Created specifically for those who have loved ones that struggle with addiction.
Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 5: Addiction and the Brain.”
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. My name is Casey Arrillaga. I’m a licensed social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Emotional Wellness Centers in Texas. I've been facilitating family workshops since 2009, but just as importantly, I’m a family member, like many of you. Addiction shows up throughout my family tree. I was raised with addiction. I embraced it for decades in my own life. I’m married to someone with addiction. I’ve been in recovery since 1998. It’s from all of these perspectives that I want to offer you experience, strength, and realistic hope. Join me as we explore addiction in the family and how to find recovery together.
Kira Arrillaga: Today’s episode is a bit of a departure from our usual format. Instead of an interview, we have Casey’s addiction and the brain lecture for you. Now, some of you might be thinking, no, lectures are boring, and frankly, I agree, but this is Casey giving the lecture. It contains chocolate cake, and not one, but two distinct genres of movies along with some really great information about why some people choose to become addicts.
Casey Arrillaga: Kira.
Kira Arrillaga: What?
Casey Arrillaga: Nobody chooses to be an addict. We’re actually going to hear about that as we go along.
Kira Arrillaga: I guess I should just listen to the lecture again, but first, a word from one of our sponsors.
[Commercial]
Welcome back. For those of you who’ve recently listened to Episode 2: Addiction 101, you may remember that we included an excerpt from this lecture. That bit starts at about six and a half minutes on this podcast and ends at about 18 and a half minutes. Feel free to skip ahead or just sit back and listen again.
Casey Arrillaga: What we’re going to be talking about today is, of course, addiction and the brain, one of my favorite all-time subjects ever about anything. We’re going to talk about some of the basic questions that families often have around this and a lot of people have around this, which has to do with things like is addiction really a disease, and if so, why would we say that? Because we know that’s the official party line, right? The family disease of alcoholism if you go Al Anon or go to AA and they’ll talk about it being a disease, things like that. We want to look and see if science supports that, I’m a big science guy, but also looking at what’s actually going on in the brain, what actually happens around drugs. Not so much like, hey, this drug does this thing. I don’t spend a lot of time telling my clients about that stuff because they come in telling me better than I do, like here’s what this thing does to my brain, but looking more on a global scale and also looking how this applies to families.
Now the main reason that I love to talk about this stuff, though, is not just because it’s interesting knowledge, and frankly, you could recover without knowing any of this, when it really comes down to it. None of this is vital for recovery in the same way I can play a piano without knowing how my piano works and I totally use my computer without knowing how my computer works. There’s so much stigma around addiction. Because of that stigma, I find that when we learn the facts about it, and that’s one of the things that they’ll say in Al Anon is learn the facts about alcoholism, when I learn the facts about it, it takes away some of the guilt and the shame and the blame. I will say if blame and shame got people sober, everybody would have done so already because I’ve never met anybody in recovery who didn’t spend a bunch of time blaming themselves, feeling ashamed. Family members, we all know a lot of blame can get thrown out within the family, a lot of blame and shame can come from outside the family. Some of it we generate within ourselves. How can my family member go through this? How did I not catch it? All these questions that can come up. What I find is when we understand more about the fact and the science, then we have less reason to go down those rabbit holes and look instead and say, well, if it’s a disease then nobody chose to have it.
That’s important to know. I say this a lot. People may choose to use drugs or engage in behaviors but I talk to groups, do some version of this with bunch of police officers, with people that work at sober houses, with social workers, 50 social workers in a room and I’ll say, “Who here has never used drugs?” A bunch of hands will go up. I’ll say, “Keeping in mind that alcohol is a drug,” and all the hands go back down. Everybody in the room chose to use drugs at some point. How many people here became addicts? Usually, not a whole lot of hands will go up in the room anymore. The choice to use a drug does not equal the choice to become an addict. That’s really important. That’s where we have to start to differentiate and say, well then, how come some people got lucky and some people didn’t get so lucky?
We’re going to look at those three major questions, which is, is it really a disease, and if so, why would we say that? Because I find that as I understand the disease aspect, then there goes one piece of guilt and shame. What’s actually going on in the brain is the second big question, because when we understand that, we can put down some of the guilt and shame. Then we look at some of the factors that put people at risk and that gives us another chance to put down some guilt and shame. That, to me, makes it worth going through all of this information. If your eyes start to glaze over, bear with me. This is why we’re talking about it.
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 simplify 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 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 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? All the hands go up, right? That idea of like, 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 see what makes anything a medical condition, we have 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. That might seem like a no brainer but it’s actually really important. What that means is there needs to be some organ or system or organs that seems to be where the problem is happening. Second thing is there has to be some kind of observable damage. Last but not least, from that we see some kind of symptom. Now, usually, we go backwards with this. We struggle with the symptoms, and from that, we try to figure out what is happening in what place. Did anyone here ever play the game Clue? Yeah, it’s that kind of idea. 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, will we be able to tell what the problem is? No, we don’t have enough information. I’d 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? What are you thinking?
Female Speaker: Diabetes.
Casey Arrillaga: Diabetes, yeah. We could say when we look at all these things and say we might be dealing with diabetes, it’s 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 really oversimplifying here, things are out of balance. Do we know where? We do actually. It’s the pancreas. I only know that because I’ve given this lecture a bunch of times and sometimes there are doctors sitting in the audience saying, “Hey, by the way, it’s the pancreas, buddy.” I’m like, “Cool, thank you so much. Next time, the lecture will be even better.” We know 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 and fix it right away. There are things we can do, right? We’re not just stuck with this. Yay, modern medicine, because for a long time, diabetes was a pretty quick death sentence.
Now we say for [0:10:30] oh, it’s this thing where you have to manage it. We can manage it through medications, medical practice, but also through a lot of behavior change. It’s a big way to help manage it. It isn’t just I’ve 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. Depending on the severity, I might have to check my blood sugar, take insulin, all those sorts of things. 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 my blood sugar. I don’t feel like seeing the doctor anymore.” What happens to me?
