recovery

A Guide to the Best Recovery Podcasts

September 24, 2018 by Paul Fuhr

Very early into my sobriety (and I’m talking days, not weeks), I suffered from a perfect storm of problems. Like any career alcoholic who suddenly resigns without giving their two-week notice, everywhere I turned, there was another surprise around the corner. First, there were all the fun physical withdrawal symptoms: the sheet-twisting sleeplessness, the racing-mind anxiety, the zero-appetite nausea. And then there was the shame, guilt and grief—all of which hung over me like a slow, miserable thunderhead. But more than anything, I just felt alone. When I look back on that Mad Max wasteland of early sobriety, that’s all I remember: I felt like I was the first person in the history of the world to have to get sober. I wasn’t exactly hurrying off to the nearest AA meeting, either. No, I was busy Googling things like “recovery” and “alcoholism help” and “sobriety” and “Am I going to feel this terrible forever or should I just go back to drinking because I can’t imagine a life that doesn’t involve booze?”

The whole time I searched online for help, I had the comfort and company of the podcasts I subscribed to: Marc Maron, Adam Carolla, NPR. (Even one called, yes, “James Bonding.”) Still, in all the same ways I couldn’t imagine a future without red wine and vodka, I couldn’t have imagined that podcasts would eventually save my life—but they did. I began searching for sobriety-themed podcasts and before I knew it, I found a landscape that immediately made sense to me. I couldn’t subscribe to the podcasts I found fast enough. There were enough to prove to me that not only wasn’t I alone in sobriety, but that others wanted to hear about sobriety and recovery on their own terms, too. I could put in my earbuds and hear someone share a story that filled me with hope as I mowed my lawn, drove to work, or washed the dishes. They even gave me the confidence to walk into an AA room for the first time, since I sort-of knew what to expect, thanks to what I’d heard. Sobriety podcasts quickly replaced most of the junk food I’d been treating my ears to and—especially in those first few weeks—genuinely got me sober.

In addition to GeniusRecovery.com Editor Anna David’s Light Hustler podcast, here are some recovery-themed podcasts that might guide you toward long-term sobriety:

The Bubble Hour: Hosted by Jean M., this is a lively hourlong podcast (as advertised), dedicated to breaking down the stigma surrounding alcoholism—one guest at a time.
Church & Other Drugs: This podcast is hosted by two “ex-addict/alcoholic Christians” who “tell the stories of the beatdown, up and coming, hard-knocked, and healed up.” All at once serious, funny, spiritual and moving.
Drop the Needle: A song-centric podcast that’s just like NPR’s “All Songs Considered” for the recovery community. Hosted by three friends (two who met in a treatment center and one who’s an accomplished music critic), the show welcomes guests to share songs that personally remind them of each week’s recovery topic. [PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS MY OWN PODCAST AND MY EDITOR FORCED ME TO INCLUDE IT.]
High Sobriety: Award-winning speaker and actor John Mabry is the host of this show (sponsored by Addiction Campuses), which interviews “high-profile recovery advocates” who share their stories and struggles around addiction, trauma, rehab and countless other topics.
The ODAAT Chat: Arlina Allen hosts this inspiring podcast that features interviews with a wide range of individuals in recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction—all of whom share stories that are oftentimes as revealing as they are deeply affecting.
Since Right Now: With nearly 200 episodes in the tank, this podcast has managed to stay fresh in its discussions of recovery from alcohol and other drugs, thanks to its irreverent yet thoughtful hosts Chris, Jeff and Matt.
Recovery Elevator: Hosted by recovering alcoholic Paul Churchill, this podcast is particularly notable in that it’s less interested in being a series of individual episodes so much as the gateway to a larger community around sobriety.
Recovery Unscripted: Hosted by David Condos and driven by the support of Foundations Recovery Network, this podcast invites a wide range of people from the recovery community to “share their personal journeys and firsthand experience.”
That Sober Guy: Host Shane Ramer’s long-running podcast shows no signs of slowing down, featuring interviews with individuals who share his passion for bringing awareness to mental health, substance abuse, addiction and recovery.
The SHAIR: When Omar Pinto isn’t busy as an addiction specialist, recovery life coach and motivational speaker, he’s the host of The SHAIR Podcast—a unique, engaging weekly show that interviews people in recovery with the simple hope that their stories “will inspire millions to stay clean and sober.” (Here Joe Polish on SHAIR here.)

The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery [Excerpt]

September 19, 2018 by Joe Polish and Anna David

If there’s one word that encompasses what we believe is crucial when it comes to recovery, it’s community.

The great impact community has on addiction and recovery is actually a proven fact. In the late ‘70s, a Canadian psychologist named Bruce K. Alexander decided to test his hypothesis that addiction is caused by environment and a lack of community—as opposed to the availability of drugs. For his experiment, he built an enormous rat colony that was 200 times the size of a typical cage. He gave those lucky rats everything a young (or old) rat could dream of: yummy food, balls to play with, tin cans, wood chips, platforms and running wheels galore. But the best treat of all? They got plenty of exposure to members of the opposite sex, not to mention places where they could get down (that is, mate). In this Rat Park of every rat’s dreams, Alexander placed two dispensers—one that contained morphine and another that was straight-up H20. With those rats happily ensconced in Rat Heaven, he set about placing some less-lucky rats alone in individual cages with access to the same amount of morphine and water, but the only interaction they ever got was with the people who brought them food and water. They couldn’t exercise, play or—well, forget mating…they couldn’t so much as have a brief catch-up with a pal.

Here’s what happened: the rats who were living in isolation got hooked on morphine while those who were luxuriating in Rat Park sampled the morphine only occasionally. In one experiment, the individually caged rats in fact drank nineteen times more morphine than the park dwellers. Take that in, please. Then fantasize about what your personal version of Rat Park might include, because that’s pretty fun. (On our list: Wi-Fi, chocolate, peanut butter and hammocks, to start.)

In another experiment, Alexander offered those sad, solitary caged rats only morphine to drink. After fifty-seven days, they were then transferred to Rat Park, where there was both morphine and water on tap. One might think, since they’d been getting high for almost two months, those rats would stay on drugs. But they didn’t. While they did show original signs of dependence, they eventually opted to forgo the morphine for the water.

