Addiction: The Problem and Solution

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they are made to do. In this podcast, Chip sits down with his long time friend, Stephen James, to discuss addiction and its close ties to our early childhood experiences. Listen to learn about the central role that depression and anxiety play in the addiction process. Chip and Stephen also discuss the solution to addiction that is so simple but largely avoided by most people. Well, Chip, it finally seems like the, US government has caught up with what we've known to be true that there is an addictions epidemic going on in our culture. Last week, they announced or a couple weeks ago, they announced $1,100,000,000 in new money to help fight heroin and painkiller prescription drug abuse in our country. But that's something you've been talking about for a long time is the epidemic of addiction. Could you talk more about that and tell Yeah. Yeah. Sure can.

Well, you know, you and I have talked about a lot too. Addiction is almost certainly hidden and overt the number one problem in our country. I would even call it a pandemic. Until more than an epidemic. Oh, I would say it's it's it's it's going to destroy us. In fact, Califano, who was the, secretary of health education welfare in the Carter administration back in, you know, the seventies, late seventies. He wrote a book called High Society that I assume did not get a lot of play, but he did such a a great statistical overview of everything that was affected by addiction from all the way from cigarette smoking to alcohol, heroin and drugs. Did all kinds of, multifactorial recognitions of its impact in terms of hospitalization, prison, the lost days of work, unemployment, and he just proved the impact of addiction. But, addiction functions off of denial. And this whole nation is being driven by addiction, and therefore it's also being driven by denial, which sets us up for hundreds of different kinds of stress illnesses just in and of itself without classic drug or alcohol addiction. So what's the difference between addiction and denial? Denial literally means blindness. I'm unable to see. And if you just a second, I'll come back around because that's a that's an incredible question. But if you take, say, one alcoholic in this country, and one alcoholic has been shown to impact negatively three to four people at a time. How? Emotionally, spiritually, often physically, mentally. Financially, I guess. Yeah. Financially in every every factor, every area. But if you just take the minimum number of people affected three and you look at the twenty two point seven million alcoholics in this country, the number is probably higher than that. Mhmm. But according to the, you know, the the people who do the surveys, I believe it's the National Institute of Health in this case, three times twenty two million is sixty six million people who are set up to not be emotionally available to their own lives. Now, addiction is an impaired attempt to find the life we're made for without having to pay the price of living fully. And the price that we're made, the price that we have to pay to live fully is to feel fully, to to be affected, to let ourselves care. You have to be touchable, to let ourselves care. You have to be able to be sad, to let to attach. You have to be able to be to face loss. And when a person is emotionally impacted by alcoholism, they slip into a category called denial. Because to maintain the relationship with an alcoholic, the people around the half the alcoholic have to pretend, quote unquote, that the person doesn't have this problem. Why do they do that? Well, it's astounding. All of that, the why they do that is rooted in fear of loss of attachment, fear of rejection, fear of humiliation, fear of embarrassment, fear of being wrong, which ironically, generationally, these very same people that are in relationship with alcoholics were already in relationship with alcoholics in childhood or were raised by adult children of alcoholics. And we're just talking about alcoholics. I'm not talking about drug addicts yet or food addicts or depressive addicts or anxiety addicts and which we'll get to. But denial, what it means is that I deny what I'm looking at so I won't wind up feeling what I'm seeing. Because if you see something, it's gonna be connected to feeling something, which is kind of a tough connection. Why smoke or why Yeah. Run or why eat. Yes. We spend our lives doing everything we can to get control over our lives so we won't have to wind up being in a position of being out of control. And out of control to people affected by the disease of addiction means to having to feel