Female Speaker: You die.
Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, well, at the very least, all the symptoms – and you’re saying, 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 from there because it can get pretty bad. We mentioned the 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? Eighty percent okay. It’s a little high actually. Yeah, it’s about 60% to 40% depending on who you talk to. That turns out to be a common relapse rate for a lot of chronic conditions. Part of the reason for that, I’m going to guess, is because to deal with a lot of chronic conditions, you have to change your behavior, and probably to no surprise to anyone in the room, human behavior is hard to change. It’s really hard to make changes and stick with them. It’s tempting to go back to what we know. It’s one of the reason that we advocate for so much repetition around recovery, going to meetings all the time, going through the steps again, calling my sponsor again, all those kinds of things. For most people, especially in early recovery, that just feels like, oh, man, I have to do all this stuff. My experience is that over time, that starts to shift into I get to do all this stuff. I feel really blessed. I have a sponsor to call. I have meetings I can go to, stuff like that. Initially, it can be onerous. Oh, I have to do all these things.
That sense of repetition turns the old behavior into a less common thing and the new behavior into my new normal. That’s getting off into a different subject but that’s where we want it to end up is where addiction was our habit, was our normal. We want recovery to turn into our habit and our normal. That’s why we tell people it’s not enough to say, hey, I’m going to go to a meeting or call my sponsor or review all the writing I did, whatever it is that I’m doing to help me recover. It’s not enough to say I’m going to go do that when I’m feeling down. I’m going to go do that when things seem shaky. I’m going to go do that if I feel like a drink. I’m always going to say, man, it’s too late. You missed the bus already. You have to be doing that stuff when things are good so you have that momentum so it’s already a normal part of your life. There was actually a really cool study done and they’re starting, as I understand, have more back up for this, finding that you can really dramatically improve somebody’s odds around a really nasty chronic disease, Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s, again, known in our day and age as pretty much a death sentence, and 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’s a breakthrough study at UCLA, I’m going to say within the last five years or so. In that study, someone showed in nine out of ten participants that 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, everything anyone has ever told you to do like a good health thing, the people and 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 changed their diet. You mean 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, and most of what they can think of is when do I get to go back to my old behavior. Because that’s a normal human thought. I think that’s what gets in the way a lot of recovery around a lot of chronic conditions.
Addiction, particularly stands out for that partly because of the symptoms that we see because when somebody has diabetes, we don’t judge them for the symptoms. We might say, hey, you should have been more careful and known in your family and eaten more carefully and things like that, which, by the way, is a touch misguided because there’s a lot of, I'm betting, diabetes that nobody has any control over but on some level, you recognize that. 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 because the kind of symptoms that get people to decide to come to treatment, and usually when I ask those people will say I’ve 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. 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. Sometimes it goes to the deeper stuff because sometimes people do decide I’m going to get sober without any treatment or without having to go through everything falling apart. What they’re losing instead, they’re not having so much external problems. 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 have these big external problems. We know they’re having these internal problems, too. Some people could show up at an AA meeting or 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. The thing is when I look at these symptoms, people put a lot of judgment on these, a lot of self-judgment, a lot of external judgment. Unlike diabetes or any other chronic condition, both the person with the addiction and the people around them will tend to say that’s your fault. That’s on you, buddy. You’re the one who’s making those decisions. Our experiences, that’s true, right? We are the ones making these decisions. I’m in recovery. I remember making the 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. It turns out that it’s not a lack of moral character. It turns out it has nothing to do with willpower. That’s an interesting fact. A lot of people mistake addiction for lack of willpower, including the person with the addiction will say, “Well, I just didn’t have enough willpower.” First of all, I want to say it takes a lot of willpower to stay in addiction. It’s been said that people with addiction are some of the hardest working people in America, they’re just given the worst returns. It turns out that the people who have an addiction aren’t struggling with willpower because the people who don’t have an addiction often aren’t fighting some titanic internal battle where they’re desperate to drink. They’re not fighting back against this huge urge with their willpower. The people who don’t have an addiction weren’t that tempted in the first place. They’re the people that, as I was just hearing a great interview with somebody, a brain researcher around this, around how habits are formed and how we make choices.
She said you open up the fridge and there’s chocolate cake in there. You’re going, oh, my God, I want this cake. I need a piece of that cake, all that kind of stuff. Then you’re one of the people who really struggles with it. You might do some willpower not to have the cake right then, but it’d be hard in the long-term. For the people who don’t have the struggle, they’re not using willpower. They open up, and yeah, I don’t need that. What else we got? The people such as myself in recovery are the people that think, oh, man, I really want to do this. Then it just gets lodged in the brain and my brain just starts thinking what do I need to do to do that. No, no, I’m not going to do it. Maybe I could just this one time. It’ll be okay. It won’t be that bad. I’m going through this big internal dialogue. Then the most likely thing, left to myself, is that I’m going to give in. We’re going to find out why.
Because like our example with diabetes, I’m going to say things go out of balance. Again, oversimplification but we’re going to get a lot more specific on that. No big surprise, in the brain, right? That is where the problem happens. Do we know which part of the brain? That’s going to be in the limbic system, which involves – well, the limbic system is a little tricky. I’m going to say it involves the amygdala. Some researchers put different parts in the box that they call the limbic system because it’s not super clearly define but you’ll often find a few select parts in there. We’re going to put some of those here. It’s a cross section. We’re looking at it from the side. If we look at it from the side, all the outside stuff, the walnut looking gray matter, that’s what we think when we think of gray matter with our brain, all that’s contained on this outer layer. We look at the cross section, looks pretty thick, it’s a pretty big chunk of the brain, but the gray matter itself, the parts that we’re doing conscious through with, among other things, is actually a thin layer over the top. It’s just like a coating. It’s almost like it was painted over the top, which we think it’s part of the reason that it’s so nobbly and wrinkly is because that actually gives us more surface area, get a little more gray matter in there.
