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Jeff Meredith: The Stories Behind Homelessness
18 Plays10 days ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum speaks with Jeff Meredith, Associate Creative Director at RKD Group and longtime writer for rescue missions across the U.S. Over the past two decades, Jeff has interviewed more than a thousand people who’ve experienced homelessness, addiction, and recovery—gaining rare insight into what drives collapse and what makes renewal possible.
Jeff shares what he’s learned from the front lines of homelessness: how family breakdown, trauma, and addiction often intersect; why accountability and forgiveness are essential to recovery; and what the most successful rescue missions do differently. This is a grounded, compassionate look at the human stories behind one of America’s most complex social challenges.
Topics Explored
- The changing face of homelessness—and why women are now the fastest-growing group
- What drives addiction and how recovery really works
- How childhood trauma and family breakdown shape adult outcomes
- The interplay of mental illness, accountability, and hope
- Why recovery requires both compassion and structure
- How faith-based missions rebuild lives physically, emotionally, and spiritually
Links
- Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-meredith-ab97b34/
- Episode with Andy Bales: https://unfoldingthought.com/20-andy-bales-from-poverty-to-purpose/
- The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease: https://amzn.to/4nl7MTa
- $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America: https://amzn.to/46yZPEk
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Jeff and Sonoya, Georgia
00:00:02
Speaker
Jeff, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Eric, thank you so much for having me. I am in Sonoya, Georgia, which is outside of Atlanta. And if you've heard of the zombie show, The Walking Dead, it's where that was filmed. We're about 10 minutes away from where the set used to be when it was still filming. So, zombie land.
00:00:23
Speaker
You do a lot of extra work then? oh the zombies are supposed to be super skinny. So alas, it was not a good career move for me.
Jeff's Career in Writing and Nonprofits
00:00:32
Speaker
Well, I suppose speaking of your career, what either do you do today and or if you want to go there first, what is your journey been like that's led you to what you do today? I make.
00:00:46
Speaker
my living with the written word. And I'll probably continue to do that until Skynet takes my job, which is going to be a lot sooner, I guess, than I anticipated a few years ago, based on the way things are developing.
00:00:59
Speaker
That was a history major. And so that lent itself pretty well to to writing professionally. And I um have worked at nonprofits and ad agencies, marketing, communications, that kind of stuff since then.
00:01:12
Speaker
And I'm not really good at anything else. So yeah, so like I said, when Skynet comes, I'll, you know, dig ditches or something. I'm sure you have told me before that you are a history major because we've known each other for so long, um but i didn't recall that.
00:01:27
Speaker
And that aside, I suppose you ended up as ah copywriter, direct response copywriter, specifically working for faith-based nonprofits for the most part, right? I mean, you've been in and out of some other nonprofits.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So, ah well, when I was younger, i my career, I would say, was more well-rounded in one sense that I had the chance to do, you know, some tourism and construction and some other businesses, even a little bit of radio and that that kind of stuff.
00:02:01
Speaker
But it has definitely veered in the in in the last 15 or what is this, 15 or 20 years that we've been friends now? But it's veered, you know, strongly towards the nonprofit realm and That was not something I desired or did on purpose. I wasn't against it either. That's just kind of where the opportunities came.
00:02:20
Speaker
And I was grateful for them. And, you know, it's perhaps not as lucrative as if I was on Madison Avenue working for those sort of Fortune 500 clients. But it has been rewarding in its own right, for
Role and History of Rescue Missions
00:02:33
Speaker
sure.
00:02:33
Speaker
i think your specialty really has become... writing for rescue missions, which is not a space that a lot of people are familiar with. So I don't want to misrepresent it, but I guess, can you describe who you write for?
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, i mean that's it it's a great question because, i mean, when I got started, I had no idea what a rescue mission even was. But for the last 15 or so years, i have been but writing for rescue missions. They've been a significant portion of my clientele.
00:03:07
Speaker
And essentially, a rescue mission is ah is a homeless shelter, to put it simply. Most cities have them, a bunch of cities. Big ones like New York City or Los Angeles have multiple.
00:03:18
Speaker
missions and very often they've been around since, well, a long time ago. I mean, some of them in New York, like the Bowery mission is almost as old as the Civil War and a lot of them predate World War I. So they've been around for a long time. But unless you were kind of heavily invested in caring for homeless people or if you had known somebody who was homeless, you would probably not have heard of them, I would think.
00:03:42
Speaker
Like I said, I had not heard of any of them until I was assigned to start writing for them. So they were founded by a lot of Christian businessmen for the most part. Most of them are are faith-based.
00:03:52
Speaker
And in as you can imagine, they've evolved quite a bit over over the years. you know Most of them continue to be Christian in nature, but they'll serve anybody without discrimination or having to pass any kind of a litmus test beyond you know typically being sober.
00:04:11
Speaker
and nonviolent. I'd say the clientele has has changed a lot over the years, for sure. like Even 30 or 40 years ago, when we were kids, they probably were serving a lot of Vietnam veterans.
00:04:23
Speaker
yeah Maybe what people used to call the old hobos who had endured severe you know battle battlefield trauma and had not been able to effectively resettle back into society and would walk with the the stick in the...
