On Addiction: Pandemic

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 Show podcast on addiction with Dr. Chip Dodd and Phil Herndon. This is a new weekly podcast recorded at the Center for Professional Excellence. Hey, everybody. Welcome back in to the Sage Hill podcast. Glad you're listening today. We're recording today from the Center for for Professional Excellence. Most of you know us by CPE. And, we're starting a series of who knows how long this thing will go. As, most of you know, we are an addictions treatment center, and addiction is a has a big old definition, but, there's no more appropriate subject to, talk about than this thing addiction, because it's a whole lot bigger than than a lot of people know. I'm here with Executive Director and Founder of CPE Chip Dye. Hello Chip. Hey Phil. How are you doing? I'm You know, it's

amazing, this Center for Professional Excellence, is you know, we're twenty two years quietly into this, assisting people in getting recovery from what ails them, whether, you know, it's, some form of addiction or some form of impairment, recovery from it so they can get recovery of their lives. And, we're really grateful to be here to talk about this, and we're talking about, something today that is has pandemic proportions to it. And and and while right now what's making the news is the opioid, epidemic, this isn't an epidemic. It's a pandemic, and it's amazing how little it's been talked about considering all the damage addiction does. So Let's back up for a minute. You said, you know, pandemic. We did a little research Yeah. Like, you know, phone on our phones research about three minutes ago. Uh-huh. Because we were talking about, you know, addiction,

like you said, opioid addictions are big these days, that kind of thing. Yeah. But we said, man, this thing is a pandemic. We looked it up Yeah. And, you know, pan means everywhere. Yeah. Endemic means people. So this thing is all over the people. Yeah. So there's the t now. You you hit it. Well, you know, the pan the pandemic piece, endemic really historically means localized to a specific group or group of people. And when we start talking about pandemic, we're talking about something that goes across cultures, race, creeds, you know, the the religious, indoctrination or religious belief system past, any kind of ethnic group. This thing, affects everyone if you're human. Mhmm. Now there are different populations, different groups where, you know, addiction to certain substances or addiction in and of itself is more pronounced in terms of alcoholism than in other groups. Mhmm. But whereas we talk about what addiction is over time in this series, we're gonna start highlighting that addiction is much more insidious than it's evident, you know, when it's just, sort of a exaggerated evident experiences that we see, people on bridges, what we think of as, Skid Row people Mhmm. That alcoholism, drug addiction, pharmaceutical prescribed addiction, sex addiction, nicotine addiction, cosmetic addiction, gambling addictions, food addictions, processed food. It's a power addiction, exercise addiction, even religious addiction. Anything that takes us away from having to fill our lives, really, is can have this addiction, component.