and it not mattering. So it seemed to me this new push for this epidemic against this epidemic, it really fighting one head of a two headed dog. It's like Servais the dog. You've got denial and addiction. I'll say it's like fighting Medusa. I mean, it's a head full of snakes and given power by God. Until there is a a gigantic reformation in our country emotionally and spiritually, until we accept that life is tragic and God is faithful or until we accept that agenda of science as our new God because our society has kind of become so secular that the God we've always known in terms of God we worship in our religion. This sort of faded, but we are people who are gonna have some way to perform a certain way to have control over life we don't control because we're running from powerlessness. We're running from the realities that life is going to hurt. Is that we're gonna be sad and we're gonna be lonely. We're gonna be afraid. We're gonna have anger. We're gonna have shame and guilt. And we're also also gonna have gladness and joy, but we try to manufacture our joy because even true joy has sadness in it. For example, if you raise a couple of children and they grow up to be fit and wonderful and kind and well educated, they grow up and they leave home And they grow up and they marry. They grow up and they have children. And let's just say they grow up and they get married, which is wonderful. At the same time, they're no longer yours. They're not with you anymore. They grow up and leave home. They separate. If you do a good job as a parent, it's gonna be sad. It's sad. So our greatest joys where we have looked forward to something and anticipated something. Now we're involved in something and it's gonna end. That's the nature of life. And so when we, we add joy, we're gonna have sadness with it. So joy is a willingness

to fully participate in something that matters to us knowing that it's going to end. Well, I've heard you say this. Unless we get adept at feeling sad and other feelings Mhmm. We're gonna end up being addicts. Absolutely. Unless you're adept at feeling the seven feelings we call negative, you're never gonna have the joy that gives you your fulfillment. And then we do everything in the world to avoid the negative feelings because cause we think they're bad and you have to do something to anesthetize yourself to avoid the quote negative feelings unquote. Anesthesia is numbness. Numbness means taking your brain and turn it away from your feelings, which means you have to have something to mood alter you. Addiction is a mood altering set of behaviors to change the way we feel. We are an addictive culture. Go back to the alcoholic. Twenty two million alcoholics. Every one person who is affected by that alcoholic, they see feelings as bad and dangerous and something to get them in trouble. So they spend their lives suppressing their feelings. They've also been traumatized too because alcoholics traumatize people with the threat of abandonment or worse. And the threat of abandonment is a freezing experience. It sort of turns on the adrenaline system and turns off the recognition of being fully present. The adrenaline system is fight, flight or freeze. Once that's turned on, the only way you can calm yourself is through some external means to create internal security because you can't go inside yourself to feel sadness, hurt or loneliness. So the three people that are directly affected by the alcoholic are all set up to find some form of control to whether it's exercise addiction because they swore they'd never drink, or perfectionism addiction, or control over people, places and things addiction because Parenting addiction. Parenting addiction, food addiction, cosmetic addiction, power addiction. Self righteousness. Self righteousness. It's the secret of sex addiction. Okay. So check this out. 310,000,000 people in this country. Twenty two million alcoholics plus sixty six million people traumatized by alcoholism. That's eighty eight million people in this country. Apparently, they they say that there are about a fifteen million drug addicts. And I know there's some crossover drug addiction and, alcoholism. But think about this. This this is just the illegal drug addiction folks. People sick with illegal drug addiction. Fifteen million times three again, forty five million plus fifteen million, sixty million. Sixty million plus 88,000,000 is a 148,000,000 people. We're almost at half of our nation And a big chunk of three hundred ten million people in this country are 18. 10. They're not addicts. So that number population is even a higher percentage. Right. So the 148,000,000

people. And And we're just talking alcohol and drugs. Exactly. Alcohol and illegal drugs. Alcohol and illegal drugs. Oh, Stephen. And you said just a minute ago that The United States Of America, I think you said it is, The United States Of America uses 80% of their narcotics that are prescribed in the whole world. In the whole world. And the CDC just came out with a a statement of that we've been teaching for years that initial pain, treatment for pain, Ibuprofen, cold packs, warm packs. You know, there are other ways of treating pain besides narcotics. And then when narcotics are needed, they're over prescribed. So we we live in a very difficult People are so afraid of pain. The doctors are so afraid of angering patients.

