It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:27.9]
Bob: Welcome back to the “Alive and Free Podcast.” Man today, we are going to bust apart this thing called Relapse the R word, right? This is a huge thing and people struggling with compulsive behaviors. Oh my goodness. This is a big one. You know, I relapsed today or I relapsed at this point in time or, you know, I get this far and then I relapse and this concept of relapse has been around so long and so far because somebody had to make sense of it. They're like, okay, this person is in, we're looking at them from the outside. Here's an addict out there and he's doing this behavior and he he's getting good. He's doing better, better, better, better, better. And all of a sudden, we say, Oh, he did it again. He went back to that behavior and we use the word back as if that's possible. [01:18.4]
We'll get there. Don't worry guys. And then we, then, you know, we, he either binges falls into it for a bit and then comes back out of it. And then climbs, claims, claims, claims is doing really good. And then he, boom, does it again. And in order to make sense of that cycle of what's going on, people just in general, cause they want to make sense of things. You and I want to make sense of things. It's it's like, you know, the who done it, mysteries on TV, you know, when you walk into a room and they just opened this massive loop to use a marketing term, or they create this big problem in front of you where you're like, Oh, who did this thing? Something big happened. And then it goes to commercial and you're like, dang it, no, I'm going to sit around and wait until it's done. [01:55.3]
My dad never had that problem. I really admire that about him. If he simply wasn't interested in the topic, it didn't bother him. He'd just go out and work on his woodworking projects and something else. Absolutely amazing. If you ever get a chance to meet my dad telling you, there's some cool things in that guy. So here we are and he's sitting here and we see this thing going on and on and on. And we're trying to make sense of it. Professionals are trying to make sense of it. You know, how do we help this person? Who's clearly not able to control himself. And so to make sense of the pattern of he's in his behavior, and then he's out and then he's in his behavior and he's out, we invented this word called relapse. Now what does that suggest to you? Just think about it for a second. [02:40.9]
You're driving down the road, you hear the word relapse. What do you think of? If you're like most people that have heard the word before you probably think about drugs or alcohol or something like that. And you might be thinking about the sense of complete helplessness, lack of control that a person went back to a negative behavior and that they're stuck in a cycle. And in fact, the word lap is inside the word relapse, right? It goes around and around and around and to re- lap, you know, to go take another lap, take another lap, take another lap. Guess what? That concept, just like the concept of the word trigger. And I'm pretty sure we've covered that in this podcast. If not, I'll look over the, the ones that maybe we'll do another episode on that, but that word is completely detrimental to helping a person find freedom. [03:33.4]
And if you happen to be using it because you didn't realize that I invite you to find another way of talking about it. I'll give you one today, don't worry. And if you're a person who has been struggling with compulsive behaviors, unwanted behaviors, bad habits or addictions, and you're using the word relapse, I invite you to stop using that as well. Not to ignore that you did whatever you did, but because the word itself has a kind of energy to it that is keeping you in a loop. And if you want to keep being loopy, if you will and stay in that cycle, then I suggest you keep using the word. But if you want to be done being loopy and done, being mad and crazy and constantly reliving this life, if you want to just simply set it aside and be free, then I'd highly suggest we start to change our vocabulary. And the way we look at it, because words are really an expression of the way that you see the world. [04:23.6]
And if we are careful with them, if we use them in a very deliberate way, they can also be a doorway to help us go experience a different world. Cool. I mean, this is something I learned from learning languages. You know, the Hebrew language sees something in one way, we talked a little bit about that a couple episodes ago with the whole Armor of God thing, very concretely Greek languages has a lot of abstractions in it, right? The Germanic language, whewwww, it's a very technical language, right? And then there's other languages that are exceptionally poetic and very artful. And they're not like technical in the same way that Germanic stuff is. And so each language lends itself in a certain way and creates a certain way of thinking about the world so that if you hadn't had the Chinese language, Chinese martial arts probably wouldn't have shown up in the same way they wouldn't have because the language and the way they thought about and saw the world is the very thing that created the situation out of which grew Kung Fu and same with India and Buddhism and all that stuff. And same within Russia, Russian Sistema, and that mentality in the Orthodox church there, like the mentality creates the possibility for a certain reality…Ooh that rhymed. [05:36.5]
