Latest / Return to Love / Hooked on a Feeling? With Dr. Adi Jaffe

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Hooked on a Feeling? With Dr. Adi Jaffe · Return to Love

• Lisa Mauriello: Do you ever feel like you're hooked on a feeling? Do you ever worry that maybe you're hooked on love or dysfunctional love and you can't get yourself out of that pattern? But what if it's not just about your relationships? What if you find that you're stuck in destructive habits that maybe you think aren't a problem? But things like shopping, gambling, the internet. AI, sex, pornography, drinking and drugs. I bet you thought I was just gonna say drinking and drugs, right? Well, addiction can be many things. And you know that here at the return to love, we are connecting to how to return to love and love well. But you might be wondering what those two things have to do with each other? Well, today we're gonna bust some myths about love and addiction and I am so honored today to have with me as my guest a gentleman who has walked the walk, not just talked the talk, about addictions and love and trauma. He certainly hit rock bottom, having been an addict himself and a dealer and having faced Quite a number of years in prison and then having a complete metamorphosis and changing his life. And now he is a PhD psychologist and neuroscientist, a specialist in addictions, and the author of two best-selling books, The Abstinence Myth and His Latest Unhooked. Free yourself from addiction forever. He is also the founder of the Ignited Recovery Program. And I'm so happy to have him here. I have Dr. Adid Jaffe with us today. Hi, Dr. Jaffe. Dr. Deb, how are you doing? Thank you so much for having me. Really excited about this conversation. Absolutely. You know, we work f kind of from different perspectives in our work as therapists. I come from the relationship aspect of couples and families. I'm not an addiction specialist, and addiction is your specialty, but I think we cross over a lot because I certainly consider addictions one of the things that I have to check on with relationships, couples and families. So I'm sure our viewers are wondering, what does addiction have to do with love? Fine answer that question. I just want to say that it's really ironic. You know, I I got to learn about relationships and co-occurring disorders like, you know, anxiety disorders and depression and other ⁓ very common mental health issues because I started with my own addiction, but then with the addiction of clients I was working with, and then realized their relationship suffers. They have co occurring mental health issues, their work suffers, their their creation. I mean, so much of their life gets ⁓ tossed into the blender, if you will. of their addiction. And so I got to a relationship through addiction. You got to addiction through relationships. And I think to answer your question, I think it's a misnomer or it's a it's a it's a myth, if you will, that any of these things are separate. Right. So what does addiction have to do with love? At at its core, I would say many individuals who struggle with addiction are in relationships, number one. So I say this, I say this in the book pretty early on. You're either somebody who struggles with what I call compulsive habits, which are behaviors and things you do over and over even though you don't want to or you want to do less of them, or you're in a relationship and you're sitting across the table from somebody who's doing that. Right. None of us are spared. They're either your spouse, your family member, your girlfriend, your daughter, your son, your uncle, your your mom. Somebody you know is doing this right now, or you're the one doing it. And oftentimes it's both. So that's what it has to do with it. If we're gonna be relationally with others and we're all impacted by it, we better understand it. Well, and we're certainly impacted by the loss of love or what I call love deficit. I know you speak a lot about it, as far as why do people get stuck in these destructive behaviors that do become addictions? And how would people know if what they're doing is really an addiction and not just well It's just a little habit that I'm taking care of, but I'm doing nothing about it. Meanwhile, their relationships are falling apart. Their job may be falling apart. Great question. And I think these things do just to start us out. What people normally call addiction, I just talk about as compulsions and compulsive behaviors. They fall into your behavioral health kind of realm, which is where we normally think of them. Relationships, work, all of those see the patterns I'm about to describe. And I it's really, really easy. Do you do something that happens more often or you do more of it on a more regular basis than you'd like? It hurts you and or other people in your life. And even though you know that and you've tried to stop or slow it down so that it doesn't cause pain and ⁓ and distress for you and others, you've been unable to. That's it. If you're doing something that causes pain for others, it happens more often or more higher quantity than you'd like and you've tried to stop it and you can't. I think that that qualifies is what we're talking about right here. Yeah. And I agree. I often hear I can't stop myself and I don't know why. And I often ask the question, is what you're doing more harmful or helpful and having them take a look that way. Because I get so much of I wanted to ask you about, you know, people that come to both of us and say, well That's going on and other people are complaining about it, but I don't think I really have a problem. I don't want to talk about it. It's fine. I'm fine. My relationship isn't affected. And I don't want to change my personality. How do you help people