Wired for Addiction with Dr. Evelyn Higgins

Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 42: Wired for Addiction with Dr. Evelyn Higgins.”

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 and the Family. My name is Casey Arrillaga, and I'm a clinical social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Emotional Wellness Center in Texas. I’m the author of the books Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions and Spirituality for People Who Hate Spirituality.

Kira Arrillaga: I’m Kira Arrillaga, addiction counselor intern and recovery coach at Windmill. Casey and I were in our addictions together for over ten years and have now been in recovery together for almost twice that long.

Casey Arrillaga: I've led hundreds of family workshops, but just as important is that Kira and I have lived the experience of being family to addiction as both children and adults.

Kira Arrillaga: Join us as we offer experience, strength, and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together.

Casey Arrillaga: In this episode, we interviewed Dr. Evelyn Higgins about the work she’s doing on the genetics of addiction and how she uses it to bring hope and offer help through her company Wired for Addiction. She also talks about some of the personal journey that led to her interest in helping those with addiction and their families. All this and more after a break to hear from one of our sponsors. [Commercial] Welcome back. Without any further ado, let’s go straight to our interview. All right. Welcome to the show. If you want to take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience and let us know, what are you doing on a show called Addiction and the Family? Dr. Higgins: Hey, Casey. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Dr. Evelyn Higgins. Currently doing a lot of different things, but I am a diplomate in addictionology and compulsive disorders. That practice has been going on in my world for over 30 years. Started out in the integrative medicine/disability area actually practicing as a chiropractor 35 years ago and was in a very rural area where there were no resources for addiction. I was having people come in. At that time, people were becoming somewhat dependent on meds. Then 20 years later, I’m practicing in an urban area and I’m seeing that shift go from dependent to addicted because people were being treated with the try this, try that approach to pain meds, things like that. That’s part of my career. Then from that, 32 years on, got into the addiction world and just went through a certified addictionologist to the current diplomate, but in doing that, there was also a personal reason. I married a man who was an alcoholic. A year after our daughter was born, we found out that he was adopted. I had no family health history. I now am saving science to know I need to know what’s going on here. What’s his background? What’s the family health history? I started seeing his behaviors. I need to know what I can do for my daughter this early in the game because of what I was seeing with him. That led us to where we are today. We have a company called Wired for Addiction. We look at 85 different biomarkers related to mental health and substance use and abuse. It’s been an evolution, to say the least, as I introduce myself to you, Casey. It’s all of these things just continue to build and build and we are in a world where addiction and mental health is paramount to everything else that’s happening all around us. I just saw this 35 years ago get to the point of where it is today step by step by step and the explosion of where we are now.

Casey Arrillaga: I was going to ask you what personally drew you into the field and you’ve talked about that a little bit. I have to wonder. Is there any experience that you’re aware of any addictive behavior within your own family before you married your husband? Dr. Higgins: Oh, absolutely, yeah. It’s the interesting part, Casey, which you know, this is your thing of specifically looking at the family is that when you’re in it until you’re out of it, you don’t know that this is not normal behavior. Every holiday doesn’t have to end with an explosion from some relative or whatever the case may be, someone needing the spotlight, all of those things that go along with it, but when you’re immersed in that, you don’t really know that there’s a different way. People actually live differently than that. Yes, I did.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s pretty common, as we know. Some family members may be more aware of this or less. I’m going to go ahead and say it for the program is that a lot of times we’re drawn back to those things because we have grown up around it. One big thing that I see in working with families is sometimes, and this speaks to the genetics among other things, we can see the addiction or other mental health disorders skip a generation or two, so to speak. They don’t fully blossom, but the family patterns still get passed down through every generation. People still learn how to not talk about it outside the house. They still learn how to put up with behavior they shouldn’t put up with, this sort of thing. Then they meet somebody who is in active addiction or more prone to it and we just think there’s just something about them, or there’s that spark and we really connect. We don’t even know why we’re connecting until much later. I wonder. I see you nodding along with that. Would you be able to speak to a little bit of that experience for yourself? Dr. Higgins: Sure, even down to is that what love is? If you’ve experienced siblings that behave in such a way and there’s love/hate relationships, we’ll say, and there’s alcohol infused within that, when you meet this individual, it’s like, oh, I know this. I’m already familiar. I love this. It’s already programmed into you maybe strong but it becomes a perfect storm. That’s your comfort zone, whether you know it or not, because you think you know how to navigate through such behavior.