Now, this doesn’t mean that if you place an active addict in a luxurious spa, replete with delicious food and hourly massages, that person will suddenly become drug-free. But it does suggest that environment matters—a lot. And it means that having a community is crucial.

As Alexander wrote, “Solitary confinement drives people crazy; if prisoners in solitary have the chance to take mind-numbing drugs, they do.”

Of course, recovery doesn’t end when we put the plug in the jug. This means that a positive social environment isn’t only important when getting off drugs or alcohol. It’s just as important—if not even more important—once we’re in recovery.

Is Everything We Know About Addiction Actually Wrong?

In 2015, a British journalist named Johann Hari hammered home the significance of community with his TED Talk, “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong.”

Although his beliefs—that punishing addicts only worsens addiction—weren’t new, no one had ever articulated them so well. The talk focused not only on Bruce Alexander’s work but also on the “human” version of it—that is, the Vietnam War, where 20 percent of troops were using heroin and 95 percent of them quit afterwards. As Hari put it, humans have “an innate need to bond” and if they don’t have other humans around to bond with, they will latch onto whatever’s there. As Hari put it, “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it’s connection.”

Joe’s Community

It’s not hyperbole to say that Joe’s entire life is built around having a community. As the creator of the world’s highest-level marketing group, Genius Network, Joe gathers the world’s top entrepreneurs, best-selling authors, and industry innovators for regular meetings. These occasions have not only featured talks by people like Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Dr. Gabor Mate, John Mackey, Brendon Burchard, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ariana Huffington, Peter Diamandis, Dan Sullivan, Randi Zuckerberg, JP Sears, Tim Ferriss, John Hagelin, and Steve Forbes, but also provide one of the greatest opportunities for high-level business people to commune.

Joe is currently building Genius Recovery, a community that will do for people in recovery what Genius Network does for entrepreneurs. Made up of a blog, podcast, resources and more, Genius Recovery is connected to Joe’s other recovery project, Artists for Addicts. The philosophy behind Artists for Addicts is to use art as a “force for good” to not only help people who have developed addiction problems but also to increase understanding about what addiction actually is, where it comes from and how to truly heal it. Artists for Addict’s first project is Black Star, a painting created by Artists for Addicts co-founder Jon Butcher as a tribute to famous people lost to addiction. (If you’re interested in purchasing a print of Black Star, go to Artists for Addicts.)

Anna’s Community

For Anna, entering rehab and then 12-step rooms revolutionized her life. She had spent the previous few years holed up in her apartment, with only cats and cocaine for company, and to suddenly be among the living was a revelation in itself. The fact that those people were talking about feelings she’d had but hadn’t known how to articulate, and that they were sharing them in intelligent and occasionally amusing ways, opened her up to connecting with other people in a way she never had. Suddenly, she wasn’t picking her friends based on how willing they were to drive across the border to Mexico to buy sheets of Xanax at a willing Mexican farmacia, but by whether or not they were honest and funny and interested in looking at themselves and growing. Anna had gotten so isolated in her addiction that being easily granted a group of people made facing all the other changes she had to deal with in early sobriety far less terrifying.

While her friends have changed over the years—her “picker” was a bit broken after years of active addiction, so she originally found herself drawn to some less-than-healthy people—maintaining a community has continued to be one of her priorities. After years of isolation during her active addiction, she was actually shocked to discover that she’s a people person. While she relishes time alone, it was in early sobriety that she realized she loved and in fact needed to be around people to stay mentally healthy.

Because she was living in a New York studio apartment for several years when she was writing books, making sure she was part of a community required extra effort. This meant, when she was writing her memoir, Falling for Me, going to coffee shops where she could be around people even if she wasn’t talking to them. This is also when she implemented “Project Study Hall,” which is what she called it when she got together with friends to sit together working side-by-side—taking, of course, regular breaks to chat.

Today, she works out of a shared office space. She also does workouts that involve group bonding (hip hop dance class with a group of people that hang out together outside of class). And although she’s inarguably tone deaf—and there are terrifying Instagram videos out there to prove it—she plans karaoke nights; when she was the editor of a website and had a team under her, she actually called karaoke nights “staff meetings” so that all her employees would attend. Without realizing it, Anna was following Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chodron’s recommendation to “liberate [yourself] from confusion” by doing “non-habitual” things like singing or dancing.

The truth is many addicts and alcoholics have a tendency to isolate when they’re depressed or triggered or tired. While recharging by spending time alone is crucial, there’s a fine line between replenishing energy reserves and having an exclusive and seemingly satisfying relationship with Netflix. It’s therefore important to prioritize being around other people—whether that means joining a hiking club, soccer league, community theater or church choir. It’s even better if you can do it with other people who are in recovery or focused on creating better lives for themselves. This doesn’t mean you need to surround yourself with an army of sober people because otherwise you’re destined to go off the rails, just that addicts can get in their heads, thus it’s best not to spend too much time alone.

Here’s a tip we’ve figured out over the years: if you’re wondering if you’re isolating, you probably are. Think about Rat Park and find your own version of wood chips, platforms, running wheels, tin cans—and, of course, people.

Reprinted with permission from The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery: Letting Go of Who You’ve Been for Who You Can Become, copyright 2018, All Rights Reserved. To get an audio version of the book for free, click here

Life Lessons from My Summer Recovery Bucket List

September 17, 2018 by Lisa Bennett

When I was drinking, I often claimed I wanted a more adventurous life. Yet there I was, sitting on the couch watching TV and downing glass after glass of wine. One of the driving forces that led me to finally ditch alcohol was a desire to climb out of my monotonous, gridlocked existence.

I entered the summer of 2018 with a year of sobriety under my belt and a list of challenging new things I wanted to try. I was eager to find out which activities would become essential parts of my life and what I might discover about myself in the process.

My summer exploits were infinitely more fun than nursing a hangover in the blazing heat. In addition to expanding my horizons, I made a conscious effort to learn an important lesson from each experience that I could apply to my recovery and life in general. In a perfect circle, quitting drinking gave me the time and energy to explore these interests, and the activities themselves gifted back tools that I am using to stay sober, awake, and present.