So here we are, and if we have a mentality around addiction and we have a mentality around bad habits, then that say, Oh my gosh, it's a loop, there's something I'm struggling with and it came back. Then that's going to continue to reinforce it. And we want to change that. So let's go look and see what happened. First question you want to ask yourself is, is it possible to go back anywhere? What I mean by that? We used to recreate the conditions of the first time you did something, or the last time you did something. The exact conditions, everything that you knew, everything that you felt, everything that was happening during that day, everything. Is it actually possible, humanly possible to ever recreate a situation, the exact situation that occurred before? [06:23.9]
I am hoping that you're seeing that no, it's not possible that even in reenactments, where we recreate the costumes and the dialogue and the accents and everything we can, it's being portrayed by people from a 21st century mindset, which is not the same thing as being portrayed or being enacted for the first time, by somebody in an 18th or 17th or fourth century mindset, we cannot in any way, shape or form recreate what has already gone. You can't add for instance, last week, you, maybe you ate a tuna sandwich for lunch. Sorry, if you hate tuna, my wife doesn't like tuna. So don't get it, don't give her any tuna. All right maybe last week, maybe you ate a tuna sandwich for lunch. It's a Friday. Cool. Let's say we go to another Friday this week and you eat another tuna sandwich for lunch. Did you relapse? What if you went to the same restaurant with the same people or anything? Did you actually recreate the same situation? No, you didn't. [07:26.2]
Here's a cool thing about taste buds. I know we go far afield in this podcast, ut's fun though, tight? You enjoy this. Okay, good. Taste, did you know that taste is really just a chemical reaction on, on some basic level and we can talk about energetic stuff, but we'll just talk about chemistry for now. Basically what happens is your body is in a certain chemical state. You eat some food that is in a certain chemical state and the interaction of the two creates an experience in you that you call taste and smell. Okay. They're kind of inextricably linked. I heard one time that taste is about 80% olfactory or related to smell. So you, that chemistry creates a taste and you go, ‘Oh man, I love the taste of this thing. ‘But have you ever noticed how your tastes change? Like sometimes you, you used to like something, but you don't like it anymore. I wonder why that is.? While we blame it on, Oh, it's that, it's that, that thing, you know, I got a bad batch or something, it just doesn't taste as good anymore. But have you ever considered the possibility that your own chemistry has changed. [08:25.4]
Your chemistry as created by thoughts, and we've talked about this before. Your chemistry has created by what you eat your nutrition and maybe diseases and a number of other things emotional states and things that we talked about in the five masks of emotion. All of this changes your internal chemical state, and so at that stage, when you put the thing in that you used to love, and you're in a different state, it's going to taste different. And what if it's also in a different state, it's going to taste different. So you go back to your tuna sandwich and it was the most glorious thing that you have ever put in your mouth on the Friday before you go back and you're like, Oh, I'm going to have one of those again. And it's just not the same. It's just not as satisfying. It just doesn't do what it is, what it was before. You cannot recreate it, because the Friday before everything that had built up to that moment in your life, all of your thoughts, beliefs, desires, all of the external weather conditions, the growing, the exact tuna fish that came up and all of the chemical constituents there, all of your thoughts and feelings, the people you were with the jokes that were being said, the kind of conversation, everything else, it's not the same. [09:26.8]
Even if you lived out Bill Murray's a movie from so long ago called Groundhog Day, where he literally relived the same day and everybody did the same thing. It's not the same. He can't have the same experience of the day because he's conscious of it differently. He has a memory of it now, and he has a different thought process around them, behind it. You can't experience the same thing again. It is impossible to recreate an event. Every event is unique and the way to really understand what's going on inside of you is to look at each event as unique. Instead of trying to draw this big pattern from your past and to string this thread between all these disparate experiences, just look at the one you're having now. And yes, the hippie idea would be we'll be in the present moment. Not that you can never not be but mean be conscious of it, be with it as it's continuing to change, not be with it for a second. And then pretend that you've somehow understood the whole of reality as reality continues to change. And then wander around saying, no, no, I had this experience once it was a very experiential experience with tuna and I suddenly saw the oneness of old things and therefore, well, did you, did you stay with it or are you now like, not in touch with reality and you're busy in your head just interacting with a memory, right? It's a good question. So you can't recreate these things at all [10:47.8]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [11:15.9]
And so I want you to think about this, like a dot- to-dot picture. If I have a page with a bunch of dots on it and I go, okay, well, you know, I want you to connect all the dots and make a picture out of it. Then you do that and what it looks like when you look at the page is that thing that you drew. But the reality is those dots are just little individual events that you strung together. And you were the one that made the picture out of it. And another person sitting next to you without numbers to tell you which one to do it. And the numbers just mean, Hey, I've made this picture before, and I'm going to tell you how to make the picture so that we get the same picture so that you can have the experience of seeing the world the way that I see the world and so on. [11:58.8]