Casey Arrillaga: Absolutely, and it reminds me of the genetic piece as well, something I often say to my clients and the family members around genetics is genetics are not fate but they are tendency and to an extent potential. In the same way growing up socially in an environment where addiction and mental health issues are somewhat normalized or almost expected, maybe feared but still expected, that it still sets us up to have a tendency to fall back into those same patterns ourselves. I think that’s part of what makes your work with genetics so powerful. You talked a little bit about what drew you into the genetic piece specifically. Give us more detail on that. Dr. Higgins: Sure, so as I said, with my daughter now, I was like, we had no family history because this was the family secret that my husband was adopted. Even before our wedding, things didn’t add up to me. I said, “Are you adopted?” He was like, “Why would you say that?” I’m like, “Because nothing is adding up. I just have this gut feeling.” I was right, but he actually did ask and was told no, so it became this double down of the lie, which was insane. After my daughter is born, that’s when the cat came out of the bag by a different relative on his side who said, “Evelyn, I wanted to let you know this, but,” he goes, “actually at your wedding.” My husband’s parents were fighting over who wanted to tell me and who didn’t at the actual event. You know what? Adoption is a beautiful thing. I would’ve said, “That is your family. Those are your parents,” but this is something that should be shared because there are genetic links to things. There is a health history that people need to know. That genetic part became important for me to find out for my daughter. As the technology evolved in this area, so did I in what I was doing and what I was doing for us and what I saw as a bigger picture of being able to create. Example, I started looking at neurotransmitters, brain chemicals 17 years ago because that technology was available, but that was the only piece looking at things like serotonin, dopamine, phenylethylene, and all those chemicals. Those were measurable. That’s where I started. It was only in tail end of 2014, beginning of 2015 that the technology was available to look at things called SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms. That’s where there’s an error in someone’s coding, but that technology wasn’t available back 17 years ago. It’s just within recent history. I started putting all these things together to identify, isolate, and be able to measure specific biomarkers. When we go over this with the individual, oftentimes there’s tears, but tears of relief because they’re like, “You are describing exactly how I feel and I never knew how to share this with someone.” Their loved ones are there, Casey. They’re like, wow, this makes sense. Now that support starts to happen by the family member and everybody says I understand where this came from. We’ve identified instead of used vocabulary words, name calling, all that that gets into that family mix. I mean, I say this in air quotes because we’re on a podcast, but people say, “I’m not crazy.” You’re not. This is just we’ve got to optimize your physiology. It’s such a big piece of it. Also, the environment is such a big piece. That’s why addiction is a biopsychosocial model, but we’ve just been looking at the psychosocial part and biology saying we need to make sure we get eight to nine hours of sleep. We need to exercise. We need to eat well. We need to be hydrated. All of those things are obviously true, but now with technology, we can take a deeper dive into, what is your individual physiology and what do we need to do for you?

