Addiction 101

Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 2: Addiction 101.”

Casey Arrillaga: How has addiction affected your family?

Female Speaker: It robbed me of my father.

Female Speaker: Addiction's affected my family in absolutely every way.

Male Speaker: It has caused a lot of turmoil.

Female Speaker: It goes back to what I understand is at least three generations.

Female Speaker: It robbed my daughter of her mother. It robbed my mother of her daughter.

Female Speaker: Addiction has made our family quite challenging.

Male Speaker: Addiction has affected my family tremendously.

Male Speaker: It's affected my relationship with my sister where I wouldn't – I'd go for months without talking to her. It's a very difficult thing for everybody involved. It doesn't just affect the one individual. It's a disease that affects the whole family.

Male Speaker: Addiction is spread not only genetically through some of my relatives and I assume ancestors.

Female Speaker: It's generational.

Female Speaker: I think of him every day.

Casey Arrillaga: Welcome to Addiction in the Family, a podcast by and for family members of anyone with an addiction. My name is Casey Arrillaga, and I'm a social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Emotional Wellness Centers in Texas. I've led hundreds of family workshops, but I've also lived the experience of being family to addiction as both a child and adult. My wife, Kira, and I were in our addictions together for over a decade and now have been in recovery together for almost 20 years. Join us as we offer experience, strength, and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together.

Kira Arrillaga: Hi, this is Kira. In this episode, we’re going to look at some of the basics of addiction, what it is and what it isn’t, discuss addiction with psychologist Dr. Heather Ingram, and look at addiction from a scientific perspective, all to help families find greater peace and understanding around this difficult but vital subject.

Casey Arrillaga: We’ll start right in with all of this after a quick word from one of our sponsors.

[Commercial]

Welcome back. Let’s take a closer look at what addiction is and what it isn’t. I should note that throughout this podcast we will use the term addiction to include alcoholism, which is simply addiction to alcohol. Similarly, alcohol is a drug by any scientific measure, so any discussion of drugs can be assumed to include alcohol by default. You’ll hear us use terms such as person with addiction rather than referring to people as addicts or alcoholics. This is because addiction may dominate someone’s life and impact everyone around them, but there’s more to that person than their disease. We’re not trying to be politically correct. These are just our editorial choices. Some of our interviewees may make different choices, and we respect that.

To start off, we thought we’d ask people who’ve been directly affected by addiction for their understanding of what it is. Some of our respondents are in recovery from addiction. Some are family members. Some work with addiction daily. Some fit all three of those categories at once. Let’s hear what they have to say.

Okay, in one sentence or less, what is addiction?

Female Speaker: Scary.

Female Speaker: I don’t even know how to answer that question right now.

Female Speaker: Addiction is a disease that steals your brain and highjacks your body.

Male Speaker: Addiction is a reliance on chemicals, or substances, or behaviors that we crave in order to fill the holes in our lives that spirituality has left.

Male Speaker: Addiction is the inability to leave a substance or something or somebody alone that you would like to leave alone but don’t possess the power to do so.

Female Speaker: Addiction to me I believe is something that takes over your mind.

Female Speaker: I think addiction is not being able to control yourself.

Male Speaker: One’s inability to control the desired intake of some form or substance.

Female Speaker: Addiction is strength. Addiction is dedication.

Female Speaker: It doesn’t have to be substances. Addiction could be anything. For me, it’s food, something that is overpowering me. It just takes away my thoughts. Yeah, I’m only able to focus on that thing regardless of the consequences or the detriment that it poses to me and my family. It’s all-powerful.

Female Speaker: Addiction is so many different things for me, but mainly, it’s my life. I am an addict. I’m always going to be an addict, but I can overcome it.

Female Speaker: It’s part of your life now. That’s what I think addiction is.

Casey Arrillaga: As you can hear, there’s not a simple and commonly agreed upon definition of addiction. Despite the fact that the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and American Psychological Association have all agreed that addiction is a disease, no one can be diagnosed with addiction. That’s right. Even if your family member goes to an addiction treatment center, they will not officially be diagnosed as having an addiction despite the fact that everyone from the admission staff to the people helping your loved one plan for what to do after they leave the treatment center will talk about addiction, and your loved one will probably be taken to meetings where people talk about their recovery from addiction.

Kira Arrillaga: If professionals aren’t treating someone for addiction or at least they’re not calling it that, what are they treating?

