Brave Middle Ground podcast

Brave Middle Ground | Dr Adi Jaffe

Season 01, Episode 02 Jan 26, 2024

Originally recorded on December 6, 2024

68 MINUTES

SPEAKERS: Dr Adi Jaffe, Dayna Del Val

SUMMARY

In this conversation, Adi Jaffe, PhD, and Dayna explore the complexities of addiction, mental health and societal definitions of normality. They discuss the stigma surrounding addiction, the fluidity of what is considered normal and how these concepts impact individuals, especially children. The conversation delves into the relationship between substance use and underlying mental health issues, emphasizing the importance of understanding the root causes rather than merely labeling behaviors. In this conversation, Adi explores the complexities of addiction, emphasizing the interplay between biological factors and environmental influences. He discusses the importance of emotional tools and support systems in recovery, while also addressing the societal stigma surrounding addiction. The dialogue transitions into personal stories of recovery, highlighting the impact of individual experiences on understanding addiction. The conversation further delves into the all-or-nothing mentality prevalent in addiction narratives and the need for a more nuanced perspective. Finally, Adi and Dayna discuss the importance of finding common ground in political and social discussions, advocating for open dialogue and understanding in a divided world.

KEY WORDS

addiction, mental health, normality, substance use, stigma, childhood development, coping mechanisms, authenticity, societal expectations, recovery, addiction, recovery, emotional tools, environment, personal stories, all-or-nothing mentality, political divides, common ground, coping strategies, societal norms

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TRANSCRIPT

Dayna Del Val  00:31

Adi, welcome to Brave Middle Ground.

Adi Jaffe  00:35

Thank you so much for having me, Dayna. Good to be here.

Dayna Del Val  00:38

I am delighted to talk to you for lots and lots of reasons, but one of the reasons is because I think the work that you do is perfectly positioned to be having these kinds of conversations about finding middle ground, because, uh, addiction, and people who suffer with addiction has such a stigma around it still. And I think people think they know exactly who those people are, and they know exactly why they’re in the boat they’re in and what they need to do to get out of it. And of course, what we know, if we’ve spent any time in that world, is that that’s, there’s never a black and white answer. It’s almost all gray. And so I’m just so looking forward to letting you share some of what you know, and us having this conversation. And I really appreciate you joining me.

Adi Jaffe  01:31

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. You know, I think, um, sure, addiction will weave its way into here, but, you know, as we get into this conversation, you know, I’m also from Israel, I’m also an immigrant. I’m also have been liberal leaning my whole life, and that has become more and more complicated for me over the years. So I think, in many interesting ways, I think this will be a fun conversation.

Dayna Del Val  01:53

I do too, and I just have to say, because it’s the most liberating thing, I realized for the first time in 15 years I’m not under the umbrella of a nonprofit, so I don’t have to be careful, because there’s no donor I might offend. And that feels amazing.

Adi Jaffe  02:10

I love it. I mean, you know, which, by the way, just, I know it’s a small part of this conversation, maybe, but not a small part of the reality that a lot of us live in, which is that we have to watch what we say, and therefore we don’t actually get to engage in a lot of fully authentic conversations.

Dayna Del Val  02:31

Absolutely. So this is an exciting project to be part of. So I want to start with the first question, which I ask everybody, which is just what does middle ground mean to you? And you can come at it from any of the various hats you wear.

Adi Jaffe  02:53

You know, just off the top of my head, probably true, middle ground probably means the same thing to me that normal means to me in the mental health world, and that that being a concept. It’s an idea. Middle ground is like this imaginary place in between all of our opinions. It’s almost like a safe zone, right? It’s like this, there’ll be like this nice little safe zone where you can say whatever you want to say and feel whatever you want to feel, but it wouldn’t be too extreme for anybody to pay attention to and and or be offended by. So I think that’s kind of, and the reason I made the assertion, or the analogy to normal, a lot of people use the word normal in everyday language, but we don’t really think about what that means. And normal is like an average of everybody.

It’s not, there’s not like, there’s not a state that makes you normal. You know, being “normal,” in mental health is really about not meeting the criteria for anything that is abnormal. But it’s not defined as a place. Like, you know, people can have depression, they can have anxiety, they can have bipolar disorder, they can have an addiction problem, they can have agoraphobia. They can have, you know, other mental health diagnoses, and that would technically make you abnormal in a way that, I guess, being a liberal, being conservative, would make you not in the middle ground, right? But normal is just the absence of those, so it’s by having the space that is not defined by the extremes. Hopefully we can have, I’ll at least call it more objective, less offensive conversations. I don’t know.

Dayna Del Val  04:43

Okay, so that is an idea I have never considered that normal is the absence of abnormal. I mean, that’s not exactly what you said, but I guess what I want to know from you then is, how in the world have we decided—this is a huge question, which I don’t really expect you to have an answer to—but how in the world have we decided that normal is what we should aspire to, if normal is just the absence of anything else? I mean, normal feels under your definition, normal feels like Limbo.

Adi Jaffe  05:26

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it’s a great question. Sorry, I’m taking notes so that I can refer back to things you’re good. My ADHD, my ADHD brain will go all over the place. Yeah, so look, I’ll just say this, and maybe this will connect back to our point. Nobody wants to be normal. Let’s just pause for a second and recognize that, right? So normal is only used as an aspirational endpoint for people who’ve been considered to have a problem, right? We say they want to be normal, but I no longer define myself by any of my previous issues, although I by no means have overcome all of them and walk around mental health struggle-free on a regular basis.

But if you look at the average person, nobody wakes up, or nobody becomes an adult and says, “You know, man, one of these days I’m gonna get to be normal.” Like, that’s not, that’s not an aspiration for anyone. So it’s almost like a return to, I’ll call it again, normality, right? Because you’ve been out on the range, you’ve been off the reservation somehow, and you got to come back to this, back to using the word you started us on, this middle ground of normality. But there is no definition of what normal per se is other than the absence of the abnormal.

There’s no, you can talk about the average, right?

So you can compare your height to the average height. You can compare your weight to the average weight. But what does it mean in terms of mental health to be average? It’s what we’ve created, is in normal, but it’s not a real thing. It’s not, there is no normal.