This part over here is where all of our consciousness sits. Our consciousness doesn’t even sit through all this part, which, by the way, is called the cortex, from the Latin for bark. Roughly the front half of the cortex is where the consciousness sits and back here we get more sensory information and right here in the middle called the motor strip, motor information and motor command, stuff like that. The way it’s supposed to work roughly is we think we get sensory information, we think up some actions, make plans, and then this part we call the executive function up here. This part is where we think we make decisions, but it turns out we’re wrong. We like to think our consciousness logically makes most decisions, but you know which part of the brain tells us that? This part, the consciousness. Our consciousness tells us our consciousness is making decisions. It thinks it’s running the show, but it’s not. It turns out we make an awful lot of our decisions much lower in the brain, down here in the amygdala right there with that little dot there. I’m going to draw this little squiggle here that represents the hippocampus. Then up here I’m going to draw one other part which often is not included in the limbic system but it’s very vital for our purposes so we’re going to lump it all together, the three major parts we look at, the nucleus accumbens, very important for us.
Let’s look at each one of these. The amygdala is a big emotional center for us. One of the things it’s known for in emotional regulation is it helps regulate fear. That’s a pretty big deal because I’ll tell you that when I see people relapse, they’ll often tell me a really familiar story. I talk about this all the time. If you ever go to AA meetings, you’ll here this a lot. Wow, how did you relapse? Someone will say, “Well, I stopped calling my sponsor and I stopped going to meetings, I stopped reading the book, stopped doing all the tools that AA was giving me.” As a counselor, the social worker, I tend to think, okay, I hear you. That’s true but what was going on that you would stop doing all those things that were working for you? I know partly the addiction wants to get foot in the door, that part of me that wants to go back to that old habit we talked a minute ago. Usually, what I find is this right here, fear. That’s what starts to push in. Something came up.
If you’re trying out 12-step recovery, I’ve got to warn you, there are two danger zones that are some of the most powerful parts of the step process, in my opinion, and they’re also the ones where I see people struggle the most and have a higher potential for relapse. That’s steps four and five and steps eight and nine. For those that aren’t familiar with the process, four and five says we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, five says admit to God and to ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of our wrongs. A lot of people look at that and remember that shame and guilt and all that stuff we were talking about. People look at that and think, oh, this is going to be horrible. I need to write down what a horrible person I am and then I need to go and take that and tell somebody else. That sounds like a really bad idea. The amygdala starts to light up.
Now every time I think about moving forward in my step work, I get scared. If I’m not able to acknowledge and deal with that fear, what I’m going to do is I’m going to come up with reasons not to do step four. We see a lot of people get stuck on step four. They either don’t start it or they get partway through it and then they stop. It’s because of this fear right here. The amygdala helps regulate that fear. When the amygdala lights up mildly, you might feel a little uneasy but you still have this executive function. The amygdala is saying, “Hey, boss, there might be something to be scared about.” Our frontal lobe looks at that and says, “Well, amygdala, I thought that over. Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.” That’s when it’s going off mildly, when it’s somewhat activated. The more activated it gets, the easier it is for this part of the brain to take over. We’ll actually see that the frontal lobe here actually starts to lose function, which I think it’s supposed to do, because if we run into circumstances that’s scary enough, we’re not supposed to sit down and think about it. We’re supposed to run or fight or freeze or do something to survive that moment and then we’ll hand control back over and the frontal lobe will take over again and say, “Okay, now I can stop and process what happened.”
If the fear gets great enough, it will take over the brain, which means we’ll start making decisions that we think are conscious decisions but they’re actually highly emotional decisions. If we’re living in a state of fear in our recovery, this is always somewhat activated, then any little thing comes in and pings and it becomes too much. For somebody with an addiction, if we feel emotionally overwhelmed, we’re going to go use. I know that in myself. If I feel overwhelmed, I’m going to go use. Some of the clients have heard me say this a number of times, part of my job as a person in recovery is to make sure I never get that overwhelmed again, which I would love to say would happen because I control the whole world and nobody ever does anything overwhelming, but life keeps coming at you when you’re in sobriety. What I found instead is I need to learn how to regulate this part so that I don’t feel overwhelmed, not because life is being really gentle with me but because I now have some better tools.
Because this part here, all this stuff down here, doesn’t deal very well with time. The frontal lobe up here, this part of the brain can deal with anything at time. What I mean by that is it can imagine infinitely into the future, infinitely into the past. I can wonder what happens at the end of the universe but what happens after that. What happened before the universe began? What happened before that? I can imagine way outside of my own lifespan. Down here in the limbic system, last estimate I heard was 45 seconds. That’s how far it can get, which means any consequences, even a minute into the future, limbic system doesn’t care. That’s way too far off. That’s abstract, man. I can’t think about that stuff. If I’m scared, I’m not going to consider any consequence that’s a full minute into the future. I’m just going to do what I need to do right now to get by. Then I’ll hand control back over to the frontal lobe and then we’ll sit down and think about, gosh, was that good or bad. I wonder among our clients, how many people have had the experience where you went and acted out in your addiction in whatever form and then immediately regretted it? Has anyone ever done that? Yeah, all the hands go up. We’ve all done it. Right up to that moment, it seemed like an okay idea. I don’t know about you. I’ve had the experience where I could feel myself making a decision to shut down the frontal lobe and not think about the consequences.
It leads to something that I call the horror movie experience. You’re watching a horror movie and the protagonist is going up the stairs and you’re shouting at the screen. Don’t go up the stairs. What are you thinking about? Don’t open the door. Don’t go in there by yourself. What are you thinking about? They’re doing it anyway. The horror movie experience for me is that’s me within me. I’m watching myself do something and thinking, Casey, what are you doing? Stop. Don’t do this. Then I did it anyway and then control came back to my frontal lobe and I went like, oh, wow, what’s going to happen now because now I regain my ability to think about consequences. If this sounds a little scary, it should because it is scary. If you haven’t had that experience, then I’m really happy for you. A lot of family members when they say, wow, I can’t relate to this at all, I say feel blessed that you can’t relate because this is a really scary experience.