who are in that kind of state? That's great. And by the way, I think that's the standard. That's how most people show up. Now let me explain why. The reason they show up is the discomfort that the addiction is helping them deal with. So I'll give an example that most people don't think about either, even though it's happening everywhere in relationships around us all the time right now. Porn. Mm-hmm. Porn use, I'll focus on men for a second. It happens in women as well, but I'll just focus on men because they're the ones who normally come to me for this. Porn use has become such a normal part of life for the vast majority of men. 30 to 40% of men though hide it from their partner. So they're you so they're doing something they don't want their partner to find out. Now you would say to yourself, Well, if you're using porn in a way that's hurting you and or your relationship, wouldn't you want to stop? But what people are forgetting is how did the porn use start and what is what role is it serving? So for a lot of men, it's a way to avoid intimacy. It's a way to avoid having to have tough conversations. It's a it's a way in which for years, if not decades, mostly decades. They've learned to not have to ask for what they want because they can get it elsewhere. And so what that means in a relationship is you don't have the tough conversations. You don't learn how to come to your partner and say, I'm not satisfied or I want something else or here's what I'm into. Because you can pretend everything is fine here and then run to porn on the other side. Of course people don't want to talk about it. They have shame, they're embarrassed, they have fear that once their partner finds out they're gonna leave them and not want to be with them. The thing is, all those fears are not actually really only about porn. They're about them as a person. Right? The fears are if my partner finds out who I am, they may leave me. So the conversation I often have with people when they come in and they don't want to do the care, I say, look, forget the porn for a second, right? Imagine we don't touch the porn. What else is it? What what is there in the relationship that bothers you? What what are the things that you would like to work on? And more times than not, there's something there. Like I'll give an example that I've heard from many, many clients. Maybe the the way they connect physically intimately, it doesn't happen enough where the th they don't get to try things that they want and they don't know how to talk about it. So then we'll start there. But the point I'll make at some point is if you have porn to run back to all the time, are you really going to put in the work to have the tough conversations that you need? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I do a very similar thing, you know, I ask them what is not being put on the table. And it's unbelievable how people that have been together twenty, thirty, and even forty years will tell me the most basic things they've never addressed with each other. They've never put it on the table. They've never been willing to rock the boat, whether that be the porn or some drinking or lack of a sex life or you know, some other conflict that they just shut down, wall off, and then go and do the other things, as we know. You know, how many stories I've heard of the husband who's at the golf club all day and then spends five hours at the bar afterwards because he doesn't want to go home. And meanwhile the wife is out shopping or doing Pilates and spending lots and lots of money because she doesn't want to deal And there you go, that's the bad deal. So And thirty and thirty years later, even when they are home, one of them is watching TV in the living room, the other one is reading upstairs. They may see each other in bed, but might one might even fall asleep before the other and they literally never see each other again. And and that's what they get used to. Yeah. And that's that's my whole message is you don't have to be out of love just because you've been together five, ten, twenty, thirty years. It's not that hard. It's easy to love, but it takes effort and it takes dealing with these other what I call symptoms that are solutions that aren't working. ⁓ I just heard on TV today there was a piece on what they're calling now the sleeping mar sleeping divorce, where they're talking about couples who are not sleeping in the same room together anymore. And questioning, you know, is this a good thing or not a good thing? I've heard many versions of it. You know, it can work for some people. I always tell them if they're doing that, they have to make some holding time, time to cuddle, to hold. The risk is that you're gonna lose the intimacy if you're not spending that holding time together. So can you help people understand? Why do people get stuck in these behaviors that do then become addictions and start destroying lives? Yeah, that's a great question. So Yeah, a hundred percent. And I'll make a little pitch here. So this is everything I'm talking about right now comes from unhooked. But the main thing that I I try to get people to understand is even if the behavior makes no sense to you or anybody else around you right now. It made sense when it started. What do I mean by that? You had a feeling you were you were living through a circumstance or the environment that you lived in was such that this behavior made things better for you when things started. I'll give an example from the book that I use all the time for myself. I was an incredibly so I'm I'm still an introvert, but I was a very socially awkward, anxious ⁓ teen. So right around the time we moved to the States when I was 14 years old. I really never felt like I fit in. I always felt like on the I was on the