Casey Arrillaga: That’s fantastic. When I teach addiction of the brain to family members with our clients sitting next to them and you can see lightbulbs coming on when we talk about it. I talk about the biological piece and say, last estimate I’ve heard, about 40% to 60% of addiction is genetic. That’s a pretty big piece of the pie, but again, because genetics are not fate, they are influenced by our experiences, by our environment, by what we go through. It’s that interplay of things. Then of course, the psychological part is how my mind reacts to all of that, which is a combination of genetics and experience. Being able to help people understand there’s a big genetic component to this, and yet, at the same time, it’s not fate. You’re not stuck that way. There are things that you can do about this. I’m excited to hear more about the biological part, but I also talk to them a lot about this is why you should address trauma because we have a certain number of clients that come in and say, “Man, I’m not talking about any of that stuff.” I say, “Well, the things you were going to take to the grave might take you to the grave.” Instead of that, what if we get in there, dig into some of those things? One of the things that I love about the treatment center where I work at Windmill Wellness Ranch is that there is a lot of forward-facing stuff, looking and saying, well, what is the latest technology? What can we do to help clients understand, but also more importantly, be able to really operationalize that understanding? We look a lot at dopamine biomarkers. Dopamine, for those that aren’t familiar with it, is really probably the Number 1 neurotransmitter that gets pointed at to say this is big in addiction but it’s not the only one. You mentioned serotonin. I actually also encourage our clients to look at oxytocin, especially around sex and love addiction where I think it plays a pretty big role, but all of that also speaks to something that a lot of people struggle with, both clients and family members and members of society, and frankly, even medical doctors and psychiatrists struggling with the idea, just the basic question, is this really a disease? Because I still see people come in and I’ll say, “How many people have trouble with the idea that this is really a medical disease?” Usually, people are almost shy about raising their hands because they know they’re supposed to say, “Yes, it’s a disease.” Yet, there’s the thought of it’s a moral failing. It’s a series of bad choices. I’m like, well, it is a series of bad choices, but those bad choices are happening for a reason. They’re us trying to really regulate ourselves. I’d love to get your perspective on some of that. Dr. Higgins: Sure, so probably to me the most exciting part of science that exists today is something called epigenetics. That’s exactly what you were talking about, right? We’re born with our DNA. Here’s your cards. Play them out. Now we know that our environment influences those genes. That’s where the perfect storm comes in. Someone says to me, “But my son, my daughter, perfect child until 21 years old. Everything was perfect. I don’t understand what happened.” What happened at 21? They went to college. They got a job. They started having all these new stressors. For their DNA, it turned on those genes, turned off those genes that were related to the behavior that we’re seeing now. All of a sudden, this is where the change came in. That’s epigenetics, how our DNA reacts to the environment. It’s all of it. That’s why it is all of those things. So often, when someone has an addiction, it starts by trying to self-medicate a diagnosed or underdiagnose condition or a trauma. Let’s say there’s anxiety and depression there. You, with your buddies and you have your first beer and you’re like, wow, this feels really good. I mean, I’ve had people tell me, as early as three and four years old, they can remember their first drink and saying I feel good. It’s self-medicating for these undertones that we’re not clear on, diagnosed, undiagnosed, trauma, as you said. It’s all of these things together. To look at it as a moral flaw, yes, it’s decisions that you make, but it’s not a moral flaw. If somebody has diabetes, we don’t say this is a moral flaw. Why are you so weak? Just don’t eat that. Just don’t drink that. We don’t say that to them, but with somebody with an addiction, it’s like, come on, man. Why are you so weak? Just get with the program. Let’s go. Stop doing it. If they could, I’m sure they would, because no one wants to wake up and say, “This is a day where I’ll really mess up my life.” None of us want to do that. The National Institute of Drug Abuse defines addiction as a chronic relapsing characterized by compulsive drug seeking despite adverse consequences. Britannica defines a disease as any harmful deviation from the normal structural or functional state of an organism. When we are addicted, we are in that disease, that distress in our body. It is a disease. You add, like I said earlier, that biopsychosocial piece, it’s all of those things together. That’s what makes it so difficult because there’s so many layers to it, as you know.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, and if I may, I’m going to offer an idea. You said a child as early as three or four years old might take a drink of alcohol or engage in some behavior. I mean, food addiction, I’m going to argue, probably starts even earlier. I’ll say in my own life, I’m in recovery from sex and love addiction was my first thing. I can trace that back to between zero and three months old, first memory of it. I think a lot of people would say, oh, I drank my first beer, yeah, it felt good, but I want to actually say it’s more like I feel okay for the first time. So many peoples’ story of addiction starts with I felt okay for the first time. I felt accepted for the first time, including self-acceptance. I felt loved for the first time, including loved by myself. I felt a sense of power, of control that I didn’t have before. There’s a couple of famous in the recovery community commentators on the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous, a couple of guys by the name of Joe and Charlie. That’s all they go by. There are some recordings that get passed around of these two guys and they’re really funny. They mention this idea. There are these promises that are given in Alcoholics Anonymous saying, if you do this stuff, you’re going to feel a new sense of ease and comfort, fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us, all these kinds of things. Their comment on it was, before AA gave me any of that, alcohol gave me that. When I first started drinking alcohol, my fear of people and economic insecurity went away. That might not be a good thing under the circumstances, but that’s what happened. I suddenly felt okay in the world. For so many people, addiction really blossoms in adolescence, of course. I say think back to yourself at 12, 13 years old and you feel okay for the first time at an age where most people don’t feel completely okay anyway, but you’ve never felt okay. All of a sudden, something comes along that says drink this, smoke this, do this with this person, eat this, whatever and you’re suddenly like, oh, I’m okay. We never knew why we didn’t feel okay. It’s really hard to talk to someone at that age and say, “Gosh, you really shouldn’t do that. That’s a bad idea. Why don’t you put that down and never do that again?” It’s hard enough to say that at 40 or 50. I say that to the family members, too. Family members often say, “Well, I can’t relate to my loved one. I don’t get why they do these things.” I’ll say, “Well, think about your favorite coping mechanism. I don’t just mean binging on ice cream and Netflix, but talking to your mom, reading a spiritual text that’s meaningful for you, talking to your higher power, and someone comes along and says you can never do that again, how scary would that be? How much distress would you feel? That’s how your loved one feels when they’re giving up their addiction or getting out of whatever mental health behavior.” These things feel like we’re okay. When people do genetic research and say that might actually be a genetic variation on how your amygdala receives dopamine, that’s a lot different than you’ve just been messed up all your life or there’s just something broken about you. Dr. Higgins: It’s more understandable, I think. It’s something to hold on to and say, objectively, this is what’s happening. They’re viewing the lens of their loved ones subjectively through their interpretation of they just don’t care or they’re just trying to mess up or however they see it. Absolutely, Casey.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, I had a dad say at one point in an addiction treatment center I worked at a number of years ago in a family workshop, this dad came in and said, “Well, this seems like a really nice place, man.” He says, “But if there’s a way to screw this up,” and he used the more offensive term, but he said, “if there’s a way to screw this up, my son’s going to find it.” He says, “I’m not even sure why I’m here. I don’t know why I’m bothering.” I said, “Well, sir, I can’t say if you’re son is going to get it this time or not because he’s swimming upstream against his own survival instinct.” That’s what he’s doing right now in trying to get sober. He’s swimming against his survival instinct because his survival instinct is going to say you need the addiction to keep going because the addiction is survival. I said, “But you might be able to get something out of being here. Maybe you could learn to not take it personally.” Because so many parents are going to look at it especially and say, “This is a reflection of my parenting.” Obviously, when we start talking about the genetics, they’re like, “Oh, man, it’s even more my fault.” I’m like, “Hold on a second. You did not pick out what genes your kid gets.” We may be getting there. I’m not sure that’s a great idea overall because a lot of the genes we don’t know for sure what they’re doing or what they’re needed for in the same way that when I teach addiction in the brain, I talk about the amygdala. Someone will raise their hand and say, “Could we just get that carved out?” I say, “No, you don’t want to live without your amygdala. You’re not going to make it very far.” Dr. Higgins: Yeah, we all come into the game of life with something. Some families have cardiovascular. Some families have cancers. To your point, it’s not, oh, you brought this, you brought this. It’s not that at all. We’re all grateful to be here and we’re made up of what we are.