00:04:39
Speaker
handkerchief attached to it or hanging from it you know across the country. And the missions were a place to kind of get a meal and a place to sleep. But in more recent times, the clientele has changed quite a bit as they um the the the people who stay there, who take refuge there, are younger and really quite diverse. A lot of women, in fact, I believe women are the fastest growing group of homeless individuals in the country.
00:05:05
Speaker
And then, you know, most people are struggling with some kind of a chemical addiction at this time too.
Causes of Homelessness: Trauma and Family Breakdown
00:05:11
Speaker
It sounds like you either, I know in the past you've not written exclusively for rescue missions, but it sounds like now there's at least a heavy focus there, but maybe the packaging aside,
00:05:29
Speaker
or the industry, or gosh, I don't know what term to use, that you do have a specialty or you have a lot of knowledge around homelessness and people affected by homelessness and associated challenges. Is that right?
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah. and you know, like I said, it wasn't ah a career i I sought out, but it has been a blessing in its own right, for sure. I've had the chance to travel to California and New York and Georgia and Florida and Texas and and most everywhere in between visiting clients and interviewing the people who are recovering there.
00:06:08
Speaker
And, you know, we interview the guests who are well along in their recovery for the sake of sharing their stories with donors and perhaps on social media with the community, so that people can see the good that's happening at the mission, so they can see you know be involved with the solution to homelessness, which is a a growing problem in the country.
00:06:28
Speaker
And so it's been an awesome experience to to get to know people and to to hear their stories and to see what kind of factors lead to life collapse, essentially. I mean, that's what homelessness is. It's when everything falls apart.
00:06:41
Speaker
And then also what leads to restoration and renewal and how people get back on their feet. What does the makeup of, you know, the homeless population, if I can call it that, look like?
00:06:52
Speaker
and And then after that, I would like to get into what is it that takes these people there and keeps them in homelessness? Yeah, so who's homeless? Yeah, I mean, i think in the old days it would have been a white guy or a black guy, basically.
00:07:08
Speaker
But now, like I said, the people who are homeless now, are are it's very but diverse. and It could be anybody, and ah and it's a lot of women too, which I don't really think that that was a thing back in the day.
00:07:20
Speaker
i could be wrong. I'm not an expert historian on the history of homelessness in America. But and I just know that it's ah it's a ah notable factor that more and more women are winding up on the streets.
00:07:35
Speaker
And of course, they face very different challenges out there. But who's homeless now? i mean, obviously, like i saw I read recently, and you've probably seen these same studies, where they show something like 50% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, which means if you lose your job or you have a health emergency or or something, like it can be catastrophic in a hurry.
00:07:55
Speaker
So with the caveat that anyone could be homeless, nevertheless, I think there's still there's still indicators that make it much easier to predict who will wind up homeless these days.
00:08:10
Speaker
And by and large, those could probably be summarized as trauma, addiction, or or mental illness, or very often a combination of the three.
00:08:21
Speaker
do Do you think that the factors that contribute to someone ending up in homelessness are likely to be different by population? You know, like as far as you're aware, if on average a woman ends up being homeless,
00:08:42
Speaker
Is that often due to a different cause from the average man? That's a good question. i think I think likely she will have faced different struggles in her descent to homelessness.
00:08:59
Speaker
Obviously, sexual abuse is something that impacts women a lot more than men in general. And that's certainly a huge factor for women that wind up on the streets.
00:09:11
Speaker
But I think even digging deeper than just like something that happens to a person, I think the root of a lot of it tends to be the breakdown of the family more than anything else and and what happens when a family breaks down.
00:09:26
Speaker
Both for men and for women? I believe so, absolutely. And, you know, for this is an extreme example, but it's a place to start. Like in Los Angeles, you know, there's so many kids in foster care, and the experts say that within two years of aging out of foster care, ah full 50% of those kids are going to be on the streets.
00:09:49
Speaker
i believe I believe that's the stat. So it's it's heartbreaking and shocking and feels like an overwhelming problem. And Obviously, if you're in foster care, like something went wrong with your family life.
00:10:01
Speaker
Well, Jeff, you've told me before you have interviewed probably over a thousand people who have been homeless or drug addicted or something like that at some point.
00:10:16
Speaker
And I think I remember you saying it's possible you've interviewed 2000.
Addiction's Root in Trauma and Pain
00:10:20
Speaker
two thousand So it's a large number, regardless of, you know, exactly where we pin it. It sounds to me like you hear in these stories some common occurrences or themes.
00:10:35
Speaker
So you hear that someone has some type of trauma that probably some number of these kids, at least in you know, a metro area maybe are foster kids.
00:10:50
Speaker
Maybe that's been something that they've gone through. Addiction, divorce. I don't think that I heard, except maybe yeah if if that went along with the breakdown of the family.
00:11:01
Speaker
So I'm curious what you hear from the people you talk to, whether it's statistically representative or not. Certainly the number one most common thing I've heard is difficult because it's such a common problem in America.