Um, I actually, I got a little upset at him for this, but now I get to be upset at him for other reasons, maybe some of which we’ll talk about here, but I’ve talked for a year—It’s literally on my list of things I want to do—which was to write a book about the myth of normal. And then Gabor Maté came out with a book called The Myth of Normal. So I will not get to do that, but the point he makes is the same point I wanted to make anyway. So it’s cool. He just saved me writing the book. Normal is not a thing. It’s never been a thing. We only use being normal with people that we don’t consider normal, like, “Why can’t you just be normal?”

None of us aspire to that, and I don’t think we should. I think we’re all unique and special, which makes us not normal, and that’s not a bad thing.

Dayna Del Val  08:02

Well, you’ve bent my brain a little bit, and we’re what, three minutes into our conversation? Okay, so if normal is not a thing, which I 100% agree with you, that it’s not, in part because it, I mean, whatever is defined as normal is just what the society you’re living in decides is normal. So if you think about women who had depression or postpartum depression, let’s say 150 years ago, well the answer to that, to normalize them, was to just give them a hysterectomy and almost guarantee that they would just bleed to death on a table and, well, whatever, it’s the loss of one woman. We don’t do that anymore, because that’s no longer considered normal. Now, if you have postpartum depression, we talk about it. There’s medication, there’s treatment, there’s help, there’s books, there’s podcasts, and it’s no longer a stigmatized thing.

Adi Jaffe  08:57

You know that even that started as being hysterical, right?

Dayna Del Val  08:59

Right. Right. Yeah.

Adi Jaffe  09:03

The Hysteria all those words, right? Somebody’s being hysterical. That all came from this notion of these crazy women walking around in their internal,

Dayna

Unbalanced humors.

Adi

Yeah, they were like making them act crazy, acting abnormal, right? And so, of course, the thing that you would do then is remove their

Dayna Del Val  09:30

Remove the most vital part of their body, yeah. Okay, so normal is not a state. Normal is a thing, that a moving target

Adi Jaffe  09:45

An absence of all the other states. Yeah.

Dayna Del Val  09:48

Right. And nobody wants to be normal, which I 100% agree with. So how in the world then do we reconcile not wanting to be normal, normal not actually being an achievable thing and saying to, let’s say, a six or seven year old boy who has a hard time sitting in school, you need to just act normal. How do we do that? Put your considerable PhD in psychology hat on and explain that to the best of your ability.

Adi Jaffe  10:28

Yeah, and I’m gonna drop in, because you know, when I first, when you and I first talked about doing this, the place I did go to, more than anything, is how all this then plays out in policy and politics in the world. So I will make, I will continue making connections to that, and I’ll probably try to push the envelope a little bit, but you asked a really relevant question, so I’ll just start there. Because, you know, I have kids, and one of my kids is more “normal.” Another one is less “normal.” And I experienced the same struggle I’m sure thousandss, millions of other parents have experienced, which is having that that drive, that impetus to take your kid and fit them into the box, and sometimes a literal box, right, like a room full of other students in a school. One of my kids does that really, really well. One of my kids does that less well and gets into trouble and suspended and all this other stuff.

And I think more than anything, just like with most of our endeavors in life, the goal is to try to figure out how to make the best of what is there. And the question that you just asked, the first thing happens in my mind is, you know, not all kids, because we’re talking about kids here, not all kids were built, developed and were meant for this traditional approach we have to growing up in the society. And I’ll allude back to what you said earlier, because you already said this, but that is how we now live in society, right now. It wasn’t true 200 years ago, right? What works now was not good 200 years ago. If 200 years ago, your ideal day was to sit in a room and listen to a person teach you concepts. And that’s what you really wanted to do all day, you were kind of SOL because there weren’t a lot of opportunities to do that. You have to be pretty affluent to even have that open to you. Most people got up in the butt crack of dawn and figured out a way to eke out a living so that they wouldn’t starve to death along with their family, and wouldn’t be killed, right?

I live in California. If you are out here, you better have a gun, some backup, and some people to help protect you, to make you through the winters, because the summers were brutal in one way; the winners were brutal in others. You’re in North Dakota. If you could make it through the winter, you were pretty lucky by itself. So that way of living, only 200 years ago, not that long ago, was completely and utterly different than now, what we now consider normal for a kid would have been unthinkable back then. Forget devices, forget social media. Like I’m not even talking about social media. I’m just talking about the way the kids spend their day in school, let’s say, just was not part of the reality.

So I really try to remind myself all the time that for my kid, who’s really rambunctious and wants to move around all that like it’s actually kind of my job to figure out how to give them more activity to do, how to get them motivated in the ways that appeal to them, because that’s his version of normal, right?

Whereas my other son, Kai, my oldest, he might talk in class like I used to do all the time, but he has no problem sitting in class and being an active part of it without offending others, etc. So I think it’s our job as parents, and some of our parents did a good job with this, some of them the really crappy job with this, but it’s our job as parents to recognize the idiosyncratic differences in our children and help work towards strengths and maybe refine or help practice out and strengthen muscles that are not as intuitive for our kids, but I don’t think it’s our job to try to fit them all into this mold.

Dayna Del Val  14:45

Well, I mean, to stay with your historical theme. You know, had Henry Ford not invented the manufacturing line to create the Ford cars, I don’t think education would look the way that it does because we really, I think, made this grand assumption that we were going to need factory workers, and we did for a long time. And so school is just a form of factory work. Sit in your line and do your work and turn it in and pass it forward—all these things. And it’s kind of inconceivable that we live in 2024, 2025, and school looks the way it looked 100 years ago. In terms of how we educate. It looks different because there are girls in school, and there are kids of color in school, and you have a lot of languages and all those things. But school largely looks like school looked. So there’s this seemingly big delay of, again, this recognition of, well, what is normal? Normal is this moving state, and why are we trying to normalize people? That’s, that’s the least of what we need. What we really need to do is celebrate the strengths and find ways to lift those up.