It's a pre-imposed pattern, but who says that you have to follow the, know the order of the numbers who says that numbers are any more than ink splashes on a page. Did they actually represent anything? Well, that's just something we made up. That's how we connected those dots. And if your life is the page, what we're doing is we're looking at the page and we're taking individual dots or instances and we're pretending that those are the whole of life. And out of those, we are drawing a pattern and then we're saying, see, I'm an addict. See, I'm an idiot. See, I'm no good at public speaking. See, my family hates me. See, my religion is the one, one true one. See your religion is horrible. See all religion sucks. See, like, it doesn't matter how you do it. You know, see there's a conspiracy theory everywhere. See, there's no conspiracy. [12:49.3]
You're taking little individual points and you're drawing a picture out of it, like a dot- to-dot and forgetting that the whole rest of the page is also part of life that we filtered out. There's some 4 billion bits of information that are running into the mind every moment. That your body's processing and data, internal temperature, fluctuations, and homeostasis metrics and light from outside of yourself that it's gathering and piecing together. And then internal responses to those things, internal dialogue about it, like 4 billion bits I read at one point in time. And your mind only can consciously process a small amount, so they say, what if we're wrong on that one? Right? And so they say on average is around 2000 bits. That's less of one half than one half of 1000000th of 1% of all that is actually occurring that we're zeroing in on and out of that we're making pictures. And the picture that most addicts draw is a picture of relapse. [13:45.3]
And why, well, why, why is it that we zeroed in on those pieces? Because society has taught us and we've taught ourselves and religion has taught us and other people that we trust have taught us. And we've accepted those teachings. That, that is, those are the important pieces to zero in on. So our mind literally zeroes in on those pieces and filters out all the other bits. And from those bits of behavior, we go see, he's still an addict. I've seen too many wives do that. See, look, he's still in his attic mode. Do you know that when I came out of addiction and I was no longer engaging in the behavior at all, I still had days that felt to my wife exactly like the days when I was like really bingeing. And fortunately, we'd learned how to have conversations enough to where we finally were able to realize, no, no, the behavior looks the same. And so she had automatically drawn her dot- to-dot picture that said, Oh no, he's back. [14:34.0]
But it's just because I had done a similar behavior. Not because that behavior came from the same place. And I do that with my wife all the time. Like we all do it. It's not like, it's not just wives. I mean, I apologize if your wife listening to this, it's not you, it's a human thing and kids do it and men definitely do it. We all do it. Okay. So here we are, we're dealing with this situation where people have taught us to draw the dot- to-dot picture of relapse. Is it actually true? They taught us to draw the dot- to-dot picture of addiction. And if you haven't listened to the addiction, myth, episodes go listen to them. Is it actually true? They taught us to draw the dot- to-dot picture of us being crippled with this for life. Is it actually true? Let’s stop making dot- to-dots and start looking at what's actually happening. So what happens? All right, I'm going a long ways. And this is what I have our clients do a lot is okay, cool. I went back and they say, I relapsed. And I go, well, let's look at that. What actually happened? And if we trace out the day, they first see, Oh, I've never actually experienced that before now. So how could I possibly have taken another lap on it? You didn't, it wasn't a relapse. [15:41.8]
What happened was there was, they didn't get much sleep the night before they woke up in the morning, kind of cranky. The kids were, were doing whatever the day was that they were doing, that was sort of irritating. Their boss at work was writing them for a little bit. They had a little bit of a reprieve, but overall, they hadn't been eating well. They'd been hopped up on energy drinks for a while and eating cheeseburgers at McDonald's or Whoppers because you know, maybe it's tax season and they're an accountant. And they've been out working like 80 hour weeks because of that's the way that the world has gone this day, these days. And that's just, what's expected at the company. And so bit by bit, there's been this buildup of internal stress and an internal condition where their body is literally in a negative state. And so the body is looking for anything and everything it can do to get itself, at least temporarily feeling better. Because if we sit in this acidic, nasty state, we're just going to break down organ function. So what are some of the things it does? [16:31.9]