Casey Arrillaga: The official diagnosis would be for a substance use disorder, usually broken down by the type of drug. For instance, what most people would call alcoholism is professionally known as alcohol use disorder, which would then be rated as mild, moderate, or severe based on how many areas of life are negatively impacted by the drug use. This will determine what type of help is recommended. For instance, for a diagnosis of, say, alcohol use disorder severe, you’d be referred to a program like Windmill Wellness Ranch for safe medical detox followed by residential treatment, whereas a diagnosis of alcohol use disorder mild will be more likely to be treated with weekly counseling at a place like InMindOut Emotional Wellness Centers. See what we did there?

Kira Arrillaga: Clever.

Casey Arrillaga: For someone with a mild or moderate disorder, I would also recommend starting right in to one of the recovery fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous or SMART Recovery. Someone in residential treatment for a severe disorder will also most likely be taken to those meetings anyway, and then be told to keep going regularly after they finish treatment. It’s important to know that detoxing from depressants such as alcohol or benzodiazepine is the most dangerous. Medical help should always be utilized.

Kira Arrillaga: There’s been a lot of focus lately on behavioral addictions like compulsive use of things like shopping, food, sex, video games, or gambling. What’s the deal with those?

Casey Arrillaga: Behavioral addictions, sometimes called process addictions, are becoming more documented and thus getting more scientific scrutiny. While some people still take issue philosophically with the idea of being addicted to a behavior, there’s an increasing number of studies showing that behavioral addictions seem to show up like drug addictions from a scientific perspective. That being said, only gambling disorder has been given the status of a diagnosable behavioral addiction in the DSM-5.

Kira Arrillaga: Which is the big book of diagnosable conditions of thinking and behavior put out by the American Psychiatric Association.

Casey Arrillaga: It’s worth noting that the World Health Organization has acknowledged compulsive sexual behavior as a disease, so the next edition of the DSM may follow suit. People who have such addictions aren’t waiting around for anyone’s official blessing. They’re finding or forming recovery fellowships to address their problem, adapting the same recovery tools such as the 12 steps that have helped so many people with drug addictions. On a personal note, I’ll say that my journey into recovery started with addressing compulsive sex and love behavior. Once I started getting help for that, I saw that I need to stop drinking to pull it off because one addictive behavior added fuel to the fire of the other.

Kira Arrillaga: I used alcohol and other drugs to lower my inhibitions so I could act out in my own sex and love addiction.

Casey Arrillaga: There is a lot of crossover between using various drugs, including alcohol, and also a crossover between any drug addiction and the various behavioral addictions. That’s one of the reasons that over time many people who enter recovery for one behavior find themselves tackling others as they grow in their recovery, sometimes participating in several recovery fellowships over time. While some would say, man, I have a lot of addictions, I’ve come to the conclusion that I and many people like me simply have one condition called addiction that shows up in several ways in my life.

Kira Arrillaga: All of which leaves us with the basic question what is addiction?

Casey Arrillaga: Let’s go with this. Addiction is a chronic relapsing and potentially deadly brain disease that strikes hardest below the level of conscious thought in the part of the brain that has the strongest influence on how we make decisions. If this sounds scary, well, it should. No one likes to think of a loved one having such a condition, but the science around this is solid. We need to have a clear-eyed view of what we’re up against. Addiction is also referred to by many as a family disease. Almost anyone who is in relationship with a family member or other loved one with addiction is negatively affected. The entire family can find itself organized around the addiction trying to fight it, hide it, or hide from it. This can lead to serious psychological harm and painful generational patterns.

Research shows that family member of someone with an addiction are more vulnerable to chronic health conditions, suicide, PTSD, high-risk behaviors, victimization, unintended pregnancies, lower life achievement, shorter life expectancies, and a greater chance of falling prey to addiction themselves. In short, addiction is a force of destruction and often a killer.

Kira Arrillaga: It’s also important to clarify what addiction isn’t. Addiction is not a lack of morals, a lack of willpower, a sign of parental failure, or the result of simply having hung out with the wrong crowd. It is certainly not a choice. It is not anybody’s fault, and it is not a problem to be solved by shaming and blaming. Most importantly, it’s not a hopeless condition. While addiction is often mistaken for these things, families cannot afford such misunderstandings. How we define a problem will define the solutions that we seek. Thus, a simplistic misunderstanding of addiction will lead the family to attempt solutions that rarely get the desired results. Such misunderstanding can also set up unrealistic expectations leading to further pain and conflict.

