Video Transcript: Spiritual and Emotional Roots and Treatment of Addiction

Hi guys. Well, welcome to the gathering summit at Saddleback. Has it been a good day? So far, been good. We've been back there with the other speakers, and just love to hear what's going on and all that. So hope it's gonna be a good time for you today. A burglar went into a home to steal everything. That's what they do, right? And it was dark as 2am he's walking around picking up what he wants. He's plucking: he's getting the silverware, he's getting the electronics, getting the Xbox, having a great time, and then he hears the voice in the darkness behind him, Jesus is watching you. And the burglar goes, what was that? Jesus is watching you? Now, this is really confusing, so he turns on his flashlight, and he turns it around to the back of the living room, and there in the corner of the living room is a cage, a bird cage, and inside the bird cage is a parrot. And the burglar says, What did you say? And the parrot said, Jesus is watching you, and the burglar says, Excuse me, are you Jesus? The parrot says, no, no, I'm Moses. So now the burglar is totally, you know, flummoxed. Here. He's very confused. He says, You're not Jesus,  you're Moses, but Jesus is watching. He says, Yeah, I'm Moses. Jesus is watching. The burglar says, Excuse me, what kind of a dysfunctional home would name their parrot Moses? Parrot says, I don't know, probably the same home that would maim their Rottweiler Jesus.

You got it. You're the only one that's okay, you got it. Two people got it. Okay. It's a metaphor. The metaphor is:  sometimes things look like Jesus that aren't, and sometimes things don't look like Jesus that are. And that's a good description of the concept of the addiction, that's what we're going to be talking about, the addiction, because a lot of times addictions, and especially how to treat them, how to address them. It gets kind of crazy in the church, all you have to do is pray harder. Well, obviously you wouldn't be addicted if, you know, you were reading your Bible. Well, you must not be serious about your faith. And the problem is that all sounds kind of interesting, but it is not biblical at all. It sounds like Jesus, but I'm sorry Jesus is not in there. So what I thought we would do today is I'm going to give you an overview of the concept of addictions, and then what it has to do with spiritual issues and understanding that in the way God works, the biblical issues, the research issues, the neurological issues, the emotional issues, they all come together. You know why? Because this is our Father's world, and you don't have to be afraid of medications, and you don't have to be afraid of psychotherapy, and you don't have to be afraid of Celebrate Recovery, and you don't have to be afraid of anything that God's created to help things get better. It's all his, all our Father's world.

So the way this is going to work is I'll give the content and some solutions for all this, and then we'll have some a few minutes for questions and answers. And I think some nice people brought up some microphones here and there, and you can ask your questions there. And by the way, not all of you know each other, right? So you're all kind of shame based anyway. So when you come up to the microphone, just say, I have a friend with a problem. So you don't have the problem, but just talk about your friend, and we'll give your friend some answers, and you can pray for your friend and all that. Let me kind of get to know our our gang here. How many of you are here because your interest is that you are a caretaker of someone who has an addiction? Okay? A lot of you, all right. How many of you are in the helping world? You're a professional, you're a clinician or a psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, okay? Family Member of somebody with an addiction that you want information about. Okay, how many of you struggle with an addiction and you really want help? And thank you for coming, guys. Let's give the addicts a hand here. Thank you for coming. Awesome. Who did I miss? By the way, I always miss one category, and then people send me really hurt emails later. Did I miss? Huh? How many recovery leaders we got here? Thanks for coming. Okay? Well, it helps, because then we know where to tailor our comments.

Let me define, sort of a working definition of what an addiction is. An addiction is a substance or behavior that interferes with life and relationships and creates a dependency on itself; a substance or behavior that interferes with the two main aspects of our existence, which is life and love, life and relationships. There's nothing more important. Life would be your money, your self care, your health, your career, your activities, your habits. Your love is your relationships. The people you care about the most, the people that you love the most, your family, your spouse, the people you're dating, colleagues, friends. A substance or behavior that interferes with life and love and that creates a dependency on itself. In other words, if you were doing something like drinking too much, and it was interfering with life and love and people were alienated by your drinking, or you had lost a job and you just went, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm stopped, and you never drink again. Is that an addiction? No, it didn't create a dependency on itself. How many of you ever heard the term tolerance? Okay, what is tolerance? It's when you need more and more and more for the same effect, your body, your chemical system, your brains, your emotional system, need more and more and more for the same effects. That's why, when you look at addiction research, it started off as a high, whether it was the coke or the meth or the alcohol or the marijuana or whatever, it started off as a high, and then as it tolerance builds, you have to take more to have just normal. You're not coming to high anymore. You're coming from feel really bad to normal. That's tolerance. It creates a dependency on itself. And there are all sorts of substances, and we know about those, and I don't need to sort of rewrite the book on that one. What I want to give you is several of the main aspects of an addiction, and then some things, if you are an addict, or if you have an addict in your life, I want to help addicts the things that we things that we can do about it.