outside. It was hard for me to talk to anybody comfortably. I was always questioning if I was showing up right, especially the girls. You know, you're in high school, you feel awkward, whatever. Mm-hmm. I go to a sleepaway camp, somebody hands me some alcohol, some warm vodka. I didn't know what it was gonna do for me when I drank it. I drank it because I was socially weird and I didn't want to say no to somebody, social pressure, etcetera. So they gave it to me. I had two swigs of the vodka. It tasted horrible. It was disgusting. It was warm. Twenty minutes later I felt really, really nice. Now I'm socially awkward. You give me two shots of vodka at fourteen. I'm not that socially awkward anymore, at least not personally, internally. I feel okay. I talked to a bunch of people at a great time. From that night, every weekend, I would go and hang out with people and drink. Because in my head, the sil I'm socially awkward got solved by alcohol. Now Alcohol led to weed, weed led to harder drugs, harder drugs led me to what you talked about in the beginning of the intro, which included arrest and rehab and all this other stuff. But I didn't know that 10 years earlier when I had a drink from somebody at a at a camp. So when you trace it back, my real problems were self esteem, feeling awkward, now feeling like I fit in, being afraid that other people are going to reject me, and you know, having anxiety, social anxiety. Those were my problems. Ten years later it looked like I had a drug problem. I still had these problems to deal with. Mm-hmm. Now I know you've made a major shift in the field with treatment in terms of, you know, there used to be a strong emphasis, and I think in many cases there still is, of well just stop drinking and then we'll deal with whatever else is going on. We'll see what else surfaces. ⁓ I get that even just with couples' behaviors too. Well just stop doing this or just start being more affectionate and then we'll see. No, they're usually stuck and the as you say, I call it the symptom is an attempted solution. And the the unconscious is actually very benevolent. I think the person is trying to solve that underlying thing that you and I know is trauma. A lot of people think they don't have any trauma because They didn't grow up in a war-torn country, they weren't severely abused. But well, we talk about the many ways of trauma, the small traumas of you weren't seen when you were growing up, or you were verbally abused, or you were just ⁓ never taken care of, you were forgotten about, or and all the many ways that then people bring into their adult couple relationships and when their coping techniques don't work anymore that they did as a child, freezing, fleeing, or fighting, then what are they gonna find? So I I I think that's really important for people to understand that it's not about shaming them. It's about, you know, I have one of my colleagues, Terry Real, he always congratulates people for their symptom. You know, he says, You did what you had to do to survive your childhood. And Congratulations on that, but it doesn't work anymore. So now we have to find something that works better. ⁓ I think in relationships, most people will relate to this, right? Let's say one partner stonewalls. And you get into a really uncomfortable place, they just stop talking, they shut down. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, right? They'll shut for a week or two. They just won't talk to the partner. Yeah. People ask me sometimes, well, you know, you talk about addictions though. I I don't deal with an addiction. I said, okay, well. ⁓ do you only stonewall when you want to? Do you only shut down when you want to? Well, no. I sometimes I f I can't really control it. It just goes on for days and I wish it would have stopped. Okay. ⁓ does it hurt you? Does it hurt your partner? Well, yeah, that it's it's causing a lot of pain. Okay. Have you ever tried to not stonewall? Have you ever tried to just get into a conversation and happen? Well, yeah, I've tried, but just I I can't even bring myself to start talking. Okay. So you do something you can't control. It happens more than you want and it hurts you and the people around you, even though you'd love to control it. Well, how is that different than an addiction? It's the same as drinking too much. It's just a behavior. And when you say that to people, they go, ⁓ Okay. Now they kind of released a little bit of the barrier. Because until you admit that something is a really big problem and that you're part of it, it's really hard to do anything about it. But once you allow people to admit, now we say, Okay, to the point you just made, well, when did you learn when did stonewalling start? When was the first time you remember shutting somebody down and not talking to them? And everybody has a story. And when they go back to that story, it makes sense. It was a father who used to beat them or scream at them. It was a a ⁓ an early girlfriend who was, you know, would go off the rails and just scream at them for hours and they would just learn to shut down. Something happened that taught them that shutting down works. And when they realize that, a lot of the shame leaves because they go, ⁓ I'm not crazy. I learned this in the past. Now how do I unlearn it? Yeah. And then they're stuck. They don't know any other solutions. You know, they chose one naturally that they thought would work and now it's not working. I like to work with people on all possible solutions. I know you do some similar things with successes and helping people to measure success rather than counting rec recovery. I when I you sent that to me before. podcast and when I read that I it's so similar to what I do since I'm solution focused. I don't like people to track the bad