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, wheelchair straight from the trenches what we've 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.
[0:35] All right, welcome back, guys. It is now on to adventure number four, after I hope nobody was offended last week after ending on my Chinese voice, because I will do it again, if you ask. So this week, we're gonna, we're gonna step into the chapter where this is where I was very conscious of already writing in writing this book of how much I am throwing a very massive argument that contradicts a lot of what the psychology industry kind of does in that not everything. You know, a lot of psychologists, a lot of therapists, a lot of people that we've worked, we've worked with them, they've come to us for help. And they agree with a lot of what's there. But the industry at large still holds a position that is quite contrary to what we're doing here. And so I had to build a case for something that we covered at length on this podcast, which is that there is no such thing as addiction, as it is commonly understood. And so we cover a lot of territory on this, I don't want to rehash some of the things you can you can listen to a ton of it over the past couple years. But there are going to be some some salient points that come up, I thought it would be cool to start with the poem. It's a short poem. But I feel like the poem sums up the entire adventure. And so I'm going to do that because I can, okay, the title of the poem is just one, a single lie believed true, will ruin all the life in you. How will you know the difference? I'm not going to get my name and date that I do that in the book, though, just in case you wanted to know my name, every chapter. But that's what we're really dealing with in this chapter is a single lie. And by lie, I don't necessarily mean a malicious lie, I mean, just something that does not correspond to what's maybe actually going on, as far as we can tell, I mean, an addition to observed data that interprets it, and then spins it in a certain direction. We didn't do the little singing bowl Gong with the poem, so you'll have to listen to the book for that. But yes, so and then we dive into all the stuff. So I don't know if you have any questions.
[2:37] Yeah, I think I think it's important to said, this isn't just your opinion, that you quote, respect to psychiatrists, Thomas Insel, who was also the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, he said, You don't understand how broken our field is that we don't have good tools, that we're not healing people. We're helping with symptoms at best, and that we're desperate for new tools. It reminds me of the emperor's new clothes. Okay, like, it's very obvious to people in the industry that this isn't working. In a large degree, people are coming back. And we've talked about therapists that we know that, you know, there's the actual industry of therapy is making money off of bringing people back, not actually healing them, you know? And so it's a broken system. And yes, it's helping and yes, I was in it. And yes, I was helped by it. And it also kept me there.
[3:31] Yes. Michael Pollan talks about this too, with the the studies around psychedelics and things. Like one reason why there is such an interest in that. And it's just because the tools that are currently available with SSRIs and stuff are just like, not that great, right? Don't be placebo. Right. Yeah. And and I think that that does speak to the integrity of the industry wanting to find answers, you know, that does speak to people wanting to find answers, and many of them are still going down trodden paths, hoping to just make those answers better. You know, there's the electroshock therapy, electroconvulsive therapy that that's being used still in there are people still exploring it a deeper and deeper levels, and trying to evolve it into something that can help. And so there's a whole host of people that are trying to make the old answers work better. There are people going out and exploring new answers, which would be me, I'm just not inside the industry. And so to try and make a compelling case for this without without having the credentials of someone like Jordan Peterson or, or the background of some of these researchers and whatnot. Well, I did my best.