The first one is what I call the tolerance principle. And I just mentioned tolerance as kind of needing more and more and more. And what you find out is that God talked about tolerance a long time ago. He came up with it because he, you know, he's the one that understood all this from before any psychologist came around. In Ephesians, chapter four, Paul talks about how we are separated from the life of God. He says, When you are sep, do not be like the Gentiles who are separated from the life of God, meaning that we were designed to be connected deeply to God and His principles and His Word and His people and His practices, and that when we turned around from God, you know, I live I'll live my way. I don't want to live your way. When we turn around from God, we are separated. We've actually cut ourself off from the life of God. And that whole passage in Ephesians four talks about the bad things that happen to us. We become more self absorbed, our lives fall apart. And at the very end of that passage, Ephesians four, the one that begins with being separated from the life of God. The very end of that passage, guess what it says. It says and we are left with an insatiable lust for more, an insatiable lust for more. What does that sound like? Sounds like an addiction, doesn't it? So God's principle is that we have a life that's supposed to be healthy and dependent on him and are being around good, healthy people and following his ways and meeting our needs the right way and finding other ways to help. And when we cut that off and go our own way, in some area, we end up after we're separated from all the health. Because when we're online with God, so to speak, we're online with God, we're in health. If we're offline with God, we end up with an insatiable lust for more. And there's never, ever, ever enough.

If you look at the research on various substances, you find out that people have a satiation cycle. They'll feel good for a few minutes. Whether it's Coke or sex or alcohol or whatever it is, they'll feel good for a few minutes. They call it satiation. And guess what happens? It wears off. It never satisfies. And people become irritable. They become dependent. They've got to find it again. They begin to feel anxious inside, dysfunctional inside, because they have an insatiable lust for more. So remember, if you are or love or care about an addict, that they're not doing this because they're bad people. They're not doing this because they're any more sinful than you or I. They're doing it because they're caught in a cycle that creates an insatiable lust for all, you've got to have a lot of mercy and compassion for that, because it's not fun. When I sit around and talk to addicts, I've treated many, many addicts in my career, they don't say, "Woo, woo! This is a party." They tell me, I'm in hell and I can't stop and it reminds me of Paul's words in Romans seven. He says, Woe, woe to me. He says, The things I hate to do, I do the things I don't want; that I want to do, I can't do. Who's going to deliver me from the body? That's death. It's not fun to be an addict. It's a form of death. That's the principle of tolerance. The second principle is the principle of what I call substitution. Principle of tolerance was the first part. Principle of substitution is the second part. What I mean by that is a way to understand addictions, is that the substance or the behavior, is substituting for a God created need, a legitimate God created need. And if you really want to help the addict, you get beyond this "just stop that. Don't do that anymore. Bad boy, bad girl!", and you help them to dig deeper, to say, What need Are you trying to meet here? Because the way you're trying to meet this need is screwing you up.

And if all we do is say, stop it, and we do, we do need to, have to stop it. That's why you need to have sobriety and all those sorts of things. But why are you working on sobriety? If you don't go into the deeper parts of the person, you're going to miss it. In Proverbs, chapter 20, verse five, Solomon says that a person's heart is deep waters, and a person of understanding draws them out. That inside you and me, there's this reservoir of deep waters. Think about a water reservoir downtown, and there's all kinds of stuff in there. There's your feelings, and there's your core values and your passions and your loves and your family of origin history and your hurts and all that. And when people haven't dealt with what's in those deep waters, they cut off and they medicate because they don't have to feel that stuff any.

I'll give an example of this. Jesus talked about this in John chapter four, when the woman, he was talking to the woman the well, and she was talking about water. Do you remember what Jesus said to her? Really famous pastor. He says, I've got the water of life that you know not about. She was talking about physical water. And he said, let me go deeper with you, into your deep waters. I have a water that will bring you life. He was saying, let's don't substitute one with the other. You're medicating with five husbands. You're medicating with all sorts of other things. I've got something deeper for you. And the important thing to know about the substitution principle, guys, is that you can have the very same, identical addiction, same symptoms, if it's alcohol, I mean, it's drinking a quart of whatever you're drinking every day. Depression, the exact same depression, the exact same alcohol, the exact same drugs. And have three people, and those three people with the identical, identical addiction can have three different substitutionary causes underneath. And if you miss that, you never cure the alcoholic, you never cure the addict, you never cure any of this.