Adi Jaffe  16:11

Yeah, so again, I agree with that point for the most part. I mean, look, there are also people who struggle at levels that make it hard for them to function in typical society. And some of these changes and some of these differences that we’re talking about right now are less subtle and cause more severe alcohol dysfunction or whatever. But let’s put that to the side for a second. You know, you mentioned that again, kind of, we talked about this idea of normal being different based on time frames. And I’m thinking I saw this Charlie Kirk video just yesterday. You know, he has a lot of these videos where he debates with college students on campuses. I don’t know if you’ve seen these or not?

Dayna Del Val  16:59

I haven’t.

Adi Jaffe  17:00

Charlie, you know, Charlie Kirk is very conservative, and I forget what I think it’s part of, like the Truth Network, or whatever, kind of, like the MAGA truth world part. So he does this thing where he goes on college campuses and debates with kids. And of course, this is a beauty of social media when you fully control the narrative and the videos he gets to show the ones that make him sound really, really smart. And so he was in a conversation with these women young, college age, let’s say, talking about trans. And, you know, asking questions like, “You know, can anybody be a woman? What makes somebody who’s transitioning an actual woman. Is it the hormones? Is it the biological changes?” All these things.

And when he made this allusion to, okay, well if, if anybody who believes that they’re a woman and wants to transition to a woman can now call themselves a woman, what about people who think that they’re, let’s say, they’re middle aged, but they think that they’re 14 years old. And then he uses a statement, which, I think is the turning point in the video for him. He says, “Which is a diagnosable mental health disorder, by the way.”

So he kind of says, you know, because so now he’s, he’s turned somebody who thinks that they’re trans and to somebody who thinks that they’re of a different age into somebody who has a mental health disorder, right, making the point that you were making before, they’re abnormal. They’re abnormal, and that’s, that’s obviously the point he’s trying to make.

And so I left a comment, but I’ll talk about it here, because I think it’s important. You know, being gay was a mental health disorder until the mid 80s. You know, being attracted to people of the same gender and again, being a woman who cried a lot or had anxiety made you hysterical, which was a mental health disorder until about 70-80, years ago, not that far back. It’s dangerous when we try to put ourselves in the normal box, because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s transitory and but we don’t see that, right?

You live in the age you live in, so whatever is considered normal when you started becoming an adult is kind of how you now perceive the world. It’s the lens through which you see the world. But it’s arbitrary. It’s defined by the time and the secular trends, the prevailing notion of the times that you grew up in. And so what you’re essentially doing is you’re taking you at a specific point in time and seeing, am I a match for what society accepts as “not having problems,” right as normal? And that’s really, that’s the best that you can get out of that comparison.

I would argue, you know, you mentioned Henry Ford. Henry Ford was not normal in his time, right? Like, what Henry Ford tried to do when he created the automobile was take something that was only for the wealthy, only for the rich. Was highly, very expensive, very difficult to reproduce, created a lot of work. And he tried to commercialize it and make it accessible to everybody. Everybody having a car. When Henry Ford created the Ford T, it was not a concept other people thought could happen, and he did a lot of other things like that.

Thomas Edison, right? Thomas Edison got expelled from school. He got kicked out of school because he was not a good fit, as we just talked about earlier for a normal model. It would be hard to argue that Thomas Edison also wasn’t smart and incredibly capable.

So just you being a mismatch for what is considered normal at the time doesn’t make you defective. It just makes you different.

And the point I make to everybody, I know you and I work with people who struggle a good bit, and so this is a point I make to those clients, right? People who are really, really struggling. And the point I make is, “Look, not only does nobody want to be normal, I’ve never, I’ve literally never met a single person who was like, ‘You know what? I really aspire to be normal one day.’” It’s worse than that. The people we look up to, to a T. I mean, if you line up the biggest idols of all times, none of them were normal for their own time. Not a single one of them was normal. They were, by definition, different than what was expected at the time, right? They were exceptional. And to be exceptional is to be different.

Now we then, they made great achievements, so we now hold them up, but they weren’t often held up at the time that they were alive. They were ridiculed, you know, second guessed. And so, you know, I think even if you’re not somebody who struggles with mental health, per se, if you constantly try to find yourself renormalizing, I would just call that into question a little bit and say, “Hold on. What are the things that make you unique, and how can you use that to distinguish you and become just so great at those things that you can stand on your own with those instead of having to then massage and pretzel yourself into being somebody that you’re not, just because That is what society currently looks at is as average?”  Like, who the hell wants that, anyway?

Dayna Del Val  22:29

I love this so much. Okay, I want to change topics a little bit, because you and I think have touched on this a time or two, but I really want to have this conversation: is substance abuse, and please, please push against anything I say that that doesn’t resonate for you, because sometimes I think I use very traditional language, and I appreciate that you have a different way of talking about this. But is substance abuse a mental health issue?

Adi Jaffe  23:07

So I’ll do as you asked me to. You know, right off the bat, I think substance abuse, by itself, is already a label, right? I mean, it’s even funny about when you say people abuse substances. Well, we definitely don’t abuse substances. It’s not like, if I do a lot of cocaine, it’s not like I’m hurting the cocaine, right? So I’m not abusing the substance.

But the question is, am I using it in unhealthy ways? So that’s where the term comes. But I think that becomes confusing by itself. And then there’s a real question of what even meets that criteria, right? So at what point are you using the substance inappropriately versus just being a substance user, if you will.

So that’s one piece.

And then I’ll go back to the mental health issue piece. So you know, seven and a half, eight billion people or so on this planet. I would argue, the vast majority, I don’t have a percentage on this, but the vast majority, at least at one point in their life, find themselves struggling with their mental health.

The question when somebody asks, “Is it a mental health issue?” We have to make a decision, which I believe is actually relatively arbitrary, but we have to make a decision of, well, where’s the line cross between just having regular, everyday mental health struggles and having a mental health problem?

So I’ll give us a ballpark to just play in so that we can have this conversation, but if it’s persistent enough, if it causes substantial enough dysfunction in your regular everyday engagement, and that could be work, that could be social, that could be, you know, family, whatever that is. And it doesn’t seem to kind of return back to baseline levels on its own for long enough periods of time to not become dysfunctional anymore. Let’s just, let’s just call that the ballpark we’re going to play in.

