May 12

Written By Christiana Kimmich

#48 – Jay Shifman

Jay Shifman’s Story

Jay Shifman is passionate about issues of Addiction and Mental Health. A Speaker, Writer, Consultant, Coach and Advocate, Jay lives intentionally around seeing the realization of his dream; to end the stigma around issues of Addiction and Mental Health. Jay works with individuals and organizations to make real change in how they approach, act on and talk about Mental health and Addiction. A graduate of Northern Kentucky University, Jay is ten years in recovery and lives with his wife, Lauren, and their dog, Nell, on Daniel Island, South Carolina. You can learn more at his website, www.JayShifman.com.

Jay is currently writing a book, Profiles in Change, that focuses on the untold stories of people doing new, unique and interesting work aimed at the issues of the Addiction and Mental Health epidemic we currently find ourselves in that grew out of his tri-weekly posts on LinkedIn and my website.

Additional Information

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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. Today, we have Jay Shifman. Jay is passionate about issues of addiction and mental health, a speaker, writer, consultant, coach, and advocate, Jay lives intentionally around seeing the realization of his dream: To end stigma around issues of addiction and mental health. Jay works with individuals and organizations to make real change in how they approach, act on, and talk about mental health and addiction. A graduate of Northern Kentucky University, Jay is 10 years in recovery and lives with his wife, Lauren and their dog [Nell 00:00:40] On Daniel Island, South Carolina. You can learn more at his website, www.jayshifman.com. Jay is currently writing a book, Profiles and Change, that focuses on the untold stories of people doing new, unique and interesting work, aimed at the issues of the addiction and mental health epidemic we currently find ourselves in, that grew out of his tri-weekly posts on LinkedIn and his website.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Ladies and gentlemen, Jay Shifman was an absolute pleasure. This is the first person we’ve had on the podcast who defines his recovery a little bit differently and is not a member of a 12 step program. I thought it was really important to get his perspective and talk about different ways that people can get sober and stay sober in recovery for long periods of time. I hope that all of you come into this with an open mind and leave with much more information and inspiration than you started with. Please feel free to reach out to us or to Jay for more information. We would love to hear from you. All right, guys, enjoy this amazing episode, episode 48, let’s do this.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Jay, where are you located right now?

Jay Shifman:

I live on Daniel Island, a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh God, I love Charleston. How big is the island?

Jay Shifman:

Not large. We have two main strips of business district and everything else around it is apartments and houses. It’s a small suburb, but it’s nice. We love it here. We’ve been here since August. It’s just removed enough that we can feel a sense of relaxation, but just close enough that we can drive within 20 minutes anywhere we need to go. Yesterday we biked up to our grocery store to get some stuff, and so it’s nice. My wife describes it as living in Pleasantville, which is very, very accurate, but we love it.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, nothing wrong with living in Pleasantville. Are you from South Carolina?

Jay Shifman:

I’m not. I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. We moved here, my wife and I, she’s from this area, and we moved here to be close to her family. Last summer, a member of her family went through a health situation and we decided that if we were ever going to live near her family, we had been living near mine, that now was the time, so we came down.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Awesome. Awesome. How does South Carolina compare to Ohio?

Jay Shifman:

Very different. The weather is unbelievable. It’s been beautiful since we got here. Obviously we got here right at the end of summer so we’re a little apprehensive about next summer. But it’s been really nice. When everybody else in Ohio was going through blizzards in the winter, I was like, “Oh no, I have to put on a sweatshirt. This is horrible.” But you understand being in California, right?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I do. It is. It is. It’s something that my husband and I talk about when we talk about ever leaving California, and you’ll see, once you adjust to that putting on a sweatshirt feeling, it is so… And your tolerance for temperature will change. And so what will feel cold to you will change. It’s definitely an adjustment.

Jay Shifman:

I believe it. I don’t miss the winters and I always hated snow so it’s nice being away from that. Yeah.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s definitely one of those things you have to learn to love if you’re going to live in a climate like that.

Jay Shifman:

It’s true. Though I will say the one thing that has been very different for us is, when I was in Cincinnati, I started this work that I do now. That journey kind of started five years ago, but the actual work itself was about a year ago. And it was received incredibly well in Cincinnati. There really wasn’t that much, Oh, let’s not talk about it. You had to push, don’t get me wrong. People weren’t like, Yes, let’s talk about mental health or addiction, you could have the conversation. Whereas here there’s so much of that Southern, Oh, bless your heart. Like let’s not talk about these things and that’s been tough. That’s been tough to get used to. And it’s been a struggle for me to find people who are willing to not run away from that conversation. And that part has been more difficult.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s interesting. Yeah. I was smiling because I was just listening to a comedian who, she’s from South Carolina and she was talking about how if a Southern person says, Bless your heart, they’re not being nice, [crosstalk 00:05:42] She made a whole joke about it.

Jay Shifman:

And there is some of that in the Midwest too. Actually, I wrote this scathing letter to the editor a couple of years ago. I used to work in politics. That was my life. And about somebody in a different part of the state who is just as backwards on beliefs as you could be, and this isn’t even a political thing. This is like, things that gay marriage brought about, all that kind of horrible stuff. And her response to the paper was, Oh bless his heart. And I was like, Oh, I got under her skin. That was…

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Shots fired, shots fired. Oh my God.

Jay Shifman:

So I’m used to that. But it is down one here, it is a different [inaudible 00:06:23] of people. Even people in the industry going, “That’s just not how we do things. You got to keep it under wraps.” And I’m just like, “I don’t do that. I’m from the North where you get shit done.” And down here this, Let’s go at a snail’s pace. Let’s be polite. I just don’t have time for that.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s so funny. Well, I don’t know if you’re familiar, I think, is it Al-Anon or Overeaters Anonymous, in one of them, there’s a common saying where they say, Bless my heart as a nice, like, Oh my gosh, there’s my disease, or there’s my addiction or there’s my mental illness. And it’s supposed to be a gentle thing you say to yourself like, Oh, I’m being, Okay, this is who I am. And so for me not having any… And my husband’s from Texas, which he says is not the South, which-

Jay Shifman:

Its own thing. Texas is its own thing.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

… Apparently. I’m like, No, it’s the South, but whatever. So I thought that it was like a kind Southern thing you say. So I’m just learning that- [crosstalk 00:07:30]

Jay Shifman:

No. [inaudible 00:07:30] saying f you.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

… Yeah, exactly. I was going to say I’m learning it’s a f you, because I don’t want to tell all these women who are like, Oh, bless my heart. Man, you guys should really learn what that means.

Jay Shifman:

Yep. Yep. That’s the Southern screw off. Like you’ve pissed me off, which is, it’s fun. I appreciate it.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you give us a little background on Jay, where did you grow up? What was your early life like?

Jay Shifman:

You mean, we can’t just talk and commiserate about our mental health for the entire episode [crosstalk 00:08:10]

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

We can, but here’s what I always say, and this is actually my pitch about the podcast in general. Which is the fact that I don’t drink and don’t do drugs, I follow the laws, I am nice to my husband and my children most of the time. And I don’t steal, I don’t hit people. That’s only impressive if you know my background, otherwise it’s like, Yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to do. I am not an impressive human being unless you know where I came from because pretty much, that’s what most people are expected to do, right?

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. But I got to disagree. [crosstalk 00:08:58] but not enough people do it. That’s number one. And number two, you’ve created one of my favorite podcasts, which means that you are an impressive person. You’re a very good interviewer. So I would not sell yourself short like that, but-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Well, thank you.

Jay Shifman:

… I get what you’re saying and I agree with you and that’s why whenever I speak publicly, one of the first things I do is sort of give a condensed or if I have a long time, a longer version of my story, because you’re right. It does put it in context and it makes it easier to understand, like, Oh, what I’m doing now is great, but what I’m doing now in the context of where I was 10 years ago, it’s like, Oh, Holy shit. So it definitely makes it more impactful.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I personally am someone who, I really appreciate things in context, much more. One of the things I, experience I had with when I was dating my husband early, like a fricking decade ago. And I remember the first time I went home with him and met his family and saw where he came from and seeing him in context. I remember there are so many things that super pissed me off about him that we would, there were just like, I could murder you over these things, but seeing it in context of why and where he came from and… He grew up a Jehovah’s Witnesses and in-

Jay Shifman:

Wow!

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

… Yeah. And in Jehovah’s Witnesses culture, you keep secrets, there’s all this crazy stuff that goes on around, you will be publicly humiliated if you keep someone else’s secret, you’re held responsible, an accomplice after the fact. And so all this weird stuff that he did that really just got in. I was like, Oh, okay, this makes sense. People in context, I just have so much more compassion for them. And so what’s been so fun for me about this is getting people in context.

Jay Shifman:

Well, and that makes perfect sense. Again, that’s something that I actually talk about when I speak, is that our brains, that’s how our brains work is that, we understand in story. So when I first started talking about my experience actually, I would put it in context of like, let me tell you about how I finally graduated school. And then I would talk about struggling with addiction, or let me tell you about my marriage. And those things were amazing. Don’t get me wrong. Obviously I love my wife very much, but the real story is that I’m still here. And so that’s harder for people to understand if they don’t have that to relate to.

Jay Shifman:

And it takes more of an effort when I speak now because I have to weave a story as opposed to, let me just tell you things because by the end, they may get it, but they don’t get it. But if you can tell that story in an effective way and help the person’s brain internalize, then they’re like, Oh shit. You know what I mean? It definitely takes more work when you’re writing and when you were speaking, but you have more of an impact that way.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And it’s the fun thing that comes with podcasting because you can do the long form and really like get this to, people can listen to it in chunks and whenever. And like you really get, even because in pitches that we do, the longest pitch I do is an hour. And usually I’m only talking for what, 40 minutes. So only 40 minutes of someone’s story is definitely going to be condensed into less context.

Jay Shifman:

And then I even tell mine in 15 minute chunk. And so you take that and it’s like-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

The worst is five minutes. I can’t [crosstalk 00:12:46]

Jay Shifman:

… There’s that famous quote where it’s like, You have me talk for an hour and I’m good. You want me to talk for 15 minutes, I got to prepare for a month. Because trying to get that story condensed is only half the battle. Getting it condensed to a way that still leaves my message and my point, that’s hard.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. So tell us, give us Jay in context. Tell me about Jay.

Jay Shifman:

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest of four boys, to-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, bless your mother’s heart.

Jay Shifman:

… Oh, I know. She kept trying-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I mean that in the California way.

Jay Shifman:

… She kept trying for a daughter and it didn’t happen. All boys. And we’re all boys within six years. So we’re all very close in age. Why they kept trying so much, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve seen pictures. They claim they were loving it, but I’ve seen pictures of each of them holding a kid and they don’t look like they’re loving it. They look exhausted. They will definitely hear this. And mom and dad, I see you. I don’t get it, but I see you and it’s appreciated. So I was the oldest of four boys born in 1986. So I’m 33 now in a really loving household. Born and raised Jewish. So had a very community based tight knit family.

Jay Shifman:

Once had our grandparents live right down the street. I had cousins that lived 10 minutes away. We were all very close growing up and it was great. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, whether it’s because I erased all those memories with drugs, I’m not sure. Or if it’s just time sort of compressing some of it. But what I do remember is very happy, born into privilege. My family business goes three generations back. It’s a pretty big deal in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a business that spans five continents? Six?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

What is it?

Jay Shifman:

My dad would be very disappointed. He’s the CEO now. He’d be very disappointed that I can’t remember how many continents. It’s a chemical manufacturing business. The easiest way I can describe it is, do you remember when the Share a Coke Campaign came out when everyone had their names on a Coke can or bottle?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, yeah.