I'll give an example. Most of my work is corporate now, with a lot of leadership training and CEO work, and so I tend to work a lot with people who have businesses or small businesses, sort of thing, and I work with making their companies better, but also have to work with their own issues, because if you know leadership at all, if a leader is very dysfunctional, the company will be dysfunctional too. Some of you are going, Yeah, I work for a company like that, right? So I have to help the leader be less dysfunctional, so the company is healthier. I worked one year with three different companies where the three leaders of the companies had identical--they didn't know each other, different parts of the country--had identical addictions, and it was alcohol, in this case, three, three alcoholics, and they were also depressed, because alcoholism and depression go together a lot. And the same thing you always notice in depression, the mood went away, lower lower energy, hopeless feelings, feeling stuck, disconnection from people, as well as too much drinking. Now there's there's leader. Let's call him CEO A, CEO B and CEO C. As we dug down underneath CEO A, guess what we found? We found a guy who was totally isolated. He had what we call a detachment disorder. He could not connect up, he could not be vulnerable. He could not open up, he could not let people know who he really was. Totally isolated. If you saw him, you'd love him. He's just a great guy, but he wouldn't let anybody in. You ever had a friend like that? When you say, how are you doing? And they go, I'm fine. How are you doing? And they look very social, because they care about people, but they don't let anybody care about them. Some of you are like this in this room, a high percentage in a group like that, on a bell curve, are like that. You're really good with other people, but you don't take anything in. You don't let anybody care about you. Anybody ask how you're really doing. You don't let yourself be vulnerable to these sorts of things. So his heart was empty. His heart was empty. So guess how he medicated that empty, hurting heart, alcohol.

Another part of the country is CEO, number B, letter B, and he didn't have an isolation problem at all. You know what he had? He was a people pleaser. People pleaser, always afraid of letting somebody down, always afraid of hurting someone's feelings, walking on eggshells around people. I don't want to fire this person. I don't want to have a tough conversation with this person. I don't make them feel bad. And we call that codependency. Has anybody ever heard the word codependency? Kind of this with a book called Boundaries. I don't know if you ever seen the book. It's this. These guys wrote these books about kind of good he had no boundaries, total, total people pleaser. And guess what happens to people who are people pleasers and codependent? Guess what happens to their energy? They experience a thing called burn out, right? Burnout. He was totally burned out. Couldn't get energy, couldn't get up in the mornings. And guess what he did to medicate his burnout? He drank too much. Substitution! CEO, letter A was substituting over an empty heart. See, CEO, letter B. Can you just kind of coach me on that same thing? CEO letter B was a people pleaser, and was burning out, giving out energy.

Then there's CEO letter C, another part of the country. He had a merciless judge in his mind, where the every time he screwed up or made a mistake or made a bad call or a bad decision, this judge in him would beat him up. How many of you, let me see, how many of you know somebody personally who's a perfectionist? If you know personally somebody who's a perfectionist, what kind of nurturant things does your friends say to themselves when they screw up? What's wrong with me? You're an idiot. There you go again. What a loser. You'll never get it right. And it's the judge in our heads. Paul calls it in Corinthians, he calls it a harsh conscience. Some of us have a overactive, harsh conscience that gives us no grace at all, and it beats us up. It beats us up. And so his perfectionism was affecting work, and it was beating himself up, and he had a big company, but guess how he was medicating the hurtful statements of his judge? Too much alcohol.

Now we could go on and on about that, but I want to make the point that you can have three people with an identical issue or identical problem, but a very different cause of the problem. Jesus said it this way in Matthew seven, he said a good tree makes good fruit and a bad tree makes bad fruit. And if you're going to deal with addiction, you've got to deal with both. You've got to deal with the fruit, which is the habit, the behavior, the drugs, the whatever, you've got to deal with that, and you've got to get into some kind of a system. That's why I think Celebrate Recovery is the best thing on the planet. Yeah, you've also got to dig underneath to find out where is the tree. Is it the tree of isolation? Is it the tree of people pleasing? Is it the tree of a harsh judge? There are more trees than that, but don't be fooled by people having the exact same sentiments, saying, Oh yeah, they're the same. That is cookie cutter treatment. That's cookie cutter Bible. It never works. There's an old Buddhist proverb that says, Beware the person whose only tool is a hammer for he sees every problem as a nail. So watch out for the 'Oh, we're all the same.' We're not. God made us differently, and we had different issues and this sort of thing. So that's the principle of substitution.

The third piece is that what we're finding out in the research now about addictions, it's that addictions are a holistic process. Addictions affect not only your emotions, but they affect your brain chemistry, your emotions, your relationships, and your whole body metabolism, hormones. And we're finding if you address brain, emotions, relationships, hormones, people really get bail a lot faster. So what we're finding out is it's sort of like you're attacking the addiction from lots of different levels. And I'm a real proponent of somebody who's got lots of different people in their lives, lots of different activities, lots of different help. They've got a CR one night they go to see their spiritual director one night they go to see their psychiatrist for their meds. One night or one day, they go to see their psychologist. They go to see lots of people. It's like you're providing all these antibiotics at one time. And that's what makes people better. Very rarely, very rarely, have I ever seen someone will it was just one answer, and that's what happened. It's always due to a bunch of stuff. That's why, when Rick wrote The Daniel Plan, wonderful book, he hasn't he doesn't have one answer. He has a diet part. He has a he has a an exercise part. He has a spiritual growth part. He has a community part. Don't ever stick with one answer. Do a lot of stuff. If you're the addict, dedicate your life to the addiction. I've got a friend who decided just quit work for a month. Had to, because he's doing all that stuff and it takes a lot of time. Not everybody has that luxury, but do more than one thing. You know, I do a radio program with Milan Yurkovich and Steve Ardenburn and Henry Cloud and a lot of other great people. And sometimes people call us, they'll say, I've got an addiction. I say, okay, that's hard. What are you done about? And they'll say, Well, I want to see a counselor. Well, we need to see counselors. So how'd it go? Well, it didn't work. So I want another answer from you guys. 

