The Recovered Life Show

You're listening to The Recovered Life Show, the show that helps people in recovery live their best recovered lives.

And here is your host, Damon Frank.

And welcome back to The Recovered Life Show.

I'm so pleased to have my guest, Jeff Jay with us.

Jeff works in the recovery field and is also an interventionist and also is about ready to have 43 years of sobriety.

I had to have Jeff onto the show.

I've been following his work for some time.

Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Thanks so much.

I'm glad to be here.

Oh, so thrilled to have you.

You know, there's a bunch of stuff I wanted to talk with you about.

And, you know, it's interesting because sometimes, Jeff, we say to ourselves, if we have long-term sobriety or even sometimes if we have over five or 10 years of sobriety, we say, man, where's all the people that have long-term sobriety?

And there's people probably going to meetings that have 10 years and say, man, no one has more than me.

Right.

So so to see somebody who is almost 43 years, 42 years of sobriety, that's a big deal.

So I want to talk with you about that.

And I also want to talk with you about the work that you do with families, because I think that's so important.

The whole idea of just if you stay sober long enough, Jeff, what's going to happen is some amazing things are going to happen, including healing for your family.

So let's dive right into it.

You know, tell us a little bit about your journey.

How did you get here?

How did you get to 42 years of sobriety?

And how did this all start?

Well, it was a bit of a miracle because I had decided to kill myself.

I'd been hitchhiking around the country trying to be the next Jack Kerouac for quite a while, you know, drinking and drugging like a madman and bouncing from city to town and town to city.

And I won't go into a whole drunkologue or anything, but it was it was down to the end.

You know, I was I had a bleeding ulcer, a bleeding colon, neuropathy of the legs.

And and I was all of 26 years old.

And I just couldn't I couldn't hack it anymore.

And I heard that a friend of mine had committed suicide.

And I thought, well, sounds like a good idea to me.

And I don't want to go into too long of a story, but a series of little miracles or coincidences took place that were insanely unlikely and which ended up in a little family intervention.

I had bounced back out to San Francisco again because all the beat poets and Kerouac and all those guys hung out in North Beach, right, you know.

So I'm, you know, in a flophouse and, you know, seven dollars a night, my kind of place.

And and like I said, I'd planned to kill myself.

I was going to do it in the same way my friend was going to.

And a friend of my brother's happened to be vacationing, happened to be in San Francisco, saw me, didn't talk to me, saw what kind of condition I was in, called my parents, said, you got to find him.

This is the address of where he went into.

You got to find him.

He's going to die like right now.

And it's it's kind of a long story.

I won't go into it a whole lot more, but they they got a phone number for a pay phone in the basement, you know, and I'm like and they, you know, called me and I, you know, had been going to kill myself.

And I gave myself a one man going away party so I, you know, didn't make it.

And, you know, I pick up the phone, this pay phone, you know, hello.

It's my father.

I haven't talked to him.

The last I talked to him, I was in Chicago.

You know, how could this be?

This is 1981.

OK.

And I'm like, I can't talk to you.

And I hung up and I got a little pint of port.

I went across the street to Washington Square Park and I just started sitting in the grass drinking.

And I knew I had to call them back because, you know, there's going to be police.

There was going to something was going to happen.

I knew it.

And I just sat there in the grass like a fool, 830 in the morning drinking while the people are doing Tai Chi over here, the other people are going to Montgomery Street to the financial, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm just sitting there, you know, and I'm like, I'm going to kill myself.

I went and called home and they had talked to my mom and dad to talk to a physician who knew something about intervention somehow.

And so they were very calm, very nice, very everything.

And believe me, we didn't have very many calm conversations in that year of my life.

And anyway, to make a long story short, all of a sudden, you know, my I talked to my mom for a minute.

I talked to my dad.

He goes, Jeff.

How are you doing?

And all of a sudden I I couldn't talk.

I was just like, how am I doing?

How am I doing?

How am I doing?

The thoughts going through my head.

And I'm like, well, I can hardly walk.

I am bleeding from both ends and I'm going to kill myself in about, oh, I don't know, 10 minutes because I'm all ready to do it.

But the sun is shining.

The birds singing.

Yes.

And I was in North Beach.

Even the sun is shining.

And and I said the most intelligent thing I've ever said in my life, which was.

I think I need to go into a hospital.

I don't know where it came from.

The next thing I know, it's in the hospital.

You know, it's funny because I know Washington Square Park well, actually got sober and drank in San Francisco.

OK, I know exactly the block that you're talking about.