We’ve got two other parts we put up here. We put up the nucleus accumbens we talked about and the hippocampus. The amygdala is where we feel fear. The nucleus accumbens over here is where we feel pleasure. We like that part of the brain, right? This is what makes us feel good. We have what makes us feel bad and scared, what makes us feel good, and then we have the hippocampus. If this does fear and this does pleasure, the hippocampus, you can probably tell from the name, that’s where hippos go to school. That’s a terrible dad joke. Sorry about that. The hippocampus, among other things, is involved in memory formation. That is a big deal when it comes to addiction. We have fear, which tells us to avoid threats. Pleasure, though, what is the point of feeling pleasure? To relieve fear? That’s often what it feels like in addiction. That’s what gets a lot of people using is we are trying to relieve fear we already felt.
The pleasure actually is our motivator to move towards things. If fear tells me to move away from something, pleasure tells me to move towards it. My brain tends to feel pleasure around anything that it thinks of as being survival. Now, between the two, fear will outweigh pleasure. That’s a bummer because when I watch a movie about addiction, what I often see is that our hero who struggles titanically with addiction is saved by the love of a good man or woman. How many people have seen that movie? There’s a whole bunch of them out there where the love of a parent, the love of a partner, the love of whoever, the love of a puppy, whatever it is that gets them through that week, it’s not a great model to a story because that’s not what actually happens because fear will win out over pleasure. Love is a form of pleasure. Love tells us we need other people to survive, which as human beings is true. We do need other people to survive. We are a tribal animal. Fear will win.
The basic theory behind that is simply that fear tells me deal with or avoid a threat. Pleasure says go get a reward. If I miss a reward, it’s a bummer but I’ll be around tomorrow to try and get my reward. If I miss a threat, then I’m dead, I don’t have to worry about what’s for lunch tomorrow because I’m somebody else’s lunch today. I’m all out of pleasure at that point. That means that my brain is going to put a lot more emphasis on fear than it is on pleasure. When the fear feels like it’s tolerable then I say, okay, what’s going to feel good? Sometimes, especially around addiction, what we mistake for pleasure is actually simply the relieve of fear. It’s just let me turn the fear off and go, oh, it feels so good. Then I miss that I’m not actually feeling a whole lot of pleasure, because let me tell you, a lot of you know this already from personal experience, by the time somebody gets to dragging themselves into AA or showing up at a treatment center, all that kind of stuff, the party was over a long time ago. We’re not showing up because we’re having too much fun. We’re showing up because we’re not feeling much pleasure anything. We’re mostly running on fear.
Kira Arrillaga: We’ll be right back with more of Casey’s lecture after this word from one of our sponsors.
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Welcome back. Now the conclusion of Casey’s lecture on addiction and the brain.
Casey Arrillaga: This is the overview of the brain. Now we’re going to get a little more microscopic. We’re going to look at an individual brain cell or two. The brain cells pay much attention to the brain are called neurons. That would be, again, a rough sketch of a neuron here. Some people look at that and they just put a little couple of arms on it. But Casey, it’s a self-portrait. What we’re going to do is we are going to draw a couple of other neurons here for a reason and that reason has to do with how it is that brain cells talk to each other because it turns out that brain cells, like human beings, thrive on connection. We need to connect to each other while our brain cells connect to each other and they’re constantly rating those connections. Our brain cells are constantly in dialogue with each other. They’re constantly talking to each other. The main point of discussion is should I fire or not fire. That’s really what they’re concerned with. Do I fire or not? Now, often when we look at animations of the brain and sketches of the brain, we see a lot of electricity shooting around. All that electricity is just within the cell, all that action potential. The cell is always trying to figure out do I fire or not within itself? The action potential is always the same, so it’s not like it’s a stronger surge or a lesser surge. What changes is how frequently it fires. How excited is that cell? Is it firing like huge flickering, or does it seem more occasional? It does that based on all the information it gets from other cells, and that’s why they need to connect and talk to each other. It’s always getting signals from somewhere else that encourage it to either fire or not fire.
Since we said all the electricity is within the cell, that only leaves us with one other mechanism for them to talk. They never actually quite touch. There’s always this little gap right there. That little gap is called the synapse. Sometimes, ironically, we hear people say, oh, the synapses are firing. When we say they’re firing, they’re not shooting electricity. They’re shooting chemicals. This is how neurons talk to each other. They talk to each other through chemical messengers, and those chemical messengers are typically called neurotransmitters.
See that little circle there. I’m going to expand that, and here is the close up of that synapse. We would see something like this where you’ve got this little knob here, and this little knob here. This would be the end of one cell and the beginning of another, and that gap right there is the synapse. In that synaptic gap, we have chemicals, and this cell here stores up little packets or globules of molecules, like different types of chemicals, neurotransmitters. This one here has these little receptors that are waiting like lock and key for just the right molecule. If the right molecule hits, it’ll respond and the response will tend to be either something that encourages them to fire or discourages them to fire.
It’s always getting votes, basically, saying, yes, fire or don’t fire. All those votes get tallied up right here in the nucleus of the cell. Then based on the information it gets, it’ll either slow down firing or speed up firing, and it’ll pay a lot of attention to which cells are giving you good information. Based on that, it’ll form stronger and stronger connections. Just like, if you talk to somebody all the time and hang out with them all the time, you’re probably going to form stronger and stronger connections. You’re brain cells are doing the exact same thing.