Okay, well, I think counseling works. So tell me about the counseling. Well, it didn't work. So give me another answer. You know, give me a protein or give me a book to read, because counseling didn't work. And then I'll say, well, let's dig into this a little bit. How many sessions did you go? Two? You went two sessions? Yeah, it didn't work. So give me like a pill. I said, after two sessions, the shrink barely knows your name, they're trying to understand your history, your dynamics, your family of origin, your life issues. And for some people, it's kind of like the parable Jesus told about the the seed that grew up and it was choked out by the cares of the world and just kind of went away. With addictions, you do lots of things for a long time, and it really, really works. It's not a few things. Here. I'm going to try something else. You have to have patience if you are an addict or somebody else is. I've seen miracles. Certainly there are miracles, but miracles are not God's norm. It's sort of like that's the microwave. Every now and then there's a zap. If somebody said I was zapped out of a drug habit, I was zapped out of a alcohol habit. I was zapped out of a sex addiction habit. And zaps do happen because God's God, and he calls the shots. But God's norm is not the microwave zap. God's norm is an oven. You ever try to bake a cake in a microwave, it's just hard, but ovens, you put the sugar and the flour and the water, the milk and all that stuff in and all the ingredients come together over time. And the addict, and the people that love the addict have to say, we're going to do lots of different things over a long period of time. Be patient with the process, because ovens work.

And then I want to talk about a bit for the problem of those who are trying to help. People who try to help an addict often end up feeling really, really helpless, feeling the addict's already helpless. They're out of control. They're giving up their life. They're not good parents anymore. They've lost their jobs, and the people trying to help them, who are trying not to slip into codependency, feel enormous, enormous helplessness. And we don't like to feel helpless. I don't enjoy feeling helpless. That's one of the things I don't like at all. I like to feel like I've got some choices. So what do people do who are love and addict or try to help them when you feel helpless and they don't want your help, they don't want to get better, they don't want to listen to you. Guess what we do? We give advice. We give it really helpful advice, and all they need to do is listen to our advice. How many card care and advice givers, have you got here? I've had my share as Dr Phil would say, How's that working for you? You know, if you stop taking that, your life be better? Oh, there's a new idea. Stop taking it. Thank you for sharing. So you have to understand, if you're in a relationship with an addict and you're giving them this advice. Guess who you're trying to help? You're trying to help yourself not feel helpless, because you feel helpless. So instead of saying, Stop doing this, ruining your life. Yeah, we have to say that a couple times. But after that, realize I am helpless. I've got to depend on God. I've got to depend on his mercy. I've got depend on the body, and I've got to stop trying to do all this myself. Advice giving tends to be the playground of those of us who feel helpless. You need to embrace the helplessness.

Second part is the issue of rescue. Now rescue is when I come in and try to fix the addict by taking away any kind of pain they have. So the addict loses a job, and so I find them another one. So the addict loses money, so I write them a check. So the addict loses their marriage, so I bring them back together and do a kumbaya song or whatever I do, and I'm the one who's rescuing, rescuing, rescuing. Now I've got a lot of addict friends, a lot of very deep relationships, and the ones I know that have really worked hard, they've always said I would have gotten out of it sooner if some people in my life had not tried to rescue me. Isn't that something? The ones that have their eyes are open to reality. They say, the longer they rescued me, paid for things, got my job again, brought my things back to me, got me out of jail all the time. If they had stopped doing that sooner, I would have done a thing called hit what? Hit bottom. And guess who I'd be faced with, then I'd be faced with God. Here's the way to look at it, guys, if you're a rescuer, we're all kind of, nobody wants to, you know, have people in their lives suffer. Here's the addict right here, and they're drinking and whatever they're doing, using and blah, blah, blah. And over here is God, and God's saying, I have a school of discipline called hitting bottom, and it's called consequences, and I need for you to experience these things so you can hit bottom and find me and have my mercy. And then in the middle is the rescuer. And the rescuer says, God, you really can't do a good job. I know you're God and everything, I have a better answer. So I'm going to take hold of them. I want to pay for things, put their life back together, get them out of jail a few more times, give them some things for free, not let them feel pain, and you go solve the Middle Eastern problem. Because I know better. And it kind of works temporarily, but it never works permanently, until I pick myself up and say, I'm out of here. I love you, but I can't rescue you. And now the addict is face to face with God in the form of reality, consequences, the pain they need to feel and all those sorts of things. And where does rescue come from? Well, where risky really comes from is a thing that psychologists called fragilizing. Fragilizing is a very, very helpful word, because fragilizing means I see you, addict, as fragile. I don't want to destroy your self esteem. I don't want to discourage you. I don't want to make you feel bad. And so I walk on eggshells because I think you're like a Faberge egg and you're going to crack. So I never let you experience consequences. And for those of you who like the technical stuff, it's really a projection of our own internal fragility that we project onto the addict, our own hurts, our own fragility that we can't experience ourself. It's so funny to watch you guys, because you're going like this. That's you. You fragile. Yeah, you do well. You do too well. You're worse than I am, but it's kind of like how we are when you go, you know, I'm projecting my own hurts and wounds onto this person. That's why I treat them like I do. I've seen fragile. There are fragile people in there. I used to run psych wards. Fragile people like slash their wrists. You got to put them in rubber rooms and give them lots of meds. But a person who's upset is not fragile. My wife and I raised kids. We raised boys, no fragile. They would yell and scream and throw things and break things and bonk each other in the head. That's emotional, that's upset, that's not fragile. So watch out for the temper tantrum thinking They're fragile, that's called fragilizing. Treat them like an adult. And I always tell people who have an addict in their lives, give them the respect that they're not fragile. It's the point of respect to say, I think you can take some pain because I love you and I'm for you, but I'm not going to rescue this time. Don't fragilize it. Okay.

