freedom to say no, right.

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We are Rooted in the Foundation of the 12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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Apr 11 2018

Hitting Rock Bottom

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode

Yeshaia’s Rock Bottom Moment
Incarceration & Panic
When the Darkness in Your Life is Exposed
The Need for Something “Good”

Yeshaia tells the story of his own “intervention“. The day he went to jail and the weight of his life and his decisions came into sharp focus.

Finding Rock Bottom in Jail

I went to jail I remember I was in the county jail, and I had a panic attack – because I was so frightened and I was scared of the trouble I was in, and I was also really ashamed.

Because suddenly the darkness that I have been living in was really palpable to me and I couldn’t find anything in my life that felt good.

That was a bottom for me, yeah, it was, it was an eye-opener – Oh my god there’s nothing good and me and in my life! – and so as soon as I realized that I knew what I needed I needed good something good – you know – that really began the journey of recovery for me.

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We are Rooted in the Foundation of the 12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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Apr 10 2018

Opening Up the Locked Heart of an Addict

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode

The Paradox of Addiction
Thread Between Unhappiness & Drug Abuse
Help People Recover by Helping them Find Happiness
The Day Yeshaia’s Heart Began to Open
Cutting Through the Fear, Hopelessness
Create Connection, Hope, & Opening the Heart

Addiction is Paradoxical

So, one of the things about addiction is, it’s paradoxical. On the one hand, it’s very complicated, biological psychological phenomenon, on the other hand there are parts of it that are very simple, like, you’re never going to find a happy person who’s using tons of drugs.

”
you’re never going to find a happy person who’s using tons of drugs

We know there’s a relationship between being unhappy or demoralized or hopeless and the state of addiction, right. So, we can gather from that, I gather from that, that one of the ways that we help people recover, is to help them find happiness or as I often talk about it, you know, opening the heart, because many people who are coming into addiction are really numb, they’ve really numbed out a lot of their feelings.

I know that because I was that, you know, since I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, I really stopped having the wide range of feelings that we have as human beings. I want to share a story about one of the moments that my heart opened up. It’s a true story.

I have a daughter named Eden and she’s short, you know, short for her age. My wife is also you know, relatively short. And I love basketball and so, you know, I want her to try the sport. She was playing on a basketball team and the entire season I’m going to every game and she’s not making a single shot and she’s watching other people score and I’m you know, just kind of holding it in and feeling bad for her, that you know, she’s not succeeding in the way that she wants.

And the last game, there were all these parents around the basketball court and the ref, you know, it’s like five-year-old’s, so the ref is like holding people back, so the kids that never made a shot get a chance to make a shot. And the ref is holding people back and my little five-year old daughter takes this basketball and she throws it up, you know, potty-shot style, and it pops in the hoop.

In that moment, like the moment that you heard the pop from the net, you know, the ball, my heart went, “Pop” and it was like it had been closed for years. You know, even in sobriety. And I was like “Oh, my God what happened?” And I would just remember, I was like in this circle and I turned around and I put my hands over my face, because I was so surprised by what it felt like to feel love and feel your heart, and I began to cry, you know.

And I didn’t know what to do, other that to hide it, because I had never felt it before. And so, you know, I relate that to sobriety and recovery, that we’ve got to be able to cut through a lot of our nomenclature, a lot of our fears, a lot of our hopelessness and we’ve got to be able to cut through a lot of that complexity and we’ve got have a lot of heart in the work.

You know, and really recognize what we’re doing. I’m not saying there aren’t other factors, there are tons of other factors, but somewhere in the core, it’s about connection, it’s about hope, it’s about opening each other’s heart, it’s about seeing each other, seeing myself and you, and you seeing yourself in me, and cultivating those moments.

Because when you have those moments, you don’t go back. I’m not going to climb back into the shadows and the darkness. I know that there’s love. I know that there’s light. I know that there’s care out there.

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We are Rooted in the Foundation of the 12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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Things I Don’t Like About Contemporary Treatment: A Meditation From The Inside

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Recovery Blog, The Field of Treatment

Dr. Erich Fromm, one of my teachers, inspires the title, and much of the content here.