00:11:16
Speaker
But the number one thing I've heard is somebody saying, well, when I was, you know, eight or 10 or whatever the age might have been, my folks split up and I never got over it And so i think more than anything else, divorce ends up being responsible for a lot of the hardships people face. I know that there are studies that have come out that have said various things about this and argued one way or another.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I also want to say, like, I know that there are very legitimate reasons for divorce. And if, you know, somebody's spouse is unfaithful or abusive, I completely understand why somebody would need to to leave that situation.
00:11:54
Speaker
But I think we've also all seen, you know, to use another extreme example, like the Hollywood couple that gets together and then they're divorced like three months later. And probably pretty much everybody knew it was coming. And you think like, maybe there's a middle ground here.
00:12:10
Speaker
where we could take it a little bit more seriously. So it feels more serious than ah and a weakened fling. I think that you know a lot of children and and families would benefit maybe from a renewed societal commitment to the to the sanctity ah of marriage while still acknowledging that there are you know bad and dysfunctional people out there who should no one should have to remain married to.
00:12:33
Speaker
My experience has been working with some of these nonprofits that it's rarely one thing that you can attribute homelessness too It's often very common experiences that whether they're unfortunate or sad or, you know, just terrible or not, I'm not trying to say like the quality of them or the nature as much as there Often it's things that happen to all of us, but typically one thing happens and then the next thing happens and things just start to fall apart.
00:13:11
Speaker
So your parents get divorced, for example, and then you I think you mentioned sexual abuse for women. You know, you have one thing, it creates some instability, and then you deal with that.
00:13:26
Speaker
It's just making everything harder. You know, it's harder not to drink a little bit too much, or it's harder to say no to drugs, or it's harder to work that job that you really need to pay to have your own house.
00:13:40
Speaker
And I suspect you will tell me that, yes, your perception is similar, but I'm wondering in part about, is that the character of the stories that you hear and sort of the nature of the stories that you tend to tell that fit that mold?
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. that That's a great question. And i mean, life is hard for everybody, like you said. But when you have the instability of, you know, maybe your dad isn't around anymore, you're splitting time, so then you don't have the same level of community, you don't have the same level of parental involvement and accountability and all that kind of stuff.
00:14:18
Speaker
It's just easier. and it's just human nature to be hurt by that. And to see like when you see, this isn't the right way to say but like the regular kids who have a mom and dad and you feel different from them to then seek to medicate those feelings. You know, you hear about so many kids who wonder like, was it my fault that my parents split up?
00:14:38
Speaker
Well, of course not. But, you know, those those kids tend to be more susceptible to falling in with the wrong crowd. and and And the wrong crowd tends to be, you know, the wrong crowd because they had tough lives. Like, they didn't just wake up one day and say, you know, I want to do bad stuff. in In as much as I feel like you can never doubt any human's capacity to make bad or self-destructive decisions,
00:15:03
Speaker
Most of the people who I've spoken with who struggled with addiction were using because they had suffered some some wrong in their life. You know, maybe like they're if they were older, maybe their wife left them or they had a child who died. Or one guy recently was sharing that his dad committed suicide when he was six years old and he just was never able to come to terms with it.
00:15:26
Speaker
And so at that stage, you know, addiction becomes a coping mechanism to deal with a ah much deeper pain. I think that, you know, if if there's one thing I've learned from interviewing a lot of people, it's really easy to judge the addict. You know, that guy needs to clean up and get a job.
00:15:42
Speaker
If you watch Futurama, I feel like saying that in the in the Professor Farnsworth voice. Get a job! But... In reality, it's not that simple. I just don't think people wake up and say, i want to be addicted to this drug.
00:15:55
Speaker
It becomes just a way to numb the pain and forget about how they're feeling or forget about that deep hurt. that is with them every minute of the day. I'm going to take a step back here for second.
00:16:06
Speaker
Being in advertising, you know, you when you're a young copy cub, you read the the titans of the industry. And David Ogilvie is one of the greats. I know you're familiar with him, and I assume most copywriters are.
00:16:20
Speaker
And he talked about you know reason why advertising being the only kind of advertising that's worth anything. You have to give the reason why behind the product, why it exists and why you're sharing it with people.
00:16:31
Speaker
But in some ways, addiction is, I almost feel like, There's a relation, like there's a reason why behind every addiction that very few people have I heard about who just, you know, I wanted to try cocaine and then I got stuck on it. I mean, that's such a rare explanation. It's always about a hardship and something going wrong.
00:16:53
Speaker
And then, you know, they started using as a way to mask or numb that pain. And it slowly, well, I should say at varying speeds to control their life. You know, some people use maybe meth once and then they're completely enslaved to it.
00:17:09
Speaker
Other people, it's alcohol where it makes them feel a little bit good on their weekend parties. And then over the years, they take more and more of it and need more and more of it. And then eventually, you know, it usually ends up with alcohol.
00:17:21
Speaker
drinking vodka as soon as you get out of bed. And so it happens at different speeds. But it's that reason why behind the addiction that I think a lot of people might not be aware of And as much as I so you know support accountability and that kind of stuff, there's there's absolutely room for compassion to coexist alongside accountability as we you know consider what people have been through that led them to this situation.
Is Addiction a Disease or Learned Behavior?