So what I want to do now is I'm going to give you several things, either if you are an addict, the things that you need from others. Or if you are helping an addict, or love an addict, or in a relationship with an addict, things to provide for them. These are kind of God's answers. The first one is, give them a stance of 'for,' F, O, R., I am for you. The stance of for, that no matter what, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how much you spend, hurt yourself, hurt the family, ruin your life, I will never judge you, and I'm for you, because that's the stance that God takes towards us. He never, never takes away his grace. He often lets us feel consequences. He never takes away his grace. So you might have to give up on somebody and say, as long as you drink, I can't be around you or whatever, but give them the stance of for. I will do anything to help you that will help you. I'll never judge you. And why is that? It's because no addict got well without grace. No addict ever got resolved without having some grace-relationship that said, I want you to win. I want you to win. That was God's stance towards us from all time, a stance of for.

The second one is give them a vulnerable statement of the impact. A vulnerable statement of the impact. Addicts are sometimes caught off in a very self absorbed world. They're not aware of the lives they touch. They're not aware of the way they affect companies and families and relationships, and sometimes what really will help an addict to start to get help is to give them a vulnerable statement of impact, something like, I'm scared of you. I used to feel really close to you and warm with you. I'm scared of you right now. Or I want to be able to trust you with my heart and trust you with my life and trust you with my energy. I can't trust you anymore, and it breaks my heart. I want to trust you, or I'm not sure it's safe here with you anymore. I'm not sure the behavior is safe, and I might have to make some other decisions. I'm not safe. I don't feel close, I feel alone. I'm not sure I trust those are vulnerable statements, and they're not judging statements, coming from a position of vulnerability. Jesus said it this way, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I wish I could have put you under my wings like a hen would her chicks, but you would not. Vulnerable statement, and then they get a picture of the impact. I'm impacting people I care about. I'm hurting people that don't feel safe with me and they don't trust me, and they're scared and they feel alone and for and for a certain percentage of addicts that begins to like connect inside, like I don't want that to happen because I love them. Now, some addicts are so severe, or maybe so far in denial, or maybe so narcissistic that doesn't get to them, but on a bell curve, remember, always remember the bell curve, there's a big percentage that will go, I can't stop, but I don't want that to happen.

Now, contrast that with a statement of impact that's not vulnerable, a not vulnerable statement of impact, things like, well, you should get your act together, or don't you see what you're doing, or I'm just giving up on you. Do you see the difference between those statements and the vulnerable statements? You have to see the difference. One statement is the parent, the parent shaking their finger, saying, Get your act together. And when you're the parent, the other person feels like a child. And what do children do when a parent wags their fingers? Does a child go, 'Oh, thank you for sharing. Can I bring you a latte? This is like, really good.' No. Children push back. They dig in their heels. They don't want to have the parents shaking their finger. Might make us feel better, but it doesn't help the situation. Give vulnerable statements of impact. So if there's a part of them that goes I love these people, they begin to open up.

