#96 – Ask the Expert – Dr. Adi Jaffe
Bringing Moderation into the Conversation About Recovery
We’re excited to introduce our new series, Ask the Expert, where your host, Ashley Loeb Blassingame, exchanges views with and picks the brains of industry leading experts.
Our first episode of the series features Dr. Adi Jaffe.
Adi Jaffe, Ph.D. is a #1 best-selling author and a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction, relationships and shame. He lectured in the UCLA Psychology department for the better part of a decade and was the Executive-Director and Co-Founder of one of the most progressive mental health treatment facilities in the country – until he started IGNTD.
Dr. Jaffe, through IGNTD, is changing the way people think about, and deal with mental health issues. His passion in the role of shame destroying lives is the philosophy behind IGNTD Recovery and its aim to greatly reduce the stigma of addiction and mental health.
Dr. Jaffe attended UCLA, graduating with a B.A. in psychology. It was during his undergraduate career that Adi began struggling with drug issues himself, eventually leading to a 4 year hiatus from studies and into the Los Angeles drug-dealing world where he became quite successful. During that period of his life, Adi’s days looked more like a re-enactment of a beatnik novel or a Quentin Tarantino film than the life of an upper-middle class suburban kid. Following a SWAT team arrest in his apartment, and extended court case and a year-long jail sentence, Adi began rebuilding his life. This eventually led to his attainment of a Ph.D. from UCLA’s top-rated doctoral program in psychology, where he graduated with honors. Even before he graduated Dr. Jaffe’s name had become known through his online and academic writing. His views on addiction and his research on the topic have been published in dozens of journals and online publications and he has appeared on numerous television shows and documentaries discussing current topics in addiction and the problem of addiction as a whole.
Dr. Jaffe now writes a blog on Psychology Today, and several other online and print sources. His goal is to bring the latest knowledge about addiction to the people who could benefit from it most – those who are suffering because of it. His writing combines personal experience with a decade’s worth of fine-detail research regarding the mechanisms involved in the addictive process. Dr. Jaffe has been featured in CNN, The Huffington Post, Bustle, Los Angeles Times, KTLA.
Episode Resources
- Dr. Jaffe’s Book | The Abstinence Myth
- IGNTD | Hero Program
Connect with Dr. Adi Jaffe
- Dr. Jaffe’s Instagram | @dradijaffe
- IGNTD Instagram | @igntd.me
- IGNTD Website | igntd.com
Connect with Us at The Courage to Change
- Podcast Website | lionrock.life/couragetochangepodcast
- Podcast Instagram | @couragetochange_podcast
- Podcast Facebook | @thecouragetochangepodcast
- Podcast Email | podcast@lionrock.life
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Episode Transcript
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Hello beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast! My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. I am so excited for this week’s Ask the Expert with Dr. Adi Jaffe.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Adi is a Ph.D. and a # 1 best-selling author, a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction, relationships and shame. He lectured in the UCLA Psychology department for the better part of a decade and was the Executive Director and Co-Founder of one of the most progressive mental health treatment facilities in the country, until he started IGNTD. Dr. Jaffe, through IGNTD, is changing the way people think about, and deal with mental health issues. His passion, and the role of shame destroying lives is the philosophy behind IGNTD Recovery and it’s aim to greatly reduce the stigma of addiction and mental health.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Dr. Jaffe attended UCLA, graduating with a B.A. in psychology. It was during his undergraduate career that Adi began struggling with drug issues himself, eventually leading to a 4 year hiatus from studies and into the Los Angeles drug-dealing world, where he became quite successful. During that period of his life, Adi’s days looked more like a re-enactment of a beatnik novel or Quentin Tarantino film than the life of an upper-middle class suburban kid. Following a SWAT team arrested in his apartment, and extended court case and a year long jail sentence, Adi began rebuilding his life. This eventually led to his attainment of a Ph.D. from UCLA’s, his top tier rated doctoral program in psychology, where he graduated with honors. Even before he graduated Dr. Jaffe’s name had become known through his online and academic writing. His views on addiction and his research on the topic have been published in dozens of journals and online publications and he has appeared on numerous television shows, documentaries discussing current topics in addiction, and the problem of addiction as a whole.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Dr. Jaffe now writes a blog on Psychology Today, and several other online and print sources. His goal is to bring the latest knowledge about addiction to the people who could benefit from it most – those who are suffering because of it. His writing combines personal experience with the decades worth of fine detail research regarding the mechanisms involved in the addictive process. Dr. Jaffe has been featured in CNN Huffington Post, Bustle, Los Angeles Times, and KTLA.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Whew, Dr. Jaffe is a really, really impressive human being, but he is, also has an incredible personality, just really fun guy and as you’ll hear in the episode, very connected to his emotions and his passion, which makes it super fun to talk to him. He is also very controversial in the treatment, the addiction treatment field world, because he talks about moderation and harm reduction and I wanted to say a little bit about that before we jump in.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So we’re going to talk in this episode about Adi’s belief system around helping people and abstinence not being the gatekeeper to recovery. And what I want to make clear is that if you are sober, if you are abstinent, and as that is working for you, our conversation about moderation is not aimed towards you. Our conversation about moderation and abstinence or lack thereof, is talking about the people who don’t go to treatment because abstinence is an early requirement. The people who abstinence is the thing that stops them from seeking help. Where instead of going to an abstinence-based treatment, they continue to use, they would do nothing else.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So really, what we’re talking about is saving the lives of the people for whom abstinence is this huge block and if they could cross over that, they might be able to get help and Adi has some really incredible ideas around that and he talks about them. We talk about his book, and I push him on some topics around that and we just had a really lovely, intense, intimate conversation that was incredibly informative and I hope that it is informative for you around the topic of harm reduction and what is available to people.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I do want to express here, as sort of a disclaimer, that what has worked for me is abstinence-based recovery and many people that I know, and moderation is not something that would have worked for me. So it is not something that I typically talk about but, as Adi and I talk about I am here to save lives and help people on their journey and the same way that Lionrock started community meetings, where people can be in any type of recovery. However, they define it. It’s really important to me that people know that there are lots of ways for people to get to their healing. So again, this is not permission to go drink. So if you hear that, please call your sponsor or email us. But Dr. Jaffe is doing some really cool stuff at IGNTD. And I think it’s an important conversation to have. So whew, after all that, I hope you enjoy our conversation. Episode 96 of Ask the Expert, I give you Dr. Adi Jaffe. Let’s do this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You are listening to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast! We’re a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds, and found the courage to change. Each week, we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Adi, welcome!
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
How are you doing? Thank you, thank you so much for having me Ashley.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Doing well. So we start in Season 3, we’re starting off each episode with the worst haircut picture that you can find just as an icebreaker. [inaudible 00:06:25]
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I’m scared.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, and so. You’re scared yeah, I have this picture of you, and you look just like Eminem.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Oh, you have an Eminem picture.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, Marshall, Marshall Mathers. What, tell me about, so we post the picture on our Instagram, so listeners can go check it out. So tell me about this picture of you that I’m looking at. It looks like you and maybe your dad and you’re smoking a cigarette and you look like Marshall, math, Marshall Mathers. That’s like back then what’s going on in that?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So that actually, by the way, the weird thing about that whole thing is it happened right around 2000. So literally like when Eminem was coming up.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, yeah!
