(00:00) What is the root cause driver of what we’re calling addiction? Is it just weak, broken people? Is it a genetic thing? I stopped seeing addiction as a diagnosable illness. There really isn’t a difference between conventionally recognized substances of abuse and the way that so many of us engage in food, work, in romantic dynamics, and sexual partnerships.
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(01:41) If you don’t completely love it after 6 weeks, you can return it for a full refund, no questions asked. Enjoy. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I would love to offer a brief missive on sobriety and specifically sober love. So, as I began to wake up from the allopathic system and the DSM5 that categorizes and pathizes all manner of human behavior as being some sort of fundamental flaw in the mechanics of uniqueness, I stopped seeing addiction as a diagnosable illness, right? meaning like a discrete disease. Even though I worked on locked
(02:37) dual diagnosis units in Bellevue Hospital in New York City and I could see the way that addiction uh specifically to identifiable substances could wreak havoc on somebody’s life or the lives of their loved ones. I recognized that the power that was given to the substance in the abstinence model or even the sort of damage control moderation model felt uh like it only perpetuated exactly that which it purported to resolve.
(03:14) And that’s why so many of these folks ended up on psychotropic meds. So they would come in for alcohol abuse and they would leave on four different psychotropic drugs as if that was some sort of a medicalized stabilization, right? As if that was really fundamentally an improvement. And so I began to see hm like are we really solving the root cause? And what is the root cause driver of what we’re calling addiction? Is it just like weak, broken people? Is it like a genetic thing or is it some intrapersonal dynamic meaning how you relate to you, right? And maybe
(03:57) specifically how you relate to your own emotional terrain because we know that many folks engage addictive so-called substances when they are under stress or when they are feeling otherwise depressed. That there’s a kind of medicating, right? self-medicating that goes on that is not random, right? And it’s not sufficiently explained through the chemistry of the substance.
(04:25) And that’s why I love those rat park studies, if you’ve heard of them, that were conducted up in Canada. And that found in a nutshell that you can addict a rat in isolation to cocaine. Some of them were with morphine. And that you can put that same rat in a rat park where there are toys and stimulation and notably other rats and they will self discontinue.
(04:52) That they will choose water instead of continuing to engage the substance and when put initially in that environment they do not actually develop the so-called addiction. So then is it the substance or is this a a meta phenomenon of what Jean Liedloff would call the continuum concept, right? These primary relational needs, this experience of connection and belonging and this safety in the self that potentially could have been should have been conferred through a kind of attuned and attached and connected birth and then postpartum experience. She talks
(05:31) about the first 18 months. I have since interviewed experts about the first three years as setting the foundation for attachment security. Regardless, the expression that we are calling addiction is a down the line symptom of the intolerable experience of being with the self and specifically being with one’s emotions.
(05:59) Right? So if that is a relationship to the inner feminine that is immature, then it could be argued that there is a kind of self-containment. There’s a kind of masculine safety that can be brought to the system that allows for this being with the feminine inside to feel fundamentally okay, right? And even welcome. So I have looked through the lens that I’ve applied to the depathizing of substance abuse and I’ll I’ll talk about kind of these like four questions that I like to introduce into that space.
(06:40) I have looked through that lens to observe that there really isn’t a difference between conventionally recognized substances of abuse and the way that so many of us engage in food, engage in work and specifically engage in romantic dynamics and sexual partnerships. And then maybe even the way that some of us engage in conflict, tension, discord, and drama that it could be the case that our nervous systems become attuned to a certain experience of highs and lows.
(07:28) Expect that experience, hunt it out, seek it, find it. And that the antithesis of that which might look like ease, harmony, spaciousness, stability is actually so fundamentally unfamiliar such that that system does not have the capacity to orient towards that as welcome as safe as even wanted. So these dynamics if we focus on how they show up in our relationships right these dynamics are related to the nervous systems inculturation around the victim triangle.
(08:17) So when your nervous system is conditioned around the victim triangle in your upbringing, you will naturally try to find your footing in the rescuer, in the punisher, and in the punished. And when you are in relational dynamics, everything is a zero- sum game. And navigating around those different angles of the triangle becomes how your system finds a little hit of stimulation, a little hit of security.
(08:54) And you engage this very narrow bandwidth. and you ping-pong between those polarized sensations of relief from the high sensation and then intolerance of the relief and then recruitment of the high sensation. So Pia Melody has written about and speaks about and I talk about her work in the Reclaimed Woman. She talks about love addiction and the possibility that while a love addict is usually on the anxious side of the attachment spectrum, worried about losing intimacy, consciously worried about that, what they are actually fundamentally
(09:41) avoiding is the intimacy that they’re worried about losing. Right? So, they’re consciously worried about abandonment and they’re unconsciously afraid of actual connection. And that’s why the love addict cycle is usually defined by the selection and choice of partners who are unable to provide intimacy, are unable to meet emotional needs.