The next one is meet them with Grace at their point of shame. Meet your addict with Grace at their point of shame. See, when you look at what's called addictionology, the science of addictions, it really corresponds to what the Bible's saying, that all of us need a savior, that there's a deep aspect of shame, that a lot of times, the addict won't even tell anybody, because it's how do you say this? They feel ashamed of being ashamed. Does that make any sense? They hide so much and so they don't want anybody to know or feel how deeply they hate themselves, and how deeply flawed they feel like they are and what's wrong with them, the shame is just massive, and sometimes we try to, like, take that away and say, Well, you're not all that bad. You know, it's not that big a deal. We're not meeting them at the point of shame with grace. We're meeting them at the point of competency, but it's not really getting down to where they really hurt. I'll give an example. I have a leadership coaching program where we take people in various spheres of influence, from executives to managers to pastors to ministers to small business owners and this sort of thing. And we were in our process group. We do a lot of process group, very vulnerable time, very confidential. And one of the guys I was talking to, we'd been meeting maybe three months, and he finally said, I got to tell you guys something. He says, I got a porn addiction. It's a guy that owns a business. I've got a porn addiction. And he couldn't even look at us. He said, I'm just, I don't even belong here. I'm so sorry. I'm probably the wrong guy. Maybe you need to kick me out. But I've got this pornography addiction. It's not getting better. I mean, you could feel, you know, the torment he felt, and the embarrassment and all this. And so the other people in the group were trying to help, because they were helpers, but they were saying things like, well, you'll get better. It's not that bad, or it's not that severe. I mean, you're still married, you got your business, it's not that big a deal. Or, you know, you're a good guy, you're going to get out of this. And I said, You guys like, Shut up here. Shut up in Jesus' name. I said, this isn't helping him. I said, Sam, look at me. I said, I think you got a big porn problem, and I think it's embarrassing for you, and it's driving your life, and I think it's pretty serious, and if you never change, I'm still your friend. I certainly want you to change, but I think that's a big problem, and if you never change, I'm still your friend. And I just had him hold eye contact with me. Just look at it. Let's look at each other, because I believe that relationships heal. I said, Can you tell what I'm saying? I'm still, I'm going to always be your friend. And I think it's a big problem. I think you've got a big problem here. And we looked at each other for maybe five seconds, which is weird for guys, and all of a sudden, he broke down, crying, convulsive weeping over, I mean, he just had to, kind of like sit over and cry and cry and cry and cry and cry, and the guys next to him were kind of patting him on the back.

And so once things sort of came back together. I said, what went on there? And he said, nobody's ever talked to me about the worst part of me. I. Yeah, nobody has ever said that it's really bad, and they're still with me, ever not because they didn't. They weren't nice people, but they were we all try to like be each other's Prozac, really, you're not that bad, you're smart, you're pretty, you're got big muscles. And that's not it. Grace doesn't matter when nothing's broken, why have grace if nothing's broken? But when you get down and you say it's really serious, and I know it's serious, and I'm not going to leave you and I'm your friend, it brings grace to the point of shame. Don't if you love your addict, do not minimize the depth of the issue. Maximize the depth of the grace. That make any sense? Don't minimize the depth of the issue. Oh, you're not that bad. They're just misunderstood. You maximize the depth of the grace, and that will begin to heal the shame that drives so many of these so many of these behaviors, then you have to have what I call a sliding scale of structure. And this is just a term I made up to kind of describe this, but some people need more structured discipline consequences. Some people need less. If you go to Matthew 18, Jesus said, Go to your brother if he sins against you, and if he repents what you've won your brother. Then if he doesn't, what do you do? You bring two or three witnesses. Then what do you do? You bring the church. Then you go over to Corinthians. It says, kick him out of the church. But then to throw him out to Satan so that the flesh will be destroyed, so the spirit will be saved. I mean, little bit of structure here, for little problems, lot of structure here. You don't have to go all the way to an intervention with somebody who has a tender heart who hates what they're doing.

And I always look at two factors. The first one is the level of denial. How much denial are they in? I don't have a problem. You have a problem. It's all you guys. And I never had a problem, and I can handle it. That's a pretty high level of denial. Level of denial. The second of it, besides the level of denial, is the level of severity. Is it a functioning drunk or is it somebody who's, you know, not functioning at all, and lost jobs and lost health? And the formula that I use is, the more the denial and the more the severity, the more the structure, the more you got to kick them out of the house, the more you got to do an intervention, the more you got to take away the money, the more you got to let them go to jail, the more you got to say you can't even come into house unless you've gone to celebrate recovery five times. Now with somebody who's not very severe and not much denial, sometimes it just takes saying this is really hard for US, and the person feels bad and they want to get help, so always go with how big the denial is and how big the severity is, and don't use a hammer when a fly swatter would help. But don't use a fly swatter when a hammer would help, okay, level of that's what I call the sliding scale of structure.

And then finally, if you're in this world, it's really good guys if, I mean, I've been in this world a long time, and I love this world because everybody's just as dysfunctional as I am, and I feel happy and I don't have any performance issues around you guys get to know the resources. Get to know the resources. Rick's brought about something pretty incredible. I mean, you've got John Baker and celebrate recovery in 25,000 churches. You've got Christian psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, you've got support groups, you've got spiritual directorship, I would ask you to get on your smartphone or on your piece of paper where the resources are, because most of the time, the addict is going to need you to come up with us, because they're in such a self absorbed, kind of like a orbit in themselves. They're not going to think of them get to know five or six resources. And when you know the resources, you can say, I'll help you with these. What I found is that if you love an addict, if you're for an addict, you want them to win, you've got to stop being the source of health, because you'll burn out and bad things will happen. Stop trying to be the source of health. I'll be your another mommy. I'll be another daddy. I'll be God for you. It just never works. You be the bridge to health, the conduit to health. Here's the numbers. I'll drive you there. I'll make the introduction for you. I want to be the conduit for what you need, because I have all these resources, but I can't be the source. If you try to be the source, you will burn out. And I've worked with too many couples and too many parents and too many friends that almost lost their own job and health because they tried to be the source. Stop that and let God's body come in with all the different things it has. You be the bridge. It always makes a big difference. So do.