[4:39] I really respect that. That this again, I'll say is this isn't your opinion. Like you go back and show us the origins of the idea of addiction and addict us and where that all came from, but then also in a relatively recent history, within the last 150 years where the modern idea of addiction come As from and how it's ridiculous, and yet it has gone unchallenged. And here we are 100 You know, 30 years later dealing with the ramifications of all that? Yeah,
[5:12] uh based on some propaganda and whether or not that people believed in their what was dubbed quack medicine at the time. It's the propaganda that sticks. You know, the right commercial jingle you guys remember your commercials from a kid? The ones like the the listener meeting? Do you remember the Listerine commercial with the guy swinging the listerine bottle swinging through the maybe you're too young for that? No, dang. Oh, dang. And anyway, like, there are certain, you know, little jingles and little things that they stick in your head, and they get to the public. And the public doesn't, then they're not in the industry looks like academics, you know, talking about things. There are academic biblical scholars that are uncovering things that massively contradict everything that the public, at large knows, but it just hasn't leaked to the public yet in a way that they could, you know, remember it, or that it would go viral. And so the same thing here with, with the psychology industry, in this case, and here we have stories of addiction, as a word that at first was just like a word to describe something that people were really invested in both good and bad, but then it became negative. And then it became like, an idea that a founding father decided was, you know, had some stuff going on with it. And then some other doctor decided that it's a disease after we tried to hold demonic approach, and maybe maybe addiction comes from demons. And then the people wanted some freedom from that. So it was an idea that landed at the right time, with a hungry populace, and it just kind of got sucked in as the disease model of addiction. The disease model of addiction is around all over the place. There are a number of really respected researchers and therapists and psychiatrists and stuff that have been trying to fight it for decades. You got Stanton Peale, doing his work on it. And he's been at it for like 50 or 60 years. You have Bruce Alexander, who's talking about it with his rat Park experiments. And you have a lot of experimentation all along the way that gets sidelined or whatnot and not mainstreamed. Because the idea landed at a time when people wanted the idea.
[7:17] And it's, it seems to me or at least it was to me like an attractive lie like, oh, this. There's it's a it's a chemical imbalance or it's a you know, I can do dice. I bought the lie. Yeah. Like I really did when we went to the 12 step programs. Yeah, the 12 step programs, were saying it was a character flaw, but the people in there were talking about the disease. Yeah. I was like, No, it's it's a disease. It's a relief to hear that it was for me, it was for me, too, because I was like, Oh, thank you. Anyway, so it was a huge relief. So and so I bought into it for a period of time, while I was there in the in the toxic programs. And it, I think you're right to say it was an attractive, it was a very attractive life and it and not a malicious one, just an add on to what the observed data actually indicated. And the people that were doing it, that's the surprising part is the people that were doing it got results, which we talked about later in the book in terms of placebo, like, they did get results. And they also didn't get results. And but by the time that anybody was really looking at the data, it was already too far gone. And the same thing happened with 12 Step programs, prohibition ends, there's a lot of alcoholics around, there aren't any recovery programs. And this one shows up and it does, it does help people at least find some sense of control and some sense of understanding or direction or meaning behind it instead of just being dogged by this, a amorphous blob thing called addiction that's controlling everything. And so it landed. And then by the mid 1900s, it became like, standard fare in terms of commonly sending people to 12 Step programs for recovery. So we've decided we would add an awkward pause in here, just because everybody's nodding, but you guys can't see that we're nodding. So there's that.
[9:05] I think, taking just a little bit of time to process. In my own experience, especially having gone through a lot of the therapy approach and 12 Step. I remember working with the marriage and family therapist, and it was it was a fun experience, because I gotta go in and again, talked about like being comfortable and sitting there and having these conversations and I remember, specifically around pornography, she just looked at me one day, and she's like, I can't help. I can't help with this. And by the way, you know, this network of therapists that I work with in this, this area also really don't have a clue of like what to do to help with this specific thing. She's like, we can look at some of the symptoms of this behavior. Not looking at that behavior as a symptom itself. But like that's, that's the best we can do. So maybe let's explore the anger issues that you have and let's explore some of these pieces. And so it was just like, okay, when you haven't dealt with this, and that was a huge thing for me and To like, you're telling me that in this area that I live like there's, there's not really anyone that is going to be able to help me with this. And so that's how I really started to question to question the industry and to look at like, is this the best way to approach this? And, you know, it wasn't just Marriage and Family Therapist, it was psychologist and psychiatrists, that was medication. Because, well, if you're doing pornography, we can't figure out another way to handle this. And, you know, in The Big Book of psychological