Hi, this is steve again. Welcome to this month's podcast. Thanks again for joining me and Happy New Year to everybody. Hopefully everything is off to a great start for you, if not please be patient and give it time and just focusing on not being too hard on yourself when things don't exactly go your way. Uh takes a lot of time and patience. And the main thing is that we believe that our dreams are possible and it starts with just giving ourselves permission to dream. So I wish you well in those endeavors. What I want to talk a little bit about today and I've written about this and some of the blogs is a little bit about relapse. My road to recovery. Relapse is a part of my story. I've been battling the disease of alcoholism for over a decade. Uh just to give you a little background, I went to multiple treatments. I had the best intention every time to want to abstain from alcohol. I didn't want it in my life. I began to recognize there were a lot of negative consequences if I continued to drink and I could get into all the different reasons we're gonna save that for another day because it's quite extensive into term in terms of why a person can relapse. And a lot of them can seem plausible, especially for those that are in recovery from my perspective and what I see and what I've experienced in my recovery. Again, it boils down to shame. Where does the shame come from? Where does this feeling of being less than something less than the situation? An opportunity less than another person. My shame ran so deep that when I was on this road to recovery and and ultimately relapse multiple times. I actually thought whether I was in group in treatment or in a 12 step meeting I actually believed hearing other people's situation, their story, if you will. That my shame was less than their shame. I was ashamed of my shame. So where does that shame come from? You know, I've read and studied that. Most of us once were adults have experienced trauma, at least one traumatic event. You hear about all types of trauma, loss of a loved one. Um, people are victims of just horrific offenses, crimes, domestic violence abuse, assault, rape, just things that are really can be difficult to speak about. Imagine if you're the person on the receiving end, the victim, there's a tremendous amount of stress with that for me and I'll talk a little bit about this. Um, I went through a tough divorce. It just wasn't working out, it got ugly for a little while. Um, a lot of it was made public. There was a lot of nasty things that went down there about a year or so later. I went from a, went through a painful separation with my former employer. I was terminated anybody that's been fired. Um, can relate to that. It's a stressful experience, even if it could be the best thing for both parties. There's still a lot of stress to go through that. And I struggled with that. That was like going through a second divorce for me. I had been with that company for a long time. I really felt like I put my heart and soul into it and it certainly didn't play out the way I intended it. So I'm fighting a lot of feelings of feeling less than something. The emotions can swing to where our ego wants to compensate for that and it can pendulum can swing the other way to feelings of, I'm greater, then I'm greater than the situation, I'm better than you. What I strive for today through meditation, gratitude list, prayer support, group meetings, going to the gym and other various forms of um, you know, relief. Um, to balance out my emotions is to just be on par. My shame is equal to your shame, my trauma is equal to yours and vice versa. I want to treat you as equal and I would like the same treatment in return. So let's take a particular example here as someone's gone through this trauma with a lot of stress and maybe they're already an at risk user um, for substance abuse or it could be tendencies when their mental health condition kicks in. Just to give you a couple of examples in this example, I was an at risk user of alcohol that was my drug of choice. And you could also say there was a genetic predisposition you factor in the trauma and stress and then it can accelerate things, which it did for me. So, I was reading an article last night about a former athlete, name is Todd marinovich, very promising prospect coming out of high school, went to uh Southern cal university here in Los Angeles and he did well for a while, a lot of people didn't know he was struggling with substance abuse. He had a short lived NFL career with the Oakland Raiders and he's been battling substance abuse ever since. We're about the same age. I fortunately was able to celebrate my 50th birthday sober anyways, if you're interested, you could look that article up, but it brings up the subject, which a lot of us I think can relate to whether you're dealing with mental health trauma in general substance abuse or all the above, which happens in a lot of cases. And we've talked about that dual diagnosis, the subject of conditional love or as he called it in this article, performance based love, that means we do something an action, say something and if I do this, then I'll receive this and our minds become conditioned to it. And if we don't receive it, then we're severely let down in my mind. So if I people please and make somebody happy, temporarily, I get some gratification, some immediate gratification. If I don't get the response to feedback, I'm looking for, it's disappointment, you get in that cycle and get conditioned