And Kevin O'Malley comes on the show a lot.

That's sober, right?

I got that little pint at Coit Liquors.

There must be something that's happening in Washington Square Park.

It must be the Italian food, something, the garlic, something.

I don't know.

Something.

St. Peter's Cathedral.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You know, what's interesting, though, is that I had a similar situation in my 20s where it just had lost all hope.

And I think it's hard for people to understand who aren't alcoholics, how people seemingly could have everything going for them.

You know what I mean?

Could literally drink themselves to death.

Right.

Right.

And then have this sense of hopelessness and not really be able to see a way out.

And that is so alcoholism, right?

Like not really singing.

You know, I even remember towards the very, very, very end of it is I really thought I was going to be able to figure out a way to be able to drink normally, whatever that was to me.

I have no interest in even drinking normally now, you know, three decades later of no interest in ever drinking normally.

I don't know where that came from.

But you know what I'm saying?

Like this whole idea of this hopelessness that only alcoholics seem to really have and not really see the solution.

We don't we don't appreciate how how malnourished the brain is, among many other things.

We have the dynamics of addiction.

We can talk about the neuroscience and stuff.

But the other thing that happens is that you're not sleeping right.

You're not eating right.

You're your brain is very malnourished.

You're pouring all kinds of chemicals on it all the time.

And we're making we're asking this brain to make better decisions.

It's not going to happen.

Yeah, we just don't see it.

You know, it's interesting in this phenomenon of craving to that kicks in.

If you want to talk a little bit about that, that you had this moment of clarity because I had that, too, and I think it's so special really to look back.

And I a lot of the times, you know, I don't take that for granted, like that.

Not everybody has that and can act on it.

It is actually the more I've been in recovery and the more I just meet other people that are recovered who have had that as well.

It is a really well, I guess they would call it now a God shot moment.

Right.

Like, can you talk about that a little bit when you finally decided it's like, OK, I mean, I need some help.

What happens?

I think, you know, in some ways, the immediate precursor to that was I stopped talking.

So I was able to listen somehow for about, you know, four tenths of a second or something like that and and realize that people who love me were trying to get to me.

I mean, look, that had happened before, you know, girlfriends, even my cocaine dealer tried to get me to go to treatment.

You know, I mean, it was just crazy.

But in that moment, I was so low and yet someone reached out.

You know, they were trying to get to me.

They were trying to save me.

And and I could feel the love and concern.

And that's what's so important is that in that moment, I knew it was authentic and I knew that I was out of answers or whatever answers I had were BS.

And that's another important thing is just having enough humility to finally call BS on yourself.

You know, absolutely, because when we're drinking and drugging, I mean, we're like the kings of of lying, right?

I mean, we lie on autopilot.

And so there has to be just a moment of of acceptance of that, that the reality is I'm not OK.

Despite this, despite what I'm telling everybody, you know, I'm not OK.

You know, what do you think?

What do you think?

You know, when you did that, you you have this, OK, I'm not OK.

I need help.

And obviously you get into recovery, you get into a hospital, you get there.

I would love to talk about the family, because I know you were interventionist in the recovery, in the recovery field.

You know, this whole idea about how you were talking about confrontational relationships with your family, about how things were maybe very blunt or very not necessarily communicating lovingly to people.

Right.

You know, I know when I first got into recovery, it was very this is the last house on the block.

Take it or leave it.

We don't give a crap what you think, like, you know what, you're going to do it exactly this way.

And I've seen the recovery business change a lot.

And even my my approach, even even if it's in a 12 step group, working with somebody has changed a little bit because, one, it's not the last house on the block always.

Two, it's like, you know, I think you have to extend yourself in a way that you're loving and kind.

Yes, you have to be direct.

Yes, you have to be honest.

Yes, you have to be all those other things.

But can you talk about that a little bit?

Because I think a lot of times with this Al-Anon culture of that's it, I'm cutting them off.

They relapsed one time.

That's the end.

I'm never speaking with that.

Right.

Is just really not the path, I think, to healing.

No, none of that works.

And that's not even an authentic Al-Anon path, what you just described.

No, it's the love and concern of the most important people in your life that has the best chance of getting through to you.

And it's all about the love and concern.

And I think it's helpful to medicalize it, to say, you know, we're looking at this not as a character problem or a moral problem or a willpower problem.

It's a medical problem.

And you need, you know, and you need some help.

And and it's not judgmental.

And it's also part and parcel of it is saying, and we're going to walk this walk with you.

You know, you're going to get into your recovery.