Jay Shifman:

So Hewlett Packard printed those labels, but they could not for the life of them, figure out how to get the ink, to stay on the labels. And my family’s business has the product that made that work. And so it’s a random business, but someone’s got to do it. And it’s been in my family now for three generations. And so because of that, we were born into privilege and went to the finest schools in Cincinnati and went to great colleges. I always was never wanting. We weren’t buying up the town, but we also went to great schools and we also had everything we ever wanted. So really, really privileged in that way.

Jay Shifman:

A lot of great friends, a couple of whom are still friends to this day. When I got married a couple of years ago, half of my groomsmen, I had known since at least middle school, so long time. And pretty typical childhood in that respect. I was an athlete, was very committed to that. I was a baseball player and actually almost played in college so that was important to me. But as I got older, again, this is the late ’80s, mid ’90s. I, like many people from my generation were put on prescription pills for ADHD. I actually, I have the stats, it’s something I talk about a lot. The year after I was born in 1987, there was like 350,000 children that were given stimulants in effort to treat ADHD. By the time I was put on pills, 10 years later in 1997 at the age of 11, that number was 2 million. This was a living, breathing experiment on my generation, and they’re still going on.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Just want to drop in and say that it was majority boys too.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah, no, that’s a hundred percent. And when I’ve started telling my story now as an adult, there were two guys who I noticed at the time had very similar stories and we all were in one class together in high school and none of us knew the other one was going through this. And so as an adult, both have reached out to me like, Yo, I had no idea, and my story is very similar to yours. So that was sort of how I got started on this. There’s a lot of research that’s been done to sort of tie that together with a lot of struggles with substances as adults.

Jay Shifman:

And it’s because we know now that if you inundate a brain before the age of 15, before the age of 20, there’s more likelihood of struggling with addiction. And here I was as an 11 year old kid being given high rates of chemicals, Well, no shit, I’m going to struggle with something. You know what I mean? So unfortunately for me, mine was all prescribed. Like every other kid, I smoked weed a couple of times and I drank a couple of times, but I was so dedicated to being an athlete. I ran cross country. It was something I was very proud of. I was very good at cross country. I was a really good baseball player. These were things that were important to me so I didn’t do anything in high school. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink.

Jay Shifman:

I experimented in middle school, but I gave it all up and I was like, I’m going to dedicate myself to being an athlete. But the problem was here I was being given things that were 10 times higher by someone, it all being prescribed to me-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. On a regular basis.

Jay Shifman:

… Exactly. Than anything, I could have smoked weed once a week and it wouldn’t have done nearly any damage to me like this was doing. So when I was in my mid teens, I’d been on ADHD medication for four or so years, my therapist right now, I’ve been seeing for about half a decade, great guy, I thought. I really developed a close relationship with him. He was cool. He was a really well known therapist in Cincinnati, Ohio. He still is very community active. He said that I was showing signs of a mood disorder. And you know, in your teens is when some of that stuff can come up and we didn’t question it. We said, Okay we’ll keep an eye on that.

Jay Shifman:

So I didn’t really push back on the medication thing. I got off it for a couple of weeks in high school because I didn’t want to be on medication anymore. And it didn’t have that much effect on me, but it had enough to, sort of my inability to focus. I was that typical class clown. I was the guy who was more interested in making people laugh than doing really well in school. And so when those things started to override my grades and all that, I got back on medication like two weeks later. But by my late high school, he was really saying, we should be talking about this mood disorder issue.

Jay Shifman:

And I had had some struggles with depression when I was younger, I still do. Struggles with anxiety when I was younger, still to much, much lesser extent, but I still did. I struggled with a little bit of OCD. And so these things were very minor, but they were blossoming and there was never, or at least I don’t remember there ever being a discussion like, is it possible that these drugs are making these things worse? So I graduated high school. I was not a good student ever. I just didn’t learn. Well, I wasn’t a good student in high school, wasn’t a good student in college. It just was not something that was great at. But I went to one of the nice schools in Ohio, The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, which is a very well respected small school.

Jay Shifman:

And by this time, I was being prescribed pills for these various issues as well. So not only was I on ADHD medication, but I was also being prescribed things for anxiety, being prescribed pills for what he believed was this mood disorder. So I go to college, my freshman year and that’s when shit really started to get bad. I got arrested in my freshman year for dealing weed. When my baseball career finished, I had no reason anymore not to experiment with other drugs. That was the reason that I didn’t before, was that I was this athlete and well, like I said, I had an opportunity to play in college, but it was only one school that wanted me and I didn’t really want to go there. So I went to this other school that accepted me instead. And when my baseball career ended, I was like, All right, well, now I can do those things that I never really had much experience with.

Jay Shifman:

So I drank a lot. I was a typical idiot college kid. I was drinking a lot. I was smoking a lot trying other drugs as well, but all this time, my base level is already a lot higher than everybody that I’m hanging out with because I’m on multiple medications as well. So freshman year did not go great. I had a lot of good friends and all that was good, but like I said, I got arrested for dealing. My roommate and I were dealing together, like a lot of weed. At one point, half the college was coming to us for weed. And we got busted right around Thanksgiving of our freshman year. Like I said, I’d been there for like two months. So at this point, three months and I already get arrested for selling weed.

Jay Shifman:

So again, we were very lucky being these privileged white kids that we were. We were able to get good lawyers and it’s not on my record anymore, but it was still an issue. Here I was a couple of months into my college career and I’m getting arrested for the first time. And I had already, I was the kind of kid who, I wasn’t a rebel but I had my license taken away for speeding in high school and got suspended a couple of times. Once for fighting a kid and stuff like that. So my parents were justifiably concerned. But all this time, I’m still seeing this therapist back in Cincinnati. We’re talking by phone once a week and he’s prescribing different medications and higher rates of these medications.

Jay Shifman:

But at the end of my freshman year, I left Wooster. I transferred back to University of Cincinnati because if I hadn’t, I would have failed out. So again, not a great student, did not take college seriously, was partying my ass off. Had a wonderful time, but was not doing well in school. Came back to UC and that didn’t change. I didn’t have the skills to be a good student. And again, I’m just on all these crazy amounts of chemicals as it is. So sophomore year, I ended up joining a fraternity, which gave me even more license to party and not go to class. And those guys, a couple of them are still very close friends and we all did that together. I felt very communal for not going to class, for drinking, smoking, doing a lot of shrooms and stuff like that multiple nights a week, because we were all doing it together.

Jay Shifman:

And I ended up failing out of University of Cincinnati, my sophomore year. So at that point you would think that there would be like, All right, maybe this is a moment where I can stop and, Okay, okay. Things have gone off the rails. But I wasn’t there yet. I hadn’t reached my moment. By this point, though, the symptoms that my therapist had said were part of, now we’re calling it bipolar disorder, are flourishing. My OCD is off the charts, I’m cleaning a lot nonstop. I’m having nightmares because I’m on so much chemicals and mixing with all sorts of stuff.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Can you tell us what you were on? Give us an idea.

Jay Shifman:

So I meant to pull out the records. I have the records here. I went back in Walgreens and CVS. I basically filed open records requests for my own stuff. And I have pages. I counted up, I was on over 10 different medications throughout this time. Conserta was the one I was on for my ADHD. I had gone through the spectrum of ADHD medication and starting with Ritalin [inaudible 00:25:08] everybody doesn’t go all the way up to Conserta and we settled on that one. By my early 20s, I’m also taking Abilify, I’m taking Klonopin, that’s the one that I really had a problem with.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

What were you taking that for? When they were like, you should be on Klonopin for X? [inaudible 00:25:29]

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. So the Klonopin was for the anxiety. And then there was things like Abilify and a couple others that were the mood stabilizers. Later I was put on Lithium and other even more high power… But at my worst, I was on, I think I was prescribed, it was either five or six different chemicals at one time and 1300 milligrams a day of chemicals that were prescribed to me. And then I was abusing every single one of those on top of the prescriptions. I went from when I was 11 and was first put on Ritalin and having to hide my Ritalin in a banana to swallow because my throat was like, No, we’re not going to do that to by the time I’m 21, 22, I’m popping handfuls of Klonopin without water. I tell people that if you’ve seen the show House, the way Dr. House takes his Vicodin, that was me on Klonopin. It was so bad at this point.

Jay Shifman:

I’m 21. I went to Israel with my fraternity brothers. We were the Jewish Fraternity. So we all went on our Birthright together, which is the trip that young Jews get the opportunity to take and this was, let’s see, that would have been, so I was 21, that would be 2007. So we all went on together and I got stopped by security going through New York and at JFK because I’m carrying a backpack that had Bob Marley’s face on it. There’s pictures of this on Facebook. And the only thing in the backpack is canisters of pills. Nothing else, just pill canisters.

Jay Shifman:

And they pulled me out and they said, “There’s no way you’re not a dealer. Who does this?” And I was like, “No, those are all mine. You can look. My name is on every single one of them.” And I was searched. I don’t blame them. If you see this kid, and by the way, I was a full blown hippie with a fro. I know you can’t see it right now, I’ve got my head shaved, but I used to have a full blown fro. I’m carrying a backpack with Bob Marley’s face on it, full of pill canisters, I would search that kid.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right, right, right. Yeah. You weren’t exactly what we would call under the radar.

Jay Shifman:

Not at all. No. So that should’ve been a red flag, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t taking any of these… I was trusting. I wasn’t taking any of these red flags for what they are and I was trusting my therapist who told me I needed all these things. So, that pattern continues where the symptoms continued to flourish, my anxiety is off the chart, my mood is up and down. There’s no stability whatsoever. The low level things, my inability to concentrate, my OCD are all blooming. And I feel like at some point I had to have said to him, “Why is it that these are not helping the things that I’m supposed to be getting better at?” But their answers were always, “We need to find the right cocktail. We need to get you in the right dosage.”

Jay Shifman:

The same answers we hear all the time. And I want to make this perfectly clear that I do believe that there are people that these help. I’m not one of those people like, All pills are evil. I’m not a doctor, who am I to say that? And I was on a podcast six, eight months ago where the person made that point. And I was like, I’m not a doctor. I’m not going to say that there aren’t people who can be helped by this. I know people in recovery who are on medication. I know people who aren’t in recovery who are on medication. I’m just saying that people in this industry are people and they’re fallible and people make mistakes and I was one of the people that they failed.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s a really good… I appreciate that you made that point. So I’ve been on both ends of that, where medication has very much in my adult life helped me. I’m on medication, it’s helped me tremendously. It helps me tremendously. And I was you too. You and I were born the same year. So we went through that similar thing. I wasn’t the boy that they had to calm down so he could sit through class, but I was definitely the, Oh, do you have a mood disorder? Oh, do you have this? Oh, do you have whatever? And through my teens, I have been put on and diagnosed with every… I Like you, pulled up all the records of everything I’ve ever taken. It’s alarming. And here’s one of the reasons why, because there is no way to say, Okay, take this blood test, or we’re going to do this chemical testing and see what… I should say, there are ways, but it’s not used.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Basically what you do is you come in and you say, I have these symptoms and they go, “Hmm. I think this sounds good.” Whatever’s top of mind. And I have been to so many psychiatrists who I know because you and I probably both now basically could probably be pharmacists and people call me and ask me about medication. I’m like, you do realize every advice I’m going to give you is not, I’m not a pharmacist, and then I drop into like, But if you ask me, and the amazing… It’s just kind of like, Okay, we’re going to drop at five milligrams. Okay. We’re going to increase it. It’s a total chemical experiment, like you said, and it’s happening… For me that chemical experiment, like with you, happened when I was very young. For me, more as a teenager than when you were a little kid, but there’s an article that I think-

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:31:04]

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

…A little kid. But there’s an article that I think, if people are interested, that really relates to what you’re talking about. And it’s called The Drugging of the American Boy. And as you said, there is absolutely a population out there where these drugs really help people. I mean, I know bipolar people where this is just, I mean, they come off their meds, they’re different people. However, we have started this and there’s so much literature on this, I encourage anyone interested. If people are interested in more information about it, feel free to email me. There’s so much literature out there about what happened with you Jay.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And it’s about making little boys in particular, but making children docile enough to be educated in large classrooms, sitting, being taught by lecture. And because our schools are set up in that way, which is a industrial revolution, the way that it was taught, and it has led to kids who cannot sit through that or don’t have the personality to sit there and listen, absorb that way, are medicated. And that is what you’re talking about. That is what happened to you through and through. And then whatever symptoms and side effects you had as a result of the original, whatever that original symptom that you are medicated for, right? Anxiety is also a side effect of Ritalin and of amphetamines in a 10 year old boy. So you start off this chain reaction and I mean, that’s really what it sounds like is a huge part of what happened for you.