When this message comes down, the action potential fires. We have electricity shooting through the cells, really exciting. This one will drop some of those neurotransmitters out, and then it’ll suck them back up. These molecules will either disintegrate or they’ll get sucked back in in a process called reuptake, and that’s going to be important for our discussion. What drugs and abuse do, they either mimic and imitate natural chemicals like opium poppy. For reasons that are probably just a really wild coincidence, opium poppy has a molecule that we use all the time in our brain to feel okay and to regulate pain and to feel motivated to do things.
It turns out you can refine what you find in the opium poppy. You can create morphine, and then from morphine you can make heroin, which is – heroin’s actually just a really efficient delivery system for morphine. You can dump this massive dump into the brain, and what happens is you totally overload the system. You’re not getting some of these chemicals. Every receptor is firing like crazy and just going we hear nothing but signal, signal, signal, signal, signal. It mistakes that pleasure – remember pleasure encouraged us to move towards survival. It looks at that pleasure and says that’s the most pleasurable thing that ever happened. Therefore, that is the most important survival thing that ever happened.
Right here, not far away in the hippocampus, we form a memory on the spot that says whatever that was was your best idea you’ve ever had. Never forget that. It hits right here by the emotional system, and the emotional system says, whoa, that took away all the fear. I feel no pain. I feel no fear. Everything is fantastic. Let’s encode that in memory, and next time we see some of that let’s go get it. That becomes a very, very strong somewhat irresistible urge to go get more of whatever that is.
Now, some other drugs like stimulus, like say cocaine, what they do is they actually interrupt the reuptake process. What happens is, when you drop your chemicals naturally, the chemicals drop down, and they just sit there. They don’t get sucked back up. Again, they overload the receptors, same basic effect. Brain goes, wow, that was amazing. Whatever that is, never forget it. If you ever have done cocaine, you know at least initially you ain’t feeling much fear. You’re a super person. You’re a super hero. You just realized all of a sudden that you’re the most brilliant person that ever walked the face of the earth, and sometimes with cocaine you can’t stop talking about that fact.
Here’s the thing, our brain doesn’t want to be on overload all the time. Just like your car doesn’t want to run in the red all the time. It can do it, but it’s not where it’s supposed to sit. The brain cells are going to try to regulate themselves. They’re going to try and take care of this problem of constantly adding outside substances. What they do, only two things they really can do. They can prune back how much of your natural chemicals that you’re manufacturing, and they can prune back the number of receptors that are there to receive those chemicals.
This now means that whenever you’re not using the drug you’re feeling deprived. Yeah, you’re going to start to feel withdrawal as soon as this happens. Now you’re in a state where whenever you’re not using you’re not getting enough of what you need. Right here in the survival center, this part of the brain is going to go, wow, things are even worse. You need to take care of this right now, and then it doesn’t matter how much consciously we know that we don’t want to be doing that. We will simply change our mind, and the rational part of the brain will do something it does really well, which is rationalize. We’ll make up all kinds of reasons why it is that it’s okay to use this one more time. We’ll promise ourselves this is the last one, and we’ll mean it. Then we’ll change our mind again, and then we’ll change our mind again, and then we’ll change our mind again. We don’t realize this part of the brain here that can’t look ahead is changing our mind for us.
Now, often at this point, it can look pretty bleak and hopeless, and it can feel really bleak and hopeless. If it was really bleak and hopeless, I wouldn’t be up here talking to you because I would just be like, nah, you’re screwed, but that’s not really how I go about this. We’re just looking to find out and recognize this is what the problem is. If we can recognize that this is what’s going on inside my brain, then all of a sudden it doesn’t come down to did I go to Sunday school enough? Did I listen to the wrong music? Did my parents make some mistakes? It comes down to, no, my chemical system is completely out of balance in a way that I did not choose. There was no conscious choice in here. This isn’t about willpower.
This is just things are chemically so far out of balance that my brain is living in a constant state of fear, and now using just feels like a relief. This is how we get to that point. Someone mentioned withdrawals, but it goes beyond that. This is how we get to that point where I’m using just to get to the baseline. I’m not even trying to get high anymore. I’m just trying to get okay so I can get out of bed and go to work and show up, and hopefully, nobody suspects I have a problem, even if I’m nodding out at work. The reality is is we get to this state, and we have to say now what?
When it gets bad enough, what often happens is – remember all of these consequences over here? Those are pretty scary too. Often, this fear generated by all this stuff happening starts to outweigh our fear of not using because not using is scary. We have to remember this. One of my colleagues says really well – especially in early recovery, he said somebody with an addiction who’s not using is suffering. You got to recognize, when people first get sober, they’re suffering. It is difficult to walk around sober. It feels raw.
It felt to me like I was walking out on a tightrope. It just felt scary. My brain is saying what do you mean we’re not going to go do the thing that always works? What do you mean I have to give up my best coping mechanism forever? Don’t even talk about tomorrow. I’m just going to try to get through today without tearing my skin off because this is so scary, and it feels so raw, and it feels so deprived.
When we look back over here, remember all this stuff about family and kids and honesty and work and money and emotions and self-esteem and values and control. Do these problems start to make more sense now? Yeah, when it feels like life and death, everything else gets pushed to the side just for the moment. It’s not that I’m bad person, or I don’t love my family, or I think that my kids are unimportant, or I don’t care about being honest. The really sad reality is I care about all those things, and I still feel compelled to try it one more time, but I intend to get back to all this stuff. I want to feel emotionally regulated. I want to be loving. I want to live by my values.
It turns out that one of the things we can do partly is give it time. This is one of the reasons I think that 12-step programs and other recovery programs make such a big deal out of sober time. Like anything else in the body, if I give it enough time and enough support, it’s going to try and heal. It’s going to start growing receptors back, but if then I start dropping drugs in, it’s going to be like, oh, you were just kidding. Okay, never mind. Let me take those back.