Now, there’s a lot of gray in that. So what is the time frame? Is it a year? Is it three months? Is it two years? Is it five years? Is a week enough? Or like, how long do you have to have this struggle causing that level of dysfunction ss already a big question, which is a real question, I think.

And the second piece is, what level of dysfunction would it bring?

Because I think everybody listening to this has felt crappy enough on one day or not in your life ever, where you just called in sick to work, even though you weren’t technically ill, right? You weren’t throwing up. You weren’t like spending your day in the bathroom. You didn’t have severe pain that would not allow you to get up out of bed, but you felt crappy, and so you stayed home. Well, was it in your head? Was it not in your head? And is one day enough to mean that you have a mental health issue? Is that just, “normal,” again, right? Like we get into these questions, it really, it changes. So the question you asked was, is, I’ll change the language, but is using substances in a problematic way, a mental health issue? And my answer, which I’m sorry to do the plug, but you knew this was coming at some point.

Dayna Del Val  26:28

I’m glad it’s coming.

Adi Jaffe  26:29

It’s why I wrote this whole book. No, using the substance is not a mental health issue, but for almost everybody who does that, who uses substances in an unhealthy way, there are underlying mental health issues that are problematic. So it’s like, it’s kind of like this, right? It’s like, does drinking water make you human? No, but all humans drink water, and so odds are, if I’m going to meet a human, one of the things I’m going to find them doing on a pretty regular basis is drinking water. But they’re not human because they drink water, right?

So people don’t have a mental health issue because they use substances. That’s not why the mental health problem exists. But they had underlying mental health problems: big, small, long term, short term, caused by an external event, like somebody near them dying or divorce versus just being biologically driven. Right? There are all these reasons and all these different ways in which it shows up. But pretty frequently, when that shows up in somebody’s life, they find a behavior or substance that makes them feel okay or numbs them out or allows them to ignore this struggle, and then they lean pretty heavily on that behavior because it’s a pain reliever.

And so what we all see is our friend drinking a fifth of vodka every day. What we don’t see is that they were heavily abused as a child and neglected, and were told that they should have never even been born, and that’s a lens through which they see themselves since they were four. And that makes life really hard to bear, and when they drink a fifth of vodka over the day, life is just not as hard to bear.

Dayna Del Val  28:23

Yeah, yeah. I think we’ve talked about this, but the First Lady of North Dakota’s platform has been recovery and erasing the shame and stigma around addiction, and so we were at her final Recovery Reinvented this, this recently, and William Moyers was one of the speakers, and he said something that I thought was so profound. He said, I gotta get this right before I say it. “My sobriety is not the most important.” My. my can’t get it. “Being free of addiction is not the most important part of my sobriety.” Do you know what I’m saying?

And so this idea, I think, I think I’m connecting with what you’re saying is the substance is actually not the problem. The substance is often an outcome of an actual problem somewhere in your life, and the substance either is masking it or is bringing it out or, I mean, whatever you need it to do, the substance is helping you manage the actual issue.

Adi Jaffe  29:52

Yeah, at some earlier point in time the substance or behavior, right? Some people just eat a lot.

Dayna Del Val  30:00

Yeah.

Adi Jaffe  30:00

Some people go to ice cream every time they’re stressed out. Now, if you do that, if that’s your stress coping mechanism, odds are you’re going to end up gaining a lot of weight. Odds are it’s going to cause other issues, like potential type two diabetes, right? Odds are it’s going to do all this other stuff. So is type two diabetes a mental health disorder? No, but people can often get it because of high stress, high dysfunction that makes them behave in ways that then bring on these other issues. And so, yes, I think you’re totally right, but again, it gets back to the normal question, Dayna. We all do this. I think that’s the problem. We all do it. You and I have talked about it, right? I no longer smoke a lot of meth. I used to, right? Twenty-two years ago, I used to smoke a lot of meth every single day for years now. Now my addiction is work and exercise, right? So I still struggle with my mental health sometimes, no doubt, right? I woke up today on the wrong side of bed, right? And I didn’t get my morning exercise because my wife and I were gonna go out later and we’re gonna do like a workout class together, and so I didn’t do my morning workout. And I was kind of an A-hole all morning,

Dayna Del Val  31:27

Because you are really regimented. I happen to know that about you. You have a long morning routine.

Adi Jaffe  31:33

Super. So I felt it, and until the workout later, like two hours after I usually do it, I didn’t feel any much, much better. But look, I experienced a ton of stress just back in the day. I would drink or do drugs to fix that stress.

Now I do other things to fix that stress. They’re healthier because they don’t cause liver damage, and I’m less likely to die of an overdose of them, right? There’s all this stuff. I’m definitely less likely to go to jail because of them, which is a nice add on. But, but I still work too much, and I still, like my wife and I have pretty regular conversations around that. So the reason I’m just bringing this up, it gets back to that normal thing, right? Like, I’m not normal. And again, I don’t aspire to be normal, so I have no problem with saying that. But I need to find a way that works for my version of being abnormal, right?

And so substance use was the mechanism through which I made myself feel more okay with the fact that I didn’t feel normal. I’ll give my one little tidbit. I talk about this in the book, but I’ve talked about it before, many, many times. I still kind of feel weird and unpopular and like people don’t really like me. I just know that’s more in my head than I think it is, but it’s still there, right? I experience with my wife, who I’ve been married to for 15 years, and she’s known me, we’ve been together for 20. I’m pretty sure she at least likes me at this point, but,

Dayna Del Val  33:11

But she’s not with you for all your free time.

Adi Jaffe  33:13

No, no, and she definitely she’s not with me for my money now, but she definitely wasn’t with me when I was flat broke as a graduate student, right? So, that’s what I’m saying, right? Like, we can understand logically what’s going on, and then the crazy part of my head that felt just rejected when I was younger, for a slew of reasons, still talks to me. I just have to learn how to talk back to it and not run away from it.

Dayna Del Val  33:41

Okay. I don’t know that I’ve ever asked you this question, and I think I know what your answer is going to be, but I’m just endlessly fascinated by this question, because so many people I talk to who fell into using substances to cope will start by saying, “I was so awkward as a teenager. I didn’t belong. I couldn’t talk to boys, girls, whoever I wanted to talk to. I felt like nobody liked me. And then I had a drink, and suddenly I thought, oh my gosh, I’m cool,” or whatever. I mean that that story is a is a trope that I have heard over and over and over again.