Jay Shifman:

Totally. And I’m really glad you make that point. It’s funny, I had that very conversation with a friend, probably six or so months ago where we were having lunch. And he told me that his son, who was seven, they had recommended that they put them on Ritalin. And he said, “I wanted to ask you, because this sounds like your experience.” I said, “Yeah, I was 11. Your son is seven. Look, I’m not a doctor, I have no idea. I can just tell you what happened to me.” And I personally, if I had a child today, would not put them on medication because I lived through it and I know how badly it screwed up my brain. And I completely agree with you. It’s unfortunate that we are unwilling to challenge some conventional beliefs on education and instead would rather tinker with humans. Now look again, I’ve not spent decades studying the American education system. I can’t tell you what needs to change. I can tell you one of those can be tinkered with safely. The other one is literal human beings. Why we went that route, couldn’t tell you.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Because it’s easier than changing an entire system. And you can blame it on that individual. And I mean, so many reasons. There’s a wonderful book called Creative Schools. And I highly, if you have a child, you’re listening to this and this is what you’re going through, I highly recommend checking it out because there are a lot of options for kids who can’t sit through a lecture at seven years old. And I too, I have a dear friend of mine who I love so much whose son, they got him into this amazing school. And who has trouble sitting still and they’re like, “Look, you either put them on medication or he can’t go to school here.” I totally get it, like, it’s not a judgment. I understand. And I am sure that there are a group of children who really do benefit and need it.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So it’s not a black and white decision, but your story is a cautionary tale, right? Which is, are we looking at all the components? Is this the best school? Are they meeting Jay, where Jay needs to be met? It’s not like you weren’t getting enough exercise. Are we engaging Jay? Is Jay super bored in college? I mean, what are you supposed to do if you are super bored in college, everyone is partying and drinking and you’re in a frat? You know what I mean? What are you supposed to do? If you don’t have any drive, like we really just don’t address these things. And then you add in the fuel to that fire. And we have Jay at 23 cleaning, whatever you were cleaning.

Jay Shifman:

And you make an excellent point. Two things. One, we deal in black and white too often in situations that are nothing but shades of gray. And I mean that both for this, what we’re talking about, the education system, and also that’s how I approach being in recovery. And when it comes to helping people enter recovery, we say, “Either you do this, or you do that. There’s nothing else.” And it’s like in reality, maybe three percent is black two percent is white and everything else has shades of gray. We don’t have an answer for 99.9% of the things that we have in our life. There is not an ironclad answer and yet our brains and the way we approach things are black and white, either this or that. And we need to do more of that shades of gray thinking. And that was number one.

Jay Shifman:

And number two is just having these conversations like you were saying to address some of this beforehand. If I had known that I had mental health issues that ran in my family, maybe we approach this situation different when 14 year old Jay is getting a diagnosis of a mood disorder. Maybe we don’t, maybe we get a second opinion. Maybe we don’t. But we didn’t talk about these things. I don’t blame my parents whatsoever for any of this that the path they followed. I would have probably done the same thing. I would like to think that going forward, if my wife and I choose to have kids, that if there was a situation like this, we would take all tools in the toolbox and come up with some kind of a solution. And we would have the conversation, like what are you feeling? What is happening? And that didn’t happen. I don’t just mean for me. I just mean we aren’t doing that period because people are shying away from conversations.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

We’re shying away from conversation. But in the case of my friend, I’ll say, right, where he has this son, because just watching this being, and I have little, little kids, right? So I haven’t been in this situation and I don’t know what that’s like. I don’t want it to seem like I’m casting judgment. But what I saw was an impossible situation, right? With a family that got their kid into a great school and they have a younger son, both parents work, and because that’s how life looks often now. And the choices were the professionals are saying, “This needs to happen.” The child does not have answers for what is going on. And the alternative is to what? Go to find some really innovative school that’s not nearby.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

These are horrendously difficult, complicated choices. And the reason for that is that it’s easier in general for everyone to just sedate or our version of sedate. I hate to say sedate with amphetamines. It’s easier for us to put a bandaid on that one thing, as opposed to be really proactive about it and upend everyone’s lives. Right?

Jay Shifman:

Right. Yep.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I think that’s the scary part, right? That’s the scary part is like these parents are being put in impossible situations and there aren’t that many resources. And so you were asking people to go hunting for them. And this is the accepted method. And I love, love, love that you’re talking about gray area. So I want to say this too. On this podcast, because I’m a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and 12 step programs, right, we hear a lot of those people.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Those are easy accesses for me. And so we’re really working to get a lot of other stories. And I know a lot of these people have these incredible stories. But I do want to say that there are a lot of ways to get sober. I would say skin a cat. I hate that saying. Who came up with that?

Jay Shifman:

Yeah.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But there are a lot of ways and types of sobriety and really the true goal for every single one of us is to have a happy and healthy better life.

Jay Shifman:

That’s exactly right.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

However we get there and if it works for us, if it’s working for us, then that is success. Success should not be defined. My success and your success don’t have to look the same.

Jay Shifman:

That’s beautifully put.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So tell us, tell me about, because I know, so you 1300 milligrams, Bob Marley, you’re going on birthright.

Jay Shifman:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

You’re seeing in the Holy land.

Jay Shifman:

I was just actually, over the weekend, I was catching up on some of the last couple episodes. And you had a quote in one of the last episodes where you said that there’s this line and I guess it’s AA, about I wouldn’t trade my worst day in recovery for my best day using, and how much bullshit that is. And I want to say, you said that, and I was sitting on my couch howling, because I was like, thank you. Thank you for saying that, because that is so much bullshit. Don’t get me wrong. The lowest of my lows when I was using are just like, I never want to go anywhere close to that again. But the highest of my highs were incredible. So whoever said that is just wrong.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Outright wrong, outright wrong. I don’t know whoever said that was not using.

Jay Shifman:

What are you in recovery from? Because you clearly weren’t having fun at all when you were doing it, if that’s your life.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Maybe they always overshot the mark.

Jay Shifman:

Exactly.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So it was all a vomiting situation. I don’t know. There’s a lot of people with a lot of experience in this area. I’m not sure how they got that. But when I heard that, I was like, “On what planet would I not trade my worst day in recovery for my best?”

Jay Shifman:

Yep.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But, but, and like I talked about it was like, but we’re talking about what I would trade. Would I trade my life?

Jay Shifman:

Right, right. No, 100%. And that definitely needs to be clarified. Neither one of us is recommending right now that you go back to using. No, no, no, no, no.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. No, no, no. But those trades, no one’s offered to trade me those things. So when that does happen, I’ll let you know how it goes. But yeah, to say, and I think this is where the DARE program really screwed the pooch for another horrible saying, which is to not address the fact that drugs and alcohol are a lot of fun.

Jay Shifman:

100%.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

We are jumping the shark on that.

Jay Shifman:

Yep.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right?

Jay Shifman:

Definitely.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s stupid and that’s not true. And to say like, “Oh, the first time you try cocaine, you’re going to overdose and die. And it’s going to be a horrible experience.” Like, no, dude, you’re going to think you saw God, let’s just be honest.

Jay Shifman:

I’m so glad you say that because I was being interviewed like two weeks ago for this parent, it was like a magazine or something, and I said this. And the person looked at me, he was like, “I can’t write that.” And I was like, “But you should. You should talk about how we have to have honest conversations with kids.” Yes. You are going to have some really horrible moments if you abuse drugs or alcohol. You’re also going to have some amazing moments. Let’s talk about how to do this safely. We know you’re going to experiment, right? We know kids are going to experiment. It’s the same thing with sex. It’s like telling them, “Well, if you show them a condom, they’re going to want to have sex.” Hell no, they’re going to have sex anyways. Maybe we can convince them to do it safely. It’s the same thing.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Nevermind. But no, I think if you tell children a lie about drugs, right? You tell them it’s not fun, it’s horrible, all drug dealers look like this, whatever, whatever you tell them, right? And then they try it because they’re going to, and it’s a lot of fun?

Jay Shifman:

Yeah.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

You’re a liar. You’re a liar now. No credibility. None.

Jay Shifman:

None. And we see that. You had, again, someone on recently who talked about his only experience with alcohol was he knew that mommy drank it and he wasn’t allowed. Of course, you’re going to try it when you get older.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right.

Jay Shifman:

Like if you tell them honestly, yes, if used correctly, alcohol is incredible. But if use it incorrectly, let’s talk about what happens, that is a much more informed child than just don’t do this, but also turn a blind eye when mom drinks three glasses of wine a night.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right.

Jay Shifman:

So we have to have these conversations and we can’t just shy. This goes back to what you and I first started talking about, the oh, bless your heart. Well, yeah, you may feel better if you don’t have these conversations, but your kid has a much higher chance of using.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. And that’s sometimes what I am sure you talk about this too, which is like, okay, so here are your options. You can wait until this gets worse. When I talk to parents about sending their kid to treatment or this that and they talk about how awful that is. And I actually worked with a mom this morning that was actually my emergency call where just heartbroken, mom just heartbroken, sending a teenager to Wilderness. And what we would talk about is like, “Look, you can send this kid to Wilderness now because everything you need to know is there, like all the signs are there, or you can be like the other people who I’ve worked with who are burying their children, who are in jail.” You get to decide where to intervene and how you want this to look. And the fact that we have this idea that it shouldn’t be painful. We have this idea that we shouldn’t have hard feelings and hard conversations. Like we should not feel discomfort, let’s avoid this discomfort.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah, and it’s screwing up everything. It’s we would rather feel okay now and deal with what’s going to be worse down the road than meet in the middle and handle a situation that’s not great, but it’s not here.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Than have an uncomfortable conversation.

Jay Shifman:

100%.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

You know what people do to avoid an uncomfortable conversation with another human being? I mean, I know you do, stupid question. But you know what I mean? It is astonishing.

Jay Shifman:

So the analogy I always use is like, why is it that the minute, the minute, if God forbid, you were giving yourself an exam and you felt a lump, you would call your doctor that day. Right? I want to come in. I want this looked at, I’m scared. Whereas the analogy you just used, we’re doing with addiction, you’re waiting months, if not years after that lump. Well, let’s see if it grows, right? Let’s see if it may be gets worse. That’s ridiculous.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But Jay, you have those people, Jay, you have those people though. And I know this because I look at some weird stuff online, which is, and it’s not on YouPorn. But the people who are like, “This woman came into the emergency room with a 60 pound tumor,” and she looks like nine months pregnant. And you’re like, “Okay,” I don’t know if you’ve seen these things. But where you just stop and you’re like, “Well, what happened? Can you talk to me about where she was at when she looked six months pregnant?” What is it about this? See you and I are like, “I got a lump. I got to go get checked out.” Right? Maybe it’s because we’re members of the tribe. But I also wonder, like I also have seen people who go to extraordinary lengths to should just not deal with things.