We can’t just say I’m going to use every once in a while, or marijuana maintenance, or heroin was my big thing, so I’m going to drink. The brain is going to go, okay, at least you give me something. Then what it usually does is say, okay, that high was cool and all, but you remember the real high? Yeah, that’s why we tell people to stay sober off of everything. This is also why I make such a big deal out of get in recovery, not just staying sober. If all I do is stay sober, I’m probably going to pick some other addictive thing.
I’ve had clients come through. I had a young man that came through. Not at this treatment center but another one. He was in his last couple of days, and the subject of food came up. He just mentioned that he had been eating three breakfasts, three lunches, and three dinners every night. I was like, “Dude, food addiction is real.” “You can’t be addicted to food.” I’m like, “Yes, you can, and you are on your way, young man.” He didn’t want to believe it because he was – instead of focusing on his recovery, he was trying to find some other way to jack his system up. How do I get that system revved again?
I’ve known two different people that got heavily into skydiving in early recovery. One of them finally watched a friend die on the skydiving team they were on. She went, “Whoa, I’m doing the same thing over again. I’m just getting the thrill out of jumping in an airplane instead of shooting speed in my veins.” She decided she needed to quit skydiving. The point is it’s not that recovery is about cutting out every little thing that’s fun. It’s actually about how do I get my system back into regulation?
It turns out that there’s actually something that can really assist with this that can bring down fear, amp up pleasure, and form really positive memories, which is some stuff we really want to do in early recovery. That turns out to be connection. The connection is a very, very deeply soothing thing for human beings. We are built to connect. Like I said earlier, we are a tribal animal. A tribal animal wants to know it’s connected.
Some of the things we found here, if we go back to our sketch of the brain here, this front part right here is the lowest part of the cortex that connects all the stuff down here in the limbic system and the nucleus accumbens to our conscious mind. It is known as the cingulate cortex, spelled with a C. This little part of it right here in the front, that’s the anterior cingulate. It does a lot of mediation about who is going to be in control. It turns out this part of the brain has a lot of control over whether your limbic system is running the show or your conscious mind is running the show. Now, for those of us such as myself that prefer when my conscious mind runs the show, I’m not cutting my emotions out and going Mr. Spock over here. I’m just saying I want some balance, and I’d like my conscious mind to make the final decision. How do I get this part of the brain to help me?
It turns out we need to energize that part of the brain. Here’s what’s really amazing. This part of the brain is energized by connection, by love, by empathy, and here’s a big one, by spirituality. Now, check that out. Twelve-step groups are all based on this idea that you’re going to find a spiritual solution to a spiritual malady. I just thought that’s cool and all. What does that have to do with science? How does that affect my actual brain?
It turns out it makes a huge difference. Now, I’m going to give you Casey’s definition of spirituality because all the arrogance didn’t go away just because I got sober. Spirituality on a very simple level, at least for recovery, is a sense of connection to something bigger than you. Ideally, it’ll have three main qualities. This is again coming from a 12-step perspective here, but this is where I see the 12-step stuff really tie in with the science stuff. There are only 3 real 12-step suggestions about a higher power. By the way, you don’t have to use the word God if it doesn’t work for you, but you can.
One of them is in Step 3. I’ve made the decision to turn our will and life over to the care of a higher power, so here it should be caring. Next one’s in the second tradition. If you don’t have them, up here, that’s all good. Second tradition says for our group purpose there’s only one authority, a loving higher power, okay, so now we’ve got caring and loving. Then, in Bill’s story I believe it is, he talks about the idea that it should feel personal to you, so there’s three ideas. It should be personal to me. It should be caring. It should be love. If I can find that quality in something bigger than me and I don’t just mean like an elephant bigger than me but something outside of myself that feels bigger than I am, that will do for spirituality.
Step 12, spoiler alert, tells us what’s going to happen. It says there’s going to be a spiritual awakening. It doesn’t say a religious conversion. You can find spirituality through religion. I think that’s amazing and fantastic, and I highly encourage it. You can also find spirituality outside of religion, which I think is amazing and fantastic, and I highly encourage it. However you find that sense of connection, that seems to be very soothing for human beings. We start to feel connected. Our fear goes down. Our pleasure goes up. We form positive memories, and our conscious mind gets to be in control, which means the spirituality is a pretty important piece of the program
These other things it talks about like being of service, it turns out being of service is really neurologically beneficial. The highest neurological boost you can get around service is if you are of service to somebody else. That’s the biggest one. If I help somebody else, I feel the best. Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you want somebody to like you, ask them for a favor.” That was actually a neurological hack.
I want to say flip it, though. If you want to like somebody, do them a favor. If you have somebody you have conflict with, 12-step recovery will say go pray for them. We’re like why would I go pray for that guy? I will feel better. It will actually give me a neurological boost to be of service, even if that other person doesn’t know I’m being of service. In fact, in some ways it’s kind of cool if you do things where you don’t get caught doing something nice. Then you don’t have that ulterior motive, and you’re living purely and being of service.
Now, the second best one is if somebody is of service to you. That means it’s important to be able to accept from others. First of all, we now know neurologically we’re doing them a favor. We allow someone to help us. We’re helping them out, and we’re helping us out, which is pretty cool. There’s even a neurological boost to just watching one person help another person, even if I’m not directly involved, which is something I think is so cool about recovery fellowships is they give me the opportunity to go places where I always have a chance to help somebody else. I always have a chance to be helped, and I can definitely sit around and watch one person help another person. All three of those benefits come when I show up to a meeting of whatever fellowship I choose to go to. Being of service, spirituality, these are things that encourage our senses of connection, which gives a big neurological benefit and over time allow us to heal this system.
What’s really cool and this is something I love about recovery is we don’t just stop when we get to baseline. Recovery doesn’t like to hold still. What we usually find is if we hold still we actually start sliding backwards, which is why when people stop going to meetings and all that kind of stuff they start to notice fairly quickly they lose the benefits of having gone to meetings. Pretty soon the old thinking is creeping back in, and one day or another, whether it’s six minutes, six hours, six months, or six years, using suddenly seems like an okay idea again. I’m going to be fine just one more time. I’m cured by now. That happens because we lose track of this stuff, so I have to keep feeding it.