Aerial Yoga & Persistence

Practicing yoga at home played a huge role in my early recovery—it helped refocus my chattering mind on my breath and my body. Once I got past feeling creaky and unstable, I decided to give public classes a try, and first up was a gentle aerial class.

Aerial yoga involves a “silk”—a large piece of material that hangs from the ceiling in a long U shape. You can use it as support to get into positions that might otherwise be difficult to maintain, swing in it, hang upside down from it, and lie down in it like a cocoon. The practice is safe and welcoming to people of various body types.

In keeping with my tendency toward wild expectations, I immediately pictured myself flying through the air like singer P!nk. To avoid growing frustrated with not being an instant superhero, I scaled back my ambitions considerably.

I started taking the same class weekly, and I accepted that progress would only come with persistence. Pushing past your body’s resistance is both intimidating and invigorating—you must apply just the right amount of pressure. I plan to stick with aerial yoga for the long haul, seeking steady growth at a realistic pace.

Bodyflight & Boldness

Indoor skydiving, or bodyflight, as the sport is known, is not particularly scary. You wait around for long periods just to hover about five feet off the ground for two minutes at a time. When it’s your turn, an upward force of air suspends you in a Superman-like position while an instructor tweaks your body position.

Families with tiny kids were doing it the day I went, and watching those kids helped drive out any fear I was feeling. The biggest challenge, in fact, was the sense of being on display. The skydiving takes place inside a clear cylinder, and people sit around the tube, both those waiting to fly plus an outer circle of civilian onlookers.

For those of us who don’t like being watched, especially when we’re doing something new, this can be anxiety-provoking. I had to coach myself into getting past my emotional discomfort to locate the bold adventurer inside.

At the end, our instructor went into the tube alone and performed some fancy tricks. If I could learn those moves without an audience, I might give bodyflight another try. But for now, I’ll remain content with learning that I can overcome my self-consciousness.

Zip Lining & Courage

For years I wanted to go zip lining, but I never made it a priority until I stopped drinking. Now, I want to travel all over the world, so I can zip line everywhere.

In addition to zooming along on multiple lines, the treetop adventure course I completed involves climbing up rope ladders to platforms in the trees and maneuvering through obstacles. Much of the course is high above the ground, and I spent a lot of time hanging on for dear life to anything grab-worthy.

Tackling the Tarzan Swing was the scariest part of the course. Instead of gliding along in a semi-seated position like on the zip lines, you sort of throw yourself forward and swing like a pendulum toward a large vertical cargo net. You can choose a less frightening alternative route, but I had already taken the easy way out earlier in the course.

As I stood there terrified, I told myself that if I wanted the payoff of truly conquering my fears, I would have to jump off that darn platform. And I’m so glad I did. Being brave gives you access to feelings and experiences you might not otherwise encounter, especially on the couch.

Flotation Therapy & Patience

When I arrived for my first flotation therapy appointment, I was pleased to see that it was nothing like the sensory deprivation tanks I had seen in the movies.

You have a small suite to yourself; there is an area to change and shower, and the large tub is in a connected room with a high ceiling. The water is loaded with Epsom salt so that you float effortlessly, and the temperature is the same as your body, helping you lose track of where your body ends and the water begins.

For the first three-quarters of my session I tried to get situated and quiet my mind. Did I want the short pool noodle that they provided under my knees or not? Should I use the foam halo under my head? Was this really any better than soaking in the bathtub at home?

I withstood the instinct to write off floating before finishing even one session, and my patience paid off. During the final minutes I let go and entered a uniquely peaceful state of mind. Next time, I will book a longer session. And outside of floating, I will remember how patience is so often rewarded.

Rock Climbing & Faith

I dragged my husband with me to the introductory class at an indoor climbing center, and boy was I relieved that he came. Every climber needs someone on the ground who can “belay” for them—manage the slack on the rope, put on the brake when necessary, and help lower the climber down.

We learned to tie knots, do safety checks, and call out set commands, so I felt pretty confident that nothing major could go wrong. But on just my third climb, the instructor called out to me to “fall.” Say what?! He wanted us to see how easy it was to stop a climber from falling very far.

The instructor did have to ask me to fall three times before I finally took a deep breath and pulled my hands and feet away from the wall. Having this kind of trust in your partner and the equipment is not easy for some of us. In the end, I was so proud that I took this literal leap of faith.

Aerial yoga and zip lining may be the only two of these activities that I’ll return to regularly. But I can use persistence, boldness, courage, patience, and faith to guide me every day.

We Want You! (To Write For Us.)

September 12, 2018 by Genius Recovery

September is National Recovery Month and we want to celebrate by featuring and rewarding you. After all, if you didn’t exist, we would just be writing this for ourselves.

How do we want to feature and reward you, you ask?

We want to welcome you into the Genius Recovery family. This could mean featuring you as an expert we interview. It could mean bringing you in as a paid contributor. We’re not entirely sure yet. What we are sure of is that we want to start by asking you to share your recovery story with us.

Here’s how it works…

Many of us are used to sharing our “experience, strength and hope.”

Well, to celebrate Recovery Month, we’d love to hear less about your addiction and more about your recovery. In fact, we’d specifically like to know—in stories that are 500 words or less or videos that are two minutes or under—about the impact community, nutrition or environment has had on your life since you put down substances and picked up life.

Once you’ve written your essay or created your video, please message us on Facebook and add the video or story as an attachment. Please also include your mailing address.

Why do we want your address? Well, we will read through all the entries and select some to publish both on our site and on our social media. IF your story is selected, we will send you a copy of our book, The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery.

YES, we want to both feature you on a site that has contributors like Dr. Gabor Mate and Tommy Rosen AND send you a copy of our #1 bestselling book.

Need help getting started? Think about the friends you’ve made in recovery, the way your diet has changed (trading vodka for smoothies, anyone?), the woo woo activities you’ve embraced or anything else that might have horrified the old you (but thrills the new one).

We are so excited to celebrate your genius in recovery.

