April 5, 2008 - Sunday Alcohol Sales In Georgia
Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour
4-05-2008
Brian: Welcome to the Breakthrough Addition Recovery Hour. My name is Brian Fujii and with me is Jill Mattingly, and also we have a special guest with us, Dr. Lois Dutton. Dr. Neil Johnston, our Psychiatric Director, is off on vacation today, but he’ll be back at another time. We’re glad to have Dr. Dutton with us. She is one of our new staff that has come on board with us, and we’re very excited having her with us. She works a lot in our medical area, but also supplements many times when I’m busy and doing other things, and she comes in and does the day treatment with us and does an excellent job there. Welcome Lois, I’m glad to have you with us.
Lois: Thank you, Brian.
Jill: She wears many, many hats.
Brian: She does. We might want to still continue just a little bit Jill, from last week on our talk on how we’re looking at these Sunday sales and I know that there was some new pieces in the newspaper this week, already contesting some of the statements that were made.
Jill: Every time I open up the AJC it seems like something or someone is talking about this, so the alcohol sales debate goes on in Georgia. And we did look at a few of these articles last week and the week before and we got a lot of passionate callers on that day. Just finding out that Dr. Neil Johnston, as he joined us last week when he was going over the New Mexico study, actually dispelled some of that study and then we find out this week there are some professionals that have definitely brought up the same point.
Brian: Indeed. In fact, in the AJC, there was a gentleman named Jason Rudbeck, he’s a lecturer at the University of Georgia, Terry College of Business, and he’s an economist. And it’s interesting in that article he mentioned that the study did not really account for an increase in the speed limit during the same period Sunday sales were allowed. That’s the statement that was made by Sonny Purdue, that it increased the amount of accidents and deaths.
Jill: Yeah, traffic fatalities is what this study was looking at, but they didn’t do a very tight-knit study. So people are finding holes in it, and even letter writers are writing in to the AJC saying the same thing we’ve been saying about alcohol dependency and there’s a lot of people that feel very passionately about this on every side, and we’re going to have a really interesting show today talking about addiction treatment, not just this alcohol Sunday sales, and I just want to start giving out the number right now so you can write it down and get near your phone if you want to join in on the conversation, if you have a question or a comment, 770-226-0920. And if you want a friend to tune in and they’re just outside the listening area, they can actually tune in on www.920WGKA.com. And so it’s basically if you Google 920 AM you’ll probably find how to get to the website and you can listen live to the radio show. Anyway, we’d really love to hear from you today so if you feel the need, go ahead and give us a call, ask a question, get in on our conversation.
So it looks like we have the guest that I’ve been wanting to get on the show for a long time, Dr. Lois Dutton. As Brian said, we just added her to our staff at Breakthrough Addiction Recovery . . .
Brian: And a welcome addition.
Jill: Yes, what a great addition she is.
Lois: Thank you.
Jill: And Dr. Dutton, from now on I’m going to call you Lois. Is that okay.
Lois: I wish you would. That’s my preference.
Jill: Well, I want to just say a few things about Lois and her journey to this seat in the radio studio. It started back in the late 60’s when she actually got her Bachelor of Science in Nursing and went into the field of addiction treatment and also she did get her Bachelor’s of Nursing from UNC at Chapel Hill, and I’m sure she’ll be watching basketball this weekend, and also went on to get her Masters of Public Health at Chapel Hill also, so you really like that area.
Lois: Oh yeah.
Jill: Then she went on in 1984 to receive her PhD from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in education. Her resume reads like an historical novel of addiction treatment. So Lois, I’m going to give you the mike and just go for it. I want you to tell a little bit about your journey through addiction treatment, but also just through the medical side and also administrative side of addiction treatment.
Lois: Thank you Jill. I’m glad to be here with you guys. I actually got into drug and alcohol treatment quite by accident. When I graduated I had a brand new degree, a Masters degree, and I didn’t really have a good clear idea of what I was going to do with it. And I ended up back here in Atlanta from Chapel Hill, and I was chairperson of Maternal and Child Health at the Piedmont School of Nursing, and I did that for a couple of years and then decided that I wanted to go back home, which is Florida. I went back to central Florida and a friend of mine called me to tell me about a National Institute of Mental Health grant that the state addiction program in Florida had gotten, and they were looking for two nurses that were accustomed to doing home presentations, home visiting, that kind of thing. And our charge was we were going to take a look at family therapy as a modality for the treatment of alcoholism. Being the renegade and being young and not knowing what I was getting myself into, I responded and there begins the story.