Jay Shifman:

But those are the minority, right? And when it comes to something like cancer, right, most people will go to the doctor. But when it comes to addiction, it’s the opposite, where most people will avoid it and the small few will immediately try to attack this thing.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But do you think that’s because of prevalence?

Jay Shifman:

I think prevalence is a big piece of it. And I think stigma is also a huge piece of it. So actually great example. I had this conversation with my grandmother a week ago, where I told her about some of the work I’m doing. And she said, “You’re so brave.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “You’re telling your story.” And my aunt unfortunately, is going through cancer right now. And I said, “Let me ask you something. When your daughter is in recovery from cancer, will you call her brave if she talks about it?” And she said, “No.” And I said, “But you would call her brave for living through that?” She said, “Of course.” I said, “Why is it different from my experience? Why is it brave for me to talk about it, but the living through it piece is, Oh, I wish we could go back and fix that for you.” Whereas my aunt it’s like, you had to go through it, but you’re stronger now. And you’re so brave for making it through it. But everyone talks about cancer. Why are those two things any different?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Context.

Jay Shifman:

That’s what I’m saying. It shouldn’t be though.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Jay Shifman:

It should be the same thing. But we’re treating those two things like night and day.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Because people do not, this is my opinion, people do not see the correlation between cancer and addiction. And in that, in that, with cancer, let’s just say we’ll count out the ones where this is just a crazy situation. But with cancer, a lot of the behaviors that people engage in, that are normal behaviors like, I don’t know, using tinfoil to bake something, whatever, like things that we do on a regular basis, whether that’s we smoke or we’re exposed to things, those things cause cancer. Right? But because there’s like norms around that and you’re not actively participating, we don’t see it the same way. So cancer is something that happens to you whereas mental health is something you do or engaged in.

Jay Shifman:

100%. 100%

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so those two things, that’s why we can’t make that connection. And what people don’t understand is that when you get to that place, you’re using against your will.

Jay Shifman:

Oh, 100%. Yeah. And I’m so glad you said that. That’s exactly what I try to teach people. At that point, right? We’re not talking about the kid who’s smoking a blunt for the first time, or even the person who does this once or twice a month. We’re talking about the people who compulsively do this. Like what you and I went through, there is nothing different at that point, right? It is the same thing. But people can’t conceptualize that. And again, I don’t blame them. That’s not how our brains work. You have to understand something.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Well it sounds crazy too.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah, right.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Until you’ve experienced it, you’re like, “What do you mean you can’t not do this thing.” I’m like, well, you know how if you’re starving and then you put yourself in a kitchen. But it’s like that, right? And it’s in the same part of the brain, which is, you’re saying, “Well, I’m not going to eat food. I’m not going to eat food.” And then you know there’s food around and you’re trying to starve yourself and it’s not working. Even if your will has decided, “Look, I’m not going to eat because that’s just not what I’m going to do,” you cannot help yourself. And that’s where that comes in.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. I like to say to that person, “Well have you ever had an Oreo?” And they’re like, “Of course.” And I’m like, “Okay.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

How many?

Jay Shifman:

Let’s talk about Oreos

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Jay Shifman:

Because we’ve all been there. We’ve all had the whole sleeve and then we’re like, “Oh shit where’d the sleeve of Oreos go?”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Totally.

Jay Shifman:

We’ve all been there.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Totally. And then you throw out the nutrition facts as fast as humanly possible.

Jay Shifman:

Take it out to the dumpster right now. Get that out of my house.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s a difficult conversation I’m not willing to have.

Jay Shifman:

That’s exactly right.

Speaker 1:

Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Hello everybody. This is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, The co-founder of Lionrock Recovery and your host. Lionrock Recovery has introduced a support meeting specifically for people struggling with anxiety related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured as an ongoing workshop, the COVID-19 anxiety support meeting will teach coping skills and to be a place to share and connect with others also feeling the effects of this crisis. Everyone struggling with anxiety about COVID-19 is welcome. Let me repeat that. Everyone struggling with anxiety about COVID-19 is welcome. To view the meeting schedule and join a meeting in session, visit www.lionrockrecovery.com, and click on the orange banner at the top of the page. You can’t miss it. Together, we will learn to feel more centered and empowered in the face of this great challenge.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So with the Klonopin, I mean that is, so there are two substances that you can die from the detox. But believe it or not, as horrible as opiate detox is, which, let me tell you it’s real rough. You’re not going to die from it or meth or coke. Benzodiazepine, Klonopin, and alcohol those are two that you can die from and the combination is the real kicker.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. So I feel like I should probably get back to the story. So by this point I am, like I said, I’m taking handfuls. It was the thing where I knew I had a problem because anytime I had a feeling that I didn’t like, my first response was at this point, the pill bottle isn’t even in the backpack, it’s in my pocket, because the backpack was too far away. So the pocket’s right there, I get one out and I pop it. I mean, it was like M&M’s, I carry these things around all day. And I woke up and the first thing I did, if I didn’t immediately grab for a pill, then the first thing I did was had to get to the bathroom because I would start going through withdrawals.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

What would you wake up and take?

Jay Shifman:

Klonopin.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Okay, okay. Yeah.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah, yeah. So if I didn’t immediately take a Klonopin, I was spending the next 20 minutes, half an hour, curled up on my bathroom floor going through withdrawals.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

For sure.

Jay Shifman:

And then by this point, I’m spending most of my day on the couch, unable to do really anything else. But I’m also, kind of we were just talking about, I’m like forcing myself out of it to do the things that are still fun. None of my life, my life has completely gone at this point. But I’m going to music festivals all the time. I’m doing the things that still reminded me that there were reasons to live. So that meant my job was gone. I hadn’t had a job now in probably, I’m in the spring and summer of 2009. And by this point I’ve been jobless for a while. I’m out of school. I’m really not doing anything other than hanging out on my couch with the people I was living with. We were all users together, different substances.

Jay Shifman:

By this point, I’m doing a lot of cocaine because I’m smoking weed all day. I’m on all the medications, I’m abusing every one of them. And when you’re on that level of drugs, what’s going to cut through that besides cocaine. I mean, if I wanted to do something, if I wanted to raise my awareness to a different level, cocaine was it. That was all I had left for me. So I’m doing a good amount of cocaine and I’m going to music festivals. And I had some great experiences, but some bad experiences. Kind of like what we were saying, some of my most amazing stories are from that period where it’s like, how do you square that circle with, I am just in an awful place and I’m also having some of the greatest fun of my life. It’s tough. I mean, it’s tough to explain that to people who don’t understand.

Jay Shifman:

But again, by this point, things are just the worst. My friends and family, they haven’t abandoned me, but I’m not like seeing them because all I’m doing is using with the people that I use with. My mother would rush over to my house on regular occurrences if I didn’t answer my phone because she was sure I was dead. And it was getting really bad. And again, my therapist had all answers for this, we got to refill more. I was taking, and I have the records again from the CVS and Walgreens, I was taking months worth of my pills in 12 days, by this point. And he kept allowing for the refill.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Got to love the 90s, man.

Jay Shifman:

No, this point, this is 2009.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, wow.

Jay Shifman:

I don’t understand how that slips by this stuff.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, that’s unusual, particularly for that. That was more of a 90s thing.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Maybe early 2000s.

Jay Shifman:

There’s no way that he doesn’t know.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, he knows.

Jay Shifman:

Because he’s the one who gave me permission for this. So the summer of 2009 was when everything finally fell apart. I went to a music festival and came back.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Which one?

Jay Shifman:

So there was a music festival in the Midwest called Rothbury. It was the prequel to what is now called Electric Forest. And for two years, instead of an electric music festival, it was a hippy band festival. And so year two, the headliners were Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Phish. I mean, it was incredible. Some of the greatest times of my life were these two years at this music festival. And I get back from that year two. And I just like, I crash. I’ve been on the road for about six weeks now, following this band around that I love. Their name is The Ragbirds, and it’ll come back up later in my story. So I’m following them around. They went to this festival and I went the year before. And so I went back to see them and also go to this festival again, and I’m exhausted. And so I get back and I crash and I don’t remember what the final, like what pushed me over the edge.

Jay Shifman:

But I decided I was going to commit suicide that summer. And this is late July, early August of 2009, I’m 23 years old. And so I dump out a lethal dosage of my pills, or what I think will be, on my computer. And I call a friend and I tell her, “I’m going to kill myself.” And she keeps talking to me. And while she does that, she texts some other friends of ours who rush over and stop me, which is amazing. And again, for like the third time in this story, should have been a wake up call. It wasn’t. The next night I learned from that mistake. And I took the pills first and then called the same damn friend and told her what I did. And this time she called the cops. And I don’t remember much from that night. I remember having my head slammed inside of a cop car as I was led out of my house in handcuffs.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

For trying to kill yourself?

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. So back at this time, and this is still true in some States, it was treated like an offense. So I was handcuffed. I was put in the backseat of a cop car, my head slammed against the side of the cop car. I spent the night at University of Cincinnati Hospital, handcuffed to the bed, going through overdose. And I would kind of become a lucid every couple hours. And I remember very little. My aunt who’s a therapist was called. My parents were out of town and so they called her and she sat by my bed all night, and basically was just making sure that I didn’t die. I mean, that night, their only goal was to make sure I was still alive the next day.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Jay Shifman:

So I was kind of in and out that night. But when I finally came to, my first memory is late the next day. And I’m sitting in the intake room of an inpatient care center in Cincinnati, in a suburb of Cincinnati. I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t remember anything else except coming to. And it’s like a moment from a movie where they zoom in and it was all of a sudden I was there and I looked around and I’m like, “Where the f am I? What’s happening?” I thought I died, like I tried to kill myself. And I’m in this place, I’m being signed in by someone, I don’t remember. And I ended up spending the next three weeks are across two different units at this lockdown center in Cincinnati. And I knew other people in the ward, one of whom was on the party scene with me. She and I were friends. And so I get there. Two days later, she comes in and she’s like, “What are you doing here?” I’m like, “What are you doing here?”

Jay Shifman:

So it wasn’t horrible, but it was also, here I was at 23 and I’m in a lockdown unit because I tried to kill myself. And I have weird memories of that time. I had a journal that I have not been able to bring myself to read because it’s some pretty scary shit. And there were some people that I knew, like I said, and I kind of got along. And two of my grandparents came to visit almost everyday and try to keep my spirits up. And it was challenging, but I wasn’t rock bottom, even though I just tried to kill myself and all this.

Jay Shifman:

So I get out of there on the promise that I’m going to get sent away to this longterm care facility. I don’t want to go. I make that very clear that I don’t think I need to go to this place. But again, I don’t blame my parents. If you have a trained well-respected therapist saying he needs to go to this place, and then you have your son, who’s just out of it completely saying, “I don’t need to go,” which one are you going to believe?

Jay Shifman:

So I get released from this lockdown unit, sent to my parents’ custody for a couple of weeks. And then sent to this longterm care unit in Massachusetts, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, called Austen Riggs. It’s a very well respected, well known place on the East coast and a little bit in the Midwest. I was one of the farthest away. There was one other person from Arizona who was there. But everybody else was East coast.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Stockbridge is a small town.

Jay Shifman:

Very small. In fact, it’s the hometown of, oh, shoot, I’m drawing a blank on the artist. Saturday night, traditional Americana, Norman Rockwell. Stockbridge is the home town of Normal Rockwell and it looks just like his painting.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jay Shifman:

It’s beautiful.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s in the brochure. So it’s beautiful.