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And I’m sorry, and I’m going to put you on blast here, but I didn’t steal Eminem’s haircut. I rocked, I rocked the bleach Caesar cuts since high school. And then in true 90’s, rolling into early 2000’s style, let the tips grow out, which it’s just, it’s stylistically appropriate is what it is. And, but here’s the funny thing about that picture, I don’t think I’ve ever told this story publicly. So a friend of mine used to shoot for Urb magazine, U R B magazine. And they did rap, and dance electronica back in the day. And so, one day she was doing a photo shoot for us and she left a CD, or I think it might’ve been a zip drive back in the days of zip drives or things.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mhmm.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
She left it in my recording studio cause, I was actually doing music as well. And I looked at it and there’s this picture of me looking out the shower curtain. And I’m like, was I that messed up, that I don’t remember her taking, we were at my studio shooting. Did we go to my house? And like take a shower? This didn’t make sense. So I, I literally, I texted her at the time. I was like, what, what is this, what did we take this picture? She’s like, oh, that’s not you. That’s this rapper Eminem.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Stop.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I didn’t even recognize myself as,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Wow.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
We actually looked a lot alike back then.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah no you do.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s kind of insane. And then, so he did a big spread and Urb right during that time. And after that, became a huge deal. But I’d never even heard of Marshall Mathers until that picture so it was really funny.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s funny. Well, it does. You do, it really does look like him, a facial. You guys don’t look alike now.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
No, no [inaudible 00:08:46] I think Em’s aged more gracefully. So I mean, it’s all that money.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I don’t know about that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
He’s like two years older than I am. We’re literally almost the exact same age. It’s kind of crazy. I’ve never the guy, by the way, for anybody for whom it was not clear. Marshall Mathers and I have literally never been in the same room at the same time. So total coincidence, beginning to end.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So what’s going on in this picture?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So, that was at the height of my meth addiction.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I weighed about 123, 124 pounds in that picture, and just for a reference, this is me at 166 pounds. So a good 40 pounds lighter.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How tall?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I’m 5’10.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So you know, 124 is unhealthily small.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh yeah, yeah. You’re ready for the runway.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s not good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could be really good maybe for like the Derelicte look from the Zoolander.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally, totally.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It was not a good look. Now the weird thing about, so I barely have any picture for my drug using days, so much so that a lot of people forever, maybe even to this day, think that I’m lying about how bad my addiction was, because of the way that my recovery has played out. And I wasn’t, I just, wasn’t taking a lot of snapshots of myself, smoking meth in the studio all day, you know, like it just wasn’t this, this wasn’t the vibe. It just wasn’t.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And it wasn’t. So I’ve talked about this before too, where it’s like part of me I actually did take. I love photography, love photos always have. And I actually did take a ton of photos. So I have a lot of photos of me using, but not compared. But they weren’t on the internet. Like I have, you know what I mean? Like it was a whole nother ball game.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
[inaudible 00:10:25] This is everybody.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Everybody listening right now. There was actually a time when, when you would take a picture, there was this thing called a camera.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And then you would take the picture on the camera.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And if you had a digital camera, you could then download it to your computer. But if not,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Which I did not.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
You have to go, wait, if not, you have to go wait for like three days for your pictures to come back.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How, how old are you in this picture?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
24.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. So that was the height of your, [inaudible 00:10:50] that that was okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I got arrested. I got arrested right before I turned 25. So yeah, that was the worst that it got.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You moved from Israel in high school, which is a fun time to move to a new country. Did you speak English?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It was very strange? I did speak English, but not well. And also in Israel you learn British English. So a weird Israeli accent with British English, brand new to a Chicago suburb, high school was far from ideal, i’ll just say it that way. It was look, here’s the thing. I spoke a little, my sister spoke almost no English, so her situation was even worse. Like she had, you know, she went to ESL classes, which again, I talk so much about shame. It’s not that any of these things are objectively bad.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s that when you’re thrown into that kind of a situation and you already feel like you’re not a good fit for, just general consumption.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Life.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
With other people, and then there’s like a very concise proof that you are different than everybody else. It’s just, it just made it tough, it just made it tough. And it’s not, it’s not a sob story. It’s nothing like I was blessed in many, many ways, but it definitely made high school. Pretty tough.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
When did you find meth? Or drugs and alcohol? What was, what was your journey there
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I found alcohol when I was 14 years old. So that first year in the US, and we were at a sleep-away camp. Actually for an Israeli boy and girl Scouts trip, and somebody handed me a bottle of vodka and like the second. I think it was the second night we were there or something. Boys and girls would all meet together in one cabin, even though we weren’t allowed to. And you know, I’m, I’m a nervous, shy kid, and somebody hands me a bottle of vodka and I’m not going to say no because I don’t want to stick out. And then I have a little bit and it’s fricking disgusting, but I’m going to keep it down, cause I’m not going to be that weirdo who was like.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
throwing up in the corner. And then 15 minutes later, I felt better than I’ve ever felt before in my life.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I was, I could talk to girls, and not care what they thought about me. I could hang out with the guys and not feel like I’m less than, and like I have to compare myself all the time. Pretty much everything that had been normal for me since I was eight, just kind of took a back seat. And that was, I mean, honestly I look back at it. It was magical. I just, I didn’t know, it could be that. I didn’t come from a family where we talked about feelings. So I never shared the, inner craziness that was going on in my head with anybody else. And so as far as I was concerned, I just found a little medicine and it was really nice. It was really, really nice. And it worked really well for a while.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You go on to use harder, you know, harder drugs. And as we talked about in the picture, you get to the height of your, your meth addiction. So it definitely progressed from there. So I want to, I want to understand the evolution of Adi from, how you know, from that this is medicine, this is magic. You getting to this point, this bottom, and then coming into your discovery, your type of recovery that worked for you.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I love it. I love it. The thing that I didn’t know when I took that drink and felt way better than I ever had before and had a great night really. And then continued coming back home to the suburbs of Chicago, really drinking most weekends with friends who now I was part of the cool club like I could drink. So I got invited to more parties, et cetera. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that I had a problem with anxiety. And because we never talked about emotions, nobody had ever a conversation with me about feelings at all. It never really got brought up and looking back, there were millions of signs, but nobody knew how to read them.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So I had essentially the equivalent of like an ulcer when I was in third grade, I would come home doubled over in pain and my stomach. Nobody could explain why my eating habits weren’t weird. I would break out in hives periodically. Nobody. I get all the allergy tests in the world. Nobody could figure out why it’s happening. It was anxiety and stress, but I’m like nine and 10. So who at nine and 10 has so much anxiety and stress to break out in this way. And so just, it got glossed over. When drinking showed up, I found an answer nobody had told me it was there before, which is, there are things that can fix the way you feel about yourself. And so it started with alcohol, it then went to weed, and weed was the same. Literally, almost the exact same story. Sitting in a circle with a bunch of people, including a girl that I thought was really cute. And I liked, she hands me a joint. I’m not going to say no to a girl I liked.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So I did you. I’m not going to look weird. So I take it and I smoked barely even felt anything. But from that point on I’m drinking and smoking every day. And by the time I went to college, I mean, I was a stoner, and I drank heavily pretty much every day. And that just, that was just the norm and the stupid things that I did were yes, consequences of the use and the drinking. But the amount of calm, and serenity, that these things gave me on a regular basis, trumped, any negative consequences I had by a long shot. I felt like I had friends. I felt like I belonged. I felt like I knew what I wanted in life. I felt like people weren’t, most of the time, laughing about me or talking about me behind my back, which was not true when I was sober for a long period of time.