(10:06) So that high and low dynamic, that seeking to buy eggs from the hardware store experience of maybe some way I can strategize, I can lie, I can appease, I can manipulate so that the love can be extracted from the impossible place. Fantasy is very alive in these dynamics. And usually the father wound which I like to characterize as unsafety.
(10:36) Unsafety in your body, unsafety relationally, unsafety in the world. Usually that father wound is specifically matched to a man who has unsafety in his own system. Right? So just as your father in this case could not contain his own system well enough to possibly offer that containment to you or your mom or your siblings, this man is similarly incapable.
(11:02) And yet you uh seek to secure it from this place. And so this is one of the reasons that I found an initiation of your inner masculine where you show up for yourself in a radical way. Confer safety to your system. engage in the choice, the commitment, the follow through, the integrity of word, the self-discipline of something like you know the version of this that I offer which is called vital where you engage in a protocol that sends your system the signal that somebody’s home right maybe that is part of why you are better able
(11:52) to offer containment to yourself, right? So that you can hold your upset and you can begin to expand beyond that ping-ponging experience of the you know trauma drama sensation game. When you offer this safety to your system, you reclaim what psychobiologists call neurosception so that you can begin to interact with the reality in front of you with more sobriety.
(12:30) So, the example that I like to use is, you know, let’s say you just watch like a super scary movie and then you go to bed and you wake up to pee and you see something in the corner and it looks like an intruder. Your entire system is going to like react. You can’t possibly register that it’s just a pile of clothes on a chair because you have been programmed to experience, anticipate, and even perceive unsafety in your environment where it doesn’t exist and then you read your inner environment to confirm and affirm that unsafety and it feeds
(13:08) forward into your behavior. But when you reclaim neurosception, you can see more clearly what’s actually in front of you and you don’t take the bait of vilifying, right? aka experiencing unsafety where it’s not there or a grandizing, right? Or experiencing, you know, the hot hero where there is just a dude.
(13:38) Okay? So when you’re not projecting these vilified or idealized dimensions of your own parents onto whatever is in front of you, you can see more clearly what’s there and you can make decisions accordingly. You can also feel your inner terrain and what I like to refer to as the little no.
(14:03) The little no is the ick that you feel on the first date that you ignore. It’s the typos in the email from somebody you’re about to hire, right? It’s the feeling in your gut that you get when you are dropping your daughter off at a playdate. It’s just not right and you ignore it because there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support it because you can’t find a ready solution if you were to actually act on it.
(14:31) and you don’t have the nervous system capacity to simply insert a pause and to rest into the uncertainty of not knowing what to do even though you know that this is not the thing. So, if you followed my work for a while, you know how seriously I take ingredient integrity. And that’s why I am so excited to partner with Equip because their prime protein is unlike anything else on the market.
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(16:22) And you have the wherewithal to take responsibility for your actions and to see that behavior is just behavior and to own it. Sometimes these reflexive responses are, you know, they’re so rapid, right? So, you may be somebody who usually uh suppresses your needs and fawns and rule follows and people pleases or you may be more like me.
(16:51) You know, you’re a rule breaker and a fighter and you know, you’re always in your I’m going to get you to see rhetorical posture. You might even engage that, but you will see yourself doing it and very quickly come around to owning it and then making decisions based on what it is that your system is actually telling you. It’s when we ignore this little no, when we neglect it that we make the inevitable poor bargain and we attempt to buy eggs from the hardware store.
(17:23) We experience our own victimhood and we perpetrate from that victim posture where we almost always become the villains from that place. So we’re steeped in disappointment and resentment and the unfulfilled promises of our childhood and we’re literally acting this out with whomever it is that we’ve put in front of us.
(17:47) So if you are uh somebody who is recovering from patterns and habits of you know what we might call um dysfunctional connection or limited uh intimacy or even what you might narrate as betrayal or rejection in your relationship history. It may be a good time to truly get sober. So the experience of taking yourself off the market, the experience of orienting towards your own system allows you to titrate which is you know a somatic term for like sort of ease into stability and peace and harmony so that you can have small doses of it.
(18:39) Initially it is probably going to feel like a silent scream of boring of loss of you know is this even worth living kind of a life. So in my experience over the past several years, I have engaged many dimensions of sobriety from, you know, peeling alcohol and even plant medicines out of my life scape uh without real cause, right? But just that inner sense that this is the next step in uh claiming my feminine gifts all the way to the calming of the dynamic stimulation that I’ve had in my romantic life over many years and even the drama.
(19:27) Right? So, I have been somebody who’s so attuned to the patterns of chaos, you could say addicted to the patterns of chaos that I will subconsciously cook up dramas even if I don’t have romantic discord, you know, to distract me. And I mean, there was a time in the past, I don’t know, a couple years where I had an ear piercing gone so wrong that I had an abscess, you know, the size of an eyeball on my ear.