disorders, this actually isn't definable as an addiction. But we're still going to try to medicate you for this to see if that'll help. And it was just a gamble. It was just like a gamble with with my life with my health, with my relationships with my chemical state. And so starting to ask those questions like, Is this the best way to approach this? So this chapter did kind of diving into the idea of addiction, for me redefining what what the problem was. And for me, it's like, porn is the problem. And then all of a sudden, when I found Bob, and we're starting to look at things like porn isn't the problem. It's also another symptom symptom of what something underneath that, you know, was created, because of past experiences, my outlook on life, let's really look at what's underneath this behavior, this pattern of thinking and in engaging with the world. And that was powerful, because it was a different way of looking at something that for, as long as I could remember was both not an addiction, but also an addiction, and just so much confusion around what the best approach was. And so, Bob, I mean, I guess that'd be kind of a question is, obviously with this chapter, you kind of go back to the history and idea of addiction. But when was it for you personally, where you just challenged the idea that addiction, as most people will find it isn't actually a thing? Yeah,
[11:50] I think I had a an advantage in this arena, because I was such a word nerd. that I commonly went to etymology for everything to try and figure out like, where did this word come from? What did it originally mean? And I, I used to do it as a kid like a nerd, like the word nauseous originally meant that that thing that is not just makes me feel nausea, so when people will wander around being like, Man, I feel nauseous, I go, Yeah, you do. Hey, nauseated would be the correct word. But of course, dictionaries change over time. And now nauseous just means I feel nausea. So I was the word nerd that way. And I think that helped. And so when I had and I mentioned it in this chapter, I think we're there me having this vision of myself at 90 years old, and I haven't gotten out of addiction. It happened in this flash, and I was like, wow, I just spent 60 years, doing nothing but fighting with willpower for a long time and trying not to relapse. And that's, that's my life. I was like, I can't do that. And so among all the other stuff I've tried, I tried. One of the things was to ask the question, what, what if that's not actually the issue? Because everybody else was saying it was lifelong. But I was like, ah, and at the time, very religiously oriented. I was like, if Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't handle addiction, that seems like a weird beta version of Jesus. Like, he seems to have some odd limitations of powers like he's playing with a handicap just so the other players have a feel like they have a shot or so. Like this, is it? So I was like, if I really believe that there is this all powerful being out there that my Jesus is an alpha, yours is an alpha version. We just said before, after beta, alpha and omega.
[13:40] Wish the Hebrews would say Oliphant off, right? And so there you go, if you say so they do. Hit the top would be the last letter in the alphabet. So I went. And I asked that question. And I think it was a really honest and sincere hearted question. I didn't mean it to be flippant in any way. But I was like, if I really believe this thing, then let's put it to the test. And so that's where it was like, Well, what if this is and then I would look up, I looked up the word addiction, I was like, the addiction as a word just means to say yes to something, then in the history of it. Oh, wow. The first addicts were actually religious people, you know, people who had given their lives over to something that they were devoted to. And then eventually, over time, the word came to mean this other thing, and so I was like, okay, cool. So if addiction is a thing, what if it's not actually a molecule like a disease was a bacteria virus in my mind? And yeah, mental health diseases aside at the time, I hadn't really challenged all of those yet, but I was like, it's not actually a thing. Like nobody has ever like in any laboratory anywhere. Isolated, Oh, we found a molecule of addiction floating through your blood. So lucky. We caught it early. Because if it had metastasized and grown, then you would have been a full blown addict here in 10 years or something like that. It wasn't anything like that. And so that's where I was like, Oh, if this isn't real, then what's actually going on? And that's where I had to boil back down into my own experience.
[14:59] Right. And I think like initially hearing that, for me, like this idea, like addiction isn't real challenged some things I mean, because I think both like you said, Bob and Jeff, like, there was some level of comfort in sitting in a 12 step meeting, like, Oh, I'm an addict, and I have I have this disease, I have this thing. Because when it's like, well, maybe then there's a possibility, like with other diseases and illnesses, that I can take medication, I can pop a pill, and it will fix this thing. And I really tried that for a long time, like a lot of different freakin medications to try and handle this porn thing. And I think, a point of clarification to when I worked with that marriage and family therapist, and she's like, there's no one up here that can help with this. There were plenty that were trying. Yeah, and there were a lot that were trying, and her point was, is that no one is consistently having success. And so it was like redefining, and that's what I, you know, challenge you the listener, as you're reading this book, if you're looking at this chapter, and it's bringing up even fear or doubt or like, even like anger, like yes, addiction is a thing, like, look at that. And look at the way you're defining this concept, this word in your own life, and kind of ask yourself, like, how is defining it in this way, making anything better?
[16:15] So Latin that but now let's take the word disease and flip it on its head? The word disease is made of two words like or two parts, right? We have dis, which would be the you designate? No, this would be it's a prefix from Latin, I'm pretty sure it means to insult No, I'm kidding. Which was like a transformation of the prefix meaning the D prefix, like down from or that which comes down from and then E. So something that somebody is experiencing dis ease, or they're ill at ease. And so if we flip that on its head, we look at it, that's what I went back to look at. I was like, okay, cool. What's happening? Well, the only things that I know happening, are I'm uncomfortable here, or I'm breathing weird here or I, my eyes are darting one way or another. And so that's where I introduce in this chapter, emotional Ninjitsu, which is something that as a reader, if you're going through it, you can really kind of dive in and look at the a b l e of that is what I end the chapter with for that. The funny thing about this, to me is like, what the way you talk about addiction isn't real. You're saying like, it's not a physical thing. It's not the disease model you makes you think, Oh, it's a molecule or some sort of, like, that's not true. And then what you end up with is a physical thing.
[17:29] But it's totally different. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, it's strange. And I but I think, you know, we've been around and Jeff and I have had a lot of talk, Jeff has this level of attention to the kind of like detail and the ramifications of the things that you say that he'll bring up all the time, like, this feels contradictory. And I go, yep. But it works. So this is, I was thinking about this last night, while I was doing the darkness, meditation a little bit, but I feel like arguing with you, is consistent with everything that you are in, it's like sparring with you. It's like you do the like woowoo thing, which is words and ideas. It's like, I can't grab onto this guy, he started, he started tickling me. Now he's just making random noises instead of like laying down a philosophical argument, which is like, Oh, of course, he's doing that.
[18:24] And that makes it so that addiction doesn't land. In case you didn't know, woowoo is a technical term for a martial arts move that we will make up later. Yeah, but 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 want some help doing it, head on over to the freedom specialists.com/feel better now, 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.
[19:08] The other thing about Bob is that he gets a lot of his wisdom from Kung Fu Panda. That's what that is. There are people listening to this and actually believe that and that's just not true. There may be some valid phrases and instances but alright, I'm pretty sure Kung Fu Panda got it for me. Yeah, just kidding. Okay, so emotional and Jitsu, which is what ends the chapter. I mean, you've dived into this a lot, Jeff, right. And do as well, like all three of you in some way. I just share my kind of like, one example of how I kind of do it in a weird hokey way so that you guys can imagine me doing snow angels on the carpet, so that it's somewhat of an entertaining. There's a lot of different ways that I've done it over the years, some more challenging some less, but when it comes to it, it's a simple acronym that I Actually my oldest son helped me create because it was like, How do I put this into something that will be memorable, let's make an acronym because of course, my dad was in the military, and they have acronyms all over the place. Welcome to the land of ridiculous acronyms basically, is what you enter into, when you start doing some of the stuff that we're doing. And a B, L E, which was a way of me saying, look, the first thing that you have to do in order to be able to get out of this dis ease any of these mental health issues is to be able to acknowledge what's there, meaning you have to be able to see it. If you can't see it, I mean, feel it, be aware of it in some way, then, then it's just going to own you until you can figure it out. Then to start to breathe, which is a kind of loosening on the inside, it also changes your chemistry, then there's loosen the L itself, which is has to do with movement, and relaxing tension in the system. And then there was escape, which is a postural thing. So these elements here, breath, movement, relaxation, and posture, or structure are elements that when you start to toggle these, now, you actually have the ability to turn up and down the volume on the problems that you have. And then that allows you some freedom to realize, wow, okay, cool. emotion can now be an adventure instead of just struggle all the time. So for you guys, as you've dived into that, particularly, like, what did it do for you?
[21:24] Though, the way I think of it is like, that preventative maintenance piece, like, when I can't, like I used to work with these big hydraulic presses or make pottery. And they would break down all the time, because we didn't really know how to use them. And we have to have the guys who built them come down from Ohio and, and like, fix them and replace parts and stuff. And then they finally like taught us like, hey, you know, every, every week, you need to do this oiling, you need to take this piece out, clean it like that. And, and so that's what I think of when I come to the we came to the first retreat, it was like, Oh, my body is breaking down. And I'm needing to do all these really intense things. And so we had this big like, refitting you know, doing all these, this really intense, deep physical work. And then the ABLE stuff is like, Okay, now when I go back into my life, I'm taking the same stuff that we're doing the retreats, changing my posture, doing stuff with my breath, but in just these, like, micro every day way, so that the stuff doesn't build up. So I mean that yeah, similar. I mean, I have two kids and a wife. And that is just like something that would, I would build up a ton of tension around all that stuff. And now, it's something that I can do in conversations with, with my wife, especially where I feel the tension starting to do it starting to increase and then I, you know, I think my old pattern would be to Okay, let's talk about this. Let's figure it out. Let's, you know, believe the right thing, let's communicate better, and start with that stuff. And now that stuff comes much more easily. I communicate way better with with Rebecca and she communicate like we understand each other way more. But not because we've worked on our communication. explicitly. That's like a byproduct of yeah, these physical and minute sometimes really, like just moving from Yes, sitting up leaning forward to leaning back doing that with intention, it changes the whole conversation. And yeah, it's Yeah,
[23:40] yeah, I feel like what you alluded to kind of there the buildup, Jeff was like, significant for me, because when I started practicing ABL, in the beginning, it was each step very intentionally, A, B, L, E, and spending time in each of those. And then as it progressed, sometimes I didn't want to acknowledge, I didn't need to, I didn't need to create a story around what was happening. Not that that's what acknowledge did, but then there were times where I'd get locked into like, I'm acknowledging, you know what's happened. And then I'm also going to try and understand why. So the quicker that I was able to move from A to B was really significant, then eventually got to the point where I could feel the tension without any context and breathe. And then that would clear out or lighten the system, my body, the escape postural stuff. So sometimes it wasn't breathing. Sometimes it was just I need to sit up in my chair, I need to not be hunched over because clearly, you know, rounding my shoulders with my chin to my chest, is actually creating physiological depression and emotional depression. And so I'm just going to lift my frickin head up and feel better. And so it was a progression of like it's laid out this way. And so I did it that way. And then I didn't always have to do it exactly that way, but I could take a piece and add on a suit just situational. What do I need in this situation? But even before like right before we started filming this podcast question in my mind, like, why do people just suddenly become maniacs, and in my mind, is oversimplification, but it's because they don't handle their crap when it comes up. They allow the build up and build up over time, whether that's built up from morning to evening, and then I'm exploding and erupting on my family or build up through the week, I've gone through my week. And I remember having conversations with clients early on, talking about redlining, you go to work on Monday and your boss yells at you go to drive home in the evening, and someone cuts you off. The next day, you get in an argument with your spouse or your kids or driving you crazy Wednesday, your car breaks down. By Thursday, Friday, you've had all of this build up. And if you haven't looked at each of those situations on their own, and and process them which Abel is really effective for doing then your red lining by Friday, I'm wondering why you've just exploded on everyone around you. And so I think that that, for me was like really powerful, like, I'm going to not allow the build up and able really effectively and simply made that possible to where like Jeff said, I didn't have to, I benefited from coming to retreats, because then I could handle some of the big stuff. But now there's just less big stuff, because I'm handling the small stuff as it comes up.
[26:20] And I think if like when I first was going through the online stuff before I ever came to a retreat, I learned this and it seems it seems so trite. Like it's just like no, this is not the problem is not that I'm not breathing. The problem is that I have this broken marriage or this broke, you know that the way that I was raised or that sort of things. And then at the retreat, doing something like a cold plunge, and doing it at first without having any control of my breath. And then getting some coaching in that. And getting control of my breath is like, night and day, the experience of it. So it was like that. So I think that that was a huge thing for me in the beginning of just this like proof of concept of just like, Oh, what if there is something as simple as my posture, and my breathing. And if I can start to build those muscles of being aware of that stuff, and then changing it, then my perception can change, what seems important to me in a situation can drastically change in a second.
[27:23] I think April has come to me very much like what Tucker was talking about, it was almost more rudimentary and clumsy. And it is happening more automatically all the time. And some of that is due to the online stuff where, you know, Bob, you had, you know, set an alarm on your phone and just stop and say what's going on, you know, and that was huge for me to be able to automatically, almost subconsciously now, take take a survey and say what's actually happening right now. And so there's been a lot going into that, where I don't go step by step necessarily, I may skip some steps. But I'm like, Oh, my shoulders are for like, I gotta, you know, shake my shoulders out and take, you know, some people call it cleansing breath. And just like, wow, that was interesting. And let's go, you know, and just the ability to move on from there. I where I have seen it personally in my life is using the idea of able in spaces, and with groups of people, you know, they're acknowledging like, hey, something's happening in this space. Let me open the windows, let me open the curtains, let's let's move the furniture around, let's, let's get people out of this space and into a new space. And let's, let's change it so that that we can start on a new foundation and have a fresh start. And I've seen that, that work itself out that way. So there's that that's able, but can we go back to this chapter. And like, and this is a conversation that we've had throughout this whole book is that like, I've come from the part of the what I've done in the past is the rescue mission industry. We're working with homeless and addicts. And we have detox rooms, where they're padded, and they're locked in for 10 hours until they come off of their, you know, they do the recovery and come out, they come down, you know, and so like I've said to you like what are we saying to that the person who's standing outside the door with the key watching this guy go pull out of addiction come out of that process? Because we can we can you know, they can say well, yeah, that may all be true about where the word addicts comes from. And and that may be true about the guy who had the chloride and put the gold in it and that may all be true of that but but I if I'm speaking as that worker saying, I stand at that drunk tank every night and watch a guy come out of that.
[29:48] Yeah, so the and I think we cover this some in chapter five where we're really looking at our substances addictive in that fifth adventure, but, you know, the question for them They're very real observations. I've gotten angry emails from nurses and people who have been in ers and stuff and watching people and they're saying like you're doing a massive disservice to the world. You're just gaslighting people you're doing all this other stuff to which I would level the same accusation, their direction, you're just gaslighting them into telling them there's something going on that isn't going on. They think they see addiction, what they do see is a chemical reaction to the environment to the substances put in if you put like, too much air into some somebody's like too much oxygen, a person can go through all kinds of problems, too much carbon dioxide, all kinds of problems, fear will come up like just pumping carbon dioxide in a higher mixture in the air will cause a chemical reaction. And that will cause a cascade chain of effects in the body to try and recover from or manage that reaction, which shows up as fear this is James Nester talks about that in the book breath, right. And so like just that was do happen, there is some something that's going on. So we don't have to take that away from that person, that worker, what we do want to take away is the lie built on top of it, all of the extra conclusions being made above the observation. It is very real, that person who is like taking a lot of like drinking a lot of alcohol, some of them can die from the cascade chain of chemical reactions that happen and if that's not mitigated, well, that's a problem. But that doesn't, that's not the same thing as addiction does not zonas chemical dependence is not a real thing. Chemical reactions are very observable chemical dependence is a theory about what's happening, used in an attempt to predict future actions. And it's been a useful theory. Because, okay, if this guy has an addiction, the prediction that I can make out of this theory of addiction is that he will return to it or he will get quote, unquote, triggered, or something else will happen. And then he'll go down the rails because that's what's happened before. So a theory is used in order to predict things, theories are proven wrong all the time. That doesn't make them not useful. Even Newtonian physics does not work at a quantum level. But it's still useful within within a range of parameters. So we can say that theory is useful for helping, like predict behavior. But in terms of what's really going on, that theory includes that behavior will never go away, which is a faulty prediction. There are people who don't do any of the stuff we're doing, and they just kind of are done. They walk away from their problem. They're just like, Yeah, I just quit cold turkey. I talked to them all the time. Because something in them changed.
[32:21] And now includes people using drugs and alcohol, not just some people come to me for like porn, and they're like, Yeah, I've quit heroin, and I quit meth and I quit all of these other things. They just walked away from it, just like that. So to say that, well, it's addiction that's at play here. There's some phantom thing that's addiction is well intended. But a poorly aimed a theory when it comes to well, let's actually make a change as opposed to mitigate circumstances. In the chapter you talk about Mr. Wright, which I think is a fascinating story. And I'm certainly had moments in my own life where I thought I had something and then, you know, had made myself sick. But speak to Mr. Right. A little bit.
[33:01] Yeah. So I in order to kind of drive the point home, I went away from addiction. And I went straight to cancer, right, because nobody, there's not anybody on the on the planet is going to argue the cancer isn't a real thing. Right. And Mr. Wright is a story hit part of his story is very well known in some like TED talks, and some other circles where he's somebody who was in the last stages of lympho sarcoma, he was led two weeks to live. And he was admitted into a trial study for a wonder drug called Krebs frozen, which was supposedly going to be the new thing that could cure cancer. And he was given his first dose and the next the next. The next week, the doctor thought he was going to be dead, but he was like a miracle. Like all these huge like baseball sized tumors had shrunk all the fluid that they were taking out of his chest like it started going away within like a handful of days, he was released from the hospital sent home to his life, perfect, perfect bill of health. And then a newspaper article comes around that says, hey, this is not actually an effective drug at all all the time. All the trials have come back negative even all the other people in the same hospital that were in the trials with him all the other 11 And they did it with a number of hospitals, all those other ones nobody got any better. And so the doctor decided to test this with his own like quack medicine. Like how is it that all these other quack medicine doctors get this? So he he told him no, no, that was just a bad batch. We're gonna get a better batch and then any comes within he came in with just, you know, just water. That's all it was. It was a sailing, so it might have been salt water, I can't remember exactly the solution at the moment was basically water and let the guy work himself up about it injected water into the guy within a couple of days faster than the first time. All those tumors that had reappeared now disappeared again, and the man went off with a clean bill of health. And then finally, you know, there was a final result. report about the drug and all the tumors came back, and then the man died. And so we were watching this change from disease to health, not not addiction to health, not Oh, he's going through withdrawals. Now this was like literally tumors, and then shifting back to health, just by virtue of this man's belief in a reality, that wasn't necessarily the case. And then the shattering of that belief in that reality. And then the reinstatement of that belief, and then the shattering of it again, until finally the life ebbed from his I was gonna say some gruesome thing about his corpse, but maybe I should be, you know, respectful to the deaths. That happened now that that as a corollary to the single greatest factor in determining whether or not a person will experience withdrawals is their belief that they will, even the people that even the people that come into these places that have no narcotics in their system, but are having withdrawals, because they got some cheapo knockoff version, that wasn't actually the thing they were after. And they're having withdrawal symptoms, because they believe that they will. So to wrap up, like what we're talking about in this chapter, and I know that's all is heavy hitting, and we've got to go around the block a little bit on this one. This was one to redirect the entire like to sidestep the theory for a second. Not that it's not useful. It is useful, there is a useful like, in all kinds of different ways. So it's a sad, but to sidestep the theory of addiction, because that theory also includes the incapacity to ever be free of it. It includes that it can be passed along nowadays, it includes it, it can be inherited, and my father was an alcoholic. So I'll be an alcoholic, it includes lifetimes of like conditioning. And if we sidestep the theory and go back to the drawing board and go, what's the new theory, boom, you got people like Max Planck, who come up with quantum mechanics. And now because of him, we have like supercomputers and all kinds of other stuff, just because somebody decided to sidestep the theory because it wasn't matching the data. And we'll talk about him in another chapter. Might be the next one, actually. And so that's my lead into next week. This week, folks, as we sign off, just consider that what other theories do you have about things in your life that are really big struggles? What if you're wrong? What if it's been useful as a theory and you don't have to necessarily chuck it, but if you want to be done with it, or if you want a new solution, or a new result, instead of being the insane doing the insane way and repeating what you're doing, hoping for a different result, you actually change the approach and see something new and that's all that I did and emotional Ninjitsu came out of that among so many other things. The final and most important question for this podcast is this. When doing emotional Ninjitsu Do you feel like a ninja so sorry. Oh, come on.
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