00:17:45
Speaker
Not that long ago, I read this book called The Biology of Desire by a gentleman named Mark Lewis, who I think he has his PhD in neuroscience. And he was addict, right?
00:18:00
Speaker
He's written two books. I forget what the other one was called. But the subtitle for his book is The Biology of Desire is Why Addiction is Not a Disease. And he argues based on, I guess, the science and his experience.
00:18:15
Speaker
And I can't remember what else. It's been a while since I read the book that Addiction is not a disease in the sense that you are simply afflicted with it, you know, like cancer is a disease or, I don't know, Lyme disease or something of that nature, but rather that it's, I'm not going to get the term right, but basically that it's, it's ah a, learned behavior.
00:18:42
Speaker
And, you know, you don't just, you're not an addict because you were just afflicted with addiction. You become an addict because there's sort of this operant conditioning that you do something and you get the immediate positive response that whether you're expecting or not, you know, you do it again and you get that positive feeling or response And so despite the fact that there's almost always a negative side to it, if you go with just alcohol, you know, you wake up the next morning and you have a hangover. Well, you didn't have a hangover when you had your first beer, right?
00:19:20
Speaker
And you start to serve this, you sort of start to chase the positive aspects of this, positive feelings, and do your best to ignore or mitigate the negative outcomes.
00:19:36
Speaker
And I'm curious, you've worked a lot with people in addiction, but you know either currently or in their past. You've heard a lot of stories.
00:19:48
Speaker
Do you have any thoughts about that claim that addiction is not a disease? Yeah, I've, I, first of all, let me affirm what you say for your fans who wouldn't know you're the single most avid reader I believe I've ever met in my life.
00:20:03
Speaker
And I'm not surprised that you would read a book that is so specialized like this. I feel like there are people who know so much more about this, including some of the, you know, rescue mission directors I've spend time with who would probably disagree.
00:20:20
Speaker
but that being said, i don't have a problem with anything you you just said. you know, my my first response is kind of like, the brain is so complex that that I have very little trouble believing that addiction is a disease for some people and not for others. And again, that's not something I would you know bet my life on or anything. There are people who know so much more about it than I do.
00:20:44
Speaker
What I would say is that addiction is very enslaving. And whether you are a person with a strong will or a weak will, whether you are rich or poor, whether you have a lot to live for, like you have a ah wife and kids and a home and a vacation home and luxury cars and everything else that, you know, the world tells us we should be working for.
00:21:10
Speaker
Or if you have nothing, if you grew up in absolute poverty and you have less now, it seems to me that addiction can ravage everybody on that spectrum just as easily and enslave them all. And...
00:21:23
Speaker
and So I don't know if I would, yeah, I don't know if I have a strong opinion on whether or not it's a disease, but I but i know that it can afflict anyone and escaping from it is a monumental task that requires something like you know, a very skilled doctor to help you overcome.
00:21:45
Speaker
As you were talking, I recalled that some of what Mark Lewis says ah about, you know, the positioning of disease and even not just positioning, but also definition of disease versus the learned behavior or whatever his phrasing is.
00:22:04
Speaker
is that if yeah you have learned this behavior, then you it's easier to understand how you are responsible for it.
00:22:16
Speaker
And that's not to say, as I think you said earlier, that there are children who are born addicted in many senses, right?
00:22:27
Speaker
And is that baby responsible? Well, for some amount of time, it's not going to be responsible, right? It will become responsible at some point, I guess. But, you know, let's take a 45-year-old man or woman.
00:22:43
Speaker
If you're able to tell yourself that you have a disease, then it does seem to me like I would have, you might have a different understanding of your responsibility to work to alleviate that condition.
00:23:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very fair point. And I had not really thought about it that way. But absolutely, if you view it as a disease that just happened to you, it seems like you could be more, andclined you might be more inclined to make excuses about it and to not fight it.
00:23:18
Speaker
And actually, this is kind of getting to something I thought we might talk about shortly, but it brings up, you know, what hope is there for the addict and and what leads to recovery. And i I feel like the number one thing I've seen lead to recovery and and and foreshadow ah ah positive outcome is accountability and taking ownership.
00:23:40
Speaker
And maybe we're not there
Intersection of Mental Illness and Addiction
00:23:42
Speaker
yet. But, you know, it's an interesting thing because humans are are complex creatures, right? And you can have a ton of bad stuff happen to you. And none of it's your fault, especially if you're a little kid when it started.
00:23:52
Speaker
And then at some point, you start making decisions that are are negative and you're older. And, you know, there's this biblical concept of an age of accountability. And I don't quite know when that is. But at some point...
00:24:06
Speaker
like bad stuff happens to you and then you start eating from it you know willingly. i don't know where it becomes your fault, but somewhere in there like there's this accountability this accountability that takes place.
00:24:19
Speaker
And yeah, until you own that, it's going to be really hard to to break free. So to to the author of that book's point, absolutely. i think, you know, as it was I ponder it more, i think he's making a very compelling case that viewing it like a disease can have negative consequences.