So So you named off a bunch of words, and after going on, you said addiction. So let's stop a minute and define it. Well, I'll tell you what. That's a great question. And, you know, you and I do what? It certainly is. And, we may look up a word before we start, but don't don't don't even dare to think that that's about our lack of expertise because we wanna be very, very specific with people to to not say things that that aren't actually accurate to the experience. So if anything, we're gonna minimize, the impact of what we're talking about. Mhmm. But addiction, it has so many, sort of, like, like, 10 tangents in the definition, but it has a core factor related to it. One, addiction to whiz, we treat addiction here. We call addiction, it's an impaired attempt to actually get the life you're created to have because we believe that a person is is created as an emotional and spiritual creature, created to do one thing in life, and it's live fully. What's amazing about human beings is science has backed this up now like crazy in the past five years. It's like a public conscious knowledge, is that human beings are created for relationship, that we literally grow through relationship. So we're emotional and spiritual creatures created to do one thing in life. It's live fully. But the only way we're gonna live fully is through relationship with ourselves, head to heart, connected, integrated, able to be congruent, head to heart, relationship with myself, relationship with others, the heart of others, and relationship with with God. So those are the three primary experiences of being full or being, experiencing completion or gratification, because we're literally made to be gratified, which means to have a sense of pleasure, pleased in life, and it doesn't always mean happiness, but it does mean that the sense of purpose, a sense of, a passion, sense of reason to be, and also what we we value something bigger than ourselves connected. Mhmm. So, you you have to have the opposite of addiction to be able to define addiction. Yeah. So, addiction is an impaired attempt to have the life we're made for, which means to be fully alive in relationship. It's an impaired attempt to have the life we're made for without having to pay the price of feeling fully, or without having to pay the price of what it costs us to experience the vulnerability of relationship. So quickly, quick down and dirty, it's an impaired attempt to feel fully alive without having to pay the price of feeling fully. Mhmm. Another really good definition of addiction, is, is a a morbid process, which means deadly or going towards destruction. It's a morbid process with a characteristic chain of symptoms of honor of known or unknown origin that is progressive, chronic with acute, episodes, and often fatal. Mhmm. So, there's your sort of the scientific definition of disease and addiction. But ultimately, addiction in and of itself, I think that, when we look at its its etymology, it's def it's, it's, where it derives from. Etymology of addiction is comes from the word it's a Roman or Latin word, actually, but it was a Roman legal term. It was the right of a Roman citizen, the dictum, of the right of a Roman citizen to have ownership of another human being, because if you're not Roman, you're kinda not human. So addiction actually means slavery. It means enslavement. But addiction is enslavement to anything that allows us to be connected with that while also the experience of believing we have control. It's it's it's pleasure or the experience of well-being or experience of being connected without having to be vulnerable,

even if you become physically ill, lose money, lose your family, lose your standing, like And that speaks that speaks to two things. One is it speaks to the power of our craving for connection. It also speaks to what happens when that, connection gets thrown off physiologically, that hunger for connection gets thrown off physiologically, that literally we're only okay if we are physiologically, involved with that substance or process or thing that we do to make us, numb to our neediness. So I get pain, you know, pain killer or Valium or something like that can numb me to that, but a guy going to Vegas and gambling or a guy soliciting a prostitute, I mean, how's that? How's he getting numb like a guy taking Valium? Well, yeah. So it's like, say, a guy going to let's just go to the prostitute. The prostitute the guy who's, like, going to a prostitute, this is gonna sound crazy, but that person is is attempting to get a legitimate need, Matt Mhmm. Through illegitimate means. Mhmm. So, there's nothing wrong with the person craving connection. In this case, this person's craving the idea of, you know, being wanted, being, satisfied, gratified without having to be needy, or some form of actually, believe it or not, it's self humiliation. To go to a prostitute is actually humiliating my neediness. It humiliates my vulnerability, hunger to be vulnerable. It's an attempt to be connected while while also, paying for the connection, which really makes me in control of the connection. So it's a false connection, but it does meet a need temporarily. Uh-huh. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. Gambling, same thing. It's going and doing something, to experience the thrill of being connected, while at the same time, it winds up often because what from what I understand, nobody beats Las Vegas Yeah. And nobody beats prostitution, ultimately. It's a way of, actually being it's self rejection. So when this per this guy, this person But we need to talk about what is it, what does it mean to be self rejecting too, which we'll do later.