How Do You Heal Core Trauma? An Exclusive Interview with Dr. Jamie Marich on EMDR

September 12, 2018 by Genius Recovery

Dr. Jamie Marich is an EMDR bad-ass. Sure, that’s a kind of crazy way to identify someone but it’s true.

Here are her stats: she travels internationally teaching on EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, expressive arts, yoga and mindfulness while maintaining a private practice in her home base of Warren, Ohio. She is the founder and director of The Institute for Creative Mindfulness, developer of the Dancing Mindfulness practice and co-developer of the Yoga Unchained approach to trauma-informed yoga. She is also the author of five books on trauma recovery, most recently EMDR Therapy and Mindfulness for Trauma Focused Care (with Dr. Stephen Dansiger). Oh and she’s over 16 years sober.

While I’d dabbled in EMDR before (I went to a therapist in the 90s and asked her if we could figure out if I had any repressed memories and she waved a pencil back and forth in my face and nothing happened), I knew a time would come when I’d have to dig in and really do it. But who wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I’d love to go pay someone to make me cry about all the things I’d rather forget”? I waited until I was, as they say, going through it and decided, since I was already sad, I might as well capitalize on that and try breaking down the thought patterns that were causing me to suffer more than I needed to.

I’m about 25 appointments in and I can say without hyperbole that it has been one of the most significant experiences of my life. While I love my regular therapist, EMDR has a way of making you go, “Why in God’s name have we been talking about all these issues all these years without ever SOLVING them?!!” Through EMDR, I have dismantled destructive thoughts in ways I never thought possible and been able to shed those labels my family gave me so that I can step into my greatness.

We all deserve to step into our greatness, as Dr. Jamie Marich knows better than anyone. Below are snippets from the conversation I had with her when I interviewed her over Facebook Live,

ANNA DAVID: Let’s start with the basics. What is EMDR?

JAMIE MARICH: EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and, as you and I were sharing in our chat before the interview, it is a terrible name. It really is reflective of the historical context of which the therapy was founded.

There’s this story which is almost the stuff of legend now that Dr. Francine Shapiro, who came up with EMDR, was taking a walk the park and was contemplating some terrible things that had happened to her. She is a cancer survivor and had recently gone through some issues around that. Because was a very devoted student of mind body medicine, she was used to experimenting with her body to see “If I do this with my body, how will it affect my mental processes and vice versa…”

So she was taking this walk and discovered that her eyes started doing this bizarre back and forth thing as she was processing her thoughts and feelings, and so from there she started trialing and erroring with her friends saying, “Follow my fingers. As you reflect on these thoughts, feelings, emotions, notice what happens.”

It’s not as simple as “Just think of the trauma—follow my fingers and it’s going to go away.”

ANNA DAVID: How is it more complicated?

JAMIE MARICH: There is a method and a protocol that therapists need to be trained in so they can do EMDR safely and properly. But the reason it’s a horrible name and a clinical misnomer is that it was eventually discovered that you didn’t need the eye movement component to have a lot of the effect. You could do it by having earphones and hearing alternating beeps or by being tapped or by holding pulsers.

The mechanism at play really is this back and forth stimulation. We sometimes call it bilateral stimulation or dual attention stimulus…that oscillating motion back and forth.

ANNA DAVID: What does the bilateral stimulation do?

JAMIE MARICH: The easiest way I can explain EMDR is that it really helps us go deeper into the brain than talk therapy alone. A lot of people who’ve had experiences with EMDR will say things like, “I’ve mulled over this issue in talk therapy for years and years and years, and it just never quite shifted. I have good cognitive understanding, but at the heart and the body level, I still feel stuck.”

EMDR is one of the approaches that can help us go deeper than talk alone. It’s probably the most effective method I have seen for allowing me to access the holistic person and allow these shifts to happen more effectively and more quickly.

ANNA DAVID: What exactly is happening to the brain?

JAMIE MARICH: The limbic brain, which is the middle part of our brain that we cannot easily get to by words—our fight or flight brain—can say stuck in trauma repetitions. So we can’t easily get to it through words. This sort of stimulation opens up neurotransmitters that connect the limbic brain—the neocortex, which is the more rational brain.

It’s like this: We can have that talk over and over again where we say, “I should know better” but it’s not linking up in the heart and the body. So what the dual attention stimulus is doing is it’s literally widening the bridge between those two brains in ourselves…we can call them parts of the brain, but they’re technically different brains.

But when you’re getting into reprocessing trauma, the speed is usually set up a little higher because we want to move information more efficiently over that neuro fiber bridge between the feeling brain and the neocortex. The way that I’ve heard one of my mentors explained it is that when we help a person process trauma in this way, we move memories to the neocortex. It’s not that we’re eliminating memories. It shifts how memories are stored in the brain.

ANNA DAVID: What percentage of your clients are you doing EMDR with and what percentage are you doing just talk therapy?

JAMIE MARICH: I do EMDR with all my clients. Because once you get known in an area as doing it, a lot of people end up finding you. Of course I do other things—I do 12 step facilitation and expressive arts therapy, there are other things I bring into the mix. But EMDR is my primary method.

ANNA DAVID: While I know how it works, how can you explain it to someone who’s never done it?

JAMIE MARICH: The client and therapist talk about something and the therapist asks the client the level of distress around the issue, from 0 to 10. After doing some of the stimulation, the therapist asks, “What are you noticing now?” as opposed to “What are you thinking about now?” We want to be open to the full range of your experience. Some people will give us the thought that’s on their mind. But if what you’re noticing is that your chest is on fire, tell us that because that means your body is giving you that information. The magic EMDR phrase is “Go with that” because we want you to be able to be with that but then keep allowing more to be revealed. At the end of the session, we ask the level of stress again, with the idea that the number goes down.

ANNA DAVID: I know it’s for reprocessing memories but is it also so people can access repressed memories?

JAMIE MARICH: EMDR may take you by surprise; you may think, “I forgot that happened, or I never connected those two things together.” But one thing Dr. Shapiro always said is that EMDR does not bring up memories just for the sake of bringing them up. The point is not to torture you with your past, but if something is going to come up in the reprocessing, it’s because it’s connected to the issue that you’re working on. EMDR reveals what needs to be revealed.

ANNA DAVID: Why do people think EMDR is sort of woo woo when in fact it’s medically supported?