We're going to get into our recovery.

We're going to do this together.

And so there is the that the beginnings of a recovery team, if you will, instead of being, you know, how can we get them to stop drinking?

How can we get them to stop drugging?

What can we know?

What kind of beatings can we bring down on this person?

It kind of knocks some sense into them.

And listen, sometimes you have to let the natural consequences take place.

I mean, I'm not saying that that isn't, you know, you don't want to just enable open checkbook, you know.

But the love and concern of family members and friends when it's done, you know, in a specific and organized way, you can really use that power of love to break through a person's defenses and denial.

Not 100 percent of the time, but you can change the kind of conversation that you're having and and make it really important that they understand that that you're with them again, not to not to necessarily write them a blank check for their their rent this month, but to get them the help that they need.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, we talk a lot in recovery, especially emotional recovery, Jeff, about this all or nothing black and white thinking that alcoholics tend to have.

And I think it's the same thing with the family, this black and white thinking all or nothing doesn't work well either.

And I've seen it in my own family of that people will eventually get there.

Hopefully, you know, you're hoping that they eventually get there, but this constant beating of them up constantly, you know, you have to have boundaries, you have to have healthy boundaries, of course.

But, you know, this constant it's just not an effective strategy.

So, you know, there's a way to do it.

So my wife, Deborah, and I are the authors of a book called Love First, which is the Hazelden's big book on intervention.

And the way you do bottom lines now, which is kind of what you're talking about, is you don't say, you know, if you don't go to treatment, you know, you're no more money and no more this, no more that.

Instead, what a bottom line letter, a second letter, you know, I'm jumping way ahead here.

But the way you really do it is to say, you know, dear Jeff, I realize now that, you know, I owe you an apology.

I've been giving you money for this and paying for your car and doing this and doing all these things.

And I realize that instead of helping you, I've really been hurting you.

And I'm really sorry.

And I'm not going to hurt you anymore.

You know, I understand that today you're saying you can't go and, you know, that's, you know, I hope you'll make a different decision down the road.

But for right now, I'm going to start going to Al-Anon.

We're going to start doing structured family recovery.

I'm going to start doing what I can do and do better.

And, you know, I hope before you make a final decision, you'll think twice about it and, you know, maybe maybe accept some help today.

So it's very important the way you're doing that.

You're starting off by really apologizing and saying, you know, I've got a deeper understanding of what I've been doing now and it wasn't helpful.

And and I'm all about helping you because I love you.

Yeah, and I think a lot of times people don't, you know, for me, I know when I had walked in old in my mid 20s and to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, I really didn't know what the problem was.

Sincerely, I knew it had something to do with alcohol that but if only I could control my drinking, I really didn't know what an alcoholic was.

And I know this sounds very ignorant, but I never met a recovered alcoholic.

I came from a family that drank a lot.

You know, everyone like I did not know that that was a thing, you know.

And not until people started asking me questions like, well, David, what do you think is really going on with you?

If it's not alcohol, if it's not this medical condition of alcoholism, if it's not the phenomenon of craving, if you're not any of these things, well, what is it?

You know, in a nonjudgmental way, they were saying that.

And I really couldn't answer that after I ran through people, places and things.

And I really kind of knew deep down inside that didn't resonate a lot.

What do you think that spark is, Jeff?

Well, you know, I was very fortunate.

I was very fortunate because I I went to detox and this, you know, a second or third day, this doc came in to talk to me and he was like God himself coming into the room as a great, big, powerful black man.

It was like James Earl Jones in his prime, you know, the white coat and a stethoscope.

And he'd been doing alcohol and drug treatment for like 30 years.

So and I'm like this kid, I'm shaking and sweating, you know, and he got right up in my face and he goes, boy, and I'm like, boy, you got a disease.

He said, you're not responsible for what you've done.

And I'm like, great.

You know, and he said, but you're responsible for what you do now.

Now, I'm like, I probably can't say that.

He said, your disease is incurable.

The most we're going to be able to do is put it in remission.

We're going to give you a program to follow 12 steps.

You follow that program, the disease will stay in remission.

You stop following that program and the disease is going to kick you in the ass again.

And he stood up and he walked out.

Damon, I didn't have any idea what he was talking about, OK, but he planted that first seed again in a kind of a nonjudgmental way that, you know, you've actually got a medical problem, you know, and there's a way out.

We're going to lay it out for you.

We're going to help you to get on this path and we can help put it in remission.

We can't cure it, but we can put it in remission to help you keep it in remission.

And everything I heard in the days, weeks and months that followed was congruent with that message.