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I had a lot of self doubt all the time. So you were asking how it got to be really bad and how it turned around. I went through a major depression after a breakup. Which was for a guy like me, somebody breaking up with you after two years is proof that you’re never going to find somebody you’re never going to be able to be in love and live that life you want. So I went all in on drugs, cocaine, MDMA mushrooms, acid. I mean ketamine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And you’re in college.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I’m in college.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Where are you in college?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So I’m in SUNY Buffalo when this starts happening.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And I did, I did two years. There sounds like a jail sentence, but I spent two years. I mean, it’s so cold. It is like, you know, over there, but I spent two years there. And then, I mean, really from the second semester of my freshman year, it was a nightmare.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I was, I was so messed up constantly. Like I would wake up at noon or 1 o’clock drink until, and smoke weed until 3:00 AM, pass out. And it was a nightmare by the skin of my teeth, transferred out to UCLA. I wanted to get out of the cold, and I was able to, I’ve, I mean, I still barely understand how I made it, but I made it that happens a lot in my story. And I started at UCLA, and UCLA was a reset for me because a big part of my use was environmental. And the people that I used to use with disappeared, but my discomfort was still there. So I gradually picked up new people. Then ecstasy became a major part of my life, and I didn’t have money. So drug dealing became a major part of my life, because I wanted the ecstasy, but I didn’t have money to buy the ecstasy.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So I went to a friend and borrowed a little money and then developed my own little entrepreneurial endeavor. And, you know, drugs is a supply based business. If you have drugs, people will buy them from you. And I grew very quickly from being broke, barely being able to afford my motorcycle. And, you know, kind of just roaming around to hundreds of clients, tens of thousands of dollars a month, a week, eventually in income and all the girls and all the attention and whatever that I wanted and with that came massive, just massive amounts of drug use. So it’s not a joke and it’s not a euphemism and I’m not exaggerating when I say that, probably from the age of 21 to the age of 25, I don’t know that I’ve spent a full 24 hours sober. And towards the latter end of that, surely all day everyday with meth. But then we take mushrooms or just take some ecstasy, or do some acid or something else on top of the meth. And it was just what.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It was. It was just.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You had your. I had experiences too, where like I had my baseline with coke or heroin or cocaine, heroin. And then like, it was like, that’s your medication? That’s your baseline. And then it’s like, let’s go party and put whatever on top of it. So it wasn’t even like, I wouldn’t have considered the baseline drugs using, cause I was always on those. The other stuff was like the, you know, the actual you in my head. And
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah, people asked me and I knew I was addicted to meth. Right? So like you were saying a baseline, I knew there was an underlying constant addiction to meth. I just didn’t know that I could do anything about it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I was like, I’m just, this is what I got now. And it started, I’m saying innocently in air quotes because I was behind on finals. Somebody handed me some meth to snot, and they were like, look, if you do this stuff, you’ll be able to get through finals. And they were right. I studied 72 hours straight. I’d never been in a situation like that. And so I gradually started using more and more frequently.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And within a year, for sure, it might’ve been within three to six months. Cause I also started selling it because it made a lot of money. I was using it everyday.And as you had mentioned, it’s like, people drink coffee.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Exactly.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I didn’t have, initially I started snorting it, but snorting was really, really.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Painful.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Intense high.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Even when you’re, you’ve developed tolerance to it. It’s still hard to know when you’re going to fall asleep. So then smoking. Cause I had so much of it. It wasn’t about wasting money. I would smoke it because it allowed me to control it more. But I think now, you know, I’m 44 years old going on 45 with three kids, a wife who I’ve known for 16 years.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
The level of insanity of the day-to-day life that I lived back then would be so intolerable to me right now. Like I tell people, I knew we’ll talk, we’ll talk in a second about this. The very different recovery way that I, I have that I live in my life. But I tried, I’ll be honest, I was sober for a minute and I tried to go back to drug dealing because I was broke and I just couldn’t take the insane stress waking up in the morning that guy owes you $4,000. You got a dealer whose coming back by today. He needs his money. Like from the moment I would wake up, I was insane. And I remember thinking to myself like, this is, you can’t do this without being high. Not the way I did it. Maybe there’s an organized you know, cartel like way of doing it. But the way I did it, it’s beginning of the morning to the end of the night.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s, it’s just a circus. And so my circus ended after a motorcycle accident where they found and about a half a pound of cocaine on me. And then they tried to get me to snitch for three months and I wouldn’t. And then once Saturday morning, the beautiful Beverly Hills SWAT team came to my apartment in Brentwood. They made the trek over the 405 and.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh wow, nice of them.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It was, it was nice of them they gave me a ride back and everything.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Eight o’clock in the morning. I wake up to just guns and 12 officers like, you know, just like shotguns to my head, screaming at the top of their lungs. And my bedroom was not big. So 12 cops fitting and that was kind of an insane experience, and add a gun next to my bed. And thank God to this day, I didn’t even try to reach for it or anything because they would have just shot me on the spot. And then they kept going after, you know, they just went in my walls and in the ducts and they just find all the drugs that they could and everything, all the money, everything that they could and took me initially to the Beverly Hills jail. But, by the end of that day, I was down in LA County.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Spent a few days in there. I had almost in,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
In the tower.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Well, actually at first I was at the USC hospital center because my leg was broken from the motorcycle accident. That is not a fun ward of the jail. Not like any of them are great, but that’s the place where the people who jumped off buildings to get away from cops, or the people who cops broke their leg.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, shit.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It was, it was not a fun place to be in. And my legs broken. And I’m, I kicked meth in that bed for about a week and was actually grateful for that. Cause my parents were not stupid. They were the nicest people on the face of the earth. And they were so on my side, which is incredible, but they were trying to figure out how to bond me out of like a $750,000 bail. And I go,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Don’t even think about it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I’ll sit here for as long as I need to.You’re not spending a hundred, $200,000 to get me out of this thing. It’s insane. And a week later I go in front of the judge, he lowered my bail. I got out on like a $50,000 bail and went to rehab for the first time. My lawyer was like, you got to go to rehab. And this is an important part of the story. Nobody asks you any questions. Nobody said, well, here’s some options. What do you want? They said, this is the place you’re going to, you got to go tomorrow. And they’re waiting for you pack a bag. My girlfriend at the time, which is funny to say, but not really my girlfriend, but the girl that I was dating at the time took me in her like Mustang and dropped me off at the, at the rehab. And it was like, you’ve seen in all the movies, you know, they check my bag and then they show me a room.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And then they bring me to a group, there was a group running at the time. And in that group, on my first day, within 20 minutes of going to rehab is when I got introduced to the language of recovery. And that was, they asked me, why are you here? And I try to tell them a factual story. I said, well, I got arrested. And I went to jail and I got up, but my lawyer said, I got to go to rehab. So that’s not why you’re here. Oh, you know, I’ve been using meth for a lot of years and it’s taken me down the wrong path. I was giving them all of the answers. Normal people in the world would give. And after what felt like 45 minutes, but as I’ve told this story, hundreds of times, it was probably 10 minutes or 5 minutes. The main guy that, Charles was his name.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
The, the counselor said, no, you’re here because you’re an addict and you’ve always been an addict. And you’re finally in the place where you need to be, because this is where addicts need to go to get help. And look, remember I’m an awkward guy who doesn’t like being put on the spot. All I wanted was the keys to the kingdom. Just tell me what words I need to say for you to get me out of the spotlight. So now I have my language. Like, oh, I’m here because I’m an addict. Cool. I know what to say now. And then every day we would go to one or two AA meetings and maybe there’d be another group that’s kind of 12 step based in the house. We would do a little gym, like we’d run around in a circle in the morning, and then we do gardening.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And that was rehab. You know, that was my experience of rehab. Now, again, that’s 18 years ago, but it was like ten, $12,000 a month, 18 years ago. And for a month, I stayed sober. And then after a month they let me go to work. But you know, my work was a recording studio. So, I got like special privileges cause I was a private paying client. So they, they let me go to my recording studio. But I mean, if I’m honest, this, these are the things I actually did in my recording studio. I play every day I would play about an hour or two of music. I would watch a lot of porn, and I would smoke a lot of meth. Like that’s what my days looked like. And I was sober for a month.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They didn’t drug test you?