Casey Arrillaga: There’s an opportunity, I hope, in all of the genetic research, and I tell my clients and the family members that the reason I teach addiction in the brain, my hope is that all this information will help you drop shame and blame. Stop pointing fingers and stop trying to figure out whose fault it is. Because you’re right. We don’t do that with cancer. We don’t do it with diabetes. We don’t do it with COPD. We don’t, most of the time, these days, do it with schizophrenia or bipolar. We don’t say whose fault is that. We recognize this person has got a big genetic hurdle. It’s not the only genes they have. It’s not the only defining thing about them. It’s just one factor. With the parents saying, “Oh, no, I gave them these genes,” well, you gave them lots of good genes, too. Addiction is not one gene. It’s a suite of things that cascade and some of them trigger others and all that stuff. When we look at that, hopefully we can get out of the shame and blame game and just say here’s this partly genetic, partly environmental, partly internal belief and stressor disease that can be addressed. I’d love to hear from you where you see the work that you’re doing helping to bring hope to people. Dr. Higgins: Oh, sure. That’s a great point. As I said, when we go over the results for the individual, sometimes there’s tears. It’s tears of joy because it’s a relief. It’s a sigh of, wow, I’m not just trying to create this monster inside of me. This is what’s happening inside of me physiological, and if we can identify something, we can then treat it. If we identify it objectively instead of guessing, we have a much better chance of getting to where we need to go. It’s full of hope. It really is because our genetics play a role, but they are not our destiny. The most exciting part is understanding this epigenetics portion, that it can change. We look at, in the biochemical pathways and say, what needs to be supported along this pathway to get this person to optimization? That’s a plan for somebody. That’s a blueprint of who you are and here’s the plan. It makes sense. Hope, absolutely.