There is a huge shift transpiring in the field of drug and alcohol treatment, it is happening rapidly and systemically, it will be for the worst and difficult to reverse. Warning: the field of treatment is being infiltrated by people who are emotionally disconnected and un-empathetic towards the plight of the people they claim to serve.

What the treatment industry used to look like: A group of people who had an experience of transformation becoming missionaries and willing to do whatever it took to help addicts and alcoholics. Twelve step, spirituality, new clinical techniques, whatever helped people recover it was done with spirit, intention and legitimacy. I am not idealizing the past, there were always unscrupulous operators, but they were the exception rather than the rule (with some large scale exceptions in the 80’s treatment bubble).

What’s happening now is something different: salesmen, hustlers, and young wealthy kids who want to show their parents they can be successful, open treatment programs, for the wrong reasons and with no experience. Many Drs. And psychiatrists enter into the field as consultants or hired employees and get tempted by money and use their degrees as cache to become owners and operators of there own centers, these too tend not to be missionary healers, but more business savvy narcissists. What’s happening now in treatment is systemic, a result of the breakdown of ethics and spirit in the treatment field. All of this has come together in a near perfect storm to create an industry that seems to have lost its way. The new breed of treatment centers is looking at how to maximize profits, buy and sell addicts care, and become as large and efficient as possible. It is the wrong approach.

One of the contributing factors to this shift is the influx of narcissistic and egoistic personalities that own and operate treatment programs. Every day I hear about the shenanigans of the owners of large “successful” treatment programs. It is clear many of the owners of private rehabs have not done their own spiritual work. Many of these owners are pathological. They tend to have the psychological profile of compulsive gamblers: Mildly (or majorly) anti-social, grandiose, charismatic, addicted to the cycle of winning and loosing, self sabotaging, self-absorbed and lacking in empathy.

What makes this situation deeply troubling, as opposed to another unfortunate by-product of profit-centered capitalism, is that recovery once was a sacred field, largely due to Alcoholics Anonymous.

We have reached a moment in the field of treatment where events and industries have conspired to create the perfect storm. The issue is greed.

Treatment, when done correctly can be a profitable business, and treatment with a focus on profit (over care) can be insanely profitable. Treatment has now become an attractive field for those looking to make a quick buck. On some level what is happening is no different than what happened in the mortgage industry in the early 2000’s. The treatment bubble began to attract these characters (en masse) with the introduction of mental health coverage from insurance in conjunction with the capacity for huge online marketing efforts on Google.

How has this happened? There is a lot more money in the field than there was ten years ago. There is also, unfortunately, a growing customer base, as our country is in the midst of the worst heroin epidemic it has ever seen, and it is an epidemic affecting not only the lower, but also the middle and upper class that can afford to spend more on treatment. This has not gone unnoticed by venture capitalists, real estate investors, huge multinational corporations; they all see treatment as an industry they can capitalize on.

One of the reasons this works is that when families or clients choose to come to treatment all they know is the marketing, not the treatment itself. Unlike a restaurant, customers cannot just try the product and decide if they like it and go somewhere else. Rehab is a big investment. From the outside (or the website) there seems to be no difference between genuine experience legitimate treatment, and large commercial insurance farms. Financial success in this industry has little to do the quality of treatment and everything to do with marketing. The more one can focus their resources on marketing the more clients one will get. It has become a marketing game to fill beds. As a result you see the greediest operators achieving enormous success, putting marketing first (over care). The clients who don’t get the care they need don’t have a voice because they disappear back to where they came from, or sometimes, tragically, die. No one takes responsibility, and the most vulnerable among us are being exploited.

And, we now have the recovering community itself getting involved. Which in many ways is a great thing, but when a recovering person in the first couple years of recovery without much experience or know how opens a treatment center, the core of the treatment matches the core of the founder: shaky, compromised and not yet fully integrated.

So what does good treatment look like? A good treatment center is one that exemplifies healthy living, strong ethics, strong boundaries, expertise (through experience) and lots of love. The men and women in the trenches of their recovery, with an interest in transitioning into the field of recovery, become counselors, therapists, techs; they go back to school learn their crafts and 10 years later they have worked their way to positions of power, legitimately.

The best of us in the field are those who feel an obligation to our fellow person, see ourselves in the people we help, recognize our own limitations, can empathize deeply with suffering, and have the strength to help create a safe and sacred place for those in need to recover.