Casey Arrillaga: If an addiction was evidence of an intrinsic lack of morals, we should expect to see people in recovery turning out to be amoral. Instead, we see people recovering and embracing their best qualities and being of service to others. They aren’t learning to fake it well. They’re recovering who they really are. Additionally, if addiction was the result of a lack of morals, people with addiction would have no regrets about their actions. Instead, I’ve seen that people with addiction are often filled with regret and shame when they first get sober.

I know I certainly was. While in active addiction, I worked hard to justify my addictive actions to myself and others if they’d listen. Despite my best efforts, I knew deep inside that these actions took me far from who I wanted to be. If I had no morals, I could never have thought this. I also found that when I was not in the grip of the compulsion to act out I was compassionate, helpful, kind, and a generally good person. As one of my mentors in recovery has often said, we aren’t bad people trying to be good. We are sick people trying to be well.

We asked psychologist Dr. Heather Ingram to weigh in on the idea of addiction as a disease among other things. Dr. Ingram is the founder and CEO of InMindOut Emotional Wellness Centers, which offers outpatient counseling and psychological services at three locations in Texas. She and I met through co-creating a family program and a residential addiction treatment center several years ago, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome her to our program. Dr. Ingram, welcome to Addiction and the Family.

Dr. Ingram: Hi. Glad to be here.

Casey Arrillaga: Could you tell us a little bit about your professional experience with addiction?

Dr. Ingram: My professional experience with addiction started in my residency for my doctorate. I worked at a residential substance abuse treatment facility, and that was my first taste of working directly with clients with addictive behaviors. I couldn’t get enough and continued to work with clients with a variety of different addictive behaviors, including eating disorders. I did that for many years, and I continue to see clients with eating disorders as well as drug and alcohol abuse issues.

Casey Arrillaga: As a psychologist, how do you see addiction?

Dr. Ingram: My view of addiction is primarily a brain-base disorder. I think the evidence is pretty solid to support a high genetic connection for people with a broad range of addictive behavior. Just like most other mental health conditions, there’s a combination of nature-nurture, and the same is very much true for addiction. What I’ve noticed in the work that I’ve done with families or clients who struggle with addiction issues, I think there’s a tendency for people to view it more in the nurture sense than the nature sense, and I think that’s inaccurate.

Casey Arrillaga: I’m with you 100% there, but we both know that a lot of family members have trouble accepting addiction as being a disease and see it more easily as a moral failing. What would you want to tell them?

Dr. Ingram: I would like to sit down with them and explain that it’s not and explain that they’re not alone in viewing it in that way, giving them education that there’s a major genetic component associated with it. Usually, when I start exploring who in the family that they have noticed with similar behaviors or even ones that are other forms of addictive behavior – so for instance, if I’m working with a family with an eating disorder and we start talking about the other family members, it’s amazing how the light bulb starts going off when they realize, oh, well, mom struggled with something similar too. Now that I’m talking about it, I’m noticing that, or even if it’s not direct linkage in terms of the addictive behavior so if we’re talking about an eating disorder, just because mom doesn’t struggle with an eating disorder doesn’t mean her or other members of the immediate family don’t struggle with other forms of addictive behavior.

I think when people start to realize that about their family systems I think it’s easier for them to understand, oh, maybe this psychologist has something here when she tells me that there’s also a nature element or a genetic element going on. When families also recognize that there’s a big genetic component, it is often times a sigh of relief. It’s not just me failing as a parent and having the discussion about something we refer to as detachment with love, and when we start talking about that this is not all your fault, I think can be really helpful for people on that.

Casey Arrillaga: If I may ask, what draws you personally to addiction work?

Dr. Ingram: I find it interesting I think because of my personal experience with people who struggle with addiction issues, and I think it’s something that once you know how to screen for addictive behaviors with your clients you see it. It’s very common, and that was something as I grew in my clinical work, just like I see in my clients, it’s an awakening too when you start learning about addiction and addiction issues. Then you realize, wow, let me look around at all of the people in my family who fit this profile, and so that was also a reason why I was so fascinated as well.

Casey Arrillaga: It sounds like learning more about addiction changed the way you saw your own family.

Dr. Ingram: I think it’s something that is a natural process with us as therapists. I know for me personally it is. It’s a wow moment and a bit of an aha moment. I think for me it’s, oh, that makes sense, and for me, it assisted me in developing an appreciation for and an acceptance of the people in my family who struggle with addictive issues in a way that I previously did not have. It allowed me that opportunity.

Casey Arrillaga: Needless to say, not everybody’s going to go and get a doctorate in psychology, but what difference do you think that understanding would make for a family member?