00:24:38
Speaker
You were getting really close to talking about some of the structure, i think, that is often required of not just rescue missions, but recovery programs.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I do want to talk about that, but I've had something on my mind that I wanted to ask you about. You've talked to a lot of people that deal with homelessness. Very often addiction is involved. Of course, it's not always, but very often addiction.
00:25:04
Speaker
Mental illness must play in, in a large portion of these cases. And I'm not trying to say that just because people are homeless, they're crazy or that they're weak willed or I don't know what.
00:25:17
Speaker
Sure. I mean, there are diagnoses along those lines in plenty of cases. I'm thinking more so that if you have some form of mental illness, maybe even minor, that there's Maybe it makes it easier to make bad decisions to, I don't know, does it make it easier to become addicted in the first place? I don't know, but the there must be some large Venn diagram overlap between mental addiction and homelessness, and sorry, mental illness addiction, and then people ending up homeless.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yes, I definitely agree with you. And it's very difficult and challenging. And even though, you know, scientists have learned so much amazing stuff about the brain and how humans operate, I feel like we're still scratching the surface of of what mental illness is. And it's like a million different diseases, right? And can afflict someone a million different ways, kind of like you said, maybe just a little, or maybe so much that most people would say they need to be institutionalized.
00:26:24
Speaker
But I kind of think of it like this. the If you'll allow me to draw an analogy, if the world's toughest Marine, right? Like if he can do a few deployments in a and a in a difficult place and go through battles and and maybe see some things that you know nobody wants to see that we would all admit are horrible.
00:26:44
Speaker
and then come home with a but the bad case of PTSD, which he essentially has to deal with every single day for the rest of his life. But if the world's toughest Marine can have that, who was totally healthy when he enlisted, like what about a young lady who grew up in an abusive home and then spent 20 years on the streets,
00:27:05
Speaker
suffering through addiction abuse and, you know, not to be vulgar, but like probably had to sell herself to survive and get food, who suffered violence at the hands of, you know, pimps and and clients. Like, that's not an extreme case. Like, that's normal for a homeless woman these days.
00:27:22
Speaker
You know, like what kind of mental illness is she going to have? Whatever it is, like given her disadvantages as a child, like it's going to be magnified a million times after 20 years of abuse and addiction.
00:27:35
Speaker
And so it's like you said about the Venn diagram. At that point, it's really hard to tell where the addiction stops and the mental illness starts or where it was maybe when she first started using. I mean, there's just no way to know.
00:27:47
Speaker
And it's a it's it's a heartbreaking thing. i mean, we've all seen, you know, or if you've spent any time in a big city, we've seen people who seem just completely crazy yelling or agitated and There's nothing you can say to calm that person down or to have a logical or or reasonable conversation with them. Like that they don't have that capacity anymore.
00:28:11
Speaker
And of course, again, this is an extreme case. There's a lot of mental illness that people are able to mask or hide or treat with medication. But when you look at the more extreme examples of people who are on the streets, it's incredibly difficult topic.
00:28:25
Speaker
And i know a lot of rescue missions and certainly professionals and, you know, probably social workers who are employed by the state. There's all these people who want to help treat individuals in that situation. And I don't think anybody knows how.
00:28:42
Speaker
When somebody is going through recovery, whether they relapse or not, what does it tend to look
Recovery Process at Rescue Missions
00:28:46
Speaker
like? Yeah, that's a great question. think they' there yeah there are a lot of different treatment options. like Obviously, you you see $40,000 week or a month or whatever they are options in Malibu that are you know the latest of science and all that kind of stuff.
00:29:04
Speaker
And so I don't want to imply that I know all of them, but I but i do know the rescue mission model. which is you know a comprehensive approach to addressing the root cause of a person's brokenness.
00:29:20
Speaker
So there are steps big and small. and the I mean, the first step, is to get their mind right, which means you have to be off all of your substances.
00:29:33
Speaker
No more drinking, no more drugs. The one thing I've seen that most of the missions allow is they allow their guests to smoke, but you know, like no more pot, no more any other kind of chemical addiction.
00:29:44
Speaker
So I'm going to ask this question then, forgive me for interrupting you, just because i think that we can put it in the, in the, you know, group of either psychoactive substances or mind altering substances or whatever, but alcohol is legal.
00:30:03
Speaker
Tobacco, nicotine, it's legal. Caffeine, it's legal. I think a lot of people say that caffeine is, you know, however much stronger than heroin or whatever, right?
00:30:16
Speaker
And any reasonable adult understands that, sure, maybe it is, but the impact of caffeine on you as compared to the impact of heroin is really quite a bit different.
00:30:31
Speaker
You know, you talked about, i think you said something about having to hit the fifth of vodka as soon as you wake up in the morning. And knowing you, I ah i was going to make a joke about having to hit the coffee cup.
00:30:42
Speaker
Yeah. But if you drink however many hundreds or thousands, I don't know, of milligrams of coffee a day, there's a very different impact on your brain and your life choices from math or whatever the other drug is. So in these rescue mission scenarios, they do tend to allow them to smoke.
00:31:09
Speaker
Of course, there's caffeine and they they draw the line somewhere, I'm assuming. I don't know how much vaping or nicotine patches or I don't know what, Zingum or something there is.