My question is, I also felt awkward. I was too tall, I was loud, I had red hair. I wasn’t regular in any way. Boys didn’t like me. Girls didn’t know what to do with me. I was so uncomfortable, and to this day, still often feel that way. What makes someone take a drink of alcohol and go, “Ahhhhhh.” And what makes someone else sit in the discomfort and suffer through it, do you think?

Adi Jaffe  35:09

I’m writing some things down so I don’t forget everything I want to say right now.

So again, and I know I keep pushing this, but spending a year writing a book, you start seeing everything through the lens that you’re writing about, right?

So the question you’re asking is, essentially, I’m gonna use the normal society version of this question that I get all the time, and then we’ll dive into it. The question is, you’re asking is, like, what’s the difference between addicts and normies? Right? That’s like, that’s a question. You’re okay, right? That’s like, the AA version of this question.

Now, historically, like, if you look at AA and traditional recovery, they would say it’s a biology thing, right? Alcoholics are biologically different. In AA, they would literally say alcoholics have an allergy to alcohol.

Now, that’s what it says in the book. I’m not gonna go in depth into that, because it’ll take us on a long deviation, but there’s a biological and a spiritual component in the AA literature, in the AA world, so that would be the difference that most people have talked about forever. And then, and I write about this in the book, like, there’s the dopamine theory and there’s all these specific biological theories through which this has been explained, right? Something is different in people’s brains who have addiction problems, their dopamine spikes become the thing that they’re dependent on, etc.

I think there is a biological component to it. I just think it’s much smaller than most people realize. And so what does that mean? Literally, some of our bodies respond differently to alcohol than some other people’s bodies. So that can be part of the equation, but I think it’s smaller part than most people think again. So most people might attribute as much as 50 to 60% of it, depending on the substance and the person. I’ll put it in the more like 20 to 30% of the equation, but still a substantial part of the equation.

Then I think there’s a lot more. So. What tools for dealing with discomfort and emotions do you even have? Number one. It’s changing now, but I think we can talk a lot about the reasons why.

It’s not a coincidence that men have this struggle with addiction at much larger proportions, historically, than women. Men don’t have a lot of tools for emotional engagement and processing. So you’re talking about sitting with the pain. Well, men are solution based, right? Like, we don’t talk about stuff, we don’t process. And I’m, I’m using a royal we, and we’re, you know, I’m being very stereotypical here. It’s changing, but so men look for solutions. Well, if you give me a drink and I have a solution, I have a solution, right? Just worked. Why do I need to even talk about the thing? So that’s, that’s one piece. So tools.

Secondly, the environment. What do I mean by that? What do you model?  What are the people around you modeling for you as a way of dealing with things? We all think we’re really special, and we kind of grew up, you know, with our own personality and our own way of being, and part of that is true in terms of, maybe temperament, etc. But you learn how to be a person from the people around you. First from the adults, because they were the first role models you had. But then other kids, and then teenagers and young adults like you model. You learn how to walk by seeing people walk. You learn how to eat by seeing people eat. You learn how to do math by seeing somebody do math. Like, it’s not rocket science, right? Like, we’ve all been there. We all know that that’s how we learn, but we kind of forgot.

So if your dad walked home every day, sat on the couch, didn’t talk about anything, and had a bunch of drinks in front of the TV, you may not have processed: “Dad’s stressed out, disconnected, doesn’t really know how to talk, and the way he deals with it is sit in front of the TV and drink a six pack.” But that’s what you saw, and that’s what you learned how to model. You can like it, you can hate it. You can want to do it, not want to do it. Doesn’t matter. It’s like the script that you were given for what dad does after work. Make sense?  So biology, the tools you have for dealing with it, the environment and the modeling grew up.

And then last but not least, I think also the support that you had around you and the people, the friends the family that you had around you in terms of who you can talk to about this stuff when it comes up, because you can be okay dealing with emotions and want to talk about it, but if there’s nobody around the process with you’re still kind of stuck and you’re still kind of isolated.

So my guess is for you, Dayna, and I could be, again, we haven’t talked about this, so I could be totally off on a limb here. But my guess is you either felt awkward and came from a family where you could just kind of sit around and mull it over and talk about it and had some support there. Or you came from a family where just drinking was just not that big a thing, and so maybe people didn’t really do it or, you know, and so you had to find other ways.

Now we’re talking about drinking, but I just want to make a really clear point. Some people find skateboarding. Some people find sports at an early age, and that’s how they deal with it. Some people find skydiving, like, you know, some people find crocheting and needlepoint. Well, it’s, like, it doesn’t have to be drugs and alcohol. It just has to relieve the pain and give you the freedom from it. So that’s all I’m saying, is like, that’s, I think that’s a mistake we make.

We think alcohol does change you. If you drink alcohol daily heavily for 10-15, years, it’s going to change you more than needlepoint will. And other than maybe if you break a ton of limbs more than like skateboarding will, right? Because it does, it causes harm to the body. But we make the mistake, and I write about this a lot. We make the mistake of seeing the end point and thinking that what we see at the end is what has been there the whole time, and that’s wrong. It’s just not true. The person that started drinking to relieve pain is very different, oftentimes, than the person you’re meeting now,

Dayna Del Val  41:42

I want to tell people the story of the first time I met you, because there are people who come into our lives in very random ways. I met you so randomly, and in one sentence, you’re going one direction. Someone who you barely know says something, and you are suddenly going a completely different direction, and you can never go back. And it is one of the most profound moments of my life. So I want to share it, because it changed everything for me.

So some of this audience may know and many may not that my husband, Mazz, has now been sober almost eight years. February 1, 2025, it will be eight years. It is awesome. I could not be more pleased for him, for us, for me, for the whole shebang. I grew up around no alcohol. I was 13 before I ever saw a beer. I was 19 before I had my first drink, I never binge drank. I mean, I lived a super goody two shoes life in the best sense of the word, and so I had no idea what was happening at my house. I knew something was desperately wrong, but I didn’t know what it was, because I thought alcoholics got DUIs, crashed their cars and lost their jobs, and none of that happened with Mazz, and so I thought it was something bad, but I didn’t know what it was.