Casey Arrillaga: I wonder, if I can ask really frankly. For instance, Alcoholics Anonymous, SMART Recovery, some of the recovery fellowships all also say here’s a plan. Here’s some things you can do, great statistics on people doing this and it works, but it’s harder for people to stick with that plan. It’s harder for people to follow through. There’s a reason AA or SMART Recovery or addiction treatment centers don’t have 100% success rate or 95% success rate because it’s hard to change human behavior. I wonder. When people get this genetic information and you’re able to say here are some things that can distinctly help, how difficult or easy is it, from your experience or observation, for people to stick with that plan? Dr. Higgins: It’s been our experience that they are much more likely to stick with it. 90% is our number of people that follow through because they’re seeing in black and white here, here, here. We’re all human. We all try our own experiments. I know I’m doing, say, six months of looking at these pathways change, but I’m feeling good right now. I’m going to stop it. Then 100% of the time it’s like, wow, this was doing something, but it was so incremental that I was like, yeah, I think I can stop now. I want you to feel the difference and that’s really powerful because that’s part of human nature, too. We think we got this. Some things need to be supported more than others depending on that individual.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you for that because part of what I work with as a therapist is helping people remove the internal roadblocks to change. I always tell them, look, if all we were doing at the treatment center was teaching you about recovery fellowships saying, “Hey, go to SMART Recovery, go to AA, do something that’s going to help you,” we’d just hand out pamphlets. We’d be a drive-thru treatment center. That’s be great, but we all have things inside us, like you said, that’ll say, well, maybe I don’t need to do this thing that’s working really well. Maybe I can wander off the path a little bit. Yes, the consequences are sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but not quite inevitable but certainly the majority of people will struggle if they stop doing the thing that’s working for them, including family members. Family members will relapse into old behavior faster than the person with the addiction. As soon as the treatment is done, they’ll say, “I don’t need to look at myself anymore. We don’t need to look at the family patterns. We don’t need to look at any of those things. We’ll just keep rolling.” It’s exciting to hear people sticking with it, or more importantly, I’d say, being able to come back to it. Being able to say, “I wandered off the path. Let me get back on the path.” That is the good news about any of these things is I see that once somebody has been willing to look at themselves in a different way, whether it’s through a spiritual path, looking it through genetics, looking at old trauma, just deciding they’re going to deal with it, once people started to look at the possibility of change, they’re much more likely to come back to that again later. Even if they say, “Screw this. It isn’t for me. I’m out,” well, they may have waited 20 years to get help the first time, but now they’re only going to suffer for six months or a year and say, “Okay, yeah, I can use some help. Uncle,” and then they wander off the path again and two weeks later, they’re like, “I need help.” We’re seeing people start to get the idea that life could feel differently and that’s really exciting for them, whether they’re the family members or the person directly with the issue. Dr. Higgins: Yeah, just feel it for a little bit and see what is that like, imagine the rest of your life having the potential to be that same way.