to that. If I do this, then this and it doesn't happen. And to to sign up for conditional love or performance based love. We have to make ourselves very exposed, very vulnerable because we have this expectation and then expectation comes higher and higher and higher. For me, the higher my expectation to lower my serenity, I lower my expectations and don't expect much. I find peace, joy, happiness serenity, and I'm able to regulate my emotions much better. So you get into cycle high expectations, major disappointment. Maybe you're already an at risk person for mental health, a genetic predisposition or substance abuse. And you're living in this disappointment here comes this amazing trauma and all the stress and unless you're on the receiving and it's very difficult to identify number one if it hasn't happened to you yet and I pray it doesn't very difficult to show compassion. It's one thing to have it. If I watch a feel good piece on tv, I'll tear up if I hear our national anthem, I'll tear up a little bit. That's compassion, I care. I'm moved. I believe that's what it is. Strong feelings, a good emotion, showing it is completely different. So when you're wondering how to support somebody in this situation, if you follow our situations and they've got a lot of this stuff going on and then in the crosshairs just think about that. I'll come back to that when we wrap up here. So this person is making themselves incredibly vulnerable. Um trauma comes in, stress comes in and they go full blown into their mental health condition and or substance abuse. Many of them have them both or some other condition that they might have where they just become really depressed and sick, which is another form of a mental health challenges depression. And we've talked about that and people unfortunately have suicidal tendencies and some follow through and unfortunately some are successful, which is tragic. So when you're thinking about supporting these people, I thought would be instead of saying what's wrong with you, you drank again, you used again, you did drugs or you're tripping out or why you depressed in bed all week. You know what the hell is wrong with you? I thought would be what happened, what happened to you and listen, try to identify, make the effort, show them compassion. Think about the shame of I'm less than something. The easiest definition is guilt is I made a mistake, shame is I am a mistake. People need a hug positive reinforcement. That's how you can support them unconditionally. Now, sometimes in the situation you have to detach with love. That's very difficult because you want to help. We instinctively want to help. Sometimes all we can do is stand on the sideline and keep them in our prayers. It does matter. And it's very challenging to break this cycle of relapse it can happen over and over again. Like this person that I referenced who's been in and out of treatment for decades now that didn't happen to me. But I've been in and out of a couple of treatments and I've been battling this thing for over a decade and I'm certainly glad that my parents and my friends realizing now more than ever I have some great friends didn't give up on me and point the finger at me. And even though they didn't do that, I still felt it because of my shame and then you factor in all this trauma and stress in your life. I thought that were their contributions as I've talked about in previous blogs, written about and talked about on a podcast. Yes, but I I I'm responsible. My pain and suffering has caused me to take action and I'm grateful for that pain and suffering. It motivates me to take action and for opportunity to continue to reach out and grow for me. It's real simple. If I'm not growing, I'm dying. People with substance abuse and mental health need one thing we're like made for more than the average person and that is connection I pick up the phone, I reach out, I call people sometimes they may feel like I'm pestering them, I need that connection. If not I will feel cut off disconnected, alienated. That's how I feel. It may not be true, but that's where my mind can go. And then I start thinking I'm not enough. There's shame, there's disconnection. And then I start wondering what my purpose is in life again. I'm not enough. And then a drink sounds pretty good. And the reason I can tell you that is I've done that one more than once and the result wasn't pretty. So I'm truly grateful. When you read about my blog this month about my pain and suffering, The pain is inevitable. As I said before, The suffering is optional. So think about that, showing compassion, trying to identify, asking the question a little bit differently. Try to relate and just simply try to provide connection, make that effort. It goes a long ways we need that connection more than most people. Most people can kind of do march to the beat of their own drum and do their deal. And everything seems finding Danny as far as we know, some of us struggling with these conditions if we don't do it together and we can't talk about our stories and help each other out. We're in trouble. We're either growing or were dying. So we'll continue to talk more about that. I'll get into more specifics about, you know, relapse and and kind of share with you what I went through and and reflection now and we'll continue to talk. So thanks again for listening. Please continue to reach out. Your messages are amazing. The support is amazing and we're all worth it. I love you. Take care and God bless.