Well, you know what? Interesting about doctors, doctors are tragically when we start talking about the prescription drug addiction in this country, because the people who become addicted to narcotics are prescribed by physicians. The people who are addicted to Xanax and Valium and narcotics and the OxyContin. OxyContin. Yeah. Narcotics. They are prescribed by a doctor who very likely grew up wanting to be a people pleaser, a care giver, caretaker, a high achiever, and their job is to quote fix, unquote, people's problems. And so if they can't, they have failed in their mission. And then the patient's displeased or talks badly about them or wonders about their competence, which is a great threat to the physician whose potential worth is in their competence. So the physician will write a prescription. Write a prescription for probably more than the person needs. Or because a physician isn't well versed in the territory of referring somebody with anxiety to a therapist because they themselves believe it's a physical brain, issue only. Or if they do believe it's it's a therapeutic issue, they're scared to refer them because the patient's in a panic, literally. Literally. Yeah. And so they they write a prescription for Xanax. If a physician is astute, he knows that she knows that Xanax takes two weeks to become addicted to it. And then the patient comes back in two weeks and they are in a conflict. The physician is, do I write it again if I know this? Or if I don't believe it is, I'll just write it again. And then now the patient is officially, quickly, officially can be listed as a chemically dependent, which is a fancy word for prescribed addiction. And this nation is so full of addiction that there are commercials on now advertising a new constipation medicine for people who With opioid addiction. Or opioid addiction. Yeah. And and when I saw it the first time, I I just recalled like, my god. Is that where we are? Is that where we really are? And proof is that, about two months later, the CDC came out with its reports. So we're we're now well with just

alcohol, illegal drugs, prescription drug addiction, and the families that that that touches, the people that that touches, if we just say three people for each of those people, we're way up close to 310,000,000 people. Stephen, it's it's unreal. There was a study done back in the eighties on mainline churches and addiction. One of the main issues in mainline churches, especially one of the more conservative mainline churches was the prevalence of medicine cabinet addiction, the use of prescription drugs. In fact, I had a relative years ago that was on the wellness committee of church and made food for the shut ins and made food for people who had been to the hospital and had come home and been sick. And she would, you know, take the cake and then go to the restroom and go to the medicine cabinet. She was maintaining a drug addiction through the neighbors in a rural community, so which we think of as a place where it doesn't doesn't affect unless it's some some meth lab that's discovered. So it is more than an epidemic. It's a pandemic. And it's not a capitalistic problem, Stephen. The idea that it's It's not an American problem. It's not an American problem.

That's just drugs and alcohol. We throw in nicotine. Yeah. And we throw in America's number one addiction, sugar. Those are just those are all just substance addictions. Yeah. Things you put in your body. Mhmm. Then we have things that are processed addictions, like you mentioned sex Mhmm. Gambling, which even the psychological community will not recognize sex as sexual compulsive behaviors as addictive. They say there's there's only gambling addiction, alcohol and drug addiction. They they don't go will not even identify other things as addiction because it's too too much of a hot topic. But we have sex is a huge problem, sex addiction, pornography addiction. And then there's the other things like depression. Can you talk a little bit about depression and anxiety as an addiction? Because when I bring this up, people get angry and they get scared because they hear me say

blame blaming them. And there's that they made themselves this way. Right. And see, I don't believe that a person makes themselves an addict, makes themselves an addict. You have genetic susceptibility plus the inability to handle emotion, to to know what to do with it and then the vibrancy and benefit of it. So if you've got a genetic susceptibility and the inability to deal with life on life's terms emotionally, then you have to find something that feels like being alive. You have to. You have to. It's not a choice. You're gonna have to do it. We are made to live and we are made to live relationally. And if you can't live as yourself relationally, you have to find another relationship. To another form of attachment. Addiction's a An attachment to live fully. It's it's a sickness that comes from attachment disruption and fear of abandonment. Talk so then talk about anxiety and depression as forms of addiction. Yeah. Okay. We teach a thing. Let me say this, that anxiety and depression are extremely normal. And, they're going to happen to everyone in this life. No matter how healthy a person is, they're going to experience anxiety, which means an anticipation of something occurring that could threaten my life. I mean, that's what anxiety is. Things things happen that scare us. Yes. The hyper awareness of what's going on around us when we're situations that call for it as a biological safety