And the longer I went, the more sense it made.

It makes total sense.

You know, it's interesting, all the people that lead up that really tell you, hey, you might have a problem.

The doctor who sees you and says, hey, you know, this isn't this isn't good.

Alcohol is doing this to you and you just kind of bury it as an alcoholic.

I found came back after I started to get sober and those things started to come back, which which tells me that any kind of service that we do to somebody else who's suffering as an alcoholic is not wasted if they decide not to get sober at that moment.

I've seen that it comes back.

I remember things that people were telling me five or six years before I got sober.

That's right, like this isn't this is there's a better way to do this.

Right.

And it did it added to like a bank and it built up and it got me to a place where I was able to see it myself.

Yes, yes.

I was fortunate in that I was, you know, my my illness had really destroyed me and I had nothing left.

And so it was it was a little simpler for me to admit that that I was pretty washed up.

Yeah, I you know, it's it's interesting and I would love to hear your I would love to hear your perspective where you go from literally in a hospital bed to now, you know, 42 years later, you're writing books, they're getting published, you're helping people get sober, you're intervening in the same situations that you once were in.

How did that all happen?

Like did that you know, did you just wake up one day and say, you know, this is it.

I'm going to dedicate my life to this.

I had been working in a regular job for about five years in the first five years of my recovery.

And I decided I wanted to become a counselor and stop making money, basically, because back in that time, nobody made any money in the recovery field, believe it or not.

And so I I did.

I knew the guy who was running a place called Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Center here in Detroit and up in a little town called Memphis, Michigan, where we had a long term residential program.

And I got to learn from the best and became an alcohol and drug counselor.

And then after I was doing it for a while, I went to Florida and I ultimately met my wife, Deborah.

I was nine years sober at that time and and got a job working for Hazelden.

They had a program in West Palm at that time called Hanley Hazelden.

And so we were both counselors.

We always make a point that we weren't patients when we met at Hazelden.

And and and and that's and then kind of we together decided that, you know, at that time, early 90s, intervention was all but unknown.

There was Vern Johnson, but he had never really put anything together in a systematic way.

And we decided we wanted to make a difference.

And, you know, we kind of brought the idea to Hazelden and they went along with it.

And they were part, you know, they hadn't merged with Betty Ford yet.

And we got them involved.

We got some other people involved and and did a big project.

And then books followed from that.

And it's kind of a long story, but it happened gradually over, you know, 10 plus years, basically, and and, you know, continuing to to grow my own recovery and go through a lot of hardship.

My father's death, my brother's suicide, a breakup of a brief marriage that I had had early in recovery and to a wonderful person.

But anyway, so you go through a lot and you evolve and you grow and, you know, etc., etc.

And so there's a lot to it.

And now fast forward to today, you know, there have been books.

There has been a career.

There have been, you know, a lot of things.

And, you know, CNN calls me up and say, all right, OK, 11 o'clock.

OK, fine.

You know, but where once upon a time it would have been, oh, my God, can you imagine?

That's great.

That is so great.

So what do you think has changed, you know, Jeff, in your in in the 42, almost 43 years of sobriety?

What do you think has changed actually in the recovery treatment area?

Do you see anything major happening?

Because I hear from a lot of people who have time.

It's like, you know what?

Nothing's changed.

And other people say, well, everything has changed.

And I think it's somewhat in the middle there.

What's your what's your experience with that?

On the professional side, there have been tremendous changes, most of which I don't love.

We don't agree anymore.

On a professional level, what the goal of treatment should be.

It used to be pretty straightforward.

We want to help people get clean and sober.

That's no longer the case.

You're you're just as likely to come out on more mood altering drugs than you went in on.

And I'm not talking about that's not necessarily, you know, a knock against like medication assisted treatment, which is what people might think I'm referring to, because some people do well with Suboxone, let's say.

Yeah, but just today I had somebody, you know, they went in to get off Benzos, you know, they're doing Xanax and now he comes out and he's so happy.

I'm clean and sober, blah, blah, blah.

And they just had me on Ativan.

And I'm like.

What?

Yeah.

What are you talking about?

That's you know, I didn't I had to like not say anything, but I mean, it's like that's another Benzo, but there's somebody who's rationalizing why that's a good idea.

And I'm sure if he has a little brain fog, they'll say, well, we can fix that with a little Adderall.

And by the way, you know, I mean, marijuana is legal.

So maybe you'll get a little lift out of that.