stuff. So and tracking recovery is a a little still connected to problem saturated. Like I would probably have people I do have people track the good days or the days you didn't do whatever. The days for me it's like the days the couple didn't fight or the days you didn't feel depressed and I know you talked about small wins and actually I had a friend of mine the other day. I was telling him I was gonna interview you and he's twenty seven years sober. And he's he said that he still feels like it's wired in him. And how did how is that something he has to live with or you know? ⁓ that's a great question. Let me I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about that piece. If you've been sober for a really, really long time, piece in a second. We'll just put a pin in that. Don't let me forget it though. ⁓ actually I'll write it down here. ⁓ I have an app. I'll give everybody in your ⁓ in your listenership a link for a a free version of it. It's they get a bunch of what we do for free. You can always upgrade, but they get a bunch of it for free in case this matters for them. But I b absolutely believe in tracking. ⁓ because the problem is you always feel like you are where you are. And so If you went from well, I'll k I'll keep going with the stonewalling example. If you used to stonewall because you guys would get in fights three times a week and the stonewalling would last two days at a time, you would essentially never talk to each other, right? You were always in this fight, stonewalling, etcetera. ⁓ but let's imagine you started stonewalling for half the time. So instead of two days at a time, it was one day. Still the same number of stonewalling events. So they would still say three times a week we're stonewalling. But it only lasts half as long. Well, look at this. You now have four days a week of an opportunity to heal and and recover, whereas before you had maybe a half a day to talk to each other every week, and then it'd be a blow up and it would start all over again. That's a win in my book, right? That just gave you four or five times as much opportunity to connect than you had before. Is it perfect? No, but here's what ends up happening for a lot of people they only remember to take notes. when they're in the middle of a negative event, like a stonewalling experience. And so all to them it seems like they didn't improve it all. They ⁓ my God, it's still happening all the time. If you don't track, it's really hard for you to to keep an accountability of where you were before and where you are now. Now, here's where that causes pain and problems for people in long term recovery. I get this from people all the time. You've tried for years, maybe again a couple of decades, to get sober, get in recovery, and you have, and now you've succeeded. And what we build over time is this massive fear capital. Because if you've been out of it for 27 years and you're always questioning it, the fear is do I want to give up what I've had for 27 years for an experiment? Look, the short answer is no. You probably don't want to give it up for an experiment. That's not what actually ends up happening in the field. A lot of people break at some point. They've held on with tight hands, you know, white knuckling for the last five, ten years. They've got their time, but they haven't actually worked on all the underlying issues that are causing them to want the return. So I would say two pieces. Number one, first go do the work. Even if you're sober, even if you're not having anger issues anymore, even if you're not cheating on your partner or using porn, whatever the thing was, drinking, using drugs, whatever your thing was, even if you're not doing it, go get help. for all the things that were causing it in the first place. Because then if at some point you slip up, you mess up, you have a you have a bad weekend, a bad night, you'll have a lot of tools to rely on. If your only tool in recovery is that you've had twenty seven years sober, you're gonna have a lot of problems if that disappears. And in the abstinence, what what I essentially tell people is don't measure your recovery only by your abstinence. Cause that is one measure. For a very complex life. How's your relationship? How's your job? How's your career? How's your ⁓ money? How's your fun and recreation in your life? How's your personal environment? Like, do you like where you live in and the room you stay in? Like a how's your personal hygiene? Measure yourself in a a bunch of different ways because then you can start telling things are off long before you get to a slip-up. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have ⁓ a couple people right now I can think of. ⁓ one is a teenager who is having some mental health issues and impulsiveness and probably by the time of adulthood is gonna have some diagnoses, comes from a background of trauma and abuse and not sure what the parents diagnoses are. The child is no longer in her birth family. ⁓ so you know, ⁓ adoptive parent came to me and has raised this child since she's little. ⁓ you know, preschooler, ⁓ but very concerned and ⁓ worried. And I said, well, let's talk about what you're not telling me so far. And it turns out the the child is smoking weed. That's just kind of come up now. But she's an A student in school. She's an accomplished athlete. ⁓ not in high school yet and already has varsity letters, ⁓ is liked by people out in the community. No, you know, I ask people, have you come to the attention of the police outside your home? No. ⁓ is anybody complaining about you? No. ⁓ do you have friends? What else are you succeeding at? So tracking, in this case, this young lady's successes, So even her parents can see her potential rather than, ⁓ my goodness, we have this piece that we don't