Jay Shifman:

100%. So I get sent there and my grandmother, who is my rock, she drove me there from Cincinnati.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, wow.

Jay Shifman:

So we made a trip out of it. We went to Niagara Falls, we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We went to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. We made this whole trip. It was kind of like a-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:02:04]

Jay Shifman:

… [inaudible 01:02:00] in Cooperstown, New York. We made this whole trip. It was kind of like a goodbye, right? I mean, we had no idea how long I was going to be there. So I move in there on October 1st or 2nd, something like that, of 2009 and right away, I was like, oh shit. This is real. Every person I met there was incredible in their own way. There were people there with some severe struggles with mental health. There were people there who are struggling with very dire cases of substance use disorder. And very quickly, I started to go, those people struggling with addiction, that looks a little more like what I’m going through, and the people that had bipolar or other similar issues, issues of mental health and what I was supposed to be going through was not that similar. And I started to struggle with that and the place was rough. I’ve described it in writing sense as that it smelled like death.

Jay Shifman:

I mean, it was dark all the time. No matter how many lights were on, it was just dark. It’s one of those places that makes you believe in ghosts. You walk in and you’re like, oh, this place is f’ing haunted, immediately. You can feel it. What’s so hard about it is, I laugh about it now, but at the time, it was incredibly oppressive and four people died while I was there. And this is a beautiful place that’s costing tens of thousands of dollars for me to be there and people were killing themselves, one person OD’ed while I was there. It was scary. And I got to say, and I’m not advocating for this at all, I’m quite the opposite, I didn’t buy in from day one. I pushed back from day one and mostly it was because I wasn’t buying in at this point. I started to bump up against this idea that maybe there was a simpler answer, right?

Jay Shifman:

Maybe there was a way for me to square this circle and it was that I didn’t have these issues. Now, have I struggled with issues of depression and… Of course, but maybe my label didn’t fit so well. And that was my initial struggle against this place. And they practice some things that I don’t love now. Perfect example is if you’ve seen the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where they sit around in the circle. I don’t remember if it was in the movie or just in the book, but where they sit around and they point out flaws in one person and they make them own up to it. That should happen at this place. And you had to do it and if you refused, you became the target.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yep. They did that at my place in Utah and it was like, it was either you or them, so it was them.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. And so here’s the thing is that, I never went that route and I always pushed back, and one day, I ended up getting into… We were this close to fighting with one of the people, not because they were saying something about me, but because they were being so harsh about this random girl I wasn’t even friends with, but I was like, and we’re done, and I lost it. And we were nose-to-nose. And the four things you couldn’t do at this place, there was no sex, no violence, no drugs and no alcohol. And so one punch and you’re gone and I’m nose-to-nose with this guy, ready to get kicked out because I could not abide by that shit. I was so disturbed watching people tear each other apart in the name of quote, unquote, therapy. That was my push back the entire time was I was going, if I’m supposed to buy into this, I’m not willing to be that person.

Jay Shifman:

So in there were other ways too. My first therapist and I didn’t see eye to eye so I switched to a second one who I liked, but he practiced the form of therapy where you would sit there in silence until one of you spoke. And that shit bothered me because some days I needed him to be the one and we would have entire sessions with me just sitting there in silence. And then the final straw there was, I became really close friends with this girl. Nothing beyond friendship, we got there right around the same time and she had a pretty severe case of bipolar disorder, but we sort of developed kind of a brother, sister thing. We were both from very far away and neither one of us had family close by, whatever.

Jay Shifman:

Okay. So about two months in was when Robin Williams did his last standup special. And Robin Williams as you know, is a hero to those of us in the mental health and addiction community because of his struggles, and so she and I co-led this group that night, where we all got together and watched his… We didn’t know at the time was his last day and up special and then we led a group discussion afterwards and it was wonderful, and that was how close she and I were. And then a couple of weeks after that was around Christmas time and we went shopping, there was a Walmart or a Target, I don’t remember, we went to a couple towns over from Stockbridge and my parents had sent up my car and we drove and went shopping and we always walked around together, we bought stuff, whatever.

Jay Shifman:

And that day she was like, “Don’t walk around with me.” And I was like, “Okay.” That was weird, but I thought, maybe you’re going to buy me presents. I didn’t take offense to it, I was just like, that’s kind of weird. So then we check out and she won’t show me a single thing she’s buying. So I’m like, okay, this is weird. We get back to the center and she goes up to her room and we were one room apart, but I had recently moved to the James Taylor room. By the way, James Taylor stayed in Austen Riggs when he was going through his stuff and he actually wrote the song, Rock-a-bye, Sweet Baby James. There’s a verse about leaving the Rigg where he says, “The 1st of December was covered with snow, so was turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston.”

Jay Shifman:

He’s writing about leaving Austen Riggs. Anyway, I can’t hear that song without crying because it’s like, that’s my experience. His last line is, “With 10 miles behind me and 10,000 more to go.” Which is like wink, wink, I’m in recovery. So I definitely identify with that song. But anyway, I’m in the James Taylor room and she’s still across the hall. And I go down for dinner and she doesn’t show up. And so after dinner, I went up to her room and I knocked on the door and I was like, “Hey what’s going on?” And she won’t let me in. And I’m like, all right, something’s going on here. So I sat down and started talking to her and it took an hour for me to get her to open the door, then it took another hour for me to get her to let me to come sit with her on the bed, and by the end of the third hour, she admitted that she was going to kill herself that night.

Jay Shifman:

She never told me what she had bought to make that possible that day. I didn’t really want to know that night, but by the end of the fourth hour or so, she was okay with me taking her by the hand to the nurses’ station where she told them and was taken away to the local lock down unit, which is what happened if you were going to kill yourself or if you tried. And that was the night decided to leave. I said, if I hadn’t known her the way I did, this place that was supposed to be saving all of us would have let her die and she would have been the fifth person while I was there. And this was a girl who is one of the most wonderful smiling people, how a lot of people with bipolar are, just a perfectly wonderful person and she would have been dead. And the next day, I was like, all right, I’m going to get out of here.

Jay Shifman:

So the only person that would take me in at that point was my grandmother who my parents were like, “Nope, if you’re leaving against your will, we’re not going to take you in.” Luckily, even though I was taken there against my will, I wasn’t committed, so I was allowed to check myself out. So my grandmother said, “All right. Come to Arizona.” Where she was living in a town called Cornville outside of… What’s it called?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Sedona.

Jay Shifman:

Thank you. Wow. You’re on your geography.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I’ve lived in both places.

Jay Shifman:

Nice. Well yeah, so I was going to Cornville and I checked myself out on December 31st of 2009, spent that night living on a friend’s couch, a friend who had moved from in the center to a day unit. She let me stay with her that night and then sent me off to stay with another friend of ours who had checked herself out two weeks before living in New York. So I’m driving in New York from Stockbridge and I get over the bridge in New York City and I’m immediately, I’m T-boned by a cab, like right away. And so the thing is that, for the normal person, that’s like, well, shit. That sucks, but give me a couple of days, I’ll get it fixed. Like you said in a different episode, patience ain’t a virtue of mine. And so the next day, this is January 2nd of 2010, I set out for Cornville, which for those of you who don’t have a geography in front of you, this is about 2,500 miles, it’s a long way.

Jay Shifman:

And so I’m driving through the hills of Pennsylvania-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

By yourself?

Jay Shifman:

By myself, in a car on three wheels. And I’m driving through the hills of Pennsylvania, which there are these tunnels that are just big enough for a car and a truck, a two lane tunnel and not at all big enough if the car is being held straight on willpower alone, and it’s blizzarding because it’s January 2nd and we’re in the hills of Pennsylvania. So I end up in ditches multiple times. I lose control on the highway multiple times, should not be alive. I pop that tire that I just damaged. I have to walk a mile on the side of the highway to a gas station. It’s a horrible day and at 9:00 or 10:00 that night, I’ve gone in 10 hours what should have taken me about three or four and I finally give up. I pull off the road in a town called Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I never fail to mention Johnstown when I speak because I’m sorry if you live in Johnstown. If you’re listening and you live in Johnston, if your grandmother’s from Johnstown, if I ever end up in Johnstown again, I’ve done something terribly wrong.

Jay Shifman:

The only thing open is this dirty truck stop motel and the gas station next to it. So I’m eating pop tarts for dinner. I’m sitting on the dirty carpet of this truck stop motel and that is my rock bottom moment. My car is damaged, I can’t drive it, I’m stuck in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, eating pop tarts for dinner and that is my sort of come to Jesus moment. And here I was a very religious guy. I wore a yamaka for over a year after coming back from Israel because I felt so spiritual from that experience. But I had that moment where I reached out and nothing came, and that’s the moment I said, if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to make it into recovery, it’s going to be on my own back. And so that night I was like, you can do this. You can get better and the next day I got up, I found the only tow shop that was around.

Jay Shifman:

They towed my car. They said, “Dude, this is going to be weeks.” I called my parents, said, “Here’s what happened. I need you to wire me some money to rent another car.” They did. I drove back to Cincinnati. Two days later, I was on a plane to Cornville, Arizona and spent the next three months slowly stepping down because as you said earlier, Klonopin will kill you if you try to just cold turkey it and I was on so much-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Wait. Wait, wait. I have a question.

Jay Shifman:

Please.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

They didn’t take you off the Klonopin?

Jay Shifman:

So you’re talking about in this facility?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Jay Shifman:

No. So actually, again, from these notes, I opened records the same thing I did from the pharmacist from this facility and they didn’t want to give them to me, and I had to get a lawyer to stamp something and they were like, “Okay, we have to give it to you.” So I have the records and I have all of my therapist’s notes. And let me tell you something, if you ever want to feel just terrible about yourself, read what a therapist has to say about you when you were at your absolute worst. So his notes are full of questions, right? I mean, he knows I’m suffering, but he doesn’t agree with the bipolar label. He’s like, this doesn’t really look like that, but he’s also not willing to challenge my old therapist and get me off drugs. So in these records, you can read the day that I come in and tell him, “I want to get off drugs.” I’ve been there for a couple of weeks at this point.

Jay Shifman:

And he says, yes, but then he coaches it and says, “But only if the end result is to get on new pills.” And I said, “Nope, not going to do that.” And so that was a constant fight between the two of us where he wouldn’t allow to stop taking them unless I agreed with him to stay longterm and to start getting on new stuff.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Well, so one of the reasons probably was that bipolar, one of like a huge… A symptom is the wrong word, but people with bipolar tend to have a very hard time staying on their medication. So you had this bipolar diagnosis and you wanted to get off your medication. And that’s like a whole thing that goes on so that it would be really difficult to… I could see how everybody that would be just treading water on that one. But yeah, that’s pretty incredible that you didn’t get off of those pills while you were there. Particularly because Klonopin, I mean, that’s not even the best drug for those situations. You could have been on all the other ones and still gotten off that and in a medically safe and theoretically environment.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. And I think there’s definitely something to be said for, if I had bought in more, if I had been more of a model patient, then I’m sure there’s more of those-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And you wouldn’t have taken the treatment, [inaudible 01:16:03]. I mean, you were describing all these things happening in this place and I kept thinking, yeah, everybody in the place has mental illness and substance use disorder. It’s going to be a complicated, angry… You are totally in the right place if you have those problems and therefore should not be expected not to fight it. It should be expected that you’re going to try to kill yourself. Those things, that’s part of the deal. You’re struggling with substance use disorder and it’s the worst moment of your life.