00:31:21
Speaker
But I think that as you say that, you know the only thing that they allow them to do is this. I do think that it's well worth noting that as much as there is an addiction, right, with nicotine, for example, the long-term impact is substantially different from any of these things that would have gotten them into addiction and homelessness.
00:31:48
Speaker
Yes, that is definitely worth talking about. And I appreciate you bringing it up because always feel like you have the young, i idealistic libertarian who wants all the drugs to be legalized and inevitably points to caffeine or or wine for why um all the hard drugs should be legalized.
00:32:08
Speaker
And yet the consequences ah of the hard drugs are just so severe. And ah I've heard it again and again from the people I've interviewed. You know, you become something that you would not have believed possible.
00:32:21
Speaker
I mean, I don't care like what your faith or politics are. like There are just certain values we all agree are wrong. and And yet, you know I've heard like people saying, I became something, I hated something, I swore I never would be. I was stealing for my children or I was stealing for my parents.
00:32:40
Speaker
I was you know violent and abusive. They turn you into someone who is unreliable and who can only think about getting that next high. And you drugs have certainly gotten worse over the years.
00:32:56
Speaker
And I think it was Andy Bales, in fact, who you talked about meth and fentanyl being like a whole new level of what they were doing to people. You know, the old days of being the functional alcoholic, which there are some, were the functional drug user, i think are fewer and fewer and further and further in between because meth and fentanyl, which are the two dominant drugs that I've, you know, that the people I've interviewed seem to have been enslaved by. They just, they make you someone that you would swear you would never be. have not been through that kind of addiction, so it's hard for me to describe or even
00:33:34
Speaker
understand, but as near as I can tell, like every waking second of your life is just devoted to it.
Impact of Meth and Fentanyl on Homelessness
00:33:41
Speaker
Has that changed in your career? You know, from you've been doing this for 20 ish years.
00:33:47
Speaker
Do you feel like the people that you have interviewed that the the contributing factors to homelessness or the associated factors have changed, you know, from, i don't know what it would have been, but because we're not going to go all the way back to Vietnam vets, you probably weren't interviewing too many of those, but that nowadays you're hearing more fentanyl or whatever else and less just, you know, a fifth of vodka a day.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah, certainly. And i think part of it is is that like they make you feel so awful when you try to get off them. It's really like, it's just a wicked thing.
00:34:22
Speaker
Because, you know, you use it and you get high. And then obviously, like, it's not a secret that getting high feels good to people. That's why they do it. And then when you try to not be higher, you say, all right, I'm not doing this anymore. Like you feel so wretchedly sick so quickly that I mean, that I've had people describe, you know, like the worst flu you can imagine. And I remember how eat how sick I felt when I had the flu.
00:34:47
Speaker
And of course, I'm a giant baby. it's like my wife joking with me that it was the man flu. You know, but I was, you know, laid out. I can't imagine having to go through that for weeks on end. I remember one guy who was well along his way to recovery, but he had been addicted to meth for a good time, for a good long time, I should say.
00:35:05
Speaker
And when he first got to the mission, even after detox, he was awake for something like two to three weeks, could not sleep, was a zombie all day, basically, so exhausted and so tired.
00:35:17
Speaker
And of course, he's not just dealing with his body not being on this anymore, but with all the emotions of trying to change his life and coming to terms with the pain he'd caused his family, which is enough to keep anybody awake. But then this chemical reaction in his body, when his brain wasn't getting what it wanted anymore, what it'd become accustomed to having, where he was you know just exhausted all day. And then the second he lay down at night after finishing a long day of recovery activities, I mean, just like wide awake, just staring off,
00:35:47
Speaker
It's just brutal. I mean, that would be enough to get me to to want to give up and relapse. So you see why so many people like try to get over it and then just relapse. I mean, every addict says they want to, or most of them seem like a they want to get off it and want to get better. But when it comes to the,
00:36:03
Speaker
rubber-hitting the road of how unbelievably, unbearably sick they feel. It's understandable why they remain trapped.
Survival and Desperation: Trading Sex for Shelter
00:36:10
Speaker
You reminded me of something a little bit ago.
00:36:14
Speaker
Forgive me, another book, but you were talking about sexual abuse. And there was... So years ago, I read this book by...
00:36:25
Speaker
think it was Catherine Eden and Maria Cephalus, if I'm recalling their names correctly, called Promises I Can Keep, which is a really great book. And at least in my opinion, and Catherine Eden then went on to write another book with Luke Schaeffer.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I think along the way, these people that I'm mentioning, I think they're all PhDs or something. And so there's a lot of research that goes on. And the book with Schaefer and Eden is called $2 a day.
00:36:57
Speaker
And it's about living on $2 a day in the United States. And they say more than one time in the book that All of all of the people that they interviewed in for their research, there was actually a decent number and so as a percentage of the people who and they were all women, of course, who had traded sex or some form of sexual activity for money or food. And I think I recall that in a lot of cases it was for food, not even for money, which i gosh, I shouldn't even say not even for money.
00:37:36
Speaker
And I think I remember that there were a couple of cases where the men or women that they were talking to, their daughters had traded sexual activity for money or food.