So this person, guy, person, is doing all that. Logic says don't do that. Don't solicit a prostitute. Don't lose all your money in Vegas. Don't knock yourself out and not be available to your family, friends, or whatever on drugs, but we have a pandemic on our hands. Yeah, there's so many directions to go here, but let's stick with, for a little while, the power of what addiction is and, how unable or how sick we have become as a society in terms of our inability to live fully in relationship. And Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, along with Bob Smith, doctor Bob Smith, who often doesn't get the, focus or attention that you Friends of Bill, not friends of Bill and Bob. That's right. But Bill Wilson said, and this could be really abused, but he he said that ultimately, alcoholism is a symptom of our inability to form a true partnership with another human being. This man was naming and this is not new. It wasn't new to him. It wasn't new to going back for thousands of years, but, I mean, he's talking about inability to live in the vulnerability of how we're made to hunger to find fulfillment in relationship. So the inability to tell the truth about ourselves, what's happening inside of us, to make confession to others in our agreement that I'm human and I'm in need, and I'm not God, so somebody's got something's got to be bigger than me to do for me what I can't do for myself. But we're living in a time now where connection has become so so, important not to throw a wrench in this, but now it's turned into connection or relationships, now the new pill. I'm saying that addiction is a primary sickness, a primary disorder. It's like cancer. It's like diabetes. If you don't address the sickness, it doesn't matter how much relationship a person has, only by being clear with being able to think and feel and tell the truth about myself am I clear enough to be able to connect. So unless I'm sober, abstinent, not using, not involved in this mood altering experience, am I even able to connect? And we're getting a lot of material now out in the public about, really, addiction is nothing but impairment of desire. So if you desire truthfully, then addiction goes away. Not true. Agreed? Yeah. And you see it happening all over the place. As a matter of fact, I think we may could spend the next the rest of this segment talking about that right there. Yeah. Go ahead and say some stuff about that because if you're not looking through both lenses of your glasses, one the one lens is addiction is a primary disorder. Yeah. You're not gonna your left eye is not gonna work until you face that one. And your right eye is the part where there it is about impaired desire, impaired craving, not not not knowing how to say yes to how I'm made and placing that in the right place with relationship or passion for my life or saying yes to how I'm made and doing something purposeful that that my my relationships matter more than addiction. Yeah. You know? So you gotta look through both lenses because if if all we're doing is helping people make connections, somehow addiction is gonna go away. All we're doing is giving them reasons to go drink or drug or whatever because there's no way addiction I mean, connection fixes a person. You've got to know what to do with your feelings. It's a feeling disorder. So addiction ultimately then is whatever I gotta do to avoid my feelings is addiction. And if I can't deal with my feelings, I'll never get get recovery from what ails me. So it's a feelings disorder. Guess what? Deal with your feelings, you relieve yourself of the disorder, or have opportunity to, anyway. Yeah.

You know, I was in my own history, my own recovery well, addictionrecovery history. This is not about to be a, anything at all, an spurs into the church. I grew up a church kid, very active in church, and I was told by very well meaning people, not necessarily in church, just well meaning people, that what I needed was to get out of isolation and connect with people. Well, my place to do that was church. It had always been my haven. Yeah, this is a great example. Yeah, and so I gravitated back to the church, and I really did make connection. There were some great people, And and I learned a great deal, but there still became the secret life. So I ended up wanting to get out of addiction, but ended up in a dual life. Yes. So the church life Yeah. And then that other thing that really Drawn to the connection, but not able to tell the whole truth Yeah. About what your fears were, your hurts, your loneliness. Yeah. Yeah. That yes. And that that was the one again, that's not a a blame church thing as much as I got there and just used different words to cover up with. Yeah. They were spiritualized words. So you you in some ways, you did a lot of recovering, a lot of us recovering, you said you had the best of both worlds. Did I ever? I did a lot of both. Except the energy required, and, believe it or not, the

the conscience that won't go away, and the wishing to be fully known that won't stop, and the hunger to be cared about as you are won't end, you know? So I mean, the pain of living in secrecy, in some ways, that having the best of both worlds was, doubling your, ultimate despair. You know? For sure. Isn't it amazing? Yes. You had to be on guard everywhere and felt bad about, on some level, everything. And one of the keys was that idea of, of feelings. I you know, course, the old saying, I didn't know a feeling from third base. Yeah. I knew I was after something, and, I had no I had no access. I had language. I was gonna say didn't have language in me. I didn't have any access to that language at all. Yeah.