know how that's gonna develop in adulthood, you know, that we don't wanna frame her in shame and you know, some label that she could never get out of. And I wanted to ask you about that if so I don't lose it. ⁓ I have so many people that say to me, ⁓ ⁓ that they, you know, have had an alcohol or a drug problem and they were told it was a disease. And unfortunately, as you know very well, what that does is they buy into the fact that I was born with something and now I can't do anything about it. It's a disease that a therapist told me I inherited. And that drives me nuts. ⁓ I hate it. By the I used to I I used to believe it myself. I used to believe it myself. ⁓ so when it comes to that, I'll talk about something called a growth mindset and I and I'll leave that here in the corner for a second. The teen plus THC piece. Let's go back to the definition. Are you doing something? Is it hurting you and the people around you? Are you doing it more often or more frequently than you'd like? And you've tried to slow down or stop, but you haven't been able to. Now She may think it's not hurting anybody and other people may think it is. So you you probably want to check that with other sources and get some c you know some collaboration there, but ⁓ or ⁓ corroboration there. But that's one piece. Now, until somebody's tried to slow down and stop, which doesn't often happen in teen years, it happens later, you have to play with this definition, right? And you have to say, well, does any of this behavior bother you? Are you are you at all bothered by what's happening? And if the answer is no, then we're not changing the behavior yet. Yeah. You're not going to change the behavior of somebody who's not at all bothered by it. And ⁓ and that's something we all need to hear, because we'll talk about it here in a second for the disease ⁓ classification. But natural consequences need to be allowed to take their course. As people bump into the walls of the world. They'll understand what is good and not good for them. Now they may choose to go into hiding, but as long as they have somebody like you, Deb, to be honest with and and process what's happening, if it's causing consequences, let's talk about it and we'll be able to figure out how to get over that. The problem with the disease concept. So in my book I talk about addiction as a syndrome. A disease is typically considered something that has a very specific biological pathway It is caused by a ⁓ a specific factor or potentially a couple of factors, but not a whole set of factors. But it's always the same. Like you get the flu from the influenza virus. You can't get the flu from anything else. There is no other version of the flu that doesn't come from influenza, right? ⁓ like cancer is not like an individual the the category of cancer is not a disease. Lung cancer of a specific type, like ⁓ T cell type ⁓ non-Hodgkins lymphoma. That's a disease. Why? Because it's caused from the same T cells from the same reason. It's it's it's got a specific biological pathway. I think addiction is something called to be called a syndrome. A syndrome is a bunch of symptoms that show up together, even if they were caused by a completely different set of things. so you know, irritable bowel syndrome. You're Your stomach is struggling, your GI tract is struggling to have good nutrition absorption and good metabolism and good functioning. But it could be caused by fifty different things. That's not a disease, it's a syndrome. Okay. So that's that's a first cut piece. And here's the reason why. And it goes back to that growth mindset idea. If you have a disease that will always get worse, you inherited it and it's incurable, how much hope does that give anybody? None ever recovering from it. Right. Right. We don't even do that to people with cancer. They go into remission. Right. And so people in addiction develop this notion that I'm screwed. I'm gonna be like this forever. So why do all the hard work? I lean on the complete other side. You're talking to somebody who was using an eight ball of meth, so think like three hundred dollars of meth a day for about five to six years. I was down to a hundred and twenty four pounds. I'm about a hundred and sixty five sitting here talking to you. I was facing fifteen to twenty years in prison. I mean my life was certainly at a bottom. I don't know if the worst bottom, but a bottom. And now my life looks nothing like it. By the way, it took five years for it to start looking good. Two years to start looking okay. Five years to start looking good. A decade later it was pretty damn good. And now it's amazing and I can't wait for the next decade, right? It takes time to change. It takes time to change. But You can't change your behavior and have a disease disappear. Like if you have the flu, you have the flu. You can take care of it, but you can't. So I think the disease model hurts people because it takes away their hope of ever being able to change. Yes. Well, and it pathologizes them, makes them a a patient, but not in a good way. You know. And I I tend to do that in all my work in terms of not pathologizing people. I Not crazy about diagnoses. I want to know what's the capability of the person. And I know you talked earlier about, you know, solutions and ⁓ measures, successes. And I'm a big believer in the internal capacity of the person to create new solutions. I like the work of Stephen Gilligan, who talks about the generative mind and the creative unconscious. And sometimes people just haven't had anybody help them to develop new solutions. And I I don't know if you experience this. A lot of times, you know, I may be thinking I have great ideas, suggestions of where they can start. I don't do I haven't done that for forty years in terms of I don't