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:25:04]
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
That’s what my days look like. And I was sober for a month.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They didn’t drug test you?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
They didn’t drug test me for another two months, and the drug test, you’re going to love this, the drug test they gave me, so I used for two months while in rehab.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Which by the way, is the worst feeling. Walking back into rehab high on meth, that is not a fun experience.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Sounds absolutely terrible.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And then they gave us a pass for New Year’s Eve.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They’re testing you on the way back.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Now I just want everybody to think to themselves, you’re a couple of months into recovery, new Year’s Eve passed, my family’s on the east coast, I got nobody here, I spent New Year’s Eve at an ecstasy party that I sold the ecstasy to, because I was still trying to sell, I was flat broke, I had no money, so I was trying to sell some drugs still. Smoking meth in the corner, watching a bunch of people fooling around half-naked, having sex on the floor, thinking to myself, this is kind of boring, and I think I’m in deep trouble. Both of them at the same time.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It went back immediately to where I’d been before, which is a story you always hear, but I was over it. I didn’t want to participate, I just wanted to smoke my meth in the corner and just have everybody leave me alone. But man, five o’clock in the morning when I knew I had to go back to rehab, the reality that I’m about to walk into rehab after being up all night on meth, there’s no way you look normal after that. I would drink the pee stuff, and I drank the gallon of water.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), niacin.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I did all the stuff.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It didn’t work. This is in 2002, so the drug test came back like a week later. Well they probably got a screening, and then they send it into the lab. So a week later they come in and they’re like, “Hey, you tested positive, you got to get out of here.” And they kicked me out, and I had to get in my car. And I remember thinking to myself at the time, again, I was lying, I was trying to tell them I hadn’t done anything, but it always seemed weird to me that essentially what happened was I got sent to rehab, when it was working well, everybody was fine, nobody cared, but the moment they found out that I was actually in trouble, the first response was, “Well, get out of here now.” I was like, “Wait, isn’t this exactly why I came here? Is exactly for the addiction.”
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Got kicked out, had a call with my dad, my dad and I talked every day back then, because we had repaired our relationship, and start out lying to him, but then pretty quickly told him the truth and said, “Look, I didn’t move out of rehab, I got kicked out, they caught me using.” And he flipped out on me, and put up his hands up in the air and said, “What the hell is wrong with you? You’re screwing everything up. You just gave away three months of this sobriety thing that was going to save you out of 15, 20 years in prison. What the hell do you expect me to do?” And it was the first moment that it really dawned on me that nobody can help me, I need to figure this out on my own.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And that was the beginning of my path of coming to terms with my recovery. I found another sober living within two weeks, but I was high the entire two weeks. And then the exact same system, a daily meeting, the blah-blah-blah meeting in the house, everything was exactly the same, but I was now committed. I was like, oh shit, I got to get this right or I’m screwed for the rest of my life. And so this time it worked.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Got in front of the judge almost a year later, eight months later, I was now eight months sober, I looked completely different. I had these letters of recommendation from all these people, my family was on the benches in the courtroom. And so instead of giving me 15 to, three years was the minimum anybody was even asking for, he gave me one year with a suspended sentence, which meant, he literally said to me, he’s like, “Look, if you screw this up again, you’ve got seven years waiting for you, plus whatever you do next time.” And honestly that kept me on the straight and narrow. I went to jail, I did a whole year. Jail is a nightmare.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, you didn’t go to prison because you were under a year.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
364 days.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God, so you did your whole time in jail?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah. Now I think he was smart in the sense that once you get into parole and parole officers.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s really hard to get out of that loop, and I think he was trying to give me a chance.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But jail itself sucks. Dirty, you don’t have your own place ever. I probably lived in eight or 10 different cells over that year. Well, I did four months in LA county, then I went to work for a low release program. But jail is the only place where you can be scared and bored all at the same time, and so I had a lot of time to think, a lot of time to think. And when those doors closed behind me on the way out, I knew one thing for sure, and that was I wanted to do everything I could to never end up back in that place. And for somebody like me, who up until this point never really thought they were going to really get in trouble, and never really thought shit was going to hit the fan, I needed proof for myself, something that I believe in, not everybody else believed in, something that I believed in that was a red line that I don’t want to cross again.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And when I got out, I had almost three years sober. Sorry, I had two years sober, I stayed sober for another year, going to meetings on and off, trying to get a job. You can’t get a job as a nine-time convicted felon. And I tried, I tried the mall, I tried the Apple store, which was just opening at the time. I would get these initial interviews, then they would go, “Oh, this looks great, we’re just going to do the background check.” Never got a call back for nine months. And I am a privileged, lucky, white, upper-middle-class kid to be able to even say the next sentence, which is my parents were paying my rent that entire time, because if they hadn’t, I would go back to dealing, I had nothing else I knew how to do.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I didn’t tell the story this way for the first few years when I got out because it seemed like, oh, I did so much work to get on the other side, but if I didn’t have that safety net, it didn’t matter what I wanted to do.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yep, I relate to that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah. And so my parents were amazing, I can’t believe that they were there for me. And after about six to seven months I said to my parents, is said, “Look, I can’t look for work anymore. This is insane, you can’t just keep paying my rent, I’m sitting around not doing anything.” And so I applied to go back to school, which I had never thought I’d want to do again. And it was in school that I first saw a massive gap between the way recovery was presented to me in the world, and the way psychology and addiction was portrayed in the literature and in research.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So it was in that third year, I had about three years sober, and I came to my family I said, “Look guys, I don’t know if I’m this person that they’re talking about in the rooms all the time. I don’t think that’s me.” And for anybody not familiar, that’s a question very often asked. I don’t know what the percentage is, but my guess is the vast majority of people ask themselves that question at some point, “Am I really that person in the book that everybody talks about?” So I talked to my family, and we talked for six months. I’m learning abnormal psychology, and social psychology, and neuroscience, and all these things, I’m like, I think I want to take the experiment. And the AA experiment is, can I drink again? can I do it?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I was dating a girl that was, I hate these f’ing terms, she was a normy, and so she drank and I just hadn’t while we were dating. And I talked about it for so long, one day, she was a waitress, she lived in Hermosa Beach, and we were sitting on her balcony overlooking this beautiful ocean, and she was drinking a glass of champagne, she was off work that day, and I just reached over, I got one sip of champagne, just one sip, and I sat back, because I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. What I’d been told was my brain was going to start shifting back to the old place, and I would start smoking meth again, and all that stuff. So I don’t think I had another sip of alcohol for weeks, maybe even a month or so, but I gradually started reintroducing, which was actually, to be honest, very weird. Everybody knew me now as a non-drinker, a non-user.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And for me what it came down to regularly, and it had before, but I didn’t know it, was an ongoing quest. Probably, if I’m honest about it, a never-ending quest to self-improve, to self-analyze, to self-process, and to never take my truth or reality as the truth or reality, but rather understand that I’m here to change, to constantly evolve, and that’s been true in my recovery. That story of taking the first sip of champagne happened in 2003, so that was about 18, well August, so about 17 and a half years ago. I’m glad to report, if anybody’s concerned, that I’m all good. I still drink socially and it’s not an issue. But the short of it is, I learned it’s not even about the alcohol at all, it’s about all those things that were problematic for me early on. The same way that most people in traditional recovery circles feel like they have to be diligent about not using and not drinking and going to meetings, I have to be diligent about self exploration, self-improvement, and service, I’m really big on service and purpose, they’re huge parts of my life.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Let me ask you a question. So what is your PhD in?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Psychology.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Psychology, okay. So you have a PhD, you’re a smart guy, PhD in psychology, you lecture,
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I don’t know about that, I’ve got a PhD, but I don’t know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, just go with me on it, lecture at UCLA, go Bruins, and you spend a lot of time in the research and the data of this, so there’s that piece of your persona. And then there’s the piece of your persona that can smoke meth and sell drugs and be enterprising in the underbelly of society. So from my perspective, and one of the reasons you are an expert, you are called upon to talk about this method of recovery that you have been doing, and you have a program based around it, you have a book based around it, it’s very much what you’re passionate about.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I have very similar experiences to you, I’ve been to a lot of rehabs and am sober 15 and a half years. And for me, every time I took that drink, every time, and I did it a lot of times, trying to do what you did, because I was like, well, I’m a drug addict, not an alcoholic. Every time I did it, six months later. I had a needle in my arm, three months later, I was… and I remember doing that experiment, taking that drink, and literally, I don’t know what happened next, but the next morning I woke up with Coke in my pocket and was flushing it down the toilet like, this isn’t real, this is right, I didn’t do this, I’m trying to make this experiment work. And I was desperate for that, and every time I did it, for me-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
When you would take the drink, did you tell other people, or would you run the experiment yourself?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I did both. I tried both.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So my whole thing is f*ck shame, that’s one of my big things.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And here’s the reality, and I love this, and I want to just be clear, my goal is not for people’s recovery to look like mine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I want to be very, very clear about that, my goal is not for moderation to become the de facto recovery method.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Right.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
My goal is to finally put an end to the ever increasing rate of overdoses and deaths and lives destroyed, that’s it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
100%, 100%, I’m with you.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
The only reason I’m even opening the door is because we know, I know from my research that I did, 50 to 60% of people don’t even engage in treatment because abstinence is a requirement. And to me it’s like, you can either bang it against their head for another 100 years and see if they’ll change their mind, but most of them will be already dead, because a hundred years will have passed. Or you can say, hey, you know what, if that’s the thing that bothers you so much, let’s try it without abstinence and see how it works. And a lot of times people who come to me for moderation, end up abstaining because they don’t like the moderation version. So just to be clear, it’s just a way to open the door.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But I want to talk about something about the f*ck shame, because I think this is so important. There’s a stigma, a way of talking about “addicts,” and I hate the term, but I’m putting it in air quotes because that’s what we all call them, alcoholics and addicts, where they’re unmotivated, they’re selfish, they don’t care about anybody else. They’ll lie, steal, cheat, do anything they can to get what they want, because they’re so self absorbed.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
In their addiction.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
In their addiction, yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
In their addiction. But I mean, let me ask, you don’t think that’s true?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
No, I think they’re running. I think they’re escaping and they’re running and they’re weak.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally agree, but let me dive there.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I agree with you, but the way that it is reflected to the people-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I know, but this is the issue, thought.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
To say they’re self-centered because they’re running away from their feelings, they’re selfish because they’re running away from their feelings, they’re they’re stealing because they’re running away from their feelings and feeding the addiction, how is that stuff not true.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s not that it’s not true, that’s not who they are, that’s a behavior they’re engaged in.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh agree, agree.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But we define them by those behaviors. And what I’m saying is what we don’t understand, and I think this is a big thing for us, we don’t know why people don’t want to walk in the rooms, taking on the label of an addict and an alcoholic is saying, I am a loser for the rest of my life. It doesn’t matter, I know Ashley that you 15 years later see it differently, but you got success, so you got the 15 years of experience.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
What I think we have to understand is it’s been shown for decades, now it’s 88%, but it used to be 90% of people, so I’ll use 90 to round up a little bit. 90% of those who need help don’t get it. So are we going to talk to the 20% of people who sought it, got help, and got better? Or am I trying to talk to the 90% of the people who won’t even touch help? My goal in life is to talk to those 90%. What can get those 90% in the door, and what has been proven to us time and time again is that calling them names, labeling them, and telling them what they have to do doesn’t work. It’s just been shown, because we’ve tried it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It doesn’t work. So a couple of things, number one, we started Lionrock because of the mission you’re talking about, help those percentage of people, and so I’m with you. We also started a program called CommUnity that allows people to define their own recovery and come in and do meetings, and it has over 3000 people attending a week. As a support group you can do whatever kind of recovery you want for that reason. And in our motto it’s like, this is about seeking peace of mind, of body, whatever that looks like for you. So agree with you.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
You have a Sinclair Method program that allows people to use the Sinclair Method, which is a non abstinence approach that is medication provided.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes, yes. Our goal, and my goal, is to help people not die and live happy lives. It’s not just not die, and you you’ve said in your literature, if all you get is absence, I’ve failed you, and I could not f’ing agree more. If all you get is abstinence, that’s it. However the part I struggle with is, what I hear you saying is, that it doesn’t work. That’s what you’re saying. But it does work for a group of people.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But that’s the thing, is I’m not… I’ll just say it again, because I think this is a really important point, I think that what I do serves both the people for whom AA works, or traditional recovery works, and the people who don’t, you know why? The people whom traditional recovery works hate me. It actually galvanizes them.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh I believe it.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It proves to them more than what they do works, which is great, because it’s not that I don’t care, I care about them as human beings, but they found something that works for them. I am here for the 90% that are being left out. And what I’m saying is, if I can bring 15% of those people into the fold, I will have served my purpose. And here’s something that is really important for everybody to hear. I just, literally I invited this guy to a conversation, it’s the second time I’m talking about him today and I’m not going to use his name, but I got a DM on Instagram and this guy came to the rehab that I used to run. I never saw him, but he saw my partner at the time.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And so he left me a message saying, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your message is sometimes really dangerous. I went to your partner, he gave me essentially permission after seven years of sobriety to relapse, and the wheels came off.” And I was like, “Oh, well, first of all, I don’t know what permission to relapse looks like,” but essentially what it sounded like, and I’m going to have a conversation with this guy this Thursday, just because I want to dive in more deeply, was this guy was trying to figure out if he should do the experiment or not, and then he came in and apparently my partner, he wasn’t part of the rehab, he was just part of his private practice, told them something that made it seem to him like maybe you could use again. Something like that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Here’s where the rubber meets the road to me. I think sometimes we lie to ourselves, and we tell ourselves that when somebody has that kind of a question, they’re looking for somebody to stop them. They’re not, they’re looking for somebody to justify it, and they want to find that there’s a reason to do it. And here’s my fear. My fear is that by presenting one option, which you guys don’t by the way, so that’s what I love about this conversation, you guys don’t present one option, but by presenting one option, what we’re saying is it’s this or nothing. And we know, the data shows us, the statistics prove it, most people choose nothing.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So if we just had another option here, and another one right next to it, and another one right next to it, et cetera, and we said, “Which one of these do you like?” Even, yes, you may hate hearing this, not to you personally, but anybody listening, even, “Do you want to go put a needle in your arm in a safe injection site?” That environment reduces the rate of overdoses at least, and keeps them alive one more day. Maybe they talk to a nurse, maybe they see somebody else who’s gotten sober and they get inspired by that. We’re all just trying to solve any little problem.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And it’s not, cause you mentioned getting out of recovery, and I love what we do with people, but I’m not in any way, shape, or form lying to myself and believing that we have the holy grail, and we’ve found the next best option in the universe to help people with addiction. What we have found is an option that works for a lot of people who felt rejected by traditional approaches, and they’re out they’re not willing to engage with anything else, looking for somebody who speaks to them.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I want to interrupt this episode to have a short little discussion about support groups, and there’s no better person to talk to about this and my production coordinator, Ashley Jo Brewer, AJB if you will. AJB, hi.
Ashley Jo Brewer:
Hi.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay, you’re a big fan of CommUnity, you attend CommUnity support group meetings, why, why should people care?