Jay Shifman:

Right. Yeah, and not only that, but you’ve been taken out of everything you know and sent away to a place where everything is unfamiliar, and that is every single person in there. And I’m guessing there was at least 50 people in this place, if not more, counting all the people who had been able to leave and move into day units. So there’s a lot of just painful struggle going on and we’re all in a little place together. So the food was nice, the scenery was beautiful, but everything else was a struggle.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Well, and just the place that you went to, you described a type of therapy and treatment that is not really in play anymore. I experienced that as well. Like I said, I went to a place for nine months that did that and you get worn down. I mean, you just get worn down to the place where like, if you keep other people’s secrets, it’s like you’re in that circle and I mean, they just tear you apart. And most of us develop the ability to disassociate, which is really what happens because you are being torn apart limb by limb in these groups. And so you just have to learn to take that, there’s really nowhere to go.

Jay Shifman:

Well, you said it on an earlier podcast, you said what they’re trying to do is break you.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Break you, yeah.

Jay Shifman:

They’re trying to break you down [crosstalk 01:18:09]. Exactly.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So my experience and your experience, when you don’t break, it’s just abuse.

Jay Shifman:

Right, 100%.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I didn’t break and so what I did was I went completely inward and learned to take it. And I don’t know if this was your experience, but it made it harder for me to recover later on because it made it harder for me to absorb the therapy and the feedback without going into that place of alarm bells and all that stuff going off because I had been in this place where I couldn’t leave. And so any feedback I was about to get or any of this, it was adversarial. And so when your doctors and people trying to help you and you’ve experienced that as adversarial, it’s very hard to get rid of that feeling, and frankly, I took me a long time. And then once I did, I could heal, but there was damage done.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. And I 100% agree with you and I actually don’t think I’m completely out of that yet mostly because my first experience with a therapist was a guy I trusted for over a decade and who almost killed me. And the second one was that situation. And so I actually think that I have my first, what I would call perfectly healthy therapist, patient relationship now, and this just started, I don’t know, he and I first started seeing each other about six months ago. So it took me going through multiple therapists since. Again, some of these were perfectly wonderful people. A lot of that was my own going, be careful because this person may kill, they literally kill you.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s so much to let your guard down. I remember doing EMDR for trauma stuff, and they want to touch… You’re closing your eyes. It’s like, I can’t close my eyes, or you can’t sit that close to me. I’m going to lose my shit, and being in a group setting and having people… I would share something and people would give me feedback and I would shut down because I’m ready for them. The place that I went to did the same thing. I wouldn’t break and so one day, they were just lobbying like, you’re going to die, you’re going to get raped and killed and be on the side of the road, and your parents are just going to bury you in shame and blah, blah, blah, just on and on and on. And then they put on Requiem for a Dream and they put me on this tall stool, like those chairs that are like, you sit almost like at a bar.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And they put me on that and they sat me probably like a foot away from the screen of the TV and they made me sit and watch it on repeat. And then at the same time, two big guys were like, this is your life. That’s you. You’re the whore, you’re the this… That whole thing. And I mean, that was, in our time, I was born in ’86. That was an accepted and I was 16 so there was nowhere I could go, I was locked down. And at that time, that was an acceptable form of therapy and I just want to say that is not happening anymore.

Jay Shifman:

Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear that they don’t break people and try to break them in therapy, that’s not the goal and it’s not healthy. That’s wonderful. So at this point, I’ve left and I’ve made it to Cornville and now I am sent to a therapist there, mostly because it’s like, well, if you want to get off medication, you need to know how to do it safely. So she was the one to tell me that I had to step down, which I started doing on all drugs. And I did Klonopin last because I had heard correctly that if you come into a detox facility on heroin and Klonopin, they get you off the heroin first because it’s easier. And so I was on everything else and I kept doing the Klonopin as I stepped down everything else. And finally, I got to the Klonopin and I stepped down all that.

Jay Shifman:

And the whole process took me about three, three and a half months. So I’m just now with this month-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Well, that’s bad.

Jay Shifman:

Well, so yes, it was painful. I mean, look, all detox is incredibly painful, but mine was a three and a half or four a month. Basically, the way I described it for people is like, imagine you’ve been stabbed and the wound is reopened every day at the center so only the periphery heals and slowly it gets smaller. That was me and mind, body and spirit for almost four months. But what’s amazing about that is, you and I are talking here on March 30th of 2020, this month, I am 10 years from that experience.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s awesome.

Jay Shifman:

So, pretty amazing. Two weeks from now, I was supposed to be on my 10 year anniversary trip just by myself. I was going to strike something off my bucket list. I was going to Boston to watch the Celtics game from courtside. I was so excited. Obviously, that’s not happening anymore because of everything going on, but I was going to drive from there to Stockbridge. And I was going to spend the night just in Stockbridge and see what memories came back. And that trip has been postponed, hopefully it’ll happen maybe next year. But I finally entered recovery around this time in 2010. But I think what a lot of people don’t understand, and obviously you do, and I hope most people listen to this podcast is that, it’s not like you take your last pill and you’re like, I’m free. I’m great now.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

You’re back to square one.

Jay Shifman:

Right, if not below zero, you know what I’m saying?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Totally. And no, you’re right. It is below zero, you’re right.

Jay Shifman:

So I actually say that while those three and a half to four months were incredibly hard, what was harder was the next five years of finally going through the personal growth in the mental growth that I should have gone through when I was a teenager, and here I am in my twenties going through it because I’ve been denied for a decade.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I’m picturing the person’s face who is like, at the worst part was the next five years.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah, right. And the thing is that, we’re back now to the point where people… We were talking it about earlier, how do you square the circle of people enjoying using? Well, it can be both things and I had a wonderful girlfriend at the time. I was back in school, I had jobs, but inside my brain is still healing and growing. And there are lasting implications from this time. I don’t have a lot of memories from anything before I was in recovery. I have bits and pieces and when I talk to friends and family, things come back. But if you just ask me to sit down and write everything I remember about my childhood, it’s not a lot. It’s just mostly gone. And my therapist and I have talked about how much of that is repression and how much of that is just the drugs erased my memories.

Jay Shifman:

And 50, 50 is our guess, we really don’t know. There are other lasting implications. I used to be a prolific writer in high school. A buddy of mine and I actually were in a rap group together and I can’t do that anymore, it just isn’t there. I still write, but it comes in trickles instead of the water hose that it used to be and I have to force it out. And like you were saying, there’s definitely the long lasting implications of going through the trauma itself, not just the drug abuse. The treatment for the drug abuse is just as bad in some ways as the drug abuse. But on December 15th of 2012, I finally graduated college. I would have been 25, 26. And the pictures of me crossing that stage, I was going nuts. I was so happy to be crossing that stage that they still use pictures of me celebrating every year to celebrate graduation, that’s the picture they put up.

Jay Shifman:

I went back to work for this school a couple of years ago. I was working in fundraising and a couple of times a year, I would see pictures of me all over campus and it’s so funny because I was so excited to be crossing that stage. But that day was made even more special on the six year anniversary of my graduation, on December 15, 2018, when I married my wife on that day. So pretty, pretty special, I always celebrate December 15th. And if that’s not even beautiful enough, both of my grandparents, my grandmothers were the ones that walked me down the aisle. So I went down and put them in their seats and then went back and walked again with my parents. But my one grandma was the one, she drove me to Stockbridge. She was the one I moved in with when I couldn’t go anywhere else.

Jay Shifman:

My other grandparents have been so supportive and so really just to thank them for everything they did, they were the ones that I walked down the aisle-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Ow, that’s so cool. That’s so cool. When I graduated college, Jay, I mean, I cried. I mean, inappropriate crying. There’s kids who are crying and were really excited and then there was me who was like, is she okay? Did she lose somebody? What’s happening right now? I mean, it was just that feeling of like, this did not seem possible.

Jay Shifman:

Right. No, 100%. And I failed out of two schools, or I failed out of one and I transferred from one before I failed out and here I was. And I will say, I want to give a shout out to Northern Kentucky University because I had never been a good student and then I went there and they showed me how to be a good student. And I started at Cincinnati State, a small technical college in Cincinnati and transferred from there to NKU. So when I graduated, obviously my parents threw me a huge party. And one of our party games was name all of Jay’s colleges and majors because combined, there were over 10. So it was a long journey, but I got there and now, as you can see, this is what I do for a living. I talk about this any chance I get. I write about this, any chance I get. I coach individuals.

Jay Shifman:

I was on a call this morning with a guy who was struggling with some depression and some other stuff and we were talking about what comes next and what you can do while still obeying the stay-at-home orders. And I do a lot of one-on-one coaching, I do some work with businesses about setting up better and more compassionate practices at their office. I’m the host of my own podcast now called the Choose Your Struggle podcast, where I talk mental health and addiction. And the number one thing I try to do is educate and to end the stigma. I’ll give a perfect example of, not long ago, my own dad was like, “Do people ever push back on you because you’re not quote, unquote, sober and you’re in recovery?” And I said, “Occasionally, but I don’t see that as a bad thing because I use it to start conversations.” I’m not sober. I’m very upfront about that.

Jay Shifman:

I do have a drink. I can drink safely. I was very lucky that, look, that’s not the case for everybody. I know that. I know that there are some people that can go through what I went through and not once ever struggle with addiction. I had friends who were taking pills like I was for fun, never once had a problem. I know other people who struggled with one substance and can’t have any, and that’s the way their brains work. Mine, if I hear a pill canister, something starts moving up there. I remember, things are coming back, but I can sit with my wife and have a glass of wine at dinner and be fine. And there wasn’t room for that for a long time. There wasn’t room for people to challenge the idea that you could only be in recovery one way and that’s a hundred percent sober, and that’s by going the 12-step method.

Jay Shifman:

And I don’t ever want people to think that I’m anti-AA or 12-step, it works for a lot of people. What I am anti is thinking that there’s only one way to do any of this because there is not. And as you and I mentioned earlier, the right path to recovery is the path that works for you. And I have worked personally, one-on-one with too many people who have failed AA multiple times and their own family is telling them, “It’s because you are a failure, you are doing this wrong.” And in reality, maybe they should try a different method. But we have this idea that has been pervasive in our society that AA is the only way. And we have to get rid of that because it’s killing people. AA is wonderful, but it’s not the only way.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I love it. And listen, AA saved my life for real. For real, and I grew up in AA, all that. And Jay, I 1,000% agree with you. I think it’s really important that we focus on the goal and not deciding what that needs to look like, right? And for me, here’s the hard part. And this is the hard part about all of it, right? Because we were talking about it earlier, when it came to prescribing medication for children, do you put them on it? All those things. So here’s the hard part, for me, I can not drink safely, even though alcohol, one would say, wasn’t exactly my drug of choice. To be honest with you, I didn’t realize how much of my drug of choice it was because I was such a heavy drug user, but I just didn’t… And I’ve seen so many people try to drink safely and not have that work. That’s where that comes from, which is that there are a lot of people where any substance that affects them from the neck up, that turns their brain on.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

For me, I mean, sugar does-

Jay Shifman:

100%.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh my God. It’s wild what it does to my brain, right? So I think there’s a huge chemistry component and people are very orthodox and it is really hard. A lot of people get turned off, turned away, however you want to say it. I think what is beautiful about what you’re doing and where you are is like, look, you’re in recovery, you’re recovering and-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:33:04]

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Look, you’re in recovery, you’re recovering. And it is not about exactly what, do you follow my program, or their program, or this program, it’s about, are you happy and healthy, and how did you get there and how did you do it?