tell people what to do. But sometimes I'll give one of my suggestions and they will come back with something that was much more creative than what I said as to how they could start getting out of depression or stop the drinking that impacts the couple relationship or the lack of intimacy. And, you know, they've created their whole new thing. And you know, I'm a big believer we need to follow them, you know, let them lead with their creativity once we can help them get unhooked, as you say, from that initial being afraid to even tell you what they've been doing. Do you find that a lot that People then by the time they get to you are they s in the shame and not wanting to say what they've really done? Yeah. ⁓ let me think for a second. So look, by the time people get to me, I'm certainly not the last house on the street, but I'm nowhere near the first, right? They've tried a lot. And so two different things happen. First of all, there can be a sense of hopelessness. Yeah. 'Cause if you've tried twenty things, including just handling this by yourself like you do so many other things, right? Mm-hmm. there can be a real sense of hopelessness internally. Number one. Number two, the message from society as we've been talking about over and over, Deb, is that you are Damaged forever. Mm-hmm. And so you already have hopelessness. The message you've gotten over and over, ⁓ is one of hopelessness. And then if you've been at this for any length of time, your environment, the people around you, family members, friends, have also deserted you often because you've harmed them. You've caused them pain and they want distance because they need to be able to take care of themselves. All three of those make the recovery harder. There are two pieces that I want to make sure everybody understands about that. Harder is not impossible. The farther along you are, sometimes the more work it takes, although some people get lucky. And the second piece is it gives even more reason to listen to podcasts like this, read books like this, get on apps, do the things that you need to do for help. See a therapist. Before things get really, really bad, right? So many of us wait until we have no choice. Yeah. Before we make a change. Like, and I again You wait until your partner says, if you do this one more time, I'm leaving you. Or I'm leaving you. I can't believe you did this to me. I'm leaving you. And that's when we decide it's time to go do something about it. Yeah. Where if we would have done something about it six months ago, the prognosis would have been much, much better. I'll go back to the sex thing. I get this from a lot of partners. They have shame around behaviors and they think to themselves, I can never tell my partner about this ever, ever, ever. And I say, I hear you. And I understand the fear and If your partner finds out about this a year from now and you weren't the one that told them, where do you think the relationship is going? Mm-hmm. And to be able to bridge the gap from people, for people around accountability, responsibility, and transparency as a way to keep shame off of yourself, mm-hmm, that's a big leap. So a lot of people they wait until they get found out because they'd rather not talk about it. But then the fallout is substantially greater if you're not the one, you're just less trustworthy. If you're not the one who told, we all mess up, we all make mistakes. It's those of us who own them, are accountable for them, take responsibility, and move forward in a way that makes future mistakes less likely. They're we're the ones that that get respected more. If you're always waiting to be caught, it feels pretty crappy internally and it also looks and feels pretty terrible for the people around you. Yeah. And it it has to do from my perspective of, you know, to me, intimacy is the opening to each other. around all areas of life. And you know, you have to find out what's the history of silent treatment and walling off and shutting down and shamefulness or acting out behavior. And when people aren't being authentic and real, they're just so walled off. That's when I usually get to see them. Then it's been going on for decades and they're in terrible shape. And somebody does come saying you know, I've already seen a lawyer where usually a husband gets dragged to me and they're at the end of their rope. You know, but it's ⁓ it it comes down a lot to not being ashamed to be transparent about yourself. I have couples with the sex issue that say they have never talked about it at all. They don't know anything about what each other wants or likes or doesn't like. They don't know how important it is to each other. They're holding all of this. And ⁓ my gosh, that's not a good solution. Imagine so the first this is during COVID, maybe I the year before. My wife and I had an online couples workshop. Mm-hmm. And we we asked people the question of Turning to each other and telling them one thing they really like or enjoy in sexual experiences that they want more of, and one thing that maybe they don't like as much and they they like less of. Mm-hmm. First of all, almost everybody said it was an incredibly uncomfortable experience. Secondly, half the couples had never done it. Everybody was married. By definition, all the people in our I think there was one engaged couple. Everybody else was married. And you think to yourself, some of these people, let's say, married seven years at a minimum, right? I think yeah, I think that was about the minimum. Seven years at a minimum married, never talked once about what they like and don't like from both sides. Imagine that in any other area of life, right? Like imagine you you had to pick restaurants for dinners without ever being told what your partner likes to eat or doesn't like