JAMIE MARICH: It used to be considered very fringe, very alternative. Like, “Oh, move your eyes back and forth while you sense into memory experiences in your body.” But one of the things I do credit Dr .Shapiro for is she really did soldier very strongly in those early days, in the 90s and 2000s, saying. “We have to research this.” And so she developed a very technical protocol.

One of the reasons you’re asked those questions about your level of distress is so that we can measure how it’s working. EMDR is one of the three most researched therapies for PTSD. There are other things out there that can treat PTSD but none of them has the research support quite like EMDR.

On EMDRia.org, which is our big international organization, there’s an up to date listing of all of the research reviews, literature reviews, and clinical randomized controls on EMDR. It’s really quite exquisite and it’s something I’m just proud to be a part of.

ANNA DAVID: So the research is just based on what the client reports?

JAMIE MARICH: There are some really highly randomized controlled studies where those ratings around distress are taken into effect but we also have seen symptoms eradicated. A measure of success is if you go in as a client and have this clinical threshold that meets PTSD symptoms and then by the end of a certain course of EMDR treatment, those symptoms are eliminated.

ANNA DAVID: What sort of symptoms?

JAMIE MARICH: The major symptoms of PTSD are things like flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts and body level distress memories. You can have what we call the heightened arousal symptoms like the increased startle response, hypervigilance, outbursts of anger and problems concentrating. Also feeling intense, negative effect or having negative experiences of emotion all the time—anger or terror, shame, sadness—or just an intense negative self-image where you’re thinking thoughts like “I’m bad. No one can be trusted. I am defective.” A lot of these symptoms may sound like other diagnoses you heard of, like ADD and depression, so it really does become important to work with a clinician who can weigh out what things are affecting you. But the more we learn about trauma, the more we see that a lot of the behaviors and issues that cause human beings distress are explained by unhealed trauma.

ANNA DAVID: Is there a typical number of sessions of EMDR that people do?

JAMIE MARICH: Some of us have long-term clients for one issue or another because the nature of an individual’s disability may require that they have some type of check in on a more permanent basis. But we’re not trying to get people into therapy long-term with this. I do find that EMDR can work a lot more effectively and quicker than other forms of therapy. But I don’t ever want to sell it as a quick fix; that’s one of my pet peeves around some of the marketing around EMDR. You’ll read things online where someone says three sessions wiped out what years of therapy could never do. Now, I think in three sessions you can go very far and if you have a person with a pretty good life who has been through one single incident trauma, you may be able to eradicate most of the symptoms. But even our international guidelines say EMDR is not done in any certain number of sessions and it really is up to the clinician and the client together to devise the best treatment plan possible.

ANNA DAVID: What actually “counts” as trauma?

JAMIE MARICH: PTSD is typically understood to be single incident…like one bad thing happens to you and so you have all of these symptoms. But then there’s complex trauma and honestly, most of us who would meet PTSD criteria, it is of the more complex variety typically—meaning it’s one thing after another that has made the trauma symptomology a little more volatile or the trauma happened at a very developmentally vulnerable point in your life…typically before the age of eight and often by a primary caregiver.

ANNA DAVID: What do you say to people who think EMDR is not going to “work” on them or they’re scared to do it?

JAMIE MARICH: It’s a very good question. I mean two things. Let’s start with the fear first. I usually approach that by validating the fear because any change process is scary. The first thing I try to understand is what the fear is about. For a lot of people, it really is a fear of getting better. What would my life look like if I made these changes and shifts?

A lot of people are also scared that they couldn’t handle what may come up. EMDR can be pretty emotionally intense and so one thing I tell folks who work with me is “I’m willing to help you get ready for that process.”

And when people say, “I don’t think this will work for me,” often it’s because they’ve been jaded by other forms of therapy. So I will often explore what some of those experiences have been. Sometimes the core idea is “Nothing will work for me because nothing has worked for me so far.” And sometimes I explore that by asking the question, “Well, what does it mean to you for something to work? Well, let’s start there.” And um, then usually from there we can develop a plan.

I think it has the potential to work for everybody but I also know that not every therapy is the best fit for everybody so I usually try to invite people to give it three to six sessions. And if it’s not a good fit for you, then I’ll help you try to find a therapy that is a good fit. But I have honestly seen this work for about every type of client out there, if they’re willing to do some of the work required.

ANNA DAVID: Amen. Well, this has been fantastic. Where can people go to find out more information about you and EMDR?

JAMIE MARICH: Everything I’ve written for free online is on my website. I also have a big YouTube presence with mindfulness videos and EMDR demos that you can watch. Just go to YouTube, type my name, EMDR or ”trauma made simple” and you’ll see.

September Recovery Reading Round-Up

September 10, 2018 by Paul Fuhr

Decades ago, I used to marvel at my Corporate America middle-managers and supervisors and executive directors who’d all stacked their office shelves with more books than they’d ever get to in a year, let alone a career. Still, I recall being blown away by the knowledge they’d must have amassed from reading everything on display, until I realized those books were mostly wallpaper and props and set dressing. One manager confided that he’d never read anything on the shelf behind him, which amounted to about 40 or 50 titles like Good to Great and True North and Competing for the Future, not to mention an endless assortment of books about leadership principles, usually written by retired soldiers. This is the kind of nonsense I’d pull in active alcoholism: everything was for show. I’d buy three Thomas Pynchon behemoths and prominently put them on my shelf—never to read them. I just wanted them there.

Anyway, in sobriety, I told myself that I wasn’t going to create a library of works I’d never read; I didn’t want my shelves filled with spines I’d never crack open. Every month here at Genius Recovery, I’ll share titles here that I’ve come across that say something meaningful about recovery. That said, these aren’t just books I’m collecting for the sake of collecting them—these are books that will likely travel with me for the journey of my sobriety. They’ve not only kept my interest but they’ve reminded me that sometimes when I’m lost in my recovery, I can often find myself again while reading pages like these.

Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano, Andrea Avery (Pegasus Books, 2017): Andrea Avery, an already ambitious and talented pianist by the age of 12, becomes diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA)—a diagnosis that’s nothing short of a death knell for her aspirations in both music and life. Staring down a bleak life Avery never imagined for herself, she instead turned her creativity to crafting the gorgeously delicate Sonata: a memoir that’s as powerful and affecting as any musical composition within her. The book has been described as “breathtaking” and “dazzling” (among other adjectives), but these words aren’t standard editorial-review hyperbole. Avery’s memoir is a poetic masterwork in how to translate darkness into light. She charts a course for readers to discover the nature of pain, the fallacy of fate, the struggle for motivation, what “success” truly means, and finding one’s place in a life that’s seemingly abandoned you.

Two Towns Over, Darren C. Demaree (Trio House Press, 2018): Don’t let its slight size fool you: this award-winning collection of delicate yet sharp poems is bursting with observations about the blighted streets and neighborhoods of Demaree’s opioid-ravaged Ohio. He doesn’t understand the addiction that’s taken hold of everything he’s always known, but that’s the point: it’s a series of poems constantly trying to make sense of something that’s almost infinitely out of reach. You don’t have to appreciate poetry to understand the gorgeous rot and ugly accuracy at the center of Two Towns Over.

Bottoms Up: A Recovery, Paul C. (Hotchkiss Publishing, 2016): While the chapter structure of Bottoms Up should be familiar to anyone who’s been to a 12-step meeting (“What it Was Like,” “What Happened” and “What it’s Like Now”), the memoir is anything but some color-by-numbers triptych about sobriety. It’s a unique, lively and (at its best) adventurous plunge into alcoholism—and the long, torturous road back. The writer paints such a vivid, detailed portrait of his disease that it’s hard not to breathe a little easier, feeling the white-knuckle release when he sits down in AA for the first time.

The vignettes are as brief as they are affecting: one- to two-page glimpses into a beautifully chaotic world, one glimpse colliding headlong into the next. A whirlwind that takes the reader from 1950s New York City, on booze-soaked vacations to Cape Cod, following a dizzying trail of months-old apologies and—finally—gussying up his alcoholism by actually becoming a respected sommelier…all before he arrives in AA. The impetus? He writes, “My wife presented me with a three-page handwritten list (by no means a complete one) highlighting some of the things I had done and failed to do in my drinking career and how she felt about them.” It’s that sort of stark black-and-white reality check that undercuts an otherwise crazy-colorful, sometimes queasy kaleidoscope of full-blown alcoholism.

Bottoms Up doesn’t romanticize AA so much as it spins dark poetry out of the writer’s experiences in the rooms. He’s not quick to pick up all the lingo or bumper-sticker logic, nor does he willingly embrace everything that’s thrown his way. And in many ways, it’s his initial skepticism about AA, especially the fact that he wrestles with whether he’s even an alcoholic to begin with, that’s the most endearing part. Paul C. simply sticks to what’s worked for him and, thanks to the sharpness of his truths, when the words cut, they bleed. For all its self-deprecation and humor, Bottoms Up is also at times jarring and terrifying. It’s a messy portrait of first sponsors, first struggles and first steps, though by the time Paul C. finds left himself unsupervised in an art gallery, trusted to be alone with priceless paintings by the likes of Degas and Picasso, it isn’t just an important emotional milestone for his sobriety—he’s also reached a highwater mark with recovery writing.

Just in Time, Joan Jackson (She Writes Press, 2017): Jackson’s novel is a deeply affecting chronicle of mental illness that’s both inexplicably funny and heartbreakingly true. Jackson’s writing is all at once delicate, barbed and beautiful—a style that lends itself perfectly to the story of Steve, a former college track star struggling with schizophrenia in adulthood. And while it’s a work of fiction, Jackson has clearly tapped into the first-hand experience of growing up with her similarly afflicted brother. Interestingly, while the novel doesn’t particularly set out to be a meditation on parenthood and addiction, Just in Time unflinchingly captures the difficulty of raising a child struggling with substance abuse. Even Jackson seems surprised by including her son’s real-life struggles, let alone just how effective their inclusion ends up being. “I didn’t plan on putting it in this book,” she admits, noting that her mother felt the same “despair” toward Steve as Jackson did with her own son. “[Dealing with addiction] is a learning curve and many people don’t know what it’s like to live with it,” she says. “My son has been clean and sober for 18 years, which is a miracle.” Still, she’s comfortable plunging the reader right in the center of the struggle. As she calls it in the novel, the book details “a series of yets,” wherein there’s a calm before the inevitable insanity of detox. Also, that Jackson’s son is only a subplot is remarkable, given how indelible his problems are. It also shows just how effortlessly commanding her writing is.

When It All Stopped Working: An Excerpt from Bottleneck

August 21, 2018 by Paul Fuhr

When you’re a recovering alcoholic and everyone around you knows it, you’re suddenly exposed. People know what to expect. You don’t have to hide much. But when you’re an alcoholic who’s suddenly a recovering alcoholic who’s trumpeting it on Facebook and showing off your 30-day sober coin while you’re secretly drinking again, it becomes ten times harder to achieve the escape velocity your brain so desperately needs from reality. You can’t just make quick, random trips to the store without getting asked a dozen questions. You can’t excuse all your stumbling, mumbling, stuttering, and confusion and sweating and puffy-faced mood swings. (Well, you can, but it’s not easy.)

Because I’m an alcoholic, I cut every corner imaginable. If there was a shortcut, you could sure as shit find me taking it. If I could make people think I was sober and still reach alcoholic bliss, that wasn’t cheating. That just meant I was smarter than everyone else around me. Of course, you can’t sustain that sort of charade for long—especially when you’re dealing with booze. Drunks aren’t the most meticulous people on the planet. Details get fuzzy and things get overlooked. Very often, I’d forget where I’d hidden my half-drunk pints of vodka, which simply turned my house into the world’s saddest version of The Hunt for Red October: my wife and I silently circling the house, not speaking, but both keenly aware that there was something lurking in the dark. In the end, it was just a matter of who’d find the bottle first.

Carrie found three empty Smirnoff bottles tucked under a pillow in the spare bedroom, a particularly lazy hiding spot. I didn’t even know what to say other than, “Oh well. You got me.” Her face was pinched with disappointment. She was more upset that I was talking about sobriety with other people who were actively trying to find it. I’d scored the cartoon version of sobriety—the one that gets played in late-night syndication.