So the idea that something bad's happened to me in the past, I don't want it to happen again in the future. So I worry about that. That's inevitable. Yes. That's called anxiety. Yes. And depression in its natural form is going to be related to the defeat, not getting to express myself, repetitive sort of discouragements. And it is a normal experience to want to depress caring, depress the desire to try, depress so on. So, anxiety is attempt to get control of life and depression is an attempt to remove ourselves from caring about it, being affected by it. Now if a person has genetic susceptibility to have that brain chemistry triggered when their life's experiences put them in a position to try to control or try to withdraw if they have a susceptibility towards isolation

or hyperactivity. Or even, you know, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, their stress hormone cortisol is higher at birth than than other Jewish babies of the same generation. They're genetically wired for anxiety. Yeah. That's when we get into this idea of legacy burdens and sort of like Epigenetic trauma. Collective unconscious and Yeah. Epigenetic trauma and histones being turned, you know, those kinds of things that I'm not well versed in. Generational curses? Yeah. It's the same thing? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so a person could have that genetic susceptibility and no fault of their own to be anxious or depressed. Well, when a person doesn't know how to handle life emotionally and they don't know the benefit of emotion, then either anxiety and or depressive impact is going to be highlighted. That's inevitable. It's simply inevitable. Because anxiety ultimately is a fear of our expression of how scared we are and the anger we have about that fear. K. Okay. Depression is in many ways, an expression when I don't know what to do with my feelings. It's like I don't know where to go to grieve and I don't know who's gonna hear me if I do. So it's like a giving up on anger. It's an attempt to suppress desire because they've been defeated or mocked. They've been useless or there's no point in having it. So we're trying to remove ourselves from life and depression and trying to take over life and anxiety. And it makes a ton of sense. If feelings are horrible, terrible, ugly, sickening, destructive things that not only put me in a position of powerlessness, but put me in a position of helplessness where my life is at stake. And that's what it feels like to people who have run from their feelings or are traumatized, then depression and anxiety is a natural result. Now the repetitive return to the genetic susceptibility and a compulsive movement towards it has all the characteristics of depression. So if I'm Excuse me. Addiction. If I'm

If I've learned to Happens reactively. Press down my heart, depress my heart, or I've learned to over function in anxiety. Yeah. K. And I get some some sort of relief from that dopamine or a payoff Yes. Then I'm much more likely to go do that again. Yes. And and do not think that addiction in and of itself is always about ecstasy. There's an addiction that directly related to dysphoria that I'm most comfortable when I care least. I'm most comfortable when I'm most removed. When I can slow my life down to the point that it's like there's barely a heartbeat, I'm safe. I'm comfortable. I'm, anesthetized. I'm dumb. And and you're saying, and I agree with you, that that very quickly becomes an unconscious compulsive movement. Yes. And addiction is not a person's fault. Depression is not a person's fault nor is anxiety disorder. In our culture though, anytime a person has a problem and anytime the problem can't be solved quickly or isn't solved quickly, then the person is blamed. Yeah. Addiction is an attempt to have the life that God created you to have without disappointing people or without getting in trouble for paying the price. Addiction is an impaired attempt to have full life without paying the price of feeling

fully. And there's no way not to pay the price. And Stephen, it's amazing about feelings. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about so what about so we've laid out the addictions crushing the world. And So what are we doing now? Including the people who are addicted to trying to stop people from being addicted. I mean, the people who are married to alcoholics and related to it would their their codependence. Their worth is built on changing the way a person behaves. And if they don't if the alcoholic behaves poorly, then they feel terrible. If the alcoholic is sober for a little while, they feel better. So what do we do? Well, I've mentioned earlier that there needs to be a reformation in this country. But the reformation is about facing that we don't have control. We are emotional and spiritual creatures in need of relationship to live fully. And we can't live fully unless we're in relationship with ourselves, others and God.

And that's how How do I begin to do that? Being in relationship with myself? The solution per person is so simple that it's embarrassing. That it's literally about feeling your feelings. Having somebody show you what it means to feel your feelings and then tell the truth about them. And there are only eight feelings, Stephen. You and I have been teaching Twist the heart for you. Nails that. Yes. So it's not like it's a complicated thing. It's like three primary colors, certain number of musical notes, eight feelings, certain amount of organs in the body. Like you said, social behaviors. Tell the truth and give it to the process, which is exactly what a kindergarten child will do that's been raised with just good enough parents, good enough environments, nothing special. Feel your feelings as normal as waking up and blinking, as normal as breathing. Your feelings are in utero. They're birthed into you. They come with the package of you. You literally start reaching out into to life with them at birth. You express yourself with them before you can talk with, a language of your culture. You're talking with the language of life. And it's about getting your needs met through expressing your feelings. And so feel your feelings. Tell the truth about them. When a child is born, they're powerless over doing anything but telling the truth.