Basically what we did was we talked about what an addiction is and what the Bible says about the nature of substitution and the nature of tolerance, and awesome things you can do. But here's the point. I'm just not one who believes that addictions can't be cured. I believe addictions can't be cured, and I really, really, I feel really hopeless sometimes when people say, Well, the best you can do is cope. The best you can do is cope. I don't think Jesus died, so I'll cope better. For God so loved the world that He gave His Son that they cope better.

I believe Jesus died so we had a new life. I want a new life. I want to feel differently. I want to have freedom of choice. I want to have great relationships. I don't want to be in bondage to something, some substance that tears me up. Now, there are some things we have to cope with. If you've got your leg cut off in a skiing accident, you've got to cope with that. If you've got one kidney because you had diabetes, you've got to cope with that. But there's a lot of stuff that Christians are saying they've got to cope with that you're selling yourself short. So many of these can be cured, so that you don't feel like you felt and you feel new, and you feel energy, and you don't feel the tug you used to feel. Go for a new life. Or what the Bible calls a transformation. Coping is here. Transformation is here. Go that way. So that's the content piece, and I hope that was helpful and spurred some thought. But I know that a lot of you have somebody in your life that has a question that you want to help. So how do I work? Does the people just come up, guys? And is that what they do? Not all at once? Because we really, okay, well, we got these nice microphones for the nice people. I'm sorry. She's just gonna yell. Okay, she's blown off the microphone. You go ahead and yell.

This is on mental health, and you're talking addiction. A lot of people don't choose to either be addicted or mentally ill. Can you bridge those two together? Then can you speak to the lower rate of recovery? 

For purposes of the webcast, let me see if I understand your question, because the webcast can hear you. Can you keep standing for a second? I just want to make sure I've understood you. You said, some people do not choose mental health or choose middle we don't choose to be mentally ill because things happen. Mental illness, right? Bridge that bridge the make the bridge between mental illness and addiction. Do you mean dual diagnosis? Do it. We've been talking about mental illness all day. We've been talking about mental illness. Nobody says, I'm going to screw my life up today. So things happen. Okay? We need communities.

We need people surrounding us. We need to be there. One of the things that you brought up is that part of addictive behavior is loving the person, but moving away from them because their addiction will be there. It's almost as important clarification on that and then the other

For some reason I'm not understanding your question, and I'm sorry, keep standing. Keep standing. We're going to work. This is a relationship. This is how we all right, the point of confusion. Now, don't let them rescue you. This is you and me. The point of confusion, or the point of like, maybe I'm not clear, is you said, okay, you don't choose mental illness. And I get that. And then you said, tie that in with addiction. I got lost, is addiction part of mental illness? Yeah, addiction is part of mental illness. So it's just like your bipolar is is addiction the same as do you mean, do you choose addiction? Is that what you're asking, do you choose an addiction? I think it's getting worse here.

Well, I don't see I'm not trying to be difficult. By the way, I am a difficult person, but I'm not trying to because I like you. We're good. You thought I was Ken, okay, I'm not trying to. No, you, I know you're not. You have a you have a question. I'm just slow. No, I have the mental illness of slow. So what? The relationship between addiction and mental illness? Yes, well, as I understand it, mental illness is a very broad umbrella term, meaning anything in the emotional and behavioral spectrum of disorders that gets in the way of life and love. Addiction is part of this. Okay, that's helpful. That's all you needed. Yeah,

and then that second part to that is both in and outside the church, the recovery for addiction, my understanding, is at the same level, less than 20% the recovery rate for addiction in and out of the church is around the 20s, whether the churchor not. Can you help us understand that a little, I mean, why is it so low?

Yes. Oh, it's horrible. I think there are several reasons it's so low. One is because I think that people's character issues aren't diagnosed. They stay on the behaviors, they stay on the fruit, and they don't go to the tree. And if you don't solve isolation issues, if you don't solve codependency issues, what we would call differentiation issues, technically, if you don't serve the judge issues and a number of other ones, if you don't solve control issues, you're just going to keep having bad fruit. It'd be like going to back your backyard and there's a peach tree in your backyard and you got bad peaches, and going to your peach and say you're really scrawny, you're just not a juicy peach. Get your act together. Now, what would any self respecting peach say to me? Fix the soil, dude, I'm only as good as the soil. Put better nitrogen in there and get the aphids away. You know, water me more. So I think one reason we're so low is we're staying on the behavior which we have to do, but we're not going to the soil of where people live and love and find happiness and find meaning in God and relationships. The second thing, I think we have a resource problem, because it takes lots of time and money and effort to get these things well, and sometimes we just have a there aren't enough specialists or people who have deep, deep knowledge of this stuff, so the resources kind of spread thin. I think that's what's so low. Yes,

I'm curious to know what your thoughts are around. It seems like addictions begin when kids are in high school.