Dr. Ingram: Understanding the addiction model and understanding what happens when you have an addiction of course allowed me more compassion towards the family members that I personally witnessed struggling and friends as well.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you for sharing some of your personal insight and experience. On another note, how important would you say it is for families to get involved in some of the recovery fellowships like Al-Anon or Families Anonymous, any of those?

Dr. Ingram: It’s essential is what I would tell families because we’re not an island, and if anybody has a family member who’s ever struggled with an addiction or anything else and most people have something of that sort in their family, whether it’s addiction issues or mental illness, I’m sure they would tell you that it has affected them in some way, shape, or form. That’s completely normal and natural. One thing that I tell my clients often is, when you’re on the airplane, there’s a reason that the flight attendant giving the instructions tells you to put your oxygen mask on first before helping your children, and that’s so that everybody makes it out alive, including the caretaker or the person, the family member who’s watching the other people around them struggle. It’s easy for people and natural for people to want to out of the kindness of their heart – and especially when it comes to family members, there’s so much love there, it’s easy to set aside one’s own care for themselves to care for others. The problem is that it’s usually unhealthy for them and ultimately for the person they’re trying to care for.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. Any final things that you’d want to tell family members?

Dr. Ingram: That they’re not alone and that there’s people who are dealing with what they’re dealing with, whether they’re the person struggling with the addiction or whether they’re the person who’s trying to be supportive of that person. There’s support, and Al-Anon, like you mentioned, is just one of those AA therapy. There’s a lot of different layers of support, so if we’re having the conversation, it’s a really good start for them.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you, Dr. Ingram, once again, Dr. Heather Ingram of InMindOut Emotional Wellness Centers. After a quick break, we’ll look at why we call addiction a medical condition and then listen to where people are finding hope. Stay with us.

[Commercial]

Welcome back. As promised, we’re going to hear why addiction is considered a medical condition rather than the sign of, say, moral failing. Here’s Kira to lead us in.

Kira Arrillaga: In this episode’s edition of “Families Have Questions,” we address some of the common questions we hear from family members around why we call addiction a disease and whether this holds up scientifically. This will be an overview only with excerpts from a presentation Casey recently gave on addiction in the brain. If you want to hear more detail on addiction as a disease, what is happening in the brain, and many of the factors that put people at risk, we will be releasing the full presentation as its own episode. Without further ado, here’s Casey.

Casey Arrillaga: First and foremost, the whole disease thing, thinking about is it really a disease, and if so, why would we say that? To understand that we need to understand on just a basic level what makes anything a disease, or maybe to simply that to make it easier to wrap our heads around say what makes anything a medical condition? What I mean by that is what makes something where I’d say I need to go see a medical practitioner about this versus say I need to go get a moral lecture about this, or I need to see a religious practitioner about this, or I need to see if it’ll go away on its own. Those are the magic words of American medicine. Maybe it’ll go away on its own. How many people who struggle with addiction in the room at some point thought maybe this will just go away on its own? Yeah, all the hands go up, right? That idea of, yeah, maybe if I just hang in there I won’t have this problem anymore. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to control it.

As we start to look and say what makes anything a medical condition, we got to try and figure out what we’re looking for. It turns out there’s three major factors that go into that. One, very simple, it has to be part of the body. Now, that might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s actually really, really important. What that means is there needs to be some organ or system of organs that seems to be where the problem is happening. The second thing is there has to be some kind of observable damage, and last but not least, from that we see some kind of symptoms.

Now, usually, we go backwards with this, right? We start with symptoms. From that, we try and figure out what is happening in what place? Did anyone here ever play the game Clue? Yeah, it’s that kind of idea, right? We think this happened in this place, so we see these things happening. Now, if we just pick something – I’m just going to pick a condition here, and I will say I am getting thirsty a lot. Based on that, would be able to tell what the problem is? No, we don’t have enough information yet.

Let’s say there’s frequent urination. Would we say we know what the problem is yet? No, not yet. I might say that at some point I have neuropathy, which that’s really bad. You don’t want that to happen. Based on this so far, do we know what it is? Diabetes, yeah, we could say – we could look at all these things and say we might be dealing with diabetes, probably the neuropathy that pushes it over. Of course, if you go into a diabetic coma, that’s a big giveaway right there.

Then, based on that, we would say – I’m going to really oversimplify here. Things are out of balance. We know where. We do, actually. It’s the pancreas. Now, I only know that because I’ve given this lecture a bunch of times, and sometimes there were doctors sitting in the audience and say, hey, by the way, it’s pancreas, buddy. I’m like cool. Thank you so much. Next time the lecture will be even better.