Mazz went to the hospital two and a half weeks in the hospital, including six days in a coma. He went to four weeks of inpatient rehab. He came home, and we started to rebuild our lives. He got sober through AA, which I think is just super typical of most treatment programs, is my understanding.

And I’m always quick to say that I have a test case of one. So my experience with active addiction is one, which is not a great scientific study. But I just, I just bought into whatever Mazz came home from AA telling me so Mazz came home and said, “I was an alcoholic. I’m now sober, but I’m still an alcoholic. I will always be an alcoholic. I will always be, you know, like a broken person, because that’s what AA tells me I am, and I anything that is wrong in our marriage is 100% my fault because I brought the alcohol into it.” And so it gave me, as the spouse, these huge passes, which felt weird to me, and all these things, but I had no other, no other language around any of this.

Okay, so I meet you on a LinkedIn call, very randomly, and I happen to say to you that I’m coming to Los Angeles in two months or something. And you say, “Well, we could meet for lunch.” So five of us ended up meeting for lunch. My son, a friend of a mutual friend of ours, and Mazz and you and me, and you said to us, “I you get a 98 out of 100 on a math test, is that a zero?”

And I can feel the sun burning my back. I know what I was wearing. I know exactly what you were sitting here as was sitting here, and I looked at you and I didn’t know what you meant. And I could tell you knew I didn’t know what you meant, and so you said, “In AA, if you have a lapse and you intentionally, accidentally, however you ingest a substance, all your sobriety is goes back to zero. If you get a 98 out of 100 on a math test, is it a zero?”

And it dawned on me that this all or nothing, black or white, zero sum game, that is AA—and I have a lot of gratitude for AA, because it worked for Mazs and it’s so I’m not anti AA—but it dawned on me that for many people saying you either are an alcoholic and you’re broken, or you’re not and you’re “normal,” that doesn’t work. Or you’ve been sober for 30 years, and somebody accidentally hands you a real beer instead of an NA beer, and suddenly 30 years of sobriety doesn’t count, or all these stories in between. I can never unknow that, Adi.

That is the middle ground for me where addiction is concerned. If Mazz came home tonight and had a drink, does that negate the almost eight years of extraordinary, glorious sobriety that we have enjoyed? I’m going to tell you, because of you, I can now say it doesn’t. I mean, I hope he doesn’t come home and have a drink. I don’t ever want to go back there.

Adi Jaffe  46:35

Yeah, of course.

Dayna Del Val  46:36

But that doesn’t mean those eight years didn’t matter, or didn’t happen, or that what the answer is, “Well see, it’s because he’s just an alcoholic.”

And that was such a game changer. It so shifted the way I not only think about addiction but think about so many facets of life. I just need people to think about that for themselves in whatever aspect of their life they’re struggling with. Again, maybe it’s ice cream, maybe it’s shopping, maybe it’s, you know, watching too much TV, scrolling through too much Instagram, whatever it is.

Adi Jaffe  47:16

Yeah.

Dayna Del Val  47:17

It’s not an all or nothing. It’s not an either or.

Adi Jaffe  47:20

Okay. First of all, I love that story. And I, you know, look, it’s kind of crazy, right? I get emotional, kind of just even thinking about it. Twenty-five-24 years ago, I was on trial. Twenty-three years ago, I spent a year in jail. Twenty-two years ago, I got out. So the fact that I get to have any impact on anybody is by itself, really, really cool. And then you and Mazz have been so open and so just forthcoming about your experience that, I don’t know if you feel this way, but I feel lucky that I get to have any impact. And then connecting with other people that have impact, and being able to cause ripple effect impact past that is all great.

I want to connect the next thing I’m going to say with another story you’ve told me about another person that you talked to that kind of lifted a veil for you in another way, and that was the third leg of the stool thing, right with you, and Mazz and one of the therapists that was there in the treatment center with you. And he said, “Okay, so Mazz has alcohol. He has got you, he’s got him he’s got to care about and he’s got alcohol is the third leg of his stool that makes him stand up. Well, you got you, you got Mazz. What’s the third leg of your stool?” And that caused you a lot of thinking, I don’t want to give away the punch line. You can do it now, or you can do it in a different you can do it in a different…

Dayna Del Val  48:34

I am working on a memoir, so I’m gonna hold it.

Adi Jaffe  48:36

Yeah, hold it. That might be a good name, you know, for the memoir. Anyway, the reason I’m sharing it is twofold. Number one, another really, really impactful story that revealed another truth for you this time, about your relationship, right? And I’m going to make a big, big leap here for a second. Black and white solutions sound simple. They’re easy. You just gotta remember two things. It’s this or it’s that, and if it’s not this, then it’s that. Normal, abnormal, right? Good, bad. Smart, stupid. Sober, not sober. That crap is easy. It’s easy to remember. It makes things simple. We just have to remember that it’s almost always wrong.

So almost nobody, and I’m not going to say nobody, because that would say always, never. So almost never do those conditions hold. Rarely do you meet somebody who’s really stupid versus somebody who’s really smart. It’s all gray areas. Are there bad people? Yes, there are bad people. Although in my line of work, if I dig in deep enough, I’ll probably figure out also why that happened and at which point that deviated, even for those people, But yes, there’s some bad people. And there’s some close to perfect good people in the world, although very, very few, I imagine. Most people are in the middle.

So if you if you can accept that, because if you can’t accept that, then we’re gonna have a serious problem. But if you can accept that most of the time, the black and the white is a very, very crude shorthand for reality, then what you’re talking about right now are just these little pieces that we learn from others. Our conversation about gray areas, which we’re having here again now. The third leg of the stool as another way of understanding. When you’re there to blame somebody else for what’s going on your relationship. Just take a step back for a second and think about what exactly are you carrying that also brings apart some blame? Like, maybe look here instead of looking there. All that much, and to me, again, had nothing to do with normal.