00:37:51
Speaker
And yeah, anyway, you, I realize I'm jumping back a bit, but I remember reading this book and, you know, talking about poverty in America and so on. And like one of these girls in this book, she got, I forget what age she was, maybe in high school or something. like She got a message on, I think, Instagram from her gym teacher saying, I've been watching you for some time.
00:38:17
Speaker
And they're like, for some time, you know, I'm 15. How long? I was like a little girl some time ago. And i I suppose, what can we take from this?
00:38:29
Speaker
Eric reads a lot of books is one. And the second thing, I suppose, may be more important. is's just there are some people who have the odds stacked against them, whether you're born with fetal alcohol syndrome or if you have to deal with issues of poverty or displacement or family dissolution, any number of things, they can contribute to trauma, which I think was mentioned a couple of times.
00:38:55
Speaker
And one thing after another, it just makes it more and more difficult, regardless of whether you're that Vietnam vet or you're the whiter black man or you're a whiter black woman or whatever it is.
00:39:08
Speaker
You know, if you have something like your gym teacher approaching you and, and, or you're not even looking for money, you're doing it just for food, you know, like to feed yourself or your siblings.
00:39:24
Speaker
I mean, imagine that situation. i'm I'm going to guess that you've probably interviewed people that have told you stories like this. I did. And in fact, well, it's it's not funny but that you mentioned that, but literally the very first person i ever interviewed was a young lady. I mean, she was probably 18 to 20 years old, and she'd come to rescue mission in North Carolina fairly recently.
00:39:47
Speaker
And she was the only one of her siblings who was addicted because she had sold herself from the time she was 12 or 13 so that her younger brothers could eat.
00:39:58
Speaker
Meanwhile, her parents were both addicts, and so they were in and out of the house. And mom, to you know to affirm the book you read, mom had to pay for her fix. So there was guys in and out of the house. And so this girl had grown it up in ah in a horribly abusive home before her mom just disappeared altogether.
00:40:18
Speaker
And then she had to take care of her little like five, eight, and ten-year-old brothers. And the mothering instinct was so strong in her that she's like, well, I'm just going to do whatever I have to do to feed my younger brothers.
00:40:32
Speaker
It's just enough to you know break your heart. what a what a young like What chance does she have in life when that's her childhood? was just hard to fathom. But yeah I mean, to it to affirm what you're saying, and the sexual abuse is stunning, that the impact it has on women. And I think that there's a you know, if you if you'll permit me to shift slightly, there's a lot of, i think, well-meaning people, perhaps with liver tin libertarian tendencies, who feel like, well, sex work should be legal if the the adults are consenting.
00:41:07
Speaker
But I think, like, maybe on paper, you know, but in real life, like, the women who are predominantly doing that, are not making that decision on paper with all of the, you know, they're women who grew up in the worst circumstances imaginable, who are doing what they have to do to survive, who are then being completely manipulated through force of physical violence,
00:41:33
Speaker
by pimps and abusive men to engage in this for, I mean, like, you should never have to sleep with somebody for food, you know, to state something that we would all agree with. And yet, like, that's that's the reality, you know, based on your book and based on people I've interviewed that, like, that's what happens out there.
00:41:50
Speaker
in And ah that is a fruit of the the of the skin trade. And obviously, like it shouldn't be that way. And yet it becomes that way very, very quickly.
Accountability in Recovery
00:42:01
Speaker
is so I think that's changing the subject slightly. But like first off, why I strongly believe that should be illegal, because it's never just on paper to consenting adults making ah a financial decision, or at least so infrequently that it's statistically irrelevant, but certainly because it keeps women locked into homelessness and addiction.
00:42:22
Speaker
Jeff, what would you do if someone that you loved was dealing with, you know, severe or long-term addiction and or homelessness or associated issues?
00:42:36
Speaker
I love that you asked that question. And yeah, if my I mean, if my son was addicted to something, i would I would do everything I could to get him to go to one of these rescue missions. For starters, if there's anybody in this situation who's listening, like it's free.
00:42:51
Speaker
You know, it's, I mean, it's all of your meals, your shelter, your counseling, your classes, your work training so that you can, you know, leave financially viable. i mean, you're not going to be Jeff Bezos, but you can have a job, you know, that meets your needs, like all of that is provided.
00:43:09
Speaker
And so you can, you know, comprehensively brick by brick, rebuild your life that the elements of the of these missions are, are beautiful, you know they, they, they, like I, like I mentioned previously, they, they set out to address the root causes of a person's brokenness.
00:43:25
Speaker
And then they, you know, try to rebuild them piece by piece physically so that you have food and shelter so that you can become healthy again. And emotionally to deal with the the heart trauma that may have afflicted you from the time of youth or whenever things went wrong through counseling and classes, through Bible studies.
00:43:45
Speaker
for those who are spiritually inclined. I do think the the spiritual element has proven very important among the people that I've interviewed. Having like a sense of ah a bigger sense of purpose and redemption and forgiveness, those are factors that touch a lot of people's hearts.