Jay Shifman:

Exactly.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And we forget, I think, because we want… One thing that’s scary for a lot of people in 12 step is that if you, and this is true, if you can do it, why can’t I do it? If you can drink safe, I want to have a glass of wine with dinner. I do. I really do, but I really can’t. And so when you say you had that pill problem, which I love, I took handfuls of pills too, and you say, now you can drink, right? Having someone in the group with us that says that, it is difficult for the people who can’t do it, because they start to question, it’s the only disease that tells you, you don’t have a disease. Right?

Jay Shifman:

Exactly right.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I think what happens a lot of the times is instead of being able to deal with the uncertainty and that variation it’s just been made homogenous. If you don’t fit into that, then we can’t deal with that. And it’s the same in program when people relapse a lot of the time. Lots of people who aren’t this way, but one of the things that I’ve seen over time is, if I have a friend who’s sober and they go out, they start drinking again. And it works for them, which is the heart is, people can’t be friends with them anymore.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And again, these are things that need to change, that we have forgotten that the point of it all, of every component of it, the therapy, the point of it all is to live a happy functioning life. That’s it. Period. End. Stop. And so why is it so important other than that comradery, right? But why is it so important that we get to decide what that looks like for each other? And I just think, I love that you’re out there talking about it. And I guess, my question for you is, how do you help people go through, when you’re working with people, how do you help people figure out? Or, how do you address when someone really wants to be in recovery the way you are and be able to drink, and it’s not working for them? How do you work within that gray area?

Jay Shifman:

Well, so first off, I appreciate the question and I think there’s a story that illustrates, look, I also struggled with this for a long time. I was sober, straight sober, and even beyond AA’s rules, I didn’t drink coffee. I didn’t have sugar for the first couple of years that I was in recovery, because I wanted to give my body and brain the chance to completely reset. And then I slowly started easing back into this.

Jay Shifman:

And the biggest challenge came, I was on a vacation with my family, including my three younger brothers. And one night, one of my brothers got his hands on some muscle relaxers and we were all hanging out. And I said, I can’t do that. And then I got mad at them that they would do that around me. I was only three or four years in recovery at this point. And then I had to stop myself and go, “Wait a minute. Why? As long as they’re not offering it to you, why should you be allowed to tell them not to do this? Just because you have a problem?”

Jay Shifman:

That was where it really hit home for me, because I was drinking again by this point, I think it was about four years in, so I could have a drink with them and then they wanted to do this. And I was like, “Well, that’s not fair, guys.” And then I stopped and went, “Who am I to say that they can’t do that?” I don’t think it’s safe. Don’t get me wrong, because that shit will f you up. But if they’re going to do it, they should not want to do it for that reason, not because big brother Jay can’t do it with them. That’s not fair to them.

Jay Shifman:

So to answer your question, first off, I say this time and time again, and I want to be incredibly clear on this. I will never, ever replace your therapist, and I never want to. I am to your therapist, what a physical trainer is to your doctor. I’m the one in there in the gym with you, spotting you and telling you what to lift. But if your back’s hurting, you need to leave me that minute and go to the doctor. I can’t help you with that, and I should not be the one that you’re coming to.

Jay Shifman:

And that’s hard for people to wrap their heads around sometimes, especially therapists. I’ve got these messages, I save them because I want these for later fuel to the fire. I have therapists who reach out to me and tell me I’m part of the problem. I have therapists who reach out to me and say, “There’s no room for you in this industry because you don’t have a PhD.”

Jay Shifman:

And I try to engage some of these people and use that analogy. “Would you go to your doctor to ask them what you should lift? That’s silly,” but also I get where they’re coming from, because if you’ve been told something for so long, and then there are people trying to challenge it, it’s exactly what you just said, and it’s like, “Well, then why did I just spend 12 years getting a doctorate if I don’t really want…” There are people I know who have their doctorate to do the work that I do. And they’re like, “I guess I didn’t need to do all that.” And I get it. I get the defensiveness, but I am always very quick to say, “I will never be your therapist. And I don’t want to be, I don’t want to replace that person. You should be seeing both of us.”

Jay Shifman:

So in that respect, there needs to be a dialogue. If the person is trying to do something too soon, number one, take some time, right? Like I said, I didn’t even make that decision to try again until I was multiple years into recovery. Almost three, if I remember correctly, and I only did so because I was in a very safe environment, where if I fell, if there was a relapse of any kind at this point, I knew that there was support there. If you are not in that situation, almost what you were saying earlier, is it worth it? You know what I mean?

Jay Shifman:

No-one’s offering you that trade, to trade your worst day in recovery for your best day. But if they were, that is a hundred percent on you to make that decision, it’s on everybody else in your life to weigh in and give you our opinion. But at the end of the day, you have to make that decision for yourself, for what you’re willing to risk. And me personally, I felt that I could do so. I was right. Now, I am never going to try pills again. It’s just not worth it to me to take that risk. I went to the doctor, this would have been about four years ago, three years ago, I was in a car accident and they took me to the hospital because I thought I had a concussion and the nurse came in and handed me a prescription. I said, “I can’t take that. I’m in recovery for a prescription pill addiction that could kill me.” And she was like, “I have to give this to you.” And I said, “Nah, you really don’t and it’ll kill me. You can’t give this to me.”

Jay Shifman:

And it became a thing. And she went and got the doctor and the doctor came in and said, “I have to give this to you.” I said, “You do not. This will kill me, go the f away.” And we ended up screaming at each other in this room. He hands me the prescription and I tear it up in front of him, and he says, “There. At least I gave it to you.” And luckily he pissed me off, because if he hadn’t, what if I walked out of there?

Jay Shifman:

And I’m like, it could have been fine. Maybe it is, probably it isn’t. So, that’s my own personal choice, that I am not willing, if I’m in a horrible accident, maybe there’s a different calculus to be made that day. But as of right now, if I have a headache, I’ll take an Advil. If it gets worse, I’m probably just going to have to deal with that pain because it’s not worth the risk of backsliding. And so at the end of the day, it’s just trying to see how much information you have, and making that decision with as much of the information and as much data as you can.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I think one of the hard things about the situation you’re in is about when your recovery looks different from other people’s, is that one of the biggest PR components of being sober is community and having community and having recovery support. And when you are not accepted into a community, right? I know they have Pills Anonymous, I’m just using that, for example, if you’re in Pills Anonymous, but you are still able to drink normally, they may not accept you into that community because other people can’t, and whatever. And so then you’re left to find your own community, right? And the thing about 12 step community is that it’s easy. It’s everywhere, it’s built in, and everybody knows the language. It’s really, you can just slot yourself in. So the one thing that you lose by having that option to use that substance, is the ability to easily fit into those communities. How have you been able to create recovery community, given that you’re not that cookie cutter?

Jay Shifman:

Well, it’s a wonderful question. I have to applaud you for asking it, in a way. I get asked that a lot in much more direct, “This is what you’re missing,” ways of asking that question. It’s more trying to push me to admit that that is something I’ve missed, and they’re not wrong. I have walked this alone more than I haven’t. And I would say the two answers that are first, I tried to have community.

Jay Shifman:

AA rejected me twice. They rejected me in Arizona when I was going through detox. And they basically said, “Why are you here?” And this was because there was no Narcotics Anonymous, they only had AA, and everybody else there was talking about drinking. And I’m like, “I’m in the midst of getting off prescription pills.” And they were like, “Why are you here?” And so I left that day and never went back.

Jay Shifman:

And then the second time, when I was living in New York, and I was lonely, and I started to have thoughts about prescription pills. And so I sought out an NA. And I got there, it was in the basement of the church. And again, being Jewish, I was already like, “This is weird.” I went into the basement of this church, and so in Midtown Manhattan, I’m sitting there in this basement and no one shows up and I sit there for about a half an hour and then a guy sticks his head in, and it’s the janitor. He goes, “Oh man, nobody comes to these meetings.” And then he left and I was like, “Well, shit, I’ve now tried AA twice. Both times, they were like, “Nope.””

Jay Shifman:

So part of it was that, I did seek it out and it just wasn’t there. So I have walked it alone. I have found community though, by telling my story, every chance I get. So I have made other people, one, I’ve given people the freedom to tell theirs. This is my favorite story. I was just telling someone this earlier today, I didn’t start talking about being in recovery until I was five years in recovery. I was ashamed of it. I had friends who had no idea where I’d gone for a year and a half. They just knew I left. And so I came back and I’m very private about this.

Jay Shifman:

There’s a buddy of mine who runs something called Cincy Stories. And it’s a storytelling program at Cincinnati, where well-known or influential Cincinnatians get up on stage and tell their origin story. And he knew I was in recovery, and he was like, “Will you tell your story?” I said, “Absolutely not.” And he asked me again. I said, “Sean, ain’t going to happen, dude. Not going to happen.” Third time, I was like, “Stop asking, ain’t going to happen.” But then I happened to be at home, and I told my dad about this. And it was just a beautiful moment. He’s reading the New York Times, and he slowly lowers it. He looks at me and goes, “Fear is never a good reason not to do something,” and then picks up the paper and keeps reading as if he didn’t just blow up my entire world with one line.

Jay Shifman:

And so then I go back to him-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That is such a Jewish dad thing to… like my dad, they just lob something at you and you’re like, “Yeah.”

Jay Shifman:

Drop a bomb and walk away.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And walk out. Calmly.

Jay Shifman:

Yeah. So I go back to this guy. I was like, “Sean, ask me again.” And he asked me, and I tell the story and it goes amazing. And it starts to snowball. And so immediately I’m telling my story more often. And the second time I was invited to do a TED style, TEDx event. And I’m at this restaurant where they’re doing it, this event space restaurant. And I tell my story and I get off stage.

Jay Shifman:

And the manager of the restaurant walks over. He says, “Would you come with me for a moment?” I said, “Okay.” So I walk with him and we go into the kitchen, and it turns out every single member of the kitchen staff was in recovery. And we ended up sitting there for half an hour, 45 minutes, having a mini little group session, all telling our stories, all relating. And we were all bawling.

Jay Shifman:

These are guys like me. Your audience can’t see this, but I’m completely covered in tattoos. We’re all sitting there together just ugly crying, and it’s beautiful. And that’s how I find the community. I find it by, I wear this on my chest. Literally you can see this, but your audience can’t, I have my medallion around my neck that says, “F addiction circa 2010.” I wear this everywhere I go. It actually never leaves my neck. I bathe with it. I sleep in it. I wear it everywhere I go.

Jay Shifman:

I wear bracelets on my wrist that say, “Choose your struggle,” which is my own personal brand about, “Look, for a long time, I didn’t get to choose what I struggled for. I chose to get off the couch. I chose to avoid withdrawals. Now I get to choose what I struggle for.” So, that’s my personal brand, and that’s one of the things I coach people on is, how to choose what you want to struggle for in a world that wants you to care about everything.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s so true.

Jay Shifman:

And it’s exhausting. And so I work with people on that and I just talk about it everywhere I go. I like to say that being in recovery is the first line of my tombstone and last line of my biography because I finish everything by saying, “Jay Schifman is a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he’s also 10 years in recovery,” There is no anonymous for me. I’ve never been, in the last five years. I was for five years. And since then, I’ve not been anonymous because I get it. If you are, I 100% get it. I empathize. I sympathize, but I’m in a place now where I’ve realized that I have the privilege of A, being someone who’s getting a second chance in our life where 99% of people don’t even get their first, and B, I get to show someone, “What you think addiction is, is not correct. I lived it. I can tell you about it in a way that will completely change your perspective. It’s not just that person that you’re picturing.”