But the best version of our lives get to be lived when we incorporate more and more of that learning from other people. Because, you know, I mentioned that before you asked me the question about, like, what makes some people turn to these drugs and other people not? We learn so much from our environment, but we now know, because of science and developmental brain, you know, patterns and periods, etc, you’re done learning most of the stuff you learn as a kid. So just think about the environment you grew up in, and think that until the age of, let’s say, 10, let’s give us extra time till 10. And then some other elements of your development went into teen, but most of it ended before you went into like junior high.

So think about yourself as a junior high kid and realize that before you entered junior high, you learned almost everything you were going to ever learn about life. Now, how many of you listening right now think that that was enough? Like, you learned enough about the way life really worked by the time you were 11, let’s say, because 10 ended it, to now know how to navigate life? I really hope at least many of us can recognize there’s a lot missing.

So now comes the reality, which is okay, like I talk about a sponge in the book, your sponge is full, right? You’re like eight, nine, 10 years old, and your sponge is full. It can take on no more learning. The only way you can really learn new things is to do what you just described, is to have a certain world view replaced, like “I used to think this. I’m gonna have to take that out. I’m gonna have to put something else in instead of it, because I’m kind of loaded up on reality.”

So to me, my job still to this day, right, I’m 22 years into my dream. I haven’t used meth again. It was, think it was 23 like something like January, 21 some, sometime around 2023 late 22 was the last time I used it. So I haven’t used meth since then. I’m not sober but, like you said before, with that quote from Bill Moyers, God knows not using meth has nothing to do, or sorry, is by no means the biggest part of what’s happened in the last 22 years of my life. I’ll say it that way. It’s not even close to the biggest thing.

Was it a requirement? I don’t know. I can’t tell you if it was a requirement, Dayna, because everything else came after it. It was definitely an important part early on, but it became less important later. The reason I’m saying this, and this is where I’m going to make the really, really big leap, black and white. We have somehow found ourselves living in a world, maybe social media is doing it. Maybe it’s technology and algorithms. I don’t know. I’m going to put at least some of the blame on that. But we’ve now lived in a world where more and more things take on this black and white false lens, right?

So Trump just got re-elected. I live in Los Angeles. A lot of my friends live in Venice. And you really, you see this place of each, no matter what side you’re on in this, this is a place where there’s only two right? It’s like, you get one side or the other in this country. I mean, the third parties are, I don’t know, what do they get? Like 8% of the vote. So it’s, like,

Dayna Del Val  54:09

Negligible,  yeah,

Adi Jaffe  54:10

Yeah. Like 90% of people have to pick a side, if you will. And we now found ourselves in a place where if you pick my side, you figured out life, and you’re right. And if you pick the other side, you’re a freaking idiot who’s evil and should be wiped off the face of the earth. And that just can’t be true, like, right?

So I’ll be really frank, like, my whole life, I grew up as a liberal, and because of, again, I mentioned, I’m from Israel, so because of what’s happening in Israel right now, this year was harder for me. I told my wife, this election in particular was harder for me than any other election because,

Dayna Del Val  54:48

Yeah.

Adi Jaffe  54:50

That issue alone made me question the party I would have normally voted for. But I can be frank. I mean, if I get if I get people hating me on it for… then it’s really fine. This is definitely not the way I make my living, so it’s okay. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for like Trump. I just couldn’t do it, right? And I know I’m making this very political, and I will for a moment, but I’m

Dayna Del Val  55:14

That’s all right.

Adi Jaffe  55:14

I’m owning my own my own truth, right? So, short of like, and some Israelis might say that this is the same issue as Israel, but short of like, “Hey, aliens are coming down tomorrow, and they’re gonna annihilate the earth, unless you vote for Trump.” Like, short of that, there was no way I’m voting for him, because I just couldn’t. Like, I don’t want to have a conversation with that guy. I don’t want, I don’t want him in my parent network at school. There’s no way I want him running the country I live in, right? Like, I wouldn’t let him,

Dayna Del Val  55:47

Yep, yep.

Adi Jaffe  55:48

I would be afraid that he would embezzle my kids school fund. Like, I just, he’s so egotistical and self centered,

Dayna Del Val  55:56

At best,

Adi Jaffe  55:56

All that stuff, right? So, so I just couldn’t do that. But then I had a lot of questions about the side that I’d normally, would regularly vote for, because a lot of people on the on the left, liberals, like they actually hate me now. Even though I’ve I’m not engaged in the things that they hate, but because I stand for something that they that they despise. So I was really caught between a rock and a hard place. And maybe it was that, but hopefully it’s just the work that I’ve done over the last 20 years of my life.

I would sit there and watch people who think Trump is the best thing ever, calling everybody on the left idiots and morons and, you know, finding what they believe are very relevant point to make their arguments. And then I would see people on the left calling all the MAGA Trump World, evil, dumb, you know? And I’d talk to my wife, and I’d talk to friends. I mean, like, “Look, you understand there’s no way there’s 100 million dumb people on the other side. You know that, right?”

Plus, some of these people are friends of ours, like, on both sides. They’ve been friends of ours for 15-20, years. Like, if they were really evil morons, you don’t think you would have figured that out before this year? So there has to be another explanation.

And I think one of the things that I was excited about when you and I were just talking about even doing this, is I do see the parallel right? In my line of work, people who go to jail and prison, or people who get addicted are seen by most of society as problematic cancers that need to be, at best, isolated and kind of relegated to the corner where we don’t need to interact with them too much, and at worst, put away long term, so we never have to see them. But the reality is, if you really look at it, we all either know people who struggle with this stuff, or we are the people who struggle with this stuff. It’s it really doesn’t cut, I would, I want somebody, if anybody listening to this right now doesn’t meet either one of those two criteria, please contact me adij@ignited.com. Just shoot me an email and say, “Hey, I’m an example of a person, nobody around me has ever been addicted and is not addicted, and I don’t struggle with it myself.”

I would argue there’s nobody

Dayna Del Val  58:16

I want to meet that person, too.