Ashley Jo Brewer:
I absolutely love CommUnity because it creates a CommUnity, and I know that sounds funny, but it truly provides a space for anyone and everyone, no matter what they are going through. Just to give you an example, I invited, or told a friend about CommUnity, because she was really struggling with binge eating disorder, and had gone to many different groups and felt shunned, or not accepted, or like it wasn’t a place for her. And at CommUnity, she found a place, because in CommUnity meetings, we don’t care what the substance is, or what the struggle is, everyone is accepted no matter where they are in life, no matter what they are recovering from, and I think that’s what’s beautiful about CommUnity.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, I love it, and yes, I 100% agree with you that the value is that you don’t have to know what your problem is, what your struggle is, what you want to give up, or not give up, or whether you’re abstinent, or whether you’re stopping, whatever, whatever it is, you are welcome, and you’re welcome in this place, and it’s a great place to discover the answers to all the questions that you’re looking for in a CommUnity and have that support. And it’s free to anyone, you go to Lionrock.life, and there is a tab with CommUnity meetings, there are different days, different times, different subjects. There’s even a cooking group called CommUnity table. There are so many different options, something out there for everyone. So I highly recommend, maybe after you listen to this, if you are looking for more CommUnity in your life, more friends, more support, please, please go check out CommUnity, lionrock.life, click that CommUnity tab.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So why, again, we’re on the same page, I’m going to argue a bit of semantics here with you, which is that while semantics, my father and husband hate how I do this, so I have them in my head going, “Stop arguing semantics,” I think that in campaigns words are so important, there’s so many, defund the police, right? I think that’s a terrible campaign, it doesn’t signify what that really means. And so I think that getting our words right in our campaigns, really, really important. And one of the things that I have a reaction to with your stuff, even though we’re on the same, like literally 100% on the same page, one of the things I have a reaction to with your stuff, and I always giggle to myself because I’m like, this guy just knows he’s ruffling the shit out of everybody’s feathers. Yeah, he knows, I dig it. But the thing I have a reaction to is, like your book, Abstinence Myth, what that says is abstinence doesn’t work, as opposed to it’s one of the options.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah, so look, first of all, abstinence should be one of the options, but not the only one in treatment. If we want to save more people, we’d never sell one book.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay, all right. No, that’s a great, that’s a fair answer.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
You have to have a hook, it’s just the way it works.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay, okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But let me explain, and look, I’m going to give you another analogy that I give in talks to professionals in a second, but here are the two abstinence myths that I actually argue for in the book. Number one, I believe that abstinence should not be the gatekeeper for recovery. What I mean by that is, we shouldn’t ask people to commit to lifelong abstinence before we’ve started helping them. And people argue with me on this all the time, but the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to quit drinking. So the only way you can argue with me is if you remove that demand from the book, otherwise now you’re talking semantics. Well, we say it, but we don’t mean it. Will screw you then and f’ing drop it out the book if you don’t mean it, because what it says to every person who comes in, and you say it meeting after meeting, the only desire is to quit. And what you’re saying to everybody who’s not ready to quit is you can’t come in here.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Now I’m sorry, but when you say that to somebody, everything else you say is bullshit after it, it doesn’t matter. You already told me that if I tell you the truth, which is I’m not sure that I’m ready to quit, I’m not sure that I want it, my life sucks and I want help, everything else you tell me after you said, “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking,” is a lie, because you already told me what I need to be in this room. So that’s number one. Abstinence should not be at the gate. If I talk about this from the standpoint of any other mental health or biological physical ailment, it sounds insane. Imagine going to a therapist and having the therapist go, “Look, if we’re going to work on depression, I want to make sure that it’s clear, I can’t see you if you’re depressed.” It sounds f’ing crazy.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We literally, at Lionrock, in the very beginning, one of the things that, and I’ve been thrown out of every treatment center I’ve been to, which is a lot, except for one, and that was the only 30 day one. I made it 30 days without getting thrown out. So one of the things that we instituted early on was that we don’t throw people out for relapsing. We help them, and we also help them on the front end because the expectation that they don’t know how to stop drinking, we’re trying to help them, and then we’re upset that they don’t know how to stop drinking, we were like, we can’t let you into group drunk, but we’re going to put together a plan to help you, here are the things we’re going to do.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Love it. So number one abstinence myth is, you can’t demand the thing you’re trying to fix from somebody before you fix it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
However, one of the requirements for our moderation program is being absent the first 30 days while you’re putting together your program for-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah, we did that for 60 days.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For moderation. So abstinence has, and totally fair, the book thing, you’re right, it’s legitimate.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s not ideal, but it’s legitimate.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, it’s not ideal, it’s legitimate. I think, it’s scary because I had a friend who, SMART recovery, where they don’t count days, and I got to be honest, the things that you’re discussing-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:50:04]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I got to be… The things that you’re discussing, that don’t work for a lot of people, they were the only thing that worked for me. And I tried everything. And I am one of those people where my brain is always looking to get me out of the… My brain is just constantly… I’m not a selfish person, but when I’m using, I am in that state. And I can separate myself from that name. I think a lot of these things that we’re talking about, interestingly, are not things I’ve experienced in my recovery. I didn’t feel like I was [inaudible 00:50:42]. I didn’t feel… The recovery communities I belonged to weren’t that, what’s the word, rigid. But I know that that exists. And I think that it’s really, really important to allow people the space to discover what works for them. And the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous says in it that if you think you are a normal drinker, if you can… I’m like totally butchering the sentence, but go ahead and try some controlled drinking. It says that in the book.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It also says that AA has no monopoly on recovery. But most AA members… Sorry, I shouldn’t say most. A lot of AA members just completely ignore those two lines.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s true. That’s true.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Can I just ask a question though, Ashley? Because I think this is really important. How many rehabs, off the top of your head?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think eight, including outpatients.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Okay. Eight of them. They were all abstinence-based, right? They all took you to AA meetings?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes. At the Meadows, they took us to more than AA, but yes. Well, I went to one treatment center for a year that was, I forgot what it’s called, but like community therapy, community based. And it was all 12 step based. Heavy duty.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Okay. Like therapeutic community?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Therapeutic community. That’s what it was. And it was heavy, heavy, like every day. I knew the book back and forth.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah. My years in AA were at the Pacific group, which is a very [crosstalk 00:52:15] group locally.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Wasn’t quite that rigid.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So here’s the thing. I don’t know if you hear it in it, but here’s the way I see it. And it’s all about perspective and I get it and I deeply respect you guys’ work. I mean, I did when we first met, I don’t know, whenever that was, 12 years ago?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Long time ago.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
A long time ago.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Eight tries of the same thing. And it only worked on the eighth try.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Not even.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
After. Doesn’t that tell you that it’s more about your readiness and your ability to listen than about the method?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
1000%. But Adi, I wouldn’t have lived. I literally would not have survived.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But that’s all I’m saying. And please hear me when I say it, because I mean no disrespect, but that’s your assumption. And what I’m saying is this: even the guy who was kind of trying to bitch me out, and we’ll have a conversation on Thursday and I can report back on what that was like, part of what I wanted to say to him is maybe you needed somebody like that guy Mark to pretend that drinking would be fine, so you could finally say to yourself, “There’s a professional who says this is okay.” And then you went and did it. Not in spite of others, not as a rebellion, but because you thought that it was okay. And it wasn’t okay. And when that ended, you were like, “Oh f. I can’t drink.” And hear me out.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And is this the safest route that I’m talking about? No. Is it the ideal way? No. But twice as many people are dying every 10 years. Whatever we’re doing right now is not stopping the bleeding. So all I’m trying to do is say, how do I talk to those motherf’ers that are on the outskirts and they just won’t respond to anything else? Maybe if I tell them, “Don’t worry about abstinence, just come in and talk about your pain.” Maybe if we tell them that, more of them will come in. And once they come in, maybe I can take some of those people and save them. And then maybe some of those people will now get to live lives abstinent, moderate. I don’t give a f. Lives. Just live lives, right?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yes, of course, a lot of our success stories end up being abstinent. But if I would have told them that they have to abstain in the beginning, they wouldn’t have walked in. And so…
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
There you go. Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Is it a risk? Yes. But I told my wife this, it seems audacious and like who the f am I to say this out loud? But when I get an email from a person who just felt rejected over and over and over, a person like you were on that eighth rehab. Over and over and over. I’ve tried it, I’ve done. And they say, “This is the first time something has made sense. And I’m now eight months in or six months in. I got my kids back. I’m living at home.” That’s it. That’s why I do this. I make less money than I would if I worked a regular goddamn job. It’s stressful as hell. You also get all the bitching on the other side of the successes. But the many dozens to a couple of hundreds of lives that have been changed forever by what we’re doing in three, four years, they’re worth the lack of safety to me and the pain, because the way my story… And I totally get it. It’s my perspective and my story, is those few hundred people would be dead on the side of the road somewhere, overdosed because they couldn’t fathom going to another meeting. And the only thing anybody ever talked to them was about a meeting.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So my ideal scenario is this: when somebody goes into recovery, there’s a world where they automatically get presented all the options. And maybe if we’re good at it, and that’s something we’re trying to do at IGNTD, we can get good at predicting, “Hey, you seem to be like this kind of person. These kinds of people really like this treatment program.” And match them with a couple that they would really love. And they can be cheap and easy to access and not crazy expensive, et cetera. And then let that person try it. And if it works for them, everybody applauds and bows down and it’s great. But if it doesn’t, stop telling them, “Hey, you need to want this more. It’s not working because you’re not trying hard enough.” But say, “Hey, maybe this isn’t the right. You want to try this other one?” And just play a little game of whack-a-mole with them. Just play it with them for a minute, until maybe they find whatever worked for you after that eighth rehab.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Because we know, I know internally, the least safe thing is the person who is really struggling and has no help. More dangerous, to me, is a person who is struggling and has no help than a person who’s struggling and is told, “Hey, don’t quit for now. Come into the sessions and let you see what we can do.” That’s what it feels like to me. And it doesn’t have to feel that way to everybody. And I’ve lost like four or five clients in my 12 years of work, but I know people in very traditional recovery, you’ve lost clients. So it’s not like I lose them for that reason. When people have, I’m learning the language, when people have died by suicide, or by overdose now, I mean, the impact is devastating, because you’re always second guessing, “Did I f them up? Did I screw it up?”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Every clinician does, whatever method, every clinician working with someone who dies, every person around that person questions, could they have done something?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah. I want to just be clear, right? The abstinence myth says two things. Stop putting abstinence at the front and requiring it before you give somebody hope. It doesn’t make sense anywhere else in the world, and I don’t think it makes sense in addiction. Secondly, let’s stop measuring recovery only by consecutive days abstinent.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How do we measure? I agree with that. But how do we measure… This is something we’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about, because we were… At Lion Rock, we were putting together a program that would coincide with different ways to measure success, and putting together some sort of a thing about happiness and… How do you measure these things? What’s your metric? Or do you have a metric?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I have a few. And I’ll start with the simple ones.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