Jay Shifman:

Those two things to me are so much more important than the random person who looks down on me for being in recovery, or even the people in recovery who have, I get told all the time that I’m not actually in recovery. I get told all the time that I was never really an addict. That’s fine. If that’s how you have to make, to feel better, dude, I’m with you. I understand. I don’t hold anything against you. I’m going to do what I need to do to help other people. If you have to protect yourself that way, I feel it, man. I feel it, do your thing.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah. And people should protect their recovery however they need to, that is on them. But I do think that we have become very close-minded in many ways, and we have to think outside the box and really push those things. And I will say that having to create community the way you have to create community would be harder than I would want it to be, for me. And for me, the ability to slot into that community has made my life a lot easier. And so, frankly, kudos to you for what you’ve, you are choosing your own path in a way that’s harder than the rest, and still remaining intact. Right. And still saying, “This is what I’m going to do, and this works for me.” And I totally, totally respect that.

Jay Shifman:

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I will say, “Look, I am so lucky that I love it, right?” I never really got to this, but my career after recovery, I was in fundraising, nonprofit fundraising, and I left that to run political campaigns, which I was very good at, and I made a good amount of money doing, and I left that in February of 2019, because I decided, like I said before, I’ve got this privilege and I am absolutely wasting it. So that would have been a much harder decision if I didn’t absolutely love this. If I didn’t love the fact that I get to get up every day and make very little money, but talk to people about the two issues that I care about above everything else, and that is addiction and mental health.

Jay Shifman:

And I get to work with people, and I get to meet awesome people, like you and the rest of your team, and we get to have these conversations, and that is, that love and that enjoyment I get, is worth the lack of money. It’s worth the sticky situations I get into times a million. I can’t overstate that. I consider myself so incredibly lucky because I get to do every day.

Jay Shifman:

And the last point I want to make on that is that, I say this every time, because I think it needs to be repeated, in every year, we as Americans lose over a hundred thousand people to addiction and mental health, just in overdoses and suicide. I’m not even talking about every other cause of death underneath those two headings, overdose and suicide costs over a hundred thousand lives a year. If there was another form of preventable death causing that sort of loss of life, there would be riot in the streets calling for change. And yet we are afraid to even have conversations about those topics.

Jay Shifman:

That boggles my mind, and it hurts me so deeply, that that’s why I get up and do this every day, is that if I can be the little grain of sand that starts that ball rolling to hopefully making that change down the road, it doesn’t matter. There’s an Eminem line where he says something along the lines of, “If there’s one kid out of a hundred million, that’s going through a struggle and feels that he can relate. That’s great.” That’s me. I don’t care if this doesn’t reach a bunch of people. If there’s that one person who relates to what I’m talking about and can make a positive change and make a positive difference, done, I’ve made my difference.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I love it. And I totally agree with you. I was thinking about that as it relates to Coronavirus, and with addiction, and the numbers for addiction are staggering, right? And everybody’s been talking about how many people the flu kills and how many people, all these different things. And I was thinking about, what is the difference? And the difference, I think, that people don’t think, it’s not contagious, right? It’s genetic, but it’s not contagious.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And people believe that it’s a choice that they opt into and therefore, and that’s where the stigma comes in. And I was like, yeah, but the numbers, in and of themselves, suggest that addressing that is such a huge piece of what needs to happen. And I think people are waking up to that.

Jay Shifman:

I hope so. I think that, I’ll use a line that, I’m writing a book, slowly, because of this situation we find ourselves in. I’ve had a bunch of my interviews canceled. That’s neither here nor there, but I’m writing a book on people who are doing incredible work on the front lines of the addiction and mental health epidemic that we’re facing right now. And one of the guys I met with, who is actually a police, he’s a sergeant, or a chief, who, it’s amazing. It shouldn’t be amazing that people are saying, “We can’t arrest our way out of this,” but it is. It’s even more amazing when it’s a policeman who’s saying it. And so he was the first person I met with. We actually go way back, because he’s from Cincinnati, and we know each other well, but I met with him and he said, “Here’s the deal.”

Jay Shifman:

He said, “I’ve pulled over the same people for drunken driving nine, 10 times. I have resuscitated people who have tried to kill themselves multiple times.” He said, I’ve taken people to the hospital who have lung cancer from smoking and still smoke. Never have I heard the words, “Let them die.” But when it comes to this addiction epidemic, people tell me to let these people die.” And he said, “I will not do it. And that is the one opinion that I will not let you have and will not validate.” He said, “If you think we should arrest them,” he says, “Look, I don’t agree with you, but we can have that conversation. If you think every single person should be saved,” he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t agree with that either. But we can have that conversation.” He said, “But if you tell me to let them die, I’m going to walk away from you. That’s the one thing I will not listen to.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah. People don’t think about what it’s, people think that it’s not going to be their loved one, or not going to be, you think you’re untouchable until you experience what that’s like. And I’ve seen that. I’ve seen up close the people who thought that they were untouchable. I’ve seen, when I was in grade school, there was a mother who wouldn’t let, she stopped speaking to my parents, who were good friends, good friends with my parents, stopped speaking to my parents, wouldn’t let her girls hang out with us anymore when they had been family friends. And I was the bad kid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And 15 years later, her whole life fell apart, and her daughter is in recovery, and her other daughter’s in treatment. And that is, until it happens to you, you make those judgements, and we’re not as untouchable as we think we are.

Jay Shifman:

Well, you couldn’t be more right. And what scares me is that there’s still that idea, even though we know that addiction is no different than cancer in that respect, in that it crosses all the superficial boundaries that we’ve created for ourselves inside our society. It’s not just a poor disease, it’s not just a rich, there is a line you can draw that encompasses all people who have struggled with addiction or mental health. It’s all of us. They say that one in five people themselves have struggled with issues of mental health? I personally think it’s higher. I think those are the ones that have been reported, but they also say that one in two people, either themselves or knows someone who has, now that’s a number I can get my mind around. And that is terrifyingly high.

Jay Shifman:

And if that’s the case, yes, it’s great that we’re finally starting to have these conversations, but let’s move beyond it. I was at a convention last year in Atlanta, where President Trump spoke, and we’re not going to get political, but I have to bring him up to make a point. And that is that he has released more money to tackle addiction than any other president. And that’s because he’s released any money to tackle some. And that day at that convention, I asked the organizer, because I was volunteering, and so I was helping run the place. And I said, “Has anyone bothered to ask him, say thank you for this, but also it was eight, it was nothing. It was no money whatsoever. And can anyone say to him, “Thank you. But also, let’s do just a thousand times more than this?””

Jay Shifman:

And her response is, “Look, you’ve got to start somewhere.” And I don’t disagree with her. She’s not wrong. But also if someone gives you a penny and is like, “Well, maybe next year, we’ll give you two.” Is that really worth applauding? Or can we go back to them and say, “Great, you’ve at least opened the door. Let’s tell you, now, about how a hundred bucks is really what’s needed, a thousand dollars, that penny ain’t doing shit.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. Right. I think it’s two piece, where they want to see what they’re going to do with it. And I do think you have to start somewhere, and the fact that that’s the case, that he’s the first, is stunning to me, but I also think that it’s not going away. It’s getting worse. And so the ability to ignore it, and that’s what it takes. It takes people standing up, it takes people of privilege standing up and saying, and talking about it, and it takes it affecting people in power.

Jay Shifman:

A hundred percent. But what’s so scary is that you would think that would be the case, when it affects somebody in power, but there’s a guy that I’m interviewing for the book who started some of the first quick response teams in the nation. And for those listeners who don’t know what that is, it’s the people who go out in the hours or days, depending on your area, after an overdose, and try to talk to someone about harm reduction. It doesn’t have to be, “Get straight into treatment.” It can just be, “How can we help you use in a safer way? And if you’re interested in treatment, let’s talk about treatment.”

Jay Shifman:

And they always drop off Narcan, which by the way, I carry my Narcan literally everywhere I go, I’m using that word correctly. I take it with me on runs when I go running in the morning, because God forbid I ever need to use Narcan and I don’t have it on me. So I carry my Narcan every day,

Jay Shifman:

But he told me about a story of a small town, and I want to say it was West Virginia, where a County Commissioner, who was an extreme to one side of the political spectrum, I won’t say which one, I think you could probably guess. He, unfortunately, his son was the very first person to overdose in that county, after the quick response team had started. And so they went out looking for the son, and they went to his house. And he called the cops on them and sued them for character assassination and would rather make a show of trying to tamp down on this quick response team, even when they were trying to help his son, than he would to look or appear soft on drugs. So yes, it does need to affect some people in power.

Jay Shifman:

I hate saying that, but we need to get this idea that, “It doesn’t happen to me, or doesn’t happen in my backyard,” out of this. But we also have to get rid of this mentality that if we just are hard on crime and the war on drugs has been a success. The war on drugs may be the biggest failure in the history of our country. They have the studies that show that drug use has continued upward at the same expected rate, which would mean the war on drugs did exactly zero to stop anything. And yet we’re still doing it because it makes us feel good.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a part of the story that is, we get to help change the course of how this is talked about and hopefully effect change. And we each have to do our part. We each have to stand up and do our part, and that’s what I’m doing, that’s what you’re doing, by standing up and just doing our part and saying, “This is the deal, that talking about the fact that drugs are fun, and they kill people.” And just having those conversations can change the course of history. And it’s an amazing life, and it’s amazing work we’re doing.

Jay Shifman:

100%. And that’s why we have to keep telling our stories, because the more that are out there that challenge convention, the more that make people stop, even if for a second, and say, “Maybe I don’t know everything,” and are willing to make people come to the table and say, “Let’s chat,” instead of just, “I know what’s best. And even though you lived it you’re wrong.” The more we can do that, the more that we have a chance of making a change in this thing.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. Jay, you’re amazing. Your story is amazing. I love what you’re doing and I love, “Choose your struggle,” because guess what, you are going to struggle, so you might as well participate in it.

Jay Shifman:

That’s exactly right. It’s the same thing with drugs. We know you’re going to struggle, right.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s going to be something.

Jay Shifman:

We know you are going to struggle instead of spreading yourself thin, instead of letting other people choose for you, let’s choose that, let’s help you make that choice-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Proactive.

Jay Shifman:

Right. Exactly.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, exactly. So, that’s awesome. Check out Jay Schifman’s podcast, Choose Your Struggle. Where else can they find you, Jay?

Jay Shifman:

They can find me on my website, jayshifman.com. And that’s J-A-Y-S-H-I-F-M-A-N. Same thing on LinkedIn and Facebook, just Jay Schifman. On Instagram, I’m thenextShifman, and on twitter @jbschiffman.com.

Jay Shifman:

And then my book, hopefully as long as it doesn’t get delayed too much because of the Coronavirus, will be out next year or the year after, if it gets delayed too much and that’s, Profiles and Change, which is going to be stories about people doing new and unique and amazing things on the front lines of the fight against the addiction and mental health epidemic that we’re currently finding ourselves in.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Awesome. Really awesome. Jay, wonderful to meet you.

Jay Shifman:

Well, thank you to you. Thank you to your entire team. I love this podcast. It’s one of my favorite. I was telling someone else in your team that I just discovered it back in September, October, and since then, I’ve listened to every episode because it’s amazing. And I love it, I look forward to new episodes every time they come out. So thank you so much for doing it.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Thank you. Thanks, Jay. Glad to have you.

Jay Shifman:

Definitely. Have a great rest of your day and keep up the great work.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Sounds good. Take care.

Jay Shifman:

Choose your struggle.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Thank you. Bye.

Speaker 2:

This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock Recovery. Lionrock provides online substance abuse counseling, where clients can get help from the privacy of their own home. They’re accredited by the joint commission, and sessions are private, affordable, and user-friendly. Call their free helpline at (800) 258-6550 or visit www.lionrockrecovery.com for more information.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [02:03:14]

#48 – Jay Shifman

Jay Shifman’s Story

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#49 - After the Episode

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