At the height of my secret drinking, I apparently texted my sister at 2:30 am. All it said was “Help me” or something to that effect. I heard about this much later from my mom, when I’d finally gotten sober. I don’t remember sending the message, but it sounded like something I’d do—especially after putting away a pint of cheap, bright-smelling vodka. But it was a far cry from the messages I normally sent out into the world at two in the morning: garbled Facebook status updates, random messages to long-out-of-touch friends, the occasional phone call and slurred voicemail. Near the end of my drinking career, I dimly knew I was in trouble, but it was only in my darkest, blurriest moments that I tapped into truth. Turns out, drunk text messages were some of my first, most important steps into recovery.

When my alcoholism was finally clear to me after seeing some of what I wrote, I no longer had just a drinking problem—I’d hurtled way past the point of no return. My texts and Facebook messages pointed to my troubles. No one needed the Rosetta Stone to translate those; it was pretty clear. But the nature of my messages started to change. They started to get more precise, like smart bombs surgically finding a house instead of flattening an entire city block. Some part of me knew I needed help, and it started to reach out even when the rest of me didn’t want to get sober yet.

With my wife and kids asleep, I zoned out and started aggressively posting music videos, movie clips, and funny cat videos on people’s Facebook walls. But something that night was different. I was lying there on my couch, wondering why alcoholism had happened to me. Bad news is always supposed to happen to other people, not you. So I searched my phone, closing one eye as I scrolled through my contacts, and found the number for Mike from Parkside. I sent him a quick hello.

I was horrified to see, immediately, the ellipsis appear on my iPhone. Those three dots told me this guy was texting me back in the middle of the night.

“How are you?” it asked.

The question stabbed back at me there in the dark. It was just too real. More than that, I didn’t know the answer to his question. So I did what I always did when I was drinking—I hid. I didn’t reply. I went back to Facebook and eventually passed out. The next morning, I went through my normal routine of surveying what public damage I’d caused just hours before. I assessed the nonsense I’d put out into the universe. When I saw the text to “AAMike,” I winced. His reply just sort of hung there against a white space, orphaned. I ignored it for a couple of days. Then, when I drank myself into watching old Twilight Zone episodes online, I summoned up the courage to text him back. It was well after midnight and right around the time William Shatner thought he saw a creature on the wing of that 747.

“Sorry, man,” I wrote back. “Got busy.”

This was a bald-faced lie, since I was unemployed and both of us knew it. There was no excuse. Either way, once again, the three dots popped up almost immediately.

“Hey, no worries,” he replied. “How are you?”

Again, I had no idea how to reply, so I went for broke: “Will you be my sponsor?”

It was like asking a stranger if I could accompany him on his Caribbean cruise.

There was a pause, then the dots came.

“No.”

I was taken aback.

I watched as that sky-monster lumbered across the 747’s wing in black-and-white, with Shatner not believing his eyes. I felt the exact same way. Then again, it’s not like I even knew what the hell a sponsor was. It just sounded like something I needed to ask, and I’d been rejected. I had to face the Twilight Zone monster that was my alcoholism, which still lurked just beyond the window.

The above is an excerpt from Bottleneck: A Drinking Memoir, available now on Amazon. East Shoreway Recovery Services (July 31, 2018). All rights reserved. Purchase the book by clicking here.

25 Recovery Hashtags You Need to Know

August 10, 2018 by Paul Fuhr

I apparently just celebrated 10 years of being on Facebook. For six of those years, I was an active alcoholic. And it showed. That’s the thing about social media and addiction: you can try to manicure your life and make it pretty-perfect, but the more you try to make it look good, all you do is draw attention to your issues. I wrote countless paragraphs on friends’ walls. I crafted non-sensical messages to people I hadn’t seen since middle school. I shared random music videos for no reason and fired off movie quotes out into the ether, tagging anyone and everyone in the process. I was sending pings into the universe, hoping for a response. Despite all the noise of social media, there was a sad silence to everything.

I’m in my early forties. My social media skills are limited at best. Uploading cat photos on Instagram? Got it. Connecting with professional strangers on LinkedIn? Sure, why not? Getting overwhelmed by my Twitter feed? Every single day. But back in early recovery, I found myself gravitating toward one thing: the hashtag. Yep. The simple, stupid, silly pound sign—and all the letters after it. (If you want to go Full Nerd, here’s a ridiculously comprehensive oral history of it.) Being online when you’re newly sober—at least for me—was a lot like being shell-shocked from war. At first, I couldn’t stomach Facebook on my MacBook but I could, however, deal with hashtags on my iPhone. Hashtags became as important to me as, back when I was drunk, getting three Likes on a 3 a.m. post about Toad the Wet Sprocket. In fact, they’re still important to me. (Hashtags. Not posts about Toad.)

By searching for recovery-based hashtags, I very quickly discovered that I wasn’t alone. I had zero idea just how vast and interconnected the online recovery community is. I’ve since used hashtags to find podcasts, books, websites, off-the-books AA meetings, wisdom and everything in between—not to mention building true bonds with other sober people thousands of miles away from where I live in Central Ohio. A hashtag can orient me when I’m lost in all the same ways it can reduce something down to nothing. Whether you’re facing your first few days of sobriety or staring down several decades of living clean, a hashtag can be shockingly powerful.

Here’s a list of 25 recovery hashtags (in no particular order) that you can use wherever you’re at in your journey. You might be surprised by where they take you.

#sober
#soberissexy
#sobriety
#soberliving
#soberlife
#today
#addiction
#alcoholism
#onedayatatime
#odat
#sobermovement
#iamnotashamed
#hellosundaymorning
#gohelpsomeone
#justfortoday
#aa
#na
#alcoholicsanonymous
#narcoticsanonymous
#addictionrecovery
#recovery
#recoveryispossible
#waitforthemiracle
#nohangover
#12steps

Scott Steindorff: Life Recovery Project

January 20, 2018 by Paul Fuhr

Producer Scott Steindorff’s filmography reads like its own compelling mystery: a wildly eclectic series of clues left for some seasoned detective to puzzle back together. Steindorff has produced Westerns (Jane Got a Gun), comedies (Chef), dramas (The Lincoln Lawyer), and epic romances (Love in the Time of Cholera). There’s even a successful TV show in the mix, too (Las Vegas). But no matter how varied his projects are, Steindorff clearly remains as dedicated to telling good stories as he is dedicated to making a difference. Case in point: his newest passion project isn’t even rooted in entertainment—it’s an initiative geared toward addicts struggling to find sobriety.