If we know that we have this problem in the pancreas, can we just go in and fix the pancreas? No, we can’t. That becomes a part of the problem is that we know where the problem is, but we can’t just go in and fix it right away. There are things we can do, right? We’re not just stuck with this, yay, modern medicine. For a long time, diabetes was a pretty quick death sentence. Now we just take for granted that, oh, it’s this thing where you have to manage it, so we can manage it through medications, medical practice but also through a lot of behavior change. A big way to help manage it isn’t just I got to go see the doctor from time to time, but I’m actually going to change some things in my daily life.

I might change my diet. I might exercise a little bit more. Those are good things, right? Depending on the severity, I might have to check my blood sugar, take insulin, all those sorts of things, but if I do all that, can I live a good life? Yeah, if I do all the things you suggested, I can live a really great life, feel good with it. All is good.

What happens, though, if I do that for a couple of years, doing all the things you suggested and then one day I get up and I’m like you know what? I miss chocolate cake. I’m tired of sticking my finger and measuring the blood sugar. I don’t feel like seeing the doctor anymore. What happens to me? At the very least, all the symptoms – I hear you say, hey, you die, which can happen, definitely, but all the symptoms start to come back. I might pick up where I left off and start going down to there because it can get pretty bad. We mentioned coma. You can get blindness and eventually death, of course. It’ll kill you. You’re absolutely right.

Does this analogy look familiar to anybody? Yeah. What do you think the relapse rate is for diabetes if you had to guess? Where would we put it, 80%? Okay, it’s a little high, actually. Whew! Yeah, it’s about 60 to 40%, depending on who you talk to, and that turns out to be a common relapse rate for a lot of chronic conditions. Part of the reason for that is because to deal with a lot of chronic conditions you have to change your behavior. Probably no surprise to anyone in the room, human behavior is difficult to change. It’s really hard to make changes and stick with them. It’s tempting to go back to what we know.

There was actually a really cool study done, and they’re starting, as I understand, to have more and more backup for this finding that you can really dramatically improve somebody’s odds around really nasty chronic disease, Alzheimer’s, and Alzheimer’s, again, known in our day and age as pretty much a death sentence. It’s a really bad one. You lose your personality. It’s terrible for you and all the people around you, a lot of confusion, a lot of anger. It’s pretty heavy stuff. There was a breakthrough study at UCLA I’m going to say within the last five years or so, and in that study, someone showed in nine out of ten participants that it not only stopped but actually started to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s. Something we weren’t sure could be done. There was some medication, but a lot of it was diet, exercise, super healthy living. I mean, brushing your gums. Everything anyone’s ever told you to do, like a good health thing, the people in the – participants in the study, the people that were doing it were required to do that thing.

Check it out. They were walking out of a death sentence. Their brains were getting better. They were regaining the memory. You know what they did? They complained. They complained that they had to change their diet. I have to keep doing this forever?

One of the doctors said, most of these trials, we give somebody a medication. They’re gaining weight. They’re feeling sluggish. These people are in the best shape of their lives. They’re feeling super energetic. Mostly what they can think of is when do I get to go back to my old behavior? That’s a normal human thought, and I think that’s what gets in the way of a lot of recovery around a lot of chronic conditions.

Addiction particularly stands out in that, partly because of the symptoms that we see. When somebody has diabetes, we don’t judge them for the symptoms. We might say, hey, you should’ve been more careful and known it ran in your family. Eat more carefully and things like that, which by the way is a touch misguided. There’s a lot about getting diabetes that nobody has any control over, but on some level, we even recognize that. We’re like, oh, man, you poor thing. You have diabetes. I know you didn’t choose to have diabetes.

When we look at the symptoms of addiction, the kind of things that get people to show up to treatment, that’s a little bit different. The kind of symptoms that get people to decide to come to treatment – and usually, when I ask, those people will say, oh, a higher tolerance. I’m like, man, people do not show up to treatment because they have a higher tolerance. They say, well, health conditions. Those definitely happen as symptoms, but that’s not why people show up to treatment either. People show up to treatment because their life is either falling apart or it’s about to fall apart, so you’ll run into problems in areas like family, problems with kids like CPS might be getting involved, problems with honesty, work problems, absolutely, which lead to money problems.