God, I hate… Sorry. The thought in my head right away is all I’m asking is if you start using them at Lion Rock, give it a little credit to this conversation. Percent of days abstinent.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. I like that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And the amount of reduction in drinking over a specific period of time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Love that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I think all three of those together. How many days consecutively, what percent of days have you used, and how much do you use on those days? Here’s why.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I love it.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
This is an insane concept to me, but it runs to this day in most meetings. If you’ve got 15 years and you had a bender on the weekend, you go back to the front of the line? I’m sorry. Are we really saying that that person has acquired no learning?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Hold on. Hold on.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They’re not saying that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Let me [crosstalk 00:58:45].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. All right. Okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Something’s gone wrong, obviously. If somebody has been on one path for 15 years and then deviated so badly, something’s gone wrong. Do they need an extra punch in the gut? Not necessarily. So what happens? Now they lost, they have zero days abstinent in a row. But if you look at the last year or the last month of their recovery, they’re still like 95%, 96% abstinent. And the thing is, somebody is much more likely in my opinion to say, you know what? I’ve still got an A. It’s not perfect, but I still got an A. I can jump back on the horse and get it done and come back. So the percent days… Sure, if you go off for a month, two months, three months, that percent starts suffering too.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And then you’ve got the next level, which is how much are you drinking? I was just talking to a woman earlier today. 15 to 20 drinks a day since she was 18. That is extremely heavy drinking, right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes. Extremely.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Extremely heavy drinking.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
She probably wasn’t using glasses anymore.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
No, no, no. She literally, she’s a very smart woman.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
She would pour them?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s IPA’s. No, it’s IPA’s and she just knows. She drinks about six or seven of them, but they’re double strength, so she just knows. But what I said to her is, “Look.” So she’s done about 20, 30% decrease in the last couple of months. And I said, “Look, if you found yourself two months down the line drinking half as much as you do right now, would that be considered to you a success?” Because one of the things that was really hard for us… We’re perfectionists, whether people realize it or not. We want to hit the ball out the park. And when we don’t, we feel so badly about it we go back to our using. And so I’ve seen people who struggle with consecutive abstinence. They’ll get three, four days. At most, a week, 20 days. But they get more and more spacing between those days. So they might only have seven days, but now all of a sudden it went to 40% from 20% abstinence over the last month.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Let’s find ways to measure progress for people in a nuanced way. And then if they used to drink 10 drinks and now on the weekend when they drink, they drink three, can we find a little compassion and empathy to say, “Hey, you know what? Man, that’s better. That’s better than you were doing before.” So yes, let’s get back to where we were originally. But does that make sense a little bit?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I agree with you. Again, I come to like, “Yes.” And I’ve had conversations with people who have gone out after 10 years, and I’m saying to them, “Look, your 10 years isn’t gone. It’s not gone. You were sober for 10 years. It doesn’t just magically go away. This is different.” But I will say this, and this is the God’s honest truth. If I didn’t have to start over, my ego has kept me from taking a drink so many times because I knew I would end up back in the rooms and I knew I would… basically in my head, I’d lose my time. And my ego, it is the last gatekeeper on not drinking. And my ego has been like, “Absolutely not.” If there’s one reason. And I honestly think that if I could slip one day and get right back on the wagon. And again, I’m classic, like I fit right into every, all of that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I also, you come from Pacific Group, which is a sect of 12 step. That was very-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
[crosstalk 01:02:06].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It was very intense and rigid. I come from a very loosey, like kind of do your thing, kind of relaxed. So I don’t relate to any of that. But I fit right into that. And that day counting has kept me from doing it. So I hear you. And I agree. Because there’s also another piece to that, which you’re probably familiar with Gorski and he talks-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
[crosstalk 01:02:39].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, I know. He talks a lot about, in his relapse prevention training, about getting people right back on the wagon. Right? Because we lose people in that space, in that relapse.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Shame.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And if I’m being honest with you, if I were to pick up, right? If I were to drink, whatever that looked like, because I’ve had 15 years, there’s no f’ing way.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
[crosstalk 01:03:04] that meeting.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Now I’m saying this.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, no. It isn’t that. There’s no f’ing way I’m going to walk in after one drink. I’m going to make it count. Right?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’s called the abstinence violation syndrome.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. And so that part of it is super dangerous. And I am certified in relapse prevention and I’ve done all the Gorski stuff. I know in my head, I work with other people telling them how to get back on the wagon. But if I’m being honest, if I’m being honest, I don’t know that I would be able to do it.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I get it. So much. And I love… Look, I don’t know that I’d be able to have this conversation with a lot of other people, because for other people, part of the question would be sort of how to prove me wrong. And then we end up in kind of a fight. And what I love is you’re sharing your experience and I’m sharing my perspective. And so here’s what I hear. I hear that there are aspects of life, like all of us have, that still drive you crazy. Because life is life and it doesn’t matter what it looks like on the outside to anybody else. It feels like a circus still on the inside. And that sometimes the thought in your head is like, “I just need a f’ing break. Just a break. Somebody turn the lights off.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Relief.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
“And [crosstalk 01:04:15] rest. I’ll be back tomorrow morning, I promise. But I just want to breathe and not have somebody call me, ask for me, pull on me, [inaudible 01:04:22], whatever.” Right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
100%.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And you mentioned the ego piece. And here’s where I think the conflict ends up happening. And you are like almost all of us. But what ends up happening is there’s a piece to you, a piece related to pride, because of your success. Because I mean, look at what you’ve done. Somebody looks at you now and maybe because you’re in recovery, they know that you might have a recovery story. But look at what you’ve done, right? And so you look at yourself, “I’m on such a pedestal. I’m on such a high rung. I can’t show weakness. I’ve got to figure out how to fix this shit. I got to get to tomorrow. Everything’s fine.” You’ve got the tools, you know what to do.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And this relates back to something Sophie and I, my wife and I, talk about all the time, and I preach to all of my clients, all my users, is something called radical transparency and something that I believe we all need to have with at least one, but hopefully a handful of people. I’ve now, fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not sure, for the people in my life, I’ve tried to grow the circle as big as I can. And that is for all of us to drop ego and be just the best we can be at any given moment in time. But also radically honest and transparent about what’s actually going on behind the scenes so that we never, never, ever trap ourselves into being in a place where everybody thinks we’re here, but we’re actually down here and we have to play a part.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Because I mean, if you want to talk about what brought me to addiction in the first place, it was that, right? I’m the nervous kid who can’t talk to girls, always compared myself to other people. Looks, grades, the bike I had. It didn’t matter what it was. I was in my head. I walked around the world looking at other people, thinking, “I wonder what they think about me.” It was insane what was going on in my head.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Torture.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And I was always trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening, that I was just cool. Feeling like the opposite of it, right? And what I learned, and we talked about this, this is what I… Honestly, at the core of it, and I have an acronym called EAT. And I’ll explain what that is. At the core of it, what I realized is this: when I feel that feeling of discomfort, something’s wrong. And I don’t know yet, my meter, my barometer is not good enough to tell me if it’s something really strongly wrong that I have to address right away or not. So with somebody like my wife, the moment I think of a weakness, or I think of something that is just uncomfortable, I have to like throw it up on her. I just spit it up. And when she’s not here, I’ll text it. I’ll just be like, “Hey, just wanted to tell you, blah whatever.” And they’re not always great things. They’re often really uncomfortable things to talk about.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And I mean, this might be TMI for some people listening, but again, I don’t give a f. I’m here to save some people in my life. And so maybe this will be something somebody needed to hear. My wife and I have been through a lot in our 17 years. Cheating on both sides, her sexual trauma before, me growing up on porn and not really knowing how to connect to women. To create a real, honest, intimate relationship between the two of us was pretty insane. So we have to talk about everything. But I’m a guy who can’t talk about anything. So the path from, “Wait, you can’t ask me that question. That’s too personal,” to, “You’re my partner. You’re the person who’s everything in my world and you get to see inside me,” it’s a massive bridge that you have to cross.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But what I hear, Ashley, for you, and I don’t mean to make this… This isn’t a judgment on you. What I hear, is that sometimes you don’t give yourself the permission to take care of yourself the way you need to because there’s too much to do, you’re too important, there’s too much going on, you’ve achieved too much, there’s too much shit to get done for you to take care of yourself. And what your brain is doing when it’s saying, “Just have a drink,” is that’s still the escape hatch for you. You haven’t used it in 15 years, but that’s still the escape hatch. And so for me, [inaudible 01:08:07] just not a question of, should you drink or not? It’s a question of like, Ashley needs a four day silent retreat where she actually connects with herself again and remembers what Ashley feels like, not what the general public viewing version of Ashley looks like.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, apropos of that, which is very, very accurate, I went to an eating disorder program in January for 30 days, because that is exactly what happened. And my head was just all over the place and I was radically transparent about it. And it was incredibly painful. And I was like ashamed, but not ashamed. I vacillated between shame and no shame. I was like, “Oh my God, I took my 15th sobriety in this program.” And it was incredibly powerful. It was at the… My children are still recovering from mom being gone for 30 days, asking me if I’m coming back every time I go for to work. It was not without sacrifice. So I did that. And you’re right. You’re 100% right. Because what happened for me was during COVID, the food issues, which it’s all been the same. I hate the word addict and alcoholism because it refers to one part of it. It’s like, no, my alcoholism goes into food. It goes into… It’ll go wherever it needs to go. That ism-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Well that’s the thing. That’s not even the problem. That’s the cure.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right, right. Exactly. It doesn’t, it’s not a good name for what’s happening. And for me, I was like, oh, it would be easier right now to take a drink than to work on my eating issues. Because I know how to get sober and I don’t know how to deal with this eating stuff. So long and short of it is, all of those skills that we talk about, the radical transparency, all of that, I had to do that. And I have been doing that and coming home and transitioning back. And I’ve had to feel that newness of it and I’ve had to tell myself the percentage of days I’ve been doing well. And I’ve had to use all the moderation things you’re talking about because I have to moderate with food.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
You have to.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But I didn’t have to do that with drugs and alcohol. So I’m learning a whole new set of skills that you’re talking about as it relates to my food. It didn’t apply to my alcoholism, but it actually applies to something that’s much harder for me. So…