The other day I was visiting with a young man who just opened a new treatment center. I was speaking with him and the clinical director for longer than I had anticipated. It was clear he was excited about his new business and also clear that he was excited to be helping those who need it. We talked about ethics, spirit and fighting the trends of our industry. Treatment programs like his and mine, are becoming the exception. We are people first, we’ve done our own work, we have experience, we are small, smart, and we are values based. I am having these conversations more and more (with colleagues, with parents, with clients, with peers); there is a small underground group of us forming, perhaps a specter is haunting the treatment field: the specter of integrity![/vc_column_text]

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The Human Side of Treatment Behind the Opioid Epidemic: Ryan’s Story

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, The Field of Treatment

I was working in residential treatment a few years back; one Friday night, a new resident, Ryan, approached me. He was a teenager, 5’6” with big, kind eyes, natural dark circles, and a face that turned red at every feeling or change in temperature. He asked, vulnerably, if he could speak with me. I took him to my office, we sat down and I asked, “What’s up?”

“I got out of Heroin detox two days ago. I’m 8 days sober. And I’m craving shooting heroin again.”

I could see that he was quite sincere and on the razors edge of going this way or that. I looked him in his eyes and asked him: “How are you going to use?” This question surprised him; I think he thought I was going to talk him out of it.

“I’ll smoke it,” he said dryly.

“Do you have Heroin on you now?”

“No,” he said.

I asked, “How will you get Heroin?”

“From my dealer” he responded, clearly getting impatient and annoyed.

I proceeded, “Do you have money?”

“Ten bucks” he answered.

I said “Give it to me,” and he did, and I put it in my pocket. “Do you have a cellphone?” I asked.

“No,” he was beginning to catch on to our game.

“How are you going to call him?” I pressed.

With some finality he said, “I’ll panhandle, get the money, I’ll call him from a payphone at the gas station, and get high.”

“So he will come drop it off and you’ll get high at the gas station?”

“No.” Ryan said, “my dealer doesn’t deliver, I’d have to take the bus to Inglewood and meet him.”

I continued, “After you meet him and get the dope where will you get high?”

“I’ll get some tinfoil and a straw from burger King and smoke it in the bathroom there.”

“And then what?” I asked accusingly.

“I’d be high,” he replied.

“And then what?” I asked.

“I’d go home,” he answered.

“To your parents?” I asked.

“ No, they kicked me out. I’d come back here,” he admitted.

“To rehab?” I asked, “and then what?”

“I’d get sober,” he answered.

“You’d get sober? But you’re sober now!” I replied, too loud, revealing my inner judgement.

“Yes but when I am High I really want to be sober,” he said.

Aha. “So let me get this right, in order for you to stay sober you have to get high?”

Two days later, Ryan was on the street getting high. Ryan wanted to be sober. But he wanted to be high, also. By the eighth day in treatment and sober, he had run out of motivation to stay sober. Why did Ryan need to get high in order to stay sober? When he went into his memory he realized that when he was high, he found the motivation to get sober; the crisis of addiction created an energy, a desire in him to get well. Ryan was cutoff, he was stuck in his own thinking, and his thinking was cut off from the world. He was stuck in a narcissistic bubble of addiction. Ryan was rational, but his reasoning was driven by an unconscious craving to get high. He didn’t want to get high, that’s why he asked to talk to me, but it was almost as if once he engaged me he was sleep talking, unable to wake up and stay where it was safe and welcoming. Underneath the mechanics of Ryan’s thinking there was something else going on. Ryan was numb, and underneath his numbness was pain, fear and sadness.

I wonder if I had been able to break out of my role in that moment: warm and clever counselor and instead become loving and vulnerable with him, would the effect have been different? If I had held his hand, been there with him 2 or 3 hours or however long was necessary, listened to his pain, given him a hug, could I have broken through to a different part of him and changed his trajectory? As it was, I believe we were both stuck in our roles at the time, him the out-of-control addict in need of saving and me the young-smart-(slightly)-distant counselor. Ryan recovered from his condition; I am still working on mine.

Ryan ended up in treatment two weeks later and has been sober ever since. So it turns out he was right, he had to get high in order to get sober.[/vc_column_text]

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