to eat. Right. And so you you're screwing it up all the time. Like you take him to sushi and then and they kind of make this disgusted face and you're trying to figure out why you can't talk about it. Turns out they hate fish. Or you're going to movies or you're picking T V shows to watch and you're not allowed to talk to each other about what shows you like or not. Like how terrifyingly bad would your relationship be in all these other areas? But we do do it around food. You would very much tell your partner, No, I don't eat sushi, let's not go there. But you wouldn't say something to them about your sexual experience. That says much more about our puritanical culture and how much shame is built into sex at all than it does about individual couples because it happens so often. Well, not understanding the connection between the openness and sexuality with their emotional security. I'm actually calling it sex curity now. My phone misspelled the word security one day and it called it spelled it sex security. Sex security. And so I'm branding that. I've I've got the trademark on it. So because I'm gonna talk about it. Yeah. I do think to myself how often you type sex into the field if your autocorrect one to sex. That's your like your auto your auto-correct dictionary just says sex so much that it just auto-corrected things to sex. I love that. Well, because it's a big part of what I do with romance rescue tips and sexuality, healthy sexuality. So it ⁓ it went there, but it created something really cool. So Sex Curry, I love it. Good. Yeah, I'm ready to kick that off. So ⁓ can we back up a little bit? I wanted you to say a little bit more. You mentioned about your beginning of your life and you know what you overcame. But ⁓ I wonder if you could say a little more about how did you get to from there to here? I mean it's such a metamorphosis that's incredible. and I think you you know, where did you find the courage? And you said it isn't courage. So it was encouraged. I mean it didn't feel like courage. So number one thing, yes, thank you for that. Number one, that I it took me a few years to recognize, and so I want to put that front and center. I didn't do it alone. I had a lot of help and I and I now recognize the privilege of that, right? ⁓ so I went to jail. I I got an eight year sentence, but it was split up into one plus seven. So as long as I stayed completely out of trouble for the first full year, like no positive drug test, no fights in jail, no Mm-hmm. No, no screwing around. I wouldn't get the seven years. But then when I was out, I had five years of probation. And if I would have screwed up during those five years, I'd get those seven years back. So in the book I call it the source of Democles, the Sword of Democles. It was like this little sword hanging over my head. If I screw up. So the judge was very smart in the way that he set up my sentence. My parents were there for me. When I was in rehab, my dad came to visit every month. They lived in New York at the time. So that's a lot of travel to come visit me every month. Then when I went to jail, he came to visit me every month. Right. So that's two years of my life that I think my mom came a few times, but she was working, she was taking care of my sister. He would come once a month to come visit me in jail or outside of jail. That was huge. ⁓ my family supported me. I you know, I had an attorney, I had ⁓ the judge who gave me a break. So a lot of other people were responsible for that. But what ended up happening, Deb, is I had to move slowly. It wasn't courage so much as deep, deep resolution about what I don't want. ⁓ I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in prison. And I knew that if I screwed up, I had seven years guaranteed, plus whatever I was gonna get after, plus I saw all the people around me. People were getting shot, people were getting thrown away in jail for twenty years. Nobody was coming out of this looking good. So what I said to myself was I'll I'll go get a job and I said this outright. I said, I'll clean toilets, I'll do whatever I need to do to not go back to prison. I couldn't get one job because I had nine felonies on my record. So nobody would hire me. The last job I tried to get, because I went through all the malls, I went through all the restaurants, was a pizza delivery job. I got rejected from that last minute. So I went back to school. ⁓ cause it was the only thing I could do. But I'd sworn off of school. So essentially at every turn, what I'm saying is I just tried to do the next thing that I could do. And when when I was hitting a wall, instead of feeling bad or sorry for myself, I'd say, okay, let's go do something else. School worked. I got into school and then I got my first job the second year of school because they match you with a job. And so My motto when I got out was I I'm just gonna do my best at whatever the next thing is. I couldn't get a job, so I did my best at school. I did so well in school I got a scholarship. Now I was not a good student before. I might have been smart, but I was not a good student. And I got back to school. I was a four point ⁓ student. I got scholarships. I got help from other professors to get into my next university. And so at every turn, and I I still try to live by this to this day. I never know what tomorrow's going to bring. I have a this is incredibly sad, but yesterday ⁓ I was out with friends and my wife on this boat. We got invited to this small boat on the marina here in in Los Angeles. We went on the boat and we literally saw on another boat a woman choking. ⁓ my goodness. And then they had to call in paramedics and I mean, in the middle, you know, you're fifteen minutes from land, it was a nightmare. Yeah. And it turned out sadly. Tragically at