We have these big problems. These are the kind of things that get people to say maybe I need to do something about this, and sometimes it goes to the deeper stuff. Sometimes people do decide I’m going to get sober without any treatment or without having to go through everything falling apart, but what they’re losing instead – they’re not having so much external problem. They’re having internal problems. They’re having problems with emotional regulation. They’re having problems with self-esteem. They haven’t lost their job, but they feel like they’ve lost their values. They feel like they’ve lost their internal sense of control.

Now, people often in treatment centers show up because they’re having these big external problems. We know they’re having these internal problems too. Some people can show up at – like an AA meeting, or a SMART Recovery meeting, or Celebrate Recovery meeting. Maybe they don’t get to the point of going to treatment, but they still have all this emotional stuff, self-esteem, values, loss of self-control, things like that. Unlike diabetes or any other chronic condition, both the person with the addiction and the people around them will say that’s your fault. That’s on you, buddy. You’re the one who’s making those decisions.

Our experience is that’s true, right? We are the ones making these decisions. I mean, I’m in recovery. I remember making a decision to act out every time that I did. What I didn’t know and I’ll be able to show you guys is that we actually know scientifically why that happens.

Kira Arrillaga: Again, that’s from a presentation Casey gave at Windmill Wellness Ranch on addiction and the brain. We’ll have a complete version of the presentation later as its own podcast.

Casey Arrillaga: We know we’ve thrown a lot of information out there. It may seem a little overwhelming, so we decided to end this episode on a note of hope. So many families wonder where they can find hope around addiction, so we asked some people with direct experience for their opinion on the subject.

Where do you find hope around addiction?

Female Speaker: For me, the hope around addiction was when I really was given the experience of unconditional love in a container that did not feed the addiction but still didn’t abandon me, and that’s where I was able to then dive in deep and see what my addiction was and find the support that I needed.

Female Speaker: I find hope in spirituality and fellowship. I can’t do this alone, and so knowing that other people you can rely on and go through this journey with you, I think that’s super important.

Male Speaker: Anything that involves a fellowship of people with understanding of the disease.

Female Speaker: The first place I find hope is in 12-step groups. It’s the first place that I come when I’m really feeling hopeless, which I have been a lot recently, and so I know I can always come into these rooms and just feel the hope in the air but also just hear people’s hopeful stories and shares. The second place where I find hope is in the literature. If I just flip back to the index of one of our daily readers and read something and read enough pages on it, by the time I’m done I feel hopeful again. That’s what I do.

Kira Arrillaga: That was beautiful. Thanks.

Male Speaker: One of my teachers said that addiction is the weight that God gives strong people to make them stronger.

Male Speaker: There’s a lot of pain in it. There’s a lot of difficulty. What’s really cool is that through the growth in – with a lot of clinical work, a lot of step work, and a lot of soul searching. Doing through the soul searching is where I think that you start discovering parts of yourself that you didn’t know are there. You start finding your heart, finding the heart of other people.

Female Speaker: All of the people I have seen in recovery, getting to watch people recover, seeing them blossom when they begin to work a program that gives them back self-esteem and integrity and hope.

Male Speaker: I would trust a recovered addict over the average person more than – I feel like someone in recovery is more self-aware, more trustworthy.

Male Speaker: In 12-step recovery treatment, anything really that you can do to get yourself recovered gives me a lot of hope because I’ve seen it over and over work.

Female Speaker: That I can connect with other people. I can be able to – I don’t know, yeah, connect.

Casey Arrillaga: Thanks for being with us through another episode of Addiction and the Family. In this episode, we looked at how addiction is hard to define, what it is, and what it isn’t, heard about the psychological view of addiction, and learned some of the basic facts about why we call it a disease. As they say in many recovery meetings, take what you liked and leave the rest. Go out and explore the possibilities for recovery in your life, and give your loved ones the space and dignity to make their own choices.

If you like this podcast, please subscribe. It means a lot to us. If you know anyone else who could use what we have to offer, please tell them about Addiction and the Family. If you have comments about this podcast, have a question you would like answered on the show, or want to contribute your voice or just want to say hi, you can write to us at addictionandthefamily@gmail.com. We’re also happy to be your friend on Facebook, and we can be found tweeting on Twitter.

Kira Arrillaga: Addiction and the Family is produced, written, and engineered by Kira and Casey Arrillaga with music by Casey.

Casey Arrillaga: In our next episode, we will start our “Spotlight on Recovery” series. In each of these episodes, we explore a different family’s story of recovery in depth. In the premiere episode, we interview Jay and Myra, a couple who are moving through the challenges of being married and both in early recovery after one of them went through treatment. See you then.