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah. And for me it was about sex, right? I haven’t used meth in 18 years, right? I have used Adderall, though, because I do have pretty terrible, annoying ADHD and focus problems. But I’ve used it 30 times in 18 years. So that hasn’t relapsed me. But I mean, I got emotional listening to you describing that because that’s all I want for everybody. All I want for everybody is to just recognize that deep inside somewhere there’s still that kid that just wants to be okay. And it’s not like it matters what method you end up using, because it matters what works for you. But what I want to get everybody off of the train of is like, let’s just drop all of our collective egos.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I will say it to the moon and back. I don’t need anybody to go to IGNTD Recovery and find it as a successful method. My program, right, the hero program. I want everybody to find the thing that works for them. And the reason I’m so passionate… And you’re right, it’s there to cause noise, no doubt. We’re here to just piss people off a little bit, is because I’m f’ing pissed. I’m pissed. I mean, first of all, I’m so grateful to hear that you were able to do this. But I’m sad that the tools and the understanding of the conversation wasn’t in place for somebody 15 years ago to be like, “Ashley, there’s something deeper here, let’s dive in.” Because the alcohol got taken care of. And everybody was like, “Hey cool. Ashley, the alcoholic addict is good now.” But [crosstalk 01:12:04].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You know what it was?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Some screaming going on.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The screaming… I did the work. I did a f ton of work. And then I had my twins. And that upset the apple cart so intensely. Not because there was a lot of like physical pain, but it brought up childhood stuff. It brought up stuff I had dealt with. And that was a, I call it postpartum recovery. Because I, cellularly, I literally changed as a human being after they were born. I suddenly became allergic to dairy. Literally. I mean, I physically, biologically changed as a human being. And my recovery had to change. And I didn’t know how to graduate it because I had done it a certain way. And so all of that stuff. So I really feel like I did the work to stay sober in my 20s, but my 30s is a whole other ball game because of what I do for a living, because my kids, because of all the expectations.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But it’s still about shame and it’s still about ego and it’s still about all those things, right? Because in my head I can do anything. I can do everything. I grew up being told I could be anything I wanted to be, right? And so I f’ing did it. Except, right? I did it. Anything I wanted to be. Business, I got myself into UCLA. I f’ing did everything I wanted to. I got married, I had kids, I went to business school. I did it all. But no one told me that there was a cost to being everything. No one told me that part, right? And no one told me that maybe being everything isn’t actually what I needed and wanted, and maybe all those things… And that was something I’ve had to discover.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Because if I have 10 things in my life, I can only give a certain percentage, like you’re talking about, I can only give a certain percentage to each of those things. And when you add two little kids into that, and I’ve only been driven by career and ambition and succeed, and then you add two little kids who just want to spend time with you, it changes internally, right? And so you have to use all those new tools and skills. And I struggled with, and I still struggle. I’m getting better because I took that time and I reconnected to like, what do I need? Who am I trying to prove that I’m good enough to? I’m still trying…. I don’t even, everyone says I’m good enough. But who am I trying to prove that to?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And there’s that piece… But the other piece to that, and in my 20s, there was a portion of time where I got really serene and peaceful, and I became really unmotivated. And I found that to be, like the fear and the need for approval got…
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:15:04]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The fear and the need for approval got me to be what society believes is successful or achievement or whatever the thing is, the letters, the this, the that. It’s driven by fear and those needs, and when it’s not there, I don’t do it. And I found that to be incredibly uncomfortable.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. I love that you get to bring these lessons, you have the platform to bring these lessons to everybody else who needs to hear them who, let’s just be honest, in most, not all, but in most other surroundings and environments would just never get this. They would just get like, “Hey, you got 30 days. You’re doing well. Good luck. Go home. You work with your family. Have a good time.” You know?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Or we’ll see you Thursday for group or whatever. I just wish it was that f’ing clean. I really wish it was. We don’t leave room for suffering. We don’t. We try to whitewash everything. We try to pretend. We f’ing Instagram and all this shit now. Just like all of us always putting on our best faces. Sophie and I, we just went to Tulum. It was the first time we spent time alone without the kids, we got three kids, without the kids and without friends because we’ve had breaks where we’ve done a night or two with friends, but it was Sophie and I on a trip for three days. And I mean, it felt like a different world, not only because we were in Tulum, but because it was just me and my wife, just waking up in the morning, doing what we wanted to do. So, you’re so right. And here’s the difference though. The question is how do you balance instead of overweighing the success or… Ashley, happiness without motivation is kind of fine sometimes. It’s okay.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’ll come back.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s uncomfortable though.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
It’ll come back. Well, of course. So, it takes us back to this conversation that we were having before which is we don’t grow from the status quo and the comfort. We just don’t. So, that’s like the reason I’m f’ing making noise is we’re hurting people. We may not want to. I’m not saying we’re doing it volitionally. We are keeping people on the out because we want to feel safe. And what I’m saying, and I’m trying… Look, I have amazing conversations with amazing people like you and then sometimes they’re a little more tense and it’s okay. And then sometimes I talk to people like Carl Hart who are like, “Hey, we should all take pills.” Whatever. The conversations are varied.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
What I think we have to get in front of the world, not us, we’re professionals. We’ll handle our shit somehow. We have a million tools and we have help and all that stuff. But I want to reach that person in the middle of Delaware that doesn’t know what to do, or the mom whose son is using pills again, or the kid who’s like, “I’m using blow, but is it too much?” I want to get in the conversations with the people who, if we’re honest about it, the traditional way of doing things is just not on their f’ing radar, but they’re suffering. And I applaud you guys because I remember… Look, 12 years ago, 13 years ago, there was nothing large online at all anyway. So, you guys were doing that. We were one of the first people to do that anyway.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
But, Ashley, your Sinclair Method clinician is in one of our LinkedIn groups. And when I heard that, all I was, was happy. The knowledge that you guys were able to say, “You know what? If this thing works for some people and it gets some people to slow down or stop or whatever so that they can hear and get better, let’s let it in.” That’s the magic because on the other side of each one of those clinical patient cases is a f’ing human being with a family who’s just in pain. And whether we like it or not, telling them what to do is oftentimes not the route to make them less in pain. What they need is a hug and somebody that they trust will actually have their best interest at heart, and once you accomplish that, sure, bring up abstinence, bring up moderation, bring up whatever you want. But the first thing we need is the empathy and the support.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes, I agree. I agree. And here’s how I came to terms. I started to get into some of the rigidity that you were talking about, particularly as a opiate addict around Suboxone. I started to feel, like I say, have a reaction to, like, “I don’t know what this is about, but I’m having a reaction.” Right? And I didn’t do it this… I started to sound like [crosstalk 01:19:29].
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I didn’t do f’ing Suboxone. Why do you get it?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. I was like, “I think I’m jealous.” And so, I started to get rigid about it. I spent a lot of time trying to understand different points of view, putting myself in the position. And I got it. I found the way in and it works with traditional treatment as well. If one of my sons, or both of my sons, if you told me he was dying of this disease and he could not get sober, and Suboxone was going to save his life, would I care? No. If you told me that my son needed to try a moderation program because it was either that he did the moderation program, he went to IGNTD, he did whatever, or he was going to continue to use, I would have zero rigidity. I would have zero stance on what recovery is.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I might think to myself, “Oh yes, I think this is what needs to happen.” But I would do anything to keep my child alive. It wouldn’t matter to me. What is it? There’s no zealots in a foxhole or whatever the… All of my belief system rigidity, if it was my child’s life, would go away and I would want only the thing that would work for them. That alone changed my view. Because if I could look at it from that perspective, what the f do I care how they do it? I just want my kid to be alive. And that helped me to see the whole thing differently. There’s no ego in that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
That hit so close to home because I was giving a talk in Ohio, which is one of the states that was hit hardest by the opiate epidemic. If I cry on this, then it’s your fault.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
At the end of the talk, I walked outside. There’s a bunch of people that want to talk to me after, and one of them was this woman. She asked me, she’s like, “Do you think it’s okay for somebody to take Suboxone for heroin addiction?” And I said, “I mean, first of all, yes, but also tell me more about what’s going on.” This woman had three kids. She’d lost two of them to overdose.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my god.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And now she was putting this third one on Suboxone and people were telling her that’s a cop-out. He can’t. He’s got to get fully sober. And I’m like, “What the f are you talking about? Why are we even having this conversation? You already lost two. Put him in a f’ing padded cell with Suboxone. I don’t care what you have to do. Sure, bring him to my f’ing house.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Anything.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Of course, you give him whatever tool he might be able to rely on. Like, if his leg is f’ing broken and he needs a crutch, do you want another crutch? Can I buy you a wheelchair? The rigidity is just so devastating because it’s principle and ego. It’s like, “Well, I did it, then he should be able to do it.” I said it before. I don’t care. I just don’t. I just want those people to survive. I see it every time I give a talk. Every time I give a talk, somebody comes to me and tells me these nightmares, and most of the time they’ve already lost the people, and they’re almost looking for a way to just learn that they did everything. I hate saying this, but when they learn that there was such a thing as harm reduction or they learn about these tools, all they do on the flip side is f’ing beat themselves up.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Right.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
You know?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I mean, I’ve got three kids. I can’t fathom losing one of them, and I hear about it all the time from people. It f’ing destroys me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. It wasn’t like this when I was a kid and when I was using. People weren’t dropping dead. I mean, yes, people died, but it wasn’t like this.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Full of fentanyl and all the mixing. It’s crazy.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And my raising children in this environment, I talk about this a lot. People are like, “Oh, you’ll be prepared. You’ll blah, blah, blah. You know what to do.” And I’m like, “No way man.” This is a whole new world that we’re dealing with. They do coke once and it has fentanyl and that’s it. Nobody died from doing coke once. I mean, that’s what they told you in D.A.R.E. but it just didn’t happen. And now it’s this whole new landscape. I think that if people are struggling, people come from the 12-step model and you have kids, if you think about it as that, I really believe that most people will relax all things. Your whole view changes when your child needs something or it’s the difference between your child living and dying. And I think that was a very helpful tool for me to see that any of the judgments I had, they were picked up along the way.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Some of my best friends are in AA and when their kids were struggling and the last thing on earth they were going to do was walk into a meeting, they called me. And I’ll just be clear. About half those kids have no problems now. Half of them got sober in the rooms actually, but they needed a bridge.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
They need somebody to have a conversation that was not that, where somebody would just kind of come to their side and have a little talk with them. And again, I mean, we don’t have to belabor the point. When I talk to my wife, I don’t need people to like what I do. I really don’t. It sounds crazy because I talk about ego and [crosstalk 01:24:50]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I know you don’t. I know you don’t because you-
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
… talk about the amount of ego that I had to let go of. I like to be liked, but at some point, I was just like… Because I went to UCLA and at UCLA, the chronic disease model, the neuroscience, the pure neuroscience model of addiction is the only one that existed when I was there. Genetics and biology, and I bought it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You don’t buy it now?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I mean, the level of environmental influence is massive. Also, one of the things I talk about that is more aligned with AA and less with that is spirituality. But I consider spirituality as a connection to anything bigger than yourself. So, I’m not religious, but I have a purpose. My purpose is to help other people, by the way. That’s my purpose, but I need to be connected to something that is bigger than me. So, I wouldn’t consider it my higher power, my purpose, but my purpose is the driving force that makes me wake up at 5:00, 5:30 in the morning and go do my morning ritual so by seven o’clock, I show up the way I need to every day, and it’s the thing that pushes me. And I don’t know what biological explanation you give to that, but it’s not genetics. It may be epigenetics and things like that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
So, I use a kind of biopsychosocial plus spiritual model idea. And I think that different people struggle with different mixes of what’s wrong with them. That’s why we’ve never been able to isolate what addiction is, is it’s not one thing. It’s millions of different things that look the same. They look like somebody who steals, and lies, and uses alcohol, and hides it in the f’ing shower, but one of them was raped as a child and can’t trust anybody because he had low attachment. Other one had a great upbringing, but then got in with a group of people when they were in high school that just drank and used drugs all the time, and to fit in, they did that. I don’t see those as the same people. Environmental influence and deep trauma, I think they’re very different stories, and I think we have to respect that.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I don’t know if this will make sense. So, my PhD was in psychology, but my two emphasis areas were behavioral neuroscience and statistics. So, I dove heavily into math and statistics. The statistics were really nice to prove significant differences and that something does or doesn’t have an effect. But what we miss oftentimes about statistics is that the whole job of statistics is to remove unpredictability or error. So, what do we do in an experiment, for instance, we’ll take a bunch of people and let’s say they’re all cocaine users, and we’ll give one group of cocaine users one medication, and we’ll give the other one CBT treatment. And we’ll say, “Which one worked better?” And so, we’ll see how much cocaine they use at the end and some other assessments. And at the end, we compare the two groups and we say, “Hey, the medication group worked better. It had a 8% or 50% greater reduction in using.”