Steindorff is spearheading Life Recovery, an enormously ambitious project in the world of addiction recovery—one that covers more media channels than his IMDb page spans genres. It’s a dynamic, multi-faceted approach that wisely recognizes addiction knows no boundaries. Life Recovery involves a structured program, a book, a Netflix docuseries, discussion groups, and nearly everything in between. In fact, when Steindorff describes the motivation behind the project, it almost sounds as beautifully layered as the plots of the novels he’s optioned. Life Recovery is nothing short of a complete reinvention of what recovery is and what we’re capable of as human beings. And because Life Recovery doesn’t promise addicts a hollow Hollywood happy ending, it suggests that Scott Steindorff might be exactly the creative visionary that the future of addiction recovery needs.

When did you first get the idea for Life Recovery?
It started about a year and a half ago. I was tired of hearing the same stuff in the rooms. I started doing some research about recovery—mainly because I felt there were so many young people coming in and out. I’ve seen it get progressively worse in the past few of the years with people in their late teens and early twenties. Mostly opioids. A lot of them had OD’d and were having very difficult times staying sober and having an equally difficult time understanding the program. They weren’t relating to the religion, for one thing. There was just something “off” about it, so I did a lot of research so I could work with my guys. I reached out to about 30 or 40 of the top addiction researchers in the world.

And this just all happened in the last year and a half?
Yeah! One day, I just woke up and thought: “How can we do better?” Rehab statistically has about a 90% failure rate; AA recovery groups are probably at a 95% failure rate. Why can’t we update, modernize, get together, and create something that will solve these problems? That’s when I started getting really excited. And let me be clear: what I’m doing now wasn’t exactly on my goal sheet. It was not on my Top 100 things to do in the remainder of my life. (Laughs)

You’re open about struggling with cocaine 34 years ago. How different was the recovery scene back then?
Well, when I got sober, I went to a treatment center and they didn’t know how to treat cocaine [addiction]. They actually told me that. And then I went to AA and they said, “We don’t know anything about cocaine.” It was just a bunch of old guys in Scottsdale, Arizona. But they loved me and they cared about me, and it got me sober. But I realize I didn’t have a spiritual experience in rehab—I had a consciousness shift. There were aspects of myself that I actually liked. I thought, “I can get through this. I can take on the world.” And I did. But I wanted to teach that to others. Unless a kid has meaning and purpose in their life, unless you can change the inner belief system of some 18-year-old kid in Ohio, nothing’s going to change. It’s so simple. Have you ever been to an AA meeting where they talk about that?

No. Never.
When I got sober at 24, there weren’t many people my age. Today, you have kids who are OD’ing on opioids by then. Opioids change the brain. They’re so potent. This crisis is bigger than the HIV crisis.

Well, with Life Recovery, you’re covering virtually every media channel imaginable. Is that strategy central to your mission?
Yes. It’s not just alcohol and drugs. It’s food, too. And it all comes down to one word: feelings. I want to change how I feel, so I’m going to eat my way, I’m going to fuck my way, I’m going to drink my way, I’m going to shoot my way to [accomplish that]. You can’t just tell me to quit eating or taking drugs or drinking. We have to change how you feel about yourself. That’s what Life Recovery is all about. I’m going to give you an example. In Oxnard, California, an 11-year-old girl committed suicide. Over 100 kids under the age of 10 have committed suicide in this last year.

What?
Yeah. It’s never been that way. So all of these kids at school were upset and the schools brought in a psychologist. Every kid showed up. And they showed up the next day. Instead of doing it once a week, they did it three times a week. Kids started talking about “Mom and Dad are getting divorced,” “I don’t know what to do,” and all of their feelings. What I realized is that if there was one thing you and I are going to do that’s constant is that we’re going to have feelings. But what’s the one thing you and don’t know much about? Feelings. So, I said let’s create a prevention program. Let’s teach kids about emotions and feelings. All the events that happened to me between the ages of 5 and 13 probably had a big contribution to me having a substance problem. I mean, what are the magic words you heard as a kid? “Shut up.” “Don’t get mad.” “Don’t feel that way.” “Don’t feel.” That’s what I learned about feelings: not to feel. I want to teach kids what they’re going to experience in life and how to appropriately express feelings.

Why do you think other treatment programs fail?
We’re just not treating [addiction] the right way. You can’t take emotional issues and solve them with a spiritual program. Now, let me be clear: I’m not knocking AA. That’s not my mission here. The Big Book was written in 1939 for what was happening in 1939. The language is dated, the meaning is dated, the core of it is based on Christianity, and it’s not going to change the consciousness of a young person today. I have three grown children and I’ve come to the conclusion that if one of them had a problem, I don’t know where to send them. There’s not one facility that I feel is really doing the job today.

That’s a pretty bold statement.
Well, what do I do? Where do I really turn? What I’ve discovered is that 85% of people who have problems with substance abuse had environmental issues happen to them. Nobody who comes into rehab says, “You know what? I’ve had a fucking amazing life and everything is going well and I just decided to start shooting heroin.” It doesn’t happen. Most of us walk around not knowing how we feel or what we feel. But if we don’t love ourselves, we’re not going to take care of ourselves and we’re sure as hell not going to help others. And if you’re in a program that’s about helping others, you can’t help others if you don’t understand or love yourself.

What’s the most fulfilling thing for you about working with young people in recovery?
Seeing them change. Seeing them have that “A-ha” moment that they’re okay and that they’re a good person. When they have that moment, there’s nothing better in the whole world, is there?

What’s your greatest hope for Life Recovery?
That we can have an 80% success rate instead of an 80% failure rate in recovery. I just want people to have happy, meaningful lives.

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