the end, when we got off the boat, it turned out she didn't survive. ⁓ my goodness. And you know, I I'm getting off this boat. I was just I just spent three hours with my wife having this nice evening, and all I could feel was just immense gratitude that I get today and I get tomorrow. Because you don't know what's coming. None of us know what's coming. So why not do the best we can now? Because if I'm gone tomorrow, I don't want to think to myself that I waited for the right time. There is no right time. So 25 years ago when I got out of jail, I just kind of started getting this mindset. I didn't have it before, but I started getting this mindset of I'm just gonna do my best at what I'm doing now. And what that's given me over the years is more and more opportunity. Cause when people see that you're doing really, really well, they'll give you another opportunity, or you'll have another chance. And so that's how I got to the PhD, and that's how I got to start writing for psychology today. And that's how I started the books. Everything came out of, you know what? I'm just gonna try the next thing and and work really, really hard at it. Twenty-five years later, my life looks completely different. But each one was just a small incremental step. Well, and I think having people there to support you and having the good things happening and paying attention to those good things, like you said before, the small wins and then You know, I think when you believe those things, you're changing the core beliefs inside. The only option then wasn't for you the drug addiction and the dealing in the prison life. You started to see that ⁓ other things were possible. Not only possible but probable. So, you know, it sounds like we both deal a lot in hope and strength and ⁓ solution building is one of my words that I use all the time, not just positive mindset, but actually then how do you build solutions in your life? How do you create something from inside of you, you know, from your own intuition that maybe you just couldn't get pulled out of there before? If you had one more thing to say to people that might be struggling with this, and I do want to tie it to ⁓ The fact that a lot of people have these addictions of the whole I didn't go through the whole list in the beginning, but it's not just alcohol and drugs. It's the sex, that's the pornography, it's the gambling, the shopping, the not paying attention to your partner because you're glued to the devices, you're not even talking to them. And it is a affected. These things don't just happen out of thin air. I think we all have some kind of trauma that we have to heal. And it usually has to do with a love deficit, I call it, and the fact that we are all hungry for what we didn't get or didn't get enough of. So I encourage people to really think about what's going on with possible addictions and your relationships and what you need to heal. And I think Dr. Jaffy, you offer us a different way forward. do you want to just say a last piece of if you could say one thing to people about how to get unhooked and change your life, what would you say? Yeah, I think I'll just I'll just reiterate and echo what we just ended on anyway, ⁓ Deb, which is nobody is hopeless. I'm not saying it's easy. But nobody is hopeless. And the next step from wherever you are right now is to make this resolute decision that you're gonna give the next step everything you have. And that if it still turns out to be the wrong one, you'll just pick another option and another choice, and you'll give that everything you have. And all I can promise everybody listening is this you do that for long enough. I can't tell you the number, but you do that for long enough, you're gonna find success. And to my mind, that is what hope is, right? Because if sure, if anybody could give you the recipe, it would feel easy. The work would still be hard. Use this moment as an adventure. Okay, I don't know what's going to get me to the other side, but I'm going to try the next thing I see and I'm going to give it everything I've got. So whether it's your work, Gabor Mate's work, my stuff, a book, a podcast, my app, like try something and just try it all out. Just do the whole thing. And then if it doesn't work, try something else. What do you have to lose? If you could follow that. There's no reason to be hopeless. Great, great. And you're living proof of what you're teaching, because that's what you had just described to us, how you one step at a time came out of where you were. And I know you have a good relationship. You have a marriage and a family and children in your life. And ⁓ I'm sure less every day you, you know, probably think of Try not to think of you wouldn't have had those things if you hadn't taken care of that addictions components. So so we encourage everybody to take a look at what trauma you have, what you need to heal, and how it is affecting not only yourself, but the other people around you that love you. So, Dr. Jaffy, I wanna thank you so much for being with me today. I'm sure this will impact a lot of folks. And thank you for sharing your story. And do you want to give some information about where people can find out more about you and your book and your speaking engagements? So ⁓ djaffy.com for me personally, ignited.com for ⁓ for all the stuff that I do professionally. But I'll give you guys a link to the app specifically to your listeners so they can go on and get ⁓ There's a free version of it they can just get and get an advantage of from. The books are available on Amazon, ⁓ Barnes and Nobles, all the other places where you buy books. So thank you for being here with us today. Remember that love is a precious gift. So make each day a whole season of love. Until I see you again. Take good care.