00:44:01
Speaker
Since a lot of people go to the missions having not only suffered greatly, but also hurt people badly. And then having that hope of like, I can have a life, you know, that's different from this one. And then, you know, financially, you know, having a tenable future as well, having a job that's sustainable so that you can pay your bills. So the missions do all that.
00:44:22
Speaker
And so that's certainly, you know, if somebody I loved was in that situation, I would strongly encourage them to go there and do whatever I could to get them there. I will say that there are factors that you know somebody who's in that situation has to exhibit. And all I'll share a story that was maybe one of my very favorite people I interviewed. He was a guy in California, and he was kind of like the first person air i ever interviewed where knew he was going to succeed just based on the accountability he modeled.
00:44:54
Speaker
I said, you know, so tell me about yourself. And he goes, well, I was a horrible father. I was a gangbanger. I was a horrible son. i mistreated people. i was violent.
00:45:04
Speaker
I had no self-control. I was a slave to my impulses. And he like one by one took ownership of every single negative factor that you could think of. You know, i I know when I screw up or when I have a bad habit, I've inclined to try to minimize it. Well, you know, it's not as bad as it could have been. and I've got some progress. and You know, just the excuses are just pathetic.
00:45:26
Speaker
But this guy, mean, he just took ownership of every single thing. And sure enough, you know, years later, when I went back to that mission for another trip, ah he was doing great. He was working there. He was ministering to people.
00:45:39
Speaker
So seeing somebody who's hit that rock bottom and who can acknowledge and not make excuses anymore is really critical. And and in in no way, shape or form did that guy deny that bad things had happened to him, but he took ownership of the things that he was responsible for. And I feel like until that happens, it's really hard to recover because to to go back to your point previously, we feel like it's a disease or like it's a victim. and We have a victim mentality and um you know we can we can be victims and yet still take ownership
00:46:13
Speaker
Those two don't have to live in contradiction with each other. They can exist in tension with each other, and yet a person can accept both and move forward. I think that's what the missions do really well.
00:46:25
Speaker
There's a lot that I want ask you about, especially around, you know, you talked about some of the spiritual or religious aspects because I definitely have an opinion on whether any of these belief systems are right or wrong, that simplifying things for people, giving them something to rely on, I think really matters.
Faith and Spiritual Forgiveness in Recovery
00:46:49
Speaker
There are things to dig into there.
00:46:51
Speaker
The community, you know, having a community because if you've, if you've gone through addiction or homelessness, you probably haven't had that. There are lots of things, but I do know that we also have a limited time today. Unfortunately, we talked a lot before we hit record because there's some we needed some time to catch up. So I'm, well,
00:47:12
Speaker
I'll wrap up with, I think, two questions unless something else comes up. One is where should people go to connect with you or to learn more? You know, where would you direct them, whether it's you or so or somewhere else?
00:47:27
Speaker
And two, you have any words of wisdom or things that you would want people to know before we're done? Yeah, absolutely I appreciate that.
00:47:38
Speaker
People can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Jeff Meredith, and I think I'm listed as an associate creative director at RKD Group, which is my day job. And um so they can find me there. Heck, I mean, I'm on Facebook too, you know, so any of the socials.
00:47:55
Speaker
But yeah, I guess if if there's something i I wanted people to know, if you if you'll permit like a spiritual proselytizing, I won't make it long or awkward. But I'll say that, you know, what I've seen give the the mission guests hope in going back to that or just any of the people who've experienced homelessness and addiction and and abuse and all these awful things and who have then in turn done bad things. Like everybody wants to make sense of the story.
00:48:21
Speaker
Like, why did I go through this? with If there's a ah real God, you know, why did he let me go through? i mean, that's a question that I've heard again and again that they were asking themselves while they were on the streets. Yeah. And, you know people have cried out to God from rock bottom and and then had faith journeys from there. I'd say we can't we can't know. like you You just can't know all that stuff. Like, if there is a transcendent God of the universe, you're not being a human. You're not going to know all the reasons why he did the things he did or allowed the things he allowed.
00:48:53
Speaker
But I think that ah power the power of the missions, the faith-based missions at least, is that the guests experience forgiveness. Like when they when they see all the bad they've done, they see a guy on a cross with his arms stretched out who calls without condemnation in spite of knowing everything really well, like the the wrong that people do.
00:49:12
Speaker
And so I think that's very... comforting, as you can imagine, to somebody who's lived through the worst of life and and maybe done some things that they sincerely regret. Of course, you don't have to, you know, heck, you can be like me. You can have done tons of things you regret without being homeless or addicted, you know So anyhow, um I guess ah I would share that message. I mean, I think that gives the missions a lot of their impact in people's lives.
00:49:36
Speaker
And um if you'll forgive me for taking it in more spiritual nature, I appreciate the opportunity.
Conclusion and Appreciation
00:49:43
Speaker
Jeff, I appreciate you recording with me. I'm glad that the weather in your area cooperated.
00:49:50
Speaker
And um I'll have links to everything we talked about in the show notes. So thank you for being here, Jeff. I appreciate it. Eric, thank you so much, sincerely, for the privilege of chatting with you about this cause that has become near and dear to my heart. I sincerely appreciate it.