Well, they started getting snappy with people, people because anger produces a different chemical state on the inside. Especially the feeling of like, see I got control. I got control, see how I did that. Like, I feel power. Like, what am I going to do to make myself feel powerful? They will inhale food because that's a nervous system stimulation that will change the chemistry on the inside and kind of maybe hopefully wake them up from their stuff. They'll go on a long brisk walk and take in some fresh air and breathe. Some people will go out for a smoke. There's all kinds of things that people do to try and manage this. And then at a certain point, you know, pretty lady walks by and they start to think about how home life has been really stressful. And so then they're like, Oh man, maybe I need to go look at something. This is how it was, you know, for a lot of how it is for a lot of the guys that we work with, who deal with the pornography side of things. The people we work with that are dealing with food and everything else, it doesn't matter what it is that they call a trigger. They see something and then they start to ruminate on it because they're like, Oh man, that would feel great. Because somewhere in their life they learned, Hey, this thing makes me feel good. [17:31.1]
If I have a ladder here and I'm on rung one. And that thing put me on rung two or three, I'm going to remember that every time I'm on rung one. But if I'm living on rung five and that thing, it still puts me on rung three, then I'm no longer going to be thinking about that when I'm living on rung five. And the behavior is an indication that your quality of your overall quality of life tanked and that mercifully the way we were created was, Hey, let's survive. And addiction has literally saved many people's lives. It's claimed in many people's lives too. So I'm not going to argue for its virtue. I'm just going to say, it's, it's saved many people's lives because otherwise they would have gone into a downward spiral and done something really horrid. And they've gone into these patterns in order to save them. And people are micro dosing on, on mushrooms these days. And they're going out every night with their friends to just get a little bit of a drink or a glass of wine at night to take the edge off. And all these things that people do are mechanisms to enable them to come to a state of at least temporary wellbeing because their life is in such a place that that's a step up for them. [18:39.0]
The key here is to understand what it's pointing to and not to look at the behavior as the problem, the behavior is the solution to the problem. So calling it a relapse is a misnomer. What you ought to call it is as like a message from my body and my soul and my mind. And every part of me saying, Hey dude, did you recognize that? Like something's going down underneath the hood and it would probably be best if you stopped to denying yourself and stop trying to please everyone else for a moment and step back and look inside and go like, what's really going on here. And am I really committed to living life this miserably? And if you trace what led up to the event, you trace what you thought you were going to get out of it. You trace what you actually got out of it. And you trace what happened after the event. What you will notice is that it wasn't a relapse at all. It was a deliberate decision. Unconsciously made from many people To experience life a little bit better, at least for a moment. [19:44.2]
It was a deliberate attempt to feel better when everything else they had tried to feel good had failed. That is what people call relapse. And they look at it as a negative thing. And they look at it as a reason to beat themselves up when it is the very reason to celebrate, Hey, my life got saved again. Hey, my body is trying to talk to me. And if you, if you have a religious idea or a spiritual thought process behind it, and you want to say, Hey, God is talking to me through this infirmity and trying to show me there's some stuff inside. There's some misery and suffering on the inside that I'll just keep pointing to so that you can remember that you don't have to live with it anymore, and I'll keep pointing to it until you remember to let it go. And it's a really a gift. I'm not saying this to condone to behavior at all, to condemn it, to condone it or to do anything with it. But I'm saying is it's important to see things a little bit more clearly. [20:44.7]
And instead of labeling it with replapse, just simply say, well, I got drunk last night, or simply say, man, I smoked a pack of cigarettes this week and, or simply say, Oh, I quit on my diet and that's it. That's all that happened. I just, I quit. And I went in or even even better. It would be like, I went and ate a piece of pie. That's it! And the more minute and granular, you can make it to where you're only stating what actually happened. I was feeling this way and I convinced myself that doing this would help me feel good. And so then I went and did it, and it did feel good for a moment, but then didn't feel really good afterwards. And it didn't actually solve the problem in the first place. That's a place of a tremendous power. It's a place where natural organic decisions to start to shift your life will start to rise up in you without you having to sit there and force yourself to do it or willpower yourself to do it. [21:41.1]
Please, please as you go thinking about things, you know, something happened again, it's not happening again. Something simply happened. And the less you can make a dot-to-dot picture out of it, the more you can expand your vision and see the rest of the blank page and everything else that's happening in your life. But you can also deal with that one dot very easily. It's harder to deal with a whole pile of dots than it is to deal with just one, relax, does not exist.
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [22:29.0]
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