E18 / Unhooked and Connected with Dr. Adi Jaffe

Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Adi Jaffe. Adi is the author of a best-selling book outlining a unique perspective on addiction called The Abstinence Myth and a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction, relationships and shame. He lectured in the UCLA Psychology department for most of a decade and was the Executive Director and Co-Founder of one of the most progressive mental health treatment facilities in the country before starting his own company called IGNTD, through which Dr Jaffe is changing the way people think about and deal with mental health issues. He’s now working on his next book, to be called Unhooked.

Adi and I met through a mens group called METAL, which is best explained by their catch-phrase “Together, we’re better,” which itself expresses a spirit of community and cooperation amongst men that also comes up in our interview.

If you’re a man and you’re not yet familiar with the world of mens work, and you’d like more community, connection and emotional depth in your life, I highly recommend finding a men's group to participate in.

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As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this one: which is what is your own understanding of how abstinence relates to addiction and recovery? And is absolute abstinence, an absolute requirement for recovery from addiction. And if so, why?

Show Notes

WHAT IS ADDICTION?

In an colloquial sense, “Addiction, broadly, is anytime we engage in habits that are bringing us harm of some sort, and we're having a hard time stopping them or slowing them down.”

In more clinical terms, it’s “people being prevented from functioning in their everyday life…”

SAMHSA’s new definition of addiction has about 40 million people, or more than 10% of the U.S. population suffering from one form of addiction or another, “but it's probably seventy to a hundred million people who struggle with the broader version of what we're talking about.”

“You're not really hooked on social media. You're escaping something else.”

“nobody talked to me about addiction until I was using meth all day every day.”

THE MYTH OF NORMAL

“there's a false dichotomy that gets created between ‘normal’ people and ‘addicts’ and ‘alcoholics.’”

There’s a kind of a cognitive misdirection that we have with the concept of normal. It's average—and nobody is the average. It's a statistical myth. Actually the variation within any “normal” is the full infinite range that exists.

“while we all try to be as normal as possible, nobody wants to be normal.”

we want to be different and accepted—different, but part of something…

what we mean by “normal” is included, invited… and understood.

HOOKED

“many people that I work with, part of the rea