Adi Jaffe  58:17

Yeah, I would argue there’s nobody who meets that criteria. So now we have to stop. How can we say that something is abnormal if, like, half of us are struggling with it that literally doesn’t meet the definition? Like, if this is so normal that it happens to half of us, then it can’t be abnormal. You can’t have something that happens to most people or half of the people and call it abnormal. By definition, that does not work. And then we have a reckoning. We have a moment of reckoning. And that is to say, Okay, this is the thing for us. As people, we experience pain, we experience discomfort. And all of us find ways of coping with it. Some of us find healthier ways, and by that, I mean literally healthy, like they don’t harm our bodies. And some of us find ways that are that do cause more harm and cut, okay. But that’s not a judgment. Like that just has to do with what we ran into, right?

I was 14 years old. Somebody handed me a vodka. I wasn’t looking for it, but it freaking worked. I don’t know that if somebody would have shown me a really good football coach or a really good soccer coach, I wouldn’t have gone into that, right? So too much of this is circumstantial.

By the way, and I’ll make the leap: I think the same thing happens with politics. We know this for a fact. Most people vote the same way their parents voted. Most. Do we think that’s a coincidence? We think our parents were just the smartest people in the world and they just got the answers right? Or are you just that affected by the environment you grew up in?

No, you just, you developed the lens of the world that is informed by what you grew up on. I don’t hate you for it. I don’t misunderstand you for it. It’s just the reality of how we got to this place.

So now let’s pause and say, “Okay, hey, here’s how I see the world. Let me tell you about it. Now I want to hear from you. How do you see the world?”

And if we can really start having those kinds of conversations, and I have a little story, and then I’ll shut the hell up for a second. If we can have more of those conversations, first of all, I think we’ll come to better answers. Because I think, unfortunately, let’s say, in this last election for sure, we didn’t have great options. Neither of the options were really great, which made everybody even more confused. And then you really have to pick a side, because, you know you’re picking less than your ideal, but you’re picking it because it’s your side. That’s number one.

Number two, we’ll understand each other better. Like, we’ll just have a better, more civil society. And in the end, if we can do that, then what comes from the top matters a little bit less, because our experience in our everyday life is just a more joyful, loving, positive experience of life.

And so I think that’s where I’m really trying to go, like I’m never, you know, I think, you know, at IGNTD we do that thing of like the sphere of influence, right? Things you’re fully in control of, things you have some influence over, things you don’t control at all.

I don’t control politics, I don’t control politicians, I don’t control geopolitics, I don’t control the economy, I don’t control the world. I have to deal with whatever comes down from that. So I try to not concern myself too much with it.

But just this last Thanksgiving, my family and my sister’s family, we got a house together. They just moved from Israel back to the States. We got a house together, and we all stayed together for four days. They just moved from Israel. They’re very, very supportive of whoever can help Israel get out of this mess. And they’re obviously focused on Israel’s survival, etc. That’s where they’re focused. Totally get it.

Well, we got into some fights over the Thanksgiving break because I’m Israeli, and I absolutely want to do everything I can for Israel to survive, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have problems with what’s going on there, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t see the other side. And again, I’ll go out on a limb, I’m also pretty liberal, and so the idea of allowing more of the strict Islam kind of influences to exist, both in Israel, by the way, and in the United States, is not something I’m attracted to, because that’s not liberal either, right? That’s not, that’s a dogmatic in a different way. So we had a lot of fights, because I’m on one my weird side. My sister’s on her, and my brother in law is actually like right wing at this point in the States.

But here’s what I notice: I love my sister. We get along really, really well. I’m very lucky in that way. We love each other deeply and we respect each other. I see a physician. We think the other person is intelligent the smartest etc, but we fought Dayna. We were like screaming at each other at some points in the middle of this weekend, which has never happened, ever, ever happened. But we would fight for 15, 20, 30 minutes. We get to the end of the fight, pull back and go, “Are you gonna? What are you gonna make to eat? Should we call the kids?” And we would just put the food on the table, and we’re just like, it’s okay to disagree.

We don’t, again, that normal thing that we started out with today, I’m not trying to be like you. I’m barely succeeding at trying to become the best version of myself. God knows, I’m not trying to emulate anybody else. But if I’m trying to do that, I should let you try to be the best version of yourself and not judge how you’re doing by how I would do what you do, because we’re not the same. We didn’t grow up the same. So I just, I’m hoping that we can get to a place where we just have less kind of self-inflicted judgment on others. Going back to how we started it was with what is normal, or how things should play out, and get back to a time that I think used to exist more, which was I can own my reality and my truth and my beliefs and not mean that that has to automatically disqualify your version of them. I think we’ve backed off of that.

I think, again, social media and technology may be playing a role in that, but I think that has way more to do with the dysfunction and the stress that we all feel than drugs and alcohol and all that other stuff. Because, again, those are the coping strategies, right? Those are the things that we do to deal with the stress. They’re not the underlying cause. Sorry,

Dayna Del Val  1:04:41

Adi, this conversation has been so fantastic. Talk about a brave middle ground. I mean, it’s not easy to talk about Israel and addiction and immigration and politics and a lot of these topics. It’s not easy, and mostly we say, well, then just don’t talk about it. But that’s not the point of this podcast. The point is to introduce some things, to hear some people’s ideas. You don’t have to agree with everything; it’s not about that. It’s about finding that middle and being willing to hear somebody else’s story.

So thank you so much for joining me, for having this conversation. You continue to inspire me, and I so appreciate you in my life. And I know that the audience will appreciate you. And probably by the time this podcast comes out, you’ll be able to get Adi’s new book Unhooked. You can get The Abstinence Myth, which is fantastic. There’s so much good to be found in the work that you’re doing, and I just so appreciate you. So thank you very much. And everyone else, we’ll talk very soon.

If you enjoyed this conversation, don’t forget to subscribe to Brave Middle Ground on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch the video at YouTube, leave a review and share it with friends who value thoughtful dialogue.

Dayna Del Val is on a mission to help others (re)discover the spark they were born with through her blog and newsletter, her professional talks and the (re)Discover Your Spark retreats she leads. Dayna works with people to help them not just identify and articulate their dreams but to develop a framework to get going on the pursuit of those dreams—today, in the next few months and for the years ahead. She's at the intersection of remarkable and so, so ordinary, but she knows that pretty much everyone else is, too. She's excited to be sharing this extraordinary journey with you.

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