And so there is an idea somehow that we can fix it all with pharmaceuticals and some deep counseling to find out, you know, what the ideology of your particular addiction was, which is always going to be, you know, something back in your past, which isn't necessarily the case because there's genetics and other things.

So there have been a lot of things that have changed.

And but the biggest one is we don't necessarily agree what the goal of treatment is.

Yes.

Yes.

That is so interesting because I've seen this really hurt a lot of people.

And I'm you know, I like you know, I think medications are amazing.

And I think that they help a lot.

And, you know, and, you know, the flip side of this, too, is, Jeff, I hear from a lot of people who are early in recovery that will go into a 12 step program and say, I don't want the Bill and Bob experience.

I don't want to be a depressive in, you know, in recovery.

I don't want this.

I don't I don't want the life that they're talking about.

So you have this whole tick tock sobriety thing.

And I think some of it is there's some there's there's a there seems to be a a misconception about what is an alcoholic.

A lot of the times there's a lot of people who get addicted to things but aren't necessarily alcoholics, you know, and there's a lot of people who have maybe used a substance because there was something else going on with them, some sort of other psychiatric disorder that was going on with them.

But they're not necessarily alcoholics.

They were addicted for a period of time.

They drop it.

They move on with their life.

That's not an alcoholic like an alcoholic drops it.

That's when the problems begin, is when you take away alcohol from from an alcoholic.

Well, yeah.

And I mean, you've actually just brought up a whole bunch of things.

And I think, you know, that the one point that sticks out, people will say, well, I don't want the Bill and Bob experience.

And but I'll tell you, just like I was referencing earlier, if you if you live long enough, you will go through some very difficult things in life.

You will experience anxiety and depression and stuff like that.

And so the question is, how are you going to deal with it?

What I found is that having a community around me is the best way to deal with it because life is difficult.

The acceptance of that fact is, you know, that's the first noble truth of Buddhism, you know.

So these things happen.

Life is difficult.

It is challenging.

And we can't escape that by saying, well, I don't want to have that experience.

You will.

You will experience tremendous losses in your life.

Believe me.

I mean, if you're alive, you will.

And and very challenging emotional situation.

So there there's no escape from that.

The other thing is.

I think that we one thing that I've seen come and go and come and go and it's come again, is that we're kind of overly psychologizing addictive disorders and in wanting to link everything in the world to trauma and without undercutting the importance of dealing with trauma or adverse experiences in your life.

You have to realize that that's not a cure for addiction if you do that, and it's very unlikely that you will have the ego strength to face those things in very early recovery.

So treatment plans that revolve around trauma, I think, are likely to do more harm than good because the person is the brain, emotionally, ego strength, everything is just not there yet.

You've got to get a foundation that you can work from and then maybe go back and start looking at some of that stuff.

But if you're not already if you don't already have a good foundation and recovery, you will not find it by going into the most difficult things that you've ever experienced.

I agree.

And I think, you know, there is so much effort right now to make people not feel uncomfortable.

And, you know, I've said a lot of times it's like, you know, you know what I'm saying?

It's like we don't want you to feel uncomfortable for any stretch of the, you know, any period of time.

And I'm like, well, you know what?

I don't know if that's really a good idea, because really, why wouldn't you be uncomfortable if alcohol was your best friend?

Drugs were your best friend.

And now you don't have them and you don't have a lot of coping mechanisms besides that.

Why wouldn't you feel uncomfortable?

Feeling uncomfortable would be a normal response, I would think, to that.

It's not an abnormal response.

The old wisdom from the most resilient generations is that, you know, emotions are just emotions.

They pass.

You know, if you're feeling bad, if you're feeling depressed, if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling uncomfortable, it's really kind of OK because that's not who you are.

You know, it's an emotion.

You're experiencing it.

It's going to pass.

It wasn't here three hours ago.

It won't be here, you know.

And so but a lot of times we focus, oh, why are you uncomfortable?

We got to get to the bottom of that.

Really?

Maybe not.

Maybe what we have to do is get me to a place.

Let's go back to young Jeff Jay, 26 years old.

He's been sober for 14 and a half minutes and he can walk into a group of people and say, you know what?

I don't even know if I want to stay sober.

You know what I mean?

And I might drink tomorrow.

I just don't care.

I don't care about anything.

I don't care about the job.

I don't care about this.

I don't care about that.

And they're all like, yeah, exactly.

I know, you know.

And all of a sudden I'm like, wow, I can actually say this to these people and they don't lose it.

They actually know what I'm talking about.

And all of a sudden what happens?

I get comfortable.

I get comfortable.