It seems like addictions begin in high school. Yeah, you know they're going through the adolescence. They become more cognitive, cognizant of their own differences and trying to fit in. Happens a lot. Adolescents have a really hard time for lots of reasons, and then the addiction becomes the medication, right?

So the and this is maybe a similar to what the other gal was asking, because she and I are good Now, see, but you led the way with men, when an adolescent recognizes that they're they're different, and they don't understand, and it goes beyond just peer pressure and but that there's a real internal recognition, like,

I don't fit in, and My I'm not okay, right? Sothey they end up getting involved with drugs to help themselves either ignore, and there may be a certain period of time where that works for them, but hides a deeper biological problem, physiological issue. And I was wondering, we don't talk, I don't hear much about that. We always want to go down to the the origin of the the need, the unmet need, you know, all of that. But is there a place for the involvement with drugs that leads to addiction, which is a separate problem, it takes on a life of its it does is, is there any do you have any thoughts on that? Or if I understand your question, right, you're saying, Hey, aren't some things not just substitution needs, but aren't there biological constitutional problems too, absolutely. And that's why you need some clinician who can distinguish between. This is biological, this is metabolic, this is brain chemistry, this is hormone, and this is emotional. And if you've got a really good diagnostician, then that makes all the difference in the world. But we need to pay attention to that. Good afternoon. We're not somebody over here.

Yes, good afternoon. Dr John, my name's Elizabeth.and I teach high school.

Congratulations. We need more.

And I see the kids at the beginning. I see the kids in rehab. I see the kids come back from rehab. So I see them. A lot of them make good so that they do graduate and go on. So what? What's the best piece of advice you could give me to to do to best serve my students. I have kids that cut, and I ask them, How you doing today? Do you have somebody to talk to? Oh, yeah, I have a counselor. How long has it been? About four months. Oh, they're looking good. They'll show me their cuts. They'll show me I see all sorts of things because I teach high school.

Yeah, and you see reality. So for purposes of the webcast, she said, I've got kids that cut, and then the cuts don't seem to be they're getting better. How do I best help kids as a teacher. My wife's a teacher too in the public school system, and we've seen a lot of this, oh yeah, I would say probably three things, okay. One is, you be a teacher who's full of grace and truth, because a lot of those kids either have too much grace and no truth, or too much truth and no grace and judgment, or some kind of crazy combination no truth. So they need adults around that they can internalize, and that internalizes. My teacher, Elizabeth is very warm. She's very loving, but she's also pretty strict. A very warm and very strict teacher is like the best possible thing to internalize, and they're taking these memories of you. Number two is if at all possible, engage with the parents, because there's stuff going on at home that that kid is the symptom of. We call it the identified patient. The cutting probably has to do with something going on in the Family Constellation. And so engage with the parents. Can we meet, and all of a sudden you get a bigger picture. And then the parents maybe sometimes open up. I've seen many teachers that were able to open up mom and dad. And the third thing is, I've had this happen. Sometimes a teacher will get permission to talk to the therapist. Now, sometimes therapists won't say that because of confidentiality. Sometimes they'll say, It's okay, and you say to the therapist, help me. Assist you. You know the therapist at the quarterback help me know how I as a teacher without I'm around that kid several hours a week. What can I do to help that kid better? And the therapist can have some really good ideas. 

So perfect. Thanks very much. Sure. 

Dr Townsend, yeah, I had a question with regards to recovery. There's really a controversy today regarding the medical model versus the social model.

It's actually a very old conflict. It's been going on a long time now, right? Well, with regards to Obamacare and where we're going with that for like, residential type care facilities, we're losing the opportunity for one alcoholic helping another alcoholic, the social model, and it's moving more where the medical model is being followed that only experts that know about alcoholics, not alcoholics themselves, are drug addicts being able to help, and we're losing a lot of that funding. Do you see that that there's opportunities at that time, because the most success has been with AA and social models, as well as some of the most cost effective recovery is in that arena. But it is kind of a problem that is moving forward right now.

So your question is, do you see one over the other, or do you have a particular bent towards one versus the

Okay? The question is, with AA, AAS, get certain results by the community of belief of people who have struggled, and AAS, alcoholics understand other alcoholics, addicts, understand other addicts. That's called a social model versus a medical model, where you got people coming and treating I've worked in both contexts and what I've noticed, and this is anecdotal, like, I don't have a statistic on this, but it's more like treating a lot of these is that I like to start with the AA, and if severity continues and is not helping, then we got to go to more of a structure. But I think relationships can do a whole lot. If the person has a problem that can be modeled, identified with, supported and it goes away. They didn't have a bad problem, but once it gets severe, I think you have to go medical. So I kind of start one way and I go to the other anyway. We we got to quit. Now, our time's up, and you guys kind of a break. But thank you so much for being here. God bless you guys. Hope you have a good day.