And there it is. Now this is you and I are going to take off on that point. I had no access to that language at all. The number of times that we have treated I mean, we have treated some of the most brilliant, professionals, many of them physicians, lawyers, clergymen. I mean, just go down the list. I mean, these are the people who are who are the, you know, the carriers of the wisdom, knowledge, expertise, and health of our world. Yes. And these people have asked us, say, where did you get this? Because I don't even know where you got it, but I know it's true. How come I didn't have access to it? And that's what we're gonna spend the rest of this podcast talking about. Where did our access to the solution go? Mhmm. Where has it been hidden, and how come it's been hidden? And that is really a part of this pandemic that's gonna do nothing but get worse until we have some type of old fashioned word, a reformation, or some type of collapse into having to be, having to find access. But look, there are approximately, and they're different different, studies, but, you know, Center for Disease Control, National Institute for Drug and Alcohol, what is it? Drug and Alcohol Assessment. Anyway, the Like ASAM? Yeah. But the big the big groups that study addiction and use and define what addiction is for us, one one study, that was two years old, three years old, said there were, like, twenty two million, full blown alcoholics in this country. I think we've always called it alcoholism, but now it's called

a sub Substance abuse substance use disorder. Substance use disorder. Yeah. Still alcohol dependence. But all the research that's gone on for really in-depth for fifty years now that that that let's say there are twenty million alcoholics, just so we can do the numbers, and the estimate is somewhere between fifth fifteen and twenty two, but, you know, alcoholism is the great hidden sickness. So, I mean, so, you know, my belief is that twenty million is a significant underestimation. Hey. But so just for for for just to prove our point here, let's go with the smallest number. Let's go with the 15,000,000, statistic. You know, at this point, you're on your own doing numbers. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's fine. Yeah. But I could do multiplication.