(20:00) And I had like rats in the walls of my home and there were probably like 10 other things going on. And it was just sort of like that like heightened experience of drama and crisis that I couldn’t seemingly otherwise source because I was not dating and not in relationship. You also might um source this kind of stimulation through your work, right? Through deadlines and through, you know, financial scarcity.
(20:28) You might source it through workrelated traumas and experiences of recurrent patterns of disappointment, frustration, overwhelm. Right? So the many many many uh faces of addiction all seem to stimulate and arouse the system in the escape from numbness and boredom or the quieting of the overwhelm and stress.
(21:03) So that toggle runs through all of these different dimensions. So, there are a couple of prompts that I have offered when I’ve talked to folks about their relationship to certain more identifiably addictive substances, right? like including I went off my some of you may know I went off my smartphone for 2 and a half years during the pandemic and it wasn’t so much related to kind of track and trace concerns as it was related to my addiction to the work that I was doing through that gadget and the sense that I needed to be available you know available this is a trauma
(21:44) response to anybody who needs to communicate with me because that’s part of my you know part of the equation of my worth. Okay. So I asked myself these same questions uh when exploring that decision. Okay. So the first one is and let’s just for you know ease of conversation with myself. Let’s just um talk about alcohol. Okay.
(22:10) So number one is to legitimize why you do it. So if we are on a radical quest to know ourselves and to take ourselves in every form that presents then there cannot be any that is rejected. There cannot be any that is excluded from the system of you. Okay. So the part of you that believes that it is a fantastic idea.
(22:37) So the devil on your shoulder that says yes have the drink. Have the second drink. Third drink. Fourth drink. Okay. has a very legitimate reason for encouraging that. Okay. So, what actually let’s celebrate it, right? Like why does it work? What are you getting out of it? What needs are being met? Now, remember, you can ask this also about your relationship drama.
(23:06) Why are you with the man who you characterize as abusive? Why are you in the same dynamic again, you know, that you’ve been in five times before? Um, why did you stay instead of go? Why were you there until it was time to leave? Right? Legitimize why you’re doing it or why you did it. Then the second one is to legitimize the substance.
(23:30) Okay? So, dynamically the substance can be right like a man, right? Um or it can be, you know, alcohol or some other material form of recognizable abuse, right? So you legitimize it. Um if it’s in the drama field, you can legitimize whatever it is that happened. So it’s the object, right? You legitimize this and you see that it has both good and bad, that it’s a mixed object, that it’s not all bad.
(24:04) And then the third is to seek to want something that it can’t give you. What would that be? If you had to find something that this substance or person or behavior or experience can’t possibly afford you, like that’s just not for sale here. What might that be? That’s how you find the fourth prompt, which is what is on the other side of quitting, right? What does quitting actually bring you? What is the upside of moving beyond this? It cannot just be that you’re not doing it anymore, right? That you’re out of that relationship.
(24:44) There is something that you will never deal with again. There is something that you get to have when you move into the realm of sobriety. And whatever that thing is, it might just be too hot for your system to handle until your system is actually ready to handle it. So, as I said, a big part of what I have experienced in these past couple of years is an engagement of sobriety that has been in service of attuning my system to the exhale, to the spaciousness.
(25:23) It’s felt a bit like a cocoon and it’s been totally necessary to end that cycle of highs and lows and all of the relational dynamics like with my friends etc that stem from that place of can you believe this kind of experience to the extent where I have wondered if I become like uninteresting to my loved ones if I don’t have a dramatic story to report and the good news is that the opportunities for celebration, the opportunities for expression of simple joy, and the fulfillment of what might otherwise be characterized as mundane becomes more
(26:07) and more available as your system begins to recode that as something other than a threat not only to your relationships, right? where you’re used to smalling yourself and you’re used to connecting through commiseration, but also to your experience of your self-concept, right? So that you are no longer your, you know, um, shameful victim stories, your huge dramatic problems and these patterns that just seem to characterize how you have shown up in this lifetime.
(26:40) to allow your identity to diffuse to the extent where you’re not that anymore, but you’re not yet. Whatever it is that is on the other side of this, you know, abstinence window, this soft and slow, cool, calm and collected experience of uniqueness, this open, soft heart and strong, stable spine, nervous system compartment that’s just crystallizing and you can hold and handle the liminal space in between.
(27:18) So I hope that that is an interesting and helpful orientation towards the kind of sobriety I see in the zeitgeist as being increasingly valued not only in the self-care realm and substance abstinence realm but also in the uh romantic and relational realms and even in the way that we narrate what is happening in the world and in our lives.
(27:45) And in our bodies where we can break and end the cycle of rescuer, of punisher, of punished, and begin to truly inhabit what is actually occurring without judgment and projection. All right, talk to you soon. [Music] I feel [Music] good.