This really cool thing happens when I practice being of service to others, when I show up and allow other people to help me out, and I’m part of that system and that flow. My life keeps getting better. Since I don’t have the option to slow down or stop that process, not very effectively for any long period of time, that means that, poor baby, I’m stuck in this situation where for the rest of my life I have to keep showing up as the best possible version of myself. My life has to keep getting better. What I find is that, if I say this right here is where my life was and this is where it ended way down here when I ended up using, I have to compare these two and think, wow, my life is so much better than it was when I was using. What I forget is this life was going downhill, so I should really be comparing where I am now to where I was ending up. I know that this is going to keep getting better. These two things, where I was going and where I am heading, are getting farther and farther and farther apart.
There’s another thing about it and I say this a lot, especially here at family workshop, the work we do here is not just about us. This is what we’re going to pass down to future generations. This is what we’re going to model for them. Do we model recovery? Do we model, hey, we’re always getting a little bit better? Do we model accepting help? Do we model being of service to others? All of these things are protective factors for the next generation.
The others we’re going to see in this next little bit, there are some things that we can’t protect the next generation from, so I say give every advantage we can. This last thing we’re going to look at – remember I said we were going to look at the biology, which we did. We looked at the medical model. We’re going to fight the disease model. The last thing we’re going to look at is risk factors. We looked at the biology. We looked at the psychology.
This part and I didn’t make this up is called social, but it actually means all the environmental factors so, basically, everything outside of you, everything inside of you, and psychologically how your mind reacts. It’s called the biopsychosocial model. We’ll start with the obvious one. The first obvious biological thing is genetic. It turns out our genetics play about 50% of the role in determining who’s going to end up addicted and who’s not. Think about that. That’s a pretty big chunk of the pie for something that we tend to blame on willpower and upbringing and morals. Did you listen to rap music or not or whatever it is that we come up with?
It turns out it’s actually about 50% genetic. Again, the work we’re doing is not just about us because we don’t decide what genes we pass down. We’re getting closer on that. I don’t know if that’s a great idea or not, but there’s not an addiction gene. There’s not one gene we look at and say that’s the one. If you have this, you’re hosed. If not, you’re free. Drink all you want. It turns out there’s a lot of genetic factors that go into it, and the way genetics work, they cascade, which means that if one gene goes left or right it’s going to affect all the other genes that are next down in the line. There are things, genes that we know for things like depression, impulsivity, how we react with certain substance. All those things are partly or sometimes entirely genetically determined.
When it comes to human behavior, we know that genetics are not the whole picture by a long shot. Our genetics and we’ve come to find out in the last few decades actually turn on and off. That is to say genes decide. They say express. The genes are going to express or not express based on environmental factors and experiences. What that means is, if you have a genetic predisposition for say depression, you’re still going to be strongly influenced by what social or environmental things happen to you. Then based on that, how much social or environmental stress, how much genetic potential because genes are not destiny, right? They’re potential. They are tendency, but they’re not where you’re stuck with.
Instead, we’ll look and say these things happened. My genes reacted this way. They will both influence how I think. If enough of those factors pile up, then I become very vulnerable to addiction. It’s funny. When I first heard this bit, 50% genetic – and while this is not a perfect correlation, it does correlate with the statistic. You’ll hear that a child of somebody who has an addiction has about a 50/50 chance of developing an addiction themselves, which is scary.
When I first heard that, I was 19 years old. I just read it in some book, and I immediately called my brother. I said, “Matt, you got to be careful, man. You’re out there in college and you’re drinking. Dad was an alcoholic. You might become an alcoholic.” He’s fine. I go to AA meetings. It turns out I was way off base. I had never considered that I might have an addiction. I was just all worried about him, which is kind of sweet, but there you go.
We know genetics are a big piece of the puzzle. Environmentally, what do you think are some of the risk factors that we might run into? Trauma, I like to say that trauma is in the eye of the beholder. That means that it really matters if it feels traumatic, not if it looks traumatic from the outside. Sometimes there are things that we think would be highly traumatic, and we see people just sail through them. Sometimes there are things where it doesn’t seem like a big deal to anyone else. In fact, this often happens with smaller children. Nobody has any idea the trauma just happened.
A really simple way to look at trauma is to say it’s an experience. Basically, it’s a stressor. It’s an invitation to feel less safe in the world. If any of my psychology up to that point and my genetics because that’s all that affect things, I may decide that I’m significantly less safe in the world, and then I’m going to start acting that way from now on. That means if I go through something that feels traumatic I might decide from then on I need to pay super close attention to everything in the environment. I have to look out for if any of those threats are going to happen again. I have to look out and see what’s going to happen? I might start having flashbacks. I might have nightmares, might be really jumpy, might be all kinds of physical symptoms.
It is amazing how many physical symptoms go with trauma that nobody thinks to stop and check on. Bessel van der Kolk wrote a great book called The Body Keeps the Score, and if you ever deal with trauma, it’s well worth reading. It’s written more for therapists, but it’s very readable. It’s got a ton of good information. Now, as one of my trainers said, sometimes you have to go shields up because he speaks very openly about highly traumatic and terrifying things that happen to human beings, but the main point is how our body reacts. We will take on all kinds of illness, and we’ll see doctor, after doctor, after doctor. Nobody’s able to figure what’s going on. Maybe nobody ever stops to say, hey, what were things like for you when you were a kid? We associate childhood trauma with the most profound effect, although it could certainly happen with adults.