Casey Arrillaga: That seems like a great place for us to take just a moment and hear from one of our sponsors and then we’ll be right back with the rest of our interview. [Commercial] Welcome back. Let’s go ahead and have the rest of our interview with Dr. Evelyn Higgins. Now, if I may, I’m going to ask because in this podcast we tend to talk in a lot of personal terms and what’s going on. Of course, you don’t have to share anything you don’t want to, but you were talking about, when I first got married, this debate was going on – which by the way, really touched on something personal for me because I found out I was adopted from the get go. There was no question that I was adopted. What I didn’t know is that my birth parents had been living about an hour away from me the entire time. We reconnected. My wife would say that that reconnection – which was very difficult. It was not an easy reconnection. It was not, oh, great, we’re all together again. I didn’t know them but I was curious about the genetics and what is the family history and learning more about them and starting to recognize certain elements, especially of sex and love addiction of both my birth parents, one of whom says, “Yeah, I can see that,” the other one is like, “No, not sure what you’re talking about,” still to this day. I’m like, “Okay.” I was starting to look and see family patterns. I didn’t know really much of anything about genetics when my daughter was born. I was not a social worker. I wasn’t even looking at going back to school at that point, but I knew my daughter was in more danger than ever. I knew that. I knew, at the time, I would’ve said by age ten, I was taking a swan dive into my addiction. I wouldn’t have put those words on it but that’s what was happening. By the time my daughter was ten, I sat her down and said, “Look, this runs in the family.” By then, by the time she was ten, I had been in recovery for about eight years or so. I was able to say, “There are some things you can do to help maybe avert this outcome for you because I’m in recovery from addiction. Your mom is in recovery from addiction. You’ve got it from both sides. There’s a lot of it all over our family in various ways, some of it food, some of it relationships. It’s not all chemicals, but there’s certainly chemical stuff as well. Just letting you know this is in the family,” and talking to her about this idea and saying here are some things you can do. She has gone through some tremendous mental health struggles but she never got addicted to anything, so far I’m going to say, knock on wood, but she’s 26 now and so she’s come through adolescence. She made it to the other side without getting addicted to anything and that’s a big deal. She’s aware of it and she did grab on to some of the tools. If I can ask, in your case, your daughter is just born and you’re thinking I need to do something about this. You’re doing all this research. I’ve got to ask. How did it turn out? Dr. Higgins: My husband and I divorced. He died at 42. I’m now 63 so that was a long time ago. My daughter, fortunately, I raised her with the tools and the knowledge and the openness instead of let’s make believe this never happened and this isn’t part of reality. She is a very well put together 32-year-old woman now with her own two children, twin two-year-olds that she’s raising with that same openness and acceptability, not acceptable behavior and all of it that’s going to go on. That’s hope that by identifying, dealing with, and moving forward with what’s available that stories can change, and they can.