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Let’s just say that’s the results. Totally made up study, by the way. Don’t go look for it. It doesn’t exist. I just made those up. Some people would be like, “That study didn’t show it.” I’m like, “It’s not a study. I just made it up in my head.”
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And then we go and we say, “You see? Medication is more effective than CBT.” But that’s not actually what happened in the study. The study had a hundred people in each. For some of them, CBT worked really, really well, and they got CBT and it was really nice. For some of them, CBT didn’t do shit, and they got CBT and they were f’ed. Medication worked for some people and they got it, and they were like, “Oh my god, this is amazing. I love this. I’d never need to use cocaine again.” And some people got it and it didn’t do anything for them. And there were more people that got medication for whom medication did something than there were people for whom CBT did something and they got CBT.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
What we forget is when I come to treat Ashley, I’m not treating cocaine users who went to CBT as a group, I’m treating you. So, I need to understand does Ashley need CBT or medication. I don’t give a f if one worked better for a group. One is going to work better for Ashley and what we get so wrapped up in statistics that are really nice… The way I explain it now when I give talks, statistics were great on macro. Macro understanding of addiction is great. I don’t treat macro. Joey, Melissa, Jackie, and Jennifer come to help with me. What am I going to do? Hey, which of these two groups do you belong to? No. And so, I mean, I’m sure you guys do the exact same thing. The job of a good therapist is actually to listen to the client, [crosstalk 01:29:01] the information, and then apply the right method.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes. But the system within which we work is one that has CPT codes, and one that has standards of care, and one that treats people macros, one that gives ranges of this, there’s a dosage of medication based on your age, not your weight or your history or any of those things. We live in a medical model, a behavioral model that we try antidepressants. I mean, I’m on them.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
We just experiment.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No, we just experiment. We don’t SPECT scans or any of it. So, while you’re right, we don’t actually function in that model except in our heads, and so it makes sense that people would use those things to try to group people because that’s how you bill for it.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I know. So, right there, you hit on a couple of things. First of all, after running a rehab for five years, I swore I will never run a rehab again because now here’s the funny thing. So, our online program is coaching and education. It’s going to stay coaching and education, and all the treatment stuff will be referrals out and I don’t want to be involved in that. And the reason is simple. Well, actually, multiple reasons. One of them is, did you ever see The Social Dilemma, the movie about Facebook?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Okay.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Totally unrelated to what we’re talking about, but they make a very important point that is really interesting. If the people that are paying you are not the people that you’re serving, there’s a conflict of interest. And when an insurance company is paying you, I don’t know if anybody understands this or has ever thought about it, but the point of an insurance company is to pay as little of the money you give them. That is their stated goal is I’m going to collect as much money as I can from all the people out there, and then I’m going to pay out as little of it as possible. So, what do they do? They deny claims. They minimize payments. They throw paperwork away, whatever the f they do so that they don’t have to do the shit that you pay them money to do.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
In the meantime you, Ashley, and your staff are there to help the person. But the true god is the agencies that are paying you the money. So, you’re trying to help this person. You’re like, “I’m trying to help you, but they gave me $25. For $25, I can’t give you a lot of help.” So, to date, and it’ll probably have to change as we scale, but to date, I went direct-to-consumer on purpose. I made it dirt cheap, 43 to $200 a month. And I’m like, “Look, you give me the money, and then you’re my god. I’m trying to make it best for you.”
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
The moment I start taking money from somebody else who doesn’t care about how well you’re doing, but instead of cares about how much money they get, we’re screwed, and I’m going to have to figure that out if we ever scale to that place. But you’re right, and here’s what I hope, Ashley, that we get to do. I hope that as this conundrum, I’ll say, of addiction nightmare continues that we do get to go to the policy-makers and we say, “Look, this blood is not random. It’s not happening for no reason.” Whatever it is, 30, 40% of claims are just being rejected off hand. Too little money is paid for good work for people which means that the people that you’re supposed to be serving as the government are dying because we don’t have the resources to help them, and it’s a messed up fight. And it’s a fight that maybe we don’t feel like we should be having, but it is also the reality, and I applaud you guys. Out of all the online providers that I know, I think you’re the only one still to this day that I’ve seen that does official outpatient online treatment. The rest of them are either telepsychiatry or they do tiny little pieces of the puzzle.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I know why because it’s a bitch and the insurance companies make it really painful, really painful, and really difficult to provide services. It was interesting. I was just thinking about a quote that you… I won’t be able to quote it, but you talked about somewhere SAMHSA and how it doesn’t describe abstinence in the description of addiction. However, if you’re providing outpatient level of care and you are getting a review of the case, the person that’s reviewing the case is looking to see whether or not that person used, and if that person is using, it is over the course of a period of time, at a certain point, they will call that a failure of treatment. And a lot of the outcomes and studies are based on abstinence, and therefore tied to research, tied to grants, tied to payers, tied to the whole system.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, while moderation, this idea of another way and why I’m so glad it’s you and not me making all the noise, right, because I did it with online treatment where I made all the noise, online treatment can work, and got all the shit for it. So, I know that road. It is not fun. Some of this is payer model. Right? And what’s cool is that you do have the academic background and influence background around talking about this from that perspective, which I think that people will eventually listen to.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And there are really amazing people who have done and are doing incredible work in this area. I mean, Alan Marlette has passed but he was at University of Washington doing harm reduction work. There’s Katie Witkiewitz who’s, honestly, one of my idols and she’s out at the University of Mexico showing different patterns of relapse and how we need to start being able to be a little bit more sensitive to different people’s responses. There’s Carl Hart who’s leading the charge in a very different direction.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
And I think I’m not a very patient man. And so, the reason I went this way is I don’t really want to wait for the results. I want to see them in front of my face, but I know it feels different now than it did 10 years ago. And in 10 years, people like me are going to be the old fogies that are like, “Oh, my god, you’re still talking about that? There’s a whole new way of discussing this.” And I’m okay with it as long as we keep saving more lives. Because I remember I was online doing a very different thing than treatment when I met you guys. I was doing treatment matching and nobody knew anything about online world. So, I honestly, hats off to you guys for getting this far and doing so much because it was not an easy way. You did it way before COVID. Nobody did anything about online, anything.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, COVID was interesting explosion for us.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I’m sure.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think you are truly impressive and I really admire the work you do, and I love that you let me push back on it and that we can have these fun conversations because I appreciate it. And I think what’s cool is there are a lot of 12-step type people listen to what I’m saying because of my background, and they’re going to hear this. And that was kind of why I wanted to have this conversation because it may make other people who wouldn’t normally get in front of your material have an open mind.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Well, thank you for being open to that. And I’ve always loved our conversations. And again, very impressed by what you guys and your new lab have been able to accomplish. It’s just a new paradigm and it’s really beautiful to see, and let’s hope that as we keep trudging along, more and more new paradigms will come up that will help more and more people, and this idea of is there one way or another will sort of be on the side and will move to a place where everybody just gets free to explore whatever it works for them.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I look forward to watching that unfold with you.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Thank you so much, Ashley.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, thank you. Thank you so much. Where can people find your information?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Igntd.com and that’s I-G-N-T-D.com is one of the big places. My name, adijaffe.com. We set up a website just for that. And then Ashley mentioned it so I’ll mention it too. The book is called The Abstinence Myth, and you can find it on Amazon or at theabstinencemyth.com
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And your podcast you do, right?
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I do. I have a podcast called IGNTD.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay, okay.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
I talk recovery, and we do kind of like a Monday Motivation and a Friday Recovery Meeting.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Killer. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Adi Jaffe:
Thank you, Ashley. Have a great one.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a recovery community offering free online support group meetings, useful recovery information, and entertainment. Visit www.lionrock.life to view the meetings schedule and find additional resources. Find the joy in recovery at Lionrock.life.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:38:04]
Ashley Jo is one of the producers of The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast team. With over a decade of experience working with C-level executives and directing corporate training events, she brings extensive production experience to Lionrock. In early 2020, she made a significant career change and stepped into the realm of podcasting.
Her recovery experience includes substance abuse, codependency, grief and loss, and sexual assault and trauma. Ashley Jo enjoys supporting others in recovery by connecting with people and being a leader. She shared her story in Season 3, Episode 92 of The Courage to Change.