I mean So how does reattaching to oneself and reattaching to others and reattaching to God begin to take away our need for addiction. It makes a person available to what addiction is about. Addiction is an impaired attempt to live fully, but now without having to pay the price. So guess what? Living fully is about facing that you are created as an emotional spiritual creature. You're made to use that to be in relationship. Being in relationship is full life. And believe it or not, full life is a willingness even an attraction to loving so much that I'm willing to be in that kind of pain if love is lost with death or cataclysm or some other what we call malfunction of reality, even though it is reality. That books are written and stories are told about the great loves. And the great loves have a willingness in them to have great loss. That's the full life. And we're made for really four forms of relationship, but relationship with ourselves so I can become present to experiencing life, touchable, knowable. And then my experience of my heart with you, and then my experience of my heart with god. God has to be relational. We can't do relationship with god, so god has to have a heart. And then what's amazing is once we're fully alive in relationship, we cannot help but create. We end up adding to life, which is our fourth relationship. Our fourth relationship is what we add to life and our willingness, desire, joy in doing that. Through service and through creativity. Creativity. Making. The carving your way in the world. It's like leaving something behind. That's a fourth relationship. That's how we build, legacy. And anyone who's participating in life with their work, like, you know, a sculptor sculpts with a picture of the beauty of what they're doing. But they're also kinda like can't help but on some level picture somebody's seen it. Just like a little kindergarten child takes a drawing home that that looks like probably in many ways nothing of what they see and wanting to show it to somebody. I want to show my life to someone. So the cure for addiction is relationship.

Full hearted, true hearted, child hearted, pure hearted relationship. Yes. And I know the physiological components, but you can't treat a drug with a drug when it comes to addiction. And that's what we're doing. The Suboxone clinics are opening up. It's a repeat of the middle and late seventies that are in the Vietnam era when we tried the methadone for heroin, still doing that junk. It's absurd. And that society trying to get control of the people that are threatening to them. Even DuPont, who was one of the main proponents of doing the methadone clinics Yeah. Recanted many years later and saying what a mistake they want. Yeah. Just because it's waste of time. Absolutely. Waste of money. Yeah. And just because a person stops the the, lust for, a drug doesn't mean it stops their craving for life. They haven't had the emotional and spiritual repair to actually attach to their life and participate in their life and create in their life and live fully. So addiction in their life. Addiction is an impaired attempt

to actually try to find what we're made for without risking heart. So once detox is done, whatever that means, and I know we live, you know, that that means so many things. I quit running 13 miles a day. Yeah. There's so much talk about how to detox from drugs and so on. But once detox is done, if a person is not beginning to address the kindergarten child, so to speak, then they won't make it. Because you can't say no to what harms you until you have something to say yes to. So when we'll never say no to what harms us until we have our yes. And the yes is the thing we've been running from our whole lives. Since we were a child. Yeah. And you know, what's amazing about that more than they realize, people are scared of feelings and we we would die not to feel. And the thing is feelings only do two things. I mean, these two things that that we run from that we will die to avoid are very small. I mean, they're not bad. We if we have feelings, we'll feel them. That's number one, danger. If we have feelings, we feel them. That's a danger. That's what people run from. It reminds us of the pain where we've come from. Yeah. And then we will remember. So what's amazing is if you can't feel your feelings, you literally are unborn. You're not living in your life. You're a zombie. You're not yeah. No matter how you look, no matter how you dress, no matter how much you run, no matter how much your success. And you and I have heard, all of us have heard, great, famous, wonderful, incredible people who live on the mountain top of success and are are miserable and dying within.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. If you're interested in learning more about the power of our core eight emotions, I encourage you to check out Chip's book, The Voice of the Heart, A Call to Full Living. If you're a therapist, a pastor, or professional that works with people, and you'd like to be better equipped to help people live fully, we invite you to learn more about Sage Hill Training. This is an in-depth experiential training to help you bring your heart to the work you are called to do. You can visit sagehilltraining.com to find out more.