Outside of that, don't take me into complicated anything. But this is simply, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Fifteen million alcoholics, way low number. And we know from all the research that's done that that alcoholism is a is a relationally damaging disorder, and we're all made to live in relationship. So if you've got a a person who's an alcoholic, research has shown that three to four people, every one person stuck in the disease of alcoholism, and it is a sickness, Mhmm. Because no one has intention to do the damage that alcoholism does to self and others. Yeah. Nobody plans that. No way. And no only the rarest psychopath actually finds pleasure in it, and unfortunately, they do. But, you know, Vernon Johnson said, and I'll quit tomorrow, which I think makes tons of sense and believe it completely, a psychopath cannot become addicted because they have a disorder of not being able to access feelings because they don't find fulfillment and connection. Mhmm. So they they're not relational creatures for whatever happened to them. No. So people don't plan to destroy their lives and destroy relationships around them, but we need to know that. So there's something more powerful controlling how they're created. So that's addiction. So anyway, though, but for every one alcoholic, there are three to four people who are detrimentally impacted, and the impact upon them starts with emotional and spiritual damage, which means that they have to withhold, anesthetize, numb, hide, remove themselves from, dissociate from how they're made to protect themselves from getting more hurt. They had to protect themselves mentally, sometimes physically, had to protect themselves emotionally and spiritually, which means they're dissociated from how they're made. They don't gain the experience of how to grow to live in relationship and vulnerability to connect. So and we're not talking about car crashes. Yeah. We're talking about living daily living Mhmm. In the presence, in the in the circumstances around an alcoholic. So fifteen million alcoholics, these people are dying. The book called High Society by Califano, who was the secretary of health, education, welfare under Carter, wrote an incredible book that said eighty eight percent of the problems in this country economic, hospitalizations, medical insurance, jails goes on down the lines connected to addiction. So, anyway, so take the number three three times fifteen million of people who are impacted by alcoholism, and they're removed these people's big impact is they're removed from knowing how to access their feelings and deal with them. They have to run from, hide, or anesthetize access to their emotional abilities. Okay? So three times fifteen is forty five million. So you got forty five million people who are unable to live in intimacy with other human beings. They don't know how to form a true partnership with another human being. So these people are set up to have to connect somehow, so they're gonna connect somehow with some type of mood altering experience Yeah. Which, if unaddressed, becomes addiction. Okay? Yeah. So you've got fifteen million people who are dying from alcoholism. You've got forty five million people who are set up to become addicts or joined these other people in alcoholism. We know that sons of alcoholics are nine times more likely to become alcoholics themselves. This is a contagious sickness, and twin studies have shown that whether or not you grow up around an alcoholic, you can you can be a twin separated from the alcoholic at a very young age and live in a nonalcoholic environment and still have a four to five times greater likelihood of becoming an alcoholic than you would if you were growing up without this genetic or hereditary illness. So it's like, this is a big problem. So forty five million plus fifteen million is sixty million people who are addicted or going to become addicted. Wow. Phil, that's that's amazing. And any other sickness in this country Oh, boy. Any other problem, there were sixty million strong Yeah. We would be screaming from the rooftops. There would be protests in Washington. We would be marching on the solutions, like, demanding that something be done, and pretty much, Phil, we have more advertising about mood altering related to drinking than we have any advertising about this tragic sickness that's, carrying off generation after generation in front of us because it's not arrested. So the the six year olds right now all over the place are are learning how to lose access to their feelings. So so you got 15,000,000 alcoholics, and the the research has shown fifteen million illegal drug illegal drug use using addicts. In other words, streets, what we think of as street drugs, are, they're they're not medically prescribed. And it's fifteen million there. I think that number is underreported, but let's go with ten million. Same principle. Ten million three times is thirty million. Thirty million plus ten million addicts is forty million. Forty million addicts plus the, sixty million alcoholic in impact. What are we looking at? A hundred million people. Exactly. Now let's say there's crossover, crossover with illegal drug use and alcoholism. Well, we know that, but you know what? There's generally a drug of choice preference and a dabbling in one thing, but a person's pretty much either alcoholic Mhmm. Or they're, addicted to other drugs. So, you know and even those have their own specifications as that Kentucky study showed us we'll talk about. So, look, you got a hundred million people, and we haven't talked about pharmaceutical addiction. You know, the the many medical doctors are emotionally and spiritually fearful of saying, I can't help you, or your problem isn't isn't physical. It's emotional, spiritual, psychological. Here's a reference a referral. So Xanax is prescribed like crazy for periods of panic or anxiety when actually, if used at all or if prescribed at all, it needs to be, like, three, four pills maybe at a certain dose because it only takes two weeks to become addicted to to, Xanax. Two weeks. Two weeks. The opioid epidemic how many times have you and I been around a physician related to a medical surgery of some kind, and they say, research has shown that if a person's using opioids, they cannot become addicted if they're using it for the right reasons. Yeah. Not true. Not true. Not true. Uh-uh. Now, after, like, four years now, we're hearing doctors all awaken to the truth of it and how they don't prescribe them anymore, so they're covering their tracks because most doctors and you and I could trace this. We've we've seen this. Most doctors come from some type of family that has addiction influences in it, and they often are approval seeking wounded children who grow up to become professionals, and they're fearful of disapproval. They're fearful of what happens to them if they're not caring for other people. They're fearful of not achieving. So if they don't satisfy the patient, give them what they're looking for, and that can mean opioids or Xanax or Klonopin to stem the symptoms, because they're all about stemming the symptoms, they they make addicts. Doctors makes addicts out of the fear that they'll be disapproved of and abandoned. They will be disconnected. Which comes down to their having

feelings about saying no. Yes. Yes. So so doctors in many ways are the biggest drug dealers, and they're paid well-to-do it. I mean, they they get a lot of their education post medical school from pharmaceutical companies, and they're basing it on research, but a lot of the research is directly connected to dollar bills. I mean, we gotta keep making the drugs to to to change the way a person feels because it's science based evidence. The drug works, But the drug actually is, most of the time, taking away, taking person away from having to find access to dealing with their feelings.