Casey Arrillaga: That is something we see in your family and in mine is that, yeah, you can change the intergenerational patterns. You can’t change the genetics, but you can change, again, how those genetics are going to express through – I mean, you’re a parent. You know you can’t control your child’s environment. You can’t control their experiences, but you can say exactly those things. We talk openly in this family. We seek and accept help. Given that I was going about it through a recovery fellowship that encouraged spirituality, I said you don’t have to do any particular spiritual thing, but spirituality helps a lot of people so you might want to find a spiritual life. Be open to therapy if it comes up or something like that where you feel you need help with that. Connect with other people. Don’t get too isolated, all these things. She grabbed on to most of that. She went on a self-guided tour of pretty much every religious and spiritual institution in the place [33:47] there was Catholic church, various Christian churches, Jewish center, a Hindu temple. She went to all of them just to see is there something that fit. She eventually I think found a version of something within herself that seemed like a good fit. I can’t help but think that all those protective factors and things that potentially influence, if she has kids, what they’re up against, whether she adopts or has kids genetically. There’s decent arguments given our family genetics for either course of action. I wonder, also, there are so many people now who are discovering things about their genetics through home kits and mail in test and stuff like that, become surprised to find out things about relatives they didn’t know they had, maybe discovering that moment that they’re adopted or related in parts of the world they didn’t see coming. I like to think that the greater popularity of those things makes it easier for people to embrace what you’re doing. Dr. Higgins: I would say, yes, for sure, because as I said, I’m 63. When I was in my early years, the shame and blame was much more focused. We’re still not where it would be the perfect sweet spot to be but we’re much better than where we were in having those conversations. That I think is helping along the way, too, for people to say it’s a combination of all these things. Why would I not look at all those things? Why would I not try those tools that have been successful for others? Why would I not try these diagnostics that have been successful for others? There’s much more of an openness now for people to explore and understand, hey, seven and a half billion people in the world. There’s seven and a half billion different sets of DNA. Why don’t we actually start to embrace that and find out in every aspect of our life who we are?

Casey Arrillaga: Absolutely, and as a guy who works with a lot of people around self-esteem and psychology, I can tell you. You say, why would I not do it? A lot of times, because people are afraid to find out. They’ll say, “Man, I don’t know who I am.” I always point out, if all it is is I don’t know who I am, then that would just be curiosity, but it becomes a scary question because I’m afraid I do know the answer and it’s bad news. Some people may shy away from this stuff and self-exploration, genetic exploration, any of those things because they’re afraid it’s just going to be terrible news. I always say it’s so much better news than you think. You’re probably a much better person than you think you are. Dr. Higgins: Yeah, and the fear part for some people is still, if this is my story and it’s a woe is me because I have all of this and I can possibly move past that story, what becomes my story? Who’s going to listen to me? There’s still people with that fear. If it’s not a woe is me, who’s going to listen to me? Will I have any friends left because I’m always my sad story? Some people want to hold on to that. I think the more and more conversations that are had, like what you do, Casey, on your podcast and open people into this discussion, all of a sudden that discussion becomes okay. I heard this podcast and it’s okay to start talking about these things. It makes a difference. It moves the needle.

Casey Arrillaga: That leads to a question I want to ask you. What’s your hope for the future? Dr. Higgins: My hope for the future is that people embrace the tools that are available to make them the best version of themselves. Like I just said, there’s seven and a half billion people. Make it your best you, not to be everybody else, but employ everything that’s available today. Take advantage of everything that’s available today to become your best you. You have that life. You have your best life. You’ve got one shot at it. Go for it. That’s my thing. It’s all about the bigger life. We’re here and it’s supposed to be a gift. To start being able to live it for the gift that it’s supposed to be.

Casey Arrillaga: Beautifully said. If people are curious about your work and want to find out more about your company or where they can get tested and all that sort of thing, where do they go? Dr. Higgins: The website is wiredforaddiction.com. Go in there. Take a look what’s on there. We offer a 15-minute complimentary consultation if this is something that possibly could be a tool for you to use. We’ll discuss that. We work with individuals coming straight to us. We work with treatment centers. We work within the criminal justice space. We’re trying to help a lot of people in a lot of different areas that could use what we have.

Casey Arrillaga: Very cool. I want to thank you so much for coming on the program. It’s been fantastic talking with you. Any last words you would want to say to family members or people listening out there that might struggle with these issues directly? Dr. Higgins: I would go back to what you said, Casey. Is there hope? Yes, there’s hope. Employ what’s available. Go out. Seek it. Use it. Make your life better and your loved ones’ lives better.

Casey Arrillaga: Dr. Evelyn Higgins, it has been fantastic having you on the program. Perhaps we’ll have you back on some time. Great talking with you. Dr. Higgins: Thank you so much, Casey. My pleasure.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s our interview with Dr. Evelyn Higgins of Wired for Addiction. Thanks for being with us through another episode of Addiction and the Family. 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 liked 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’d 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.