Trauma, peers, stressors, I like to put a few other up here just for time. I’ll say media and then psychological things so trouble with self-esteem. Any kind of psychiatric disorder correlates very highly with substance use, and by the way, it’s not always super simple to figure out which one actually came first. It’s very chicken and egg question. We might think, oh, this person is drinking because you’re depressed, but it turns out that drinking actually causes depression as well. It’s hard to tell exactly which one came first so psychiatric conditions, self-esteem problems, any kind of connection problem. Remember how the vital connection feels. If we grow up feeling disconnected, we are way more vulnerable to addiction.
Here’s the thing, they all feed each other, makes this big triangle. My genetics make me more vulnerable to depression, and if I’m depressed, I’m going to have different experiences and interactions with my peers and things on the outside, which will then reinforce that genetic message, etc., etc., etc. That’s how we get on this downward spiral. Sometimes the downward spiral starts really young, and nobody has any idea it’s happening. For all the parents who are like, oh, no, it was me; I gave them the genetics, you didn’t pick the genetics, so we’ll start with that. Nobody does. Second of all, you don’t pick their environment. I learned that really early on in parenting my daughter that we are not controlling her environment. She’s going out there in the world, and her impression, psychologically what’s happening, is also well beyond my control. It’s also beyond her control.
What this really means to me when I look at all these different factors that go in – and we could spend all day writing stuff down and our environmental factors that might make you more vulnerable. One takeaway is chaos here. There are way too many factors to go in and to look at one thing and say that’s the reason this person has an addiction. It’s never that simple. There’s so many different things that go into it. It also really reinforces that nobody chooses to have an addiction. In fact, as we saw in the last section, we don’t always know why we make any choice. It’s just reality.
Another thing that I look at and I look at that and say, okay, how do we get on the upward spiral? I’m tired of the downward spiral. How do I make this into an upward spiral? I can’t go and change the genetics, right? We have found out I can have some influence on which genes express and which ones don’t, so I might look at things in my environment. Now, again, I’m not going to stay sober just by controlling the environment. In fact, I’ll probably drive myself crazy trying to control the environment. I can look and say how am I reacting to the environment? Is there unresolved trauma? Is there stuff I know I need to be dealing with that I’m not talking about?
Let’s start talking about it. Peers, who am I hanging out with? What kind of stressors around me? Are some of those manageable? If they are, let me reduce them. If not, let me learn how to deal with them better. Media messages, that’s what it is. Availability, yeah, it might depend on who I’m hanging out with.
I threw a party a couple years ago when I was living in New Mexico with my wife. We liked to throw parties a lot at the time, and I looked around the party at one point. It was the weirdest thing. I just looked around the room. I went, “Huh.” I was just going around and counting and looking, and I realized that everybody in our house was in recovery.
Now, I didn’t say we’re going to throw a party where only people in recovery are going to show up. Those were just the people I had the most in common with. While I’m hanging out with people in recovery, nobody’s offering me drugs. It’s the coolest thing. It doesn’t come up. Nobody like, “Hey, man, do you like to get high?” They already know I like to get high. They like to get high too, but we’re not doing that anymore.
I worked on the psychological stuff. I mean, you can do it the way you want to, but man, when I got in recovery, first three years I was in therapy every week, out-of-pocket. Insurance was not touching it. I’m like my checkbook’s touching it. You know what? I need to work on all that stuff that I’m avoiding all this time.
When I look up on this list, you can – maybe you noticed it already. All of these things come into play probably the most strongly when we hit puberty, and most people start using at some point in puberty. Whatever trauma we’ve been through, even if we seemed just fine as little kids, when we hit puberty, our brain – well, the way we think shifts, and trauma may resurface. It may come out some really funky ways. Our peers suddenly become the most important people in our lives. We react to stressors differently. We react to media messages differently.
All of a sudden, everything’s available that wasn’t available before. Our psychological or psychiatric factors are going to suddenly kick into high gear, and our genetics are going to be expressing in new ways. There’s no way to perfectly prevent somebody from this. In fact, as teenagers, we’re already built to take higher – to take greater risks for lesser rewards. In other words, things sounded more fun. We talked about teenagers being impulsive. It’s not as simple as that.
I don’t know about you all. I planned a lot of my mischief. It wasn’t just impulse. It was like, oh, man, Friday night we’re sneaking out. We’re going to go do the thing, but I was willing to take big risks. What’s really cool, though, is I can look at this and say how do I get on the upward spiral? That’s really by saying, okay, I’m going to finally look at all that psychological and psychiatric stuff I didn’t want to deal with before. It’s time to deal with it.
I’m going to look at my environment, past and present, and say what do I need to heal from? What do I need to change? Through those things, now I know I can influence my genetics. I can influence how these things express. A lot of it comes down to, again, taking good care of myself, being good to other people. Have to put my honesty mask on first, so I can’t go save the world until I’m in better shape. I can get in better shape so I can help other people. That’s a big deal.
If I’m willing to do that, then it reminds me – I’m going to close with this thing from the comedian, Russell Brand, talks about addiction a lot, if you’ve ever checked out his stuff. He’s a great guy or so he seems from over here. He said at one point that there’s no condition that leaves people uglier than addiction, and he didn’t mean physically because leprosy is pretty bad that way. He was saying just personality-wise we become our worst self, but I see the opposite happening in recovery. I don’t know if he talks about this elsewhere, but he didn’t say it at that same time. I always think, man, if I ever got to meet Russell Brand, hey, Russell, you should listen to this podcast. What I want to say is there’s nothing that leaves you looking better than recovery, and I see that not just for the person with the addiction but for family members too. We have the opportunity to start working to become our best selves, and if I’m faced with that choice every day, either I’m sliding back into my worst self or I get to make a conscious choice of heading into my best self, I know which choice I’m going to make. You guys are sweet.
Kira Arrillaga: Thanks for being with us for another episode of Addiction and the Family. In today’s episode, we learned a lot about addiction and the brain. If you find this subject as important and as interesting as we do, consider checking out drugabuse.gov and other websites run by the US government that give information for free about drug addiction and what’s happening in the brain.
Casey Arrillaga: 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.