I ended up in Avon Park which is in the middle of nowhere in central Florida, it’s down around Highlands, down in that area – beautiful orange groves – and it was the state facility for chemical dependency. And the mental health grant that we had, we actually brought people into the center, we brought their families after they had been in treatment for two weeks alongside of their addicted or identified patient, is what we used to call them, then they went back home and we nurses went out and did home visits, and we did family therapy sessions in the home.
It was an incredible experience for me because I got to meet people like Virginia Satir, who was the quote – deaconess of family therapy in those days. I met the young man that had started the alcohol program in Haight-Ashbury back in the 60’s. I had an incredible experience with a Dr. Ivan Nagy, who had also written a book on family therapy, so this is how I got started. But back then, we thought we were really doing a wonderful thing by bringing the family in. It was like we had discovered all of a sudden that alcoholism doesn’t occur just in one person, that it’s a family disease. There we were, we go the whole 9 yards, but back then what we had to offer was extremely limited. We had Alcoholics Anonymous, which then was the premier modality.
Brian: That was the gold standard during that time.
Lois: It was the standard.
Jill: What year was this around?
Lois: This was in the late 60’s.
Jill: Late 60’s.
Lois: Late 60’s. We did that for just about anybody who came in. It was the 90 meetings in 90 days concept, where everybody who came through, came through with the idea that they were to hook up with someone back in the community, and this was going to be your best friend, was going to replace the John Barleycorn, the Jim Baynes, and all of the things that had been your best friend for so long, and it was to get yourself aligned with someone who had been sober for a while and hang with them. That was our treatment modality. In those days, we actually watched, in a very brief period of time, we watched addiction go from a sin, to a crime, to an illness.
Jill: Wow!
Lois: In a very brief period of time.
Jill: And that was from the late 60’s going into the 70’s.
Lois: Going into the 70’s, correct.
Jill: So you would say the most significant change that you saw during that time was . . .
Lois: Was our knowledge base. As we got more and more into it, as more and more people came into the field, people who were non-addicted, and that was really unusual back in the early days . . .
Brian: Back then, they believed that if you were not recovering yourself, you didn’t have anything to contribute to the field.
Lois: Absolutely. You could not possibly understand what it was like to have this kind of a difficulty to deal with. We moved very rapidly though, as we started to look at addiction and what that meant and how it happened and how it occurred indifferent people, we began to ask ourselves a very basic question – why is it some people can drink everybody at the party under the table and get up the next day and go to work and not have a problem? The next guy who sits there, and once he starts to drink he can’t stop, and he ends up in serious, serious trouble down the road. What is the difference between these two people? We didn’t have a clue.
Brian: Right. And I think from that question, that was a launching pad for even more medical research. We tried to find out what was the real reason, rather than just saying, ‘I’ve got weak will power.”
Lois: Absolutely, it wasn’t a matter of will power at all.
Jill: Right. Well Lois, hold on to that thought just for a moment because we’re coming up to a break. 770-226-0920. And when we get back we’re going to talk to Dr. Lois Dutton a little bit more about those early years in addiction treatment and how the change in thinking how to do this, changed so rapidly in those decades. We’ll be right back. Stay with us.
Brian: Welcome back to the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour. My name is Brian Fujii and Jill Mattingly is with me along with our guest, Dr. Lois Dutton, and today we’re talking on the subject about the development of how drug treatment began and how it’s changed over the last few years.
Jill: Let’s go ahead with Lois and talk a little bit more about the change of addiction through the years, addiction treatment that is, and we talked about in the last segment that we were talking about the knowledge base changed while you were actually in the field.
Lois: More and more attention began to be directed toward answering some of the questions that were baffling us. Why do some people get addicted and other people do not? We began to see patterns in families, and it was not just an environmental influence, we finally realized. And there probably was some genetic connection, some genetic component in this whole process of addiction, but we had no idea what it was. We just thought, particularly if you had fathers with addictive problems and young sons following in their footsteps, that they were just being what their dad had always been. And so it was environmental and we got into years of back and forth, nature versus nurture, how much of it is genetic and how much is environmental. Then we got into how much of it can we actually attribute to some basic flaw within this individual that’s also in the family. If your dad was no good, you’re going to be no good kind of thing is what we struggled with for years because it seemed as if that’s the direction we were going in. Then lo and behold, as more and more attention started being directed toward the field of addiction, and I think probably part of what happened to us is that we had so many named individual celebrities who began to come out of the woodwork and out of the closet and it meant that they indeed had an addictive problem. And then all of a sudden . . .
Brian: All those other adages and all the social issues, parental raising, it all didn’t fit. And now we’re looking at, how are we going to answer this question?
Jill: Right now I think it’s a badge of honor to be a celebrity with an addiction problem. The pendulum has swung too far over. But the nature versus nurture, I really like that. When you go from thinking it’s just an environmental problem - dad’s no good, you’re going to be no good – and having a mother saying that to the child is not going to help, but I like when they start to look at there’s actually something genetically, like a predisposition for the person, and obviously there’s some hope in that.
Lois: I think that for those of us that have been into it for so long, it gave us something that we could actually hold on to. Because for years we struggled, and we saw people die, they would come out of the treatment facility sober because we had tucked them away for that proverbial 28 days, we put them in an environment that was safe, we put them in an environment where they couldn’t get the drugs or alcohol, and then we discharged them back into unsuspecting families . . .
Brian: With very little support. And you’re exactly correct – we ended up discharging them back into the highly dysfunctional environments from which they came with no additional support to help them deal with all of those challenges they were facing prior to entering into treatment.
Jill: But they were sober.
Lois: They were sober – that was the only thing they were. But they were sober, and many of them were clean. But wewere so elitist with our view in those days that we separated. We did not want hardcore drugs to be mixed with the alcohol. So we put alcoholics in one treatment program and people in another that had other drug addictions, we put them in another program. And then we went so far as to separate the mental health issues from the addictive issues, like the two never could occur in the same person.
Brian: And that’s the topic we had several weeks ago and even last week, about how co-occurring disorders, we used to call it a dual diagnosis, meaning having a mental illness along with a alcohol or drug addiction. And now through studies and research we come to realize that it is the alcohol many times that people are using in order to self-medicate their uncomfortable psychiatric condition, so depression and anxiety, all of these seem to be self-medicating with drugs or alcohol.
Jill: Right. And if you are really getting something out of this conversation, please call us 770-226-0920. This is a call-in show, you can get in on the conversation, comments and questions are welcome.
We are talking to Dr. Lois Dutton if you just tuned in, and Lois is talking about what she’s see in the changes in addiction treatment through the years. Here’s something Lois, I wanted to ask you about. You floored me when you were telling me about the proverbial drunk tank. Obviously if they thought it was a sin to be an alcoholic, they were not going to treat them, or a crime, they were not going to treat them very well. And that visual you gave me was very striking.
Lois: It’s a visual that I will never forget either. I was very, very young, and just a young pup in this business. People would get arrested for public intoxication and be put in jail and if they were obviously very intoxicated then the people in the jail knew what inevitably was going to happen. They would be sick, they were going to go into DT’s, they were going to do all kinds of things. So in local jails, they had one cell and they called it the drunk tank, and it was stark. It had a metal floor that was slanted and had a drain in the center of it, and people would be put in there and for however long they were there – 24 hours, 72 hours, depending on their offensive behavior that got them in there. And they would just leave them there. We had many people die in those proverbial drunk tanks. But I as a young, renegade kind of nurse, I could remember the one and only time that I ever went in that I really got so incensed that I said I’m never going in there again and I’m going to do something to change this. There was a young client that we had, we had discharged him from treatment, he was sober but he went right back into the hostile environment he came from, and he ended up within a week, in jail. And he had my business card in his pocket, and somebody from the jail called me. And when I went to see him, the jailer says to me, “You don’t want to go back there, little lady.” And I said, “Ho, ho, yes I do.” And back I went. And it cured me. I never wanted to go again.
Jill: That’s awful. And he called you “little lady”. Okay, so we were in the south.
Lois: We were in the south, yeah.
Jill: And you’re probably wondering, why would people die in a cell like that? Well, when you are going cold turkey off of alcohol, daily alcohol drinking or a huge binge, you run the risk of alcohol withdrawal which actually is the most deadly type of withdrawal. Heroine looks terrible, but it usually doesn’t kill you. But alcohol, go cold turkey, you can end up with a seizure and stop breathing. So I am sure that they found a lot of bodies back there, someone wasn’t paying attention. That’s just phenomenal.
Brian: That goes back to this whole idea that now instead of looking at it only as a social environmental issue, now we’re beginning to realize the medical component of addiction. And I think that’s what we’ve done in trying to raise the consciousness and through the fact that we now are doing more and more research, not only from this medical side, but from a neuro-physiological side. I think that has been so phenomenal, as people have done PET scan and other kinds of brain scans to help us to understand how the brain is impacted.
Jill: And that’s what we do at Breakthrough Addiction Recovery.
Brian: Exactly, to help individuals understand that this is a brain disease.
Jill: If you’d like to read a little bit about Breakthrough Addiction Recovery, you can go to www.BreakthroughAddictionRecovery.com. A lot of the things that we’re starting to talk about with the biological issues are in that website, it’s chock full of information.
We’re going to slide out into a break. 770-226-0920, if you’d like to call and get in on this conversation. If you’re an addiction professional and want to call in with your comments, we welcome that. So stay with us and we will be right back.
Jill: 770-226-2690, that’s the number to call if you want to get in on this conversation about the history of addiction treatment and someone who watched the change through the years. And we are talking with Dr. Lois Dutton right now, she’s actually the newest member of our Breakthrough Addiction Recovery team and she’s just joined us today and hopefully next week if you can Lois, to talk a little bit about the history of addiction treatment and what’s been happening over the years. You’ve seen it firsthand, as a nurse, as a director, as been many, many hats that you’ve worn. And over the break I was just thinking about the young man that had your card in his pocket as he sat in the drunk tank, and you were called in to start to talk to him. When these people are struggling in these drunk tanks, or when they were made sober and put out on the streets, what would happen next? Did anybody start to realize that this was a dangerous situation and try to treat these people medically?
Lois: I think we began to really realize that we were probably doing a disservice by bringing people in to a stable, 28-day environment that was cocooned and protected in an in-patient setting and then we sent them back to basically a toxic environment for many of them, and we saw people who were sober going out our front doors who would end up committing suicide because we failed to recognize underlying depression, underlying other kinds of mental health problems that we just did not see. We didn’t recognize and we didn’t treat at that time. So we sent people back home with very little, very, very few tools that would help them on a day-to-day basis, get through one 24-hour period of time.
Now, what we did have was the proverbial 90 meetings in 90 days that we could offer people, and that was basically our support system for once people get through their 28-day treatment programs and got back into the community, we would hook them up with AA, which is what we had. And it worked for a good number of people. We had some doctors back in those days, physicians, some of whom themselves had been down this slippery slope of addiction and were now recovered and were now knowing, down deep inside, that something more was going on and something more needed to be done. And we had those docs then begin to start looking at how can we reach out to the recovering population and do something.
Jill: And there weren’t any addiction-ologists back then.
Lois: I did not know of one. Everybody who was in the field was a family practice, well not a family practice in those days, a GP, a general practitioner, surgeons, anesthesiologists, most of the physicians that were involved were physicians who had gotten into trouble themselves and were now clean and sober and were back trying to reach out to their fellow addicts. And they’re the ones who sort of spearheaded, starting a whole medical piece of this recovery process. Before then, the physician community was pretty new and pretty out of it.
Jill: They probably didn’t want to dirty their hands.
Lois: They didn’t know what to do. I really am convinced that they did not know what to do. Addiction was a baffling kind of thing to them. If someone came into the emergency room with bleeding esophageal varices, that could be treated. But you know what would happen to us a lot of time is that we would couch the varices with a bleeding ulcer so that we could get them admitted to a hospital, because the diagnosis of bleeding esophageal varices associated with alcoholism, you very seldom could get someone admitted, particularly with an insurance coverage. You just couldn’t do it. So they would go in with a gastro-intestinal bleed, and that way we could get them into the hospital to get some treatment and I think that the physicians back then who started the whole process of people looking at this as a medical disease.
Brian: That’s great. And again, that’s when we started moving more from seeing it as a physiological issue, where now people saw it medically – they’re not seeing it as a character defect. They weren’t seeing it as a sociological, environment-only situation. It didn’t mean it didn’t contribute to it, but the fact is that was not the only reason. I think that’s a very powerful move. Now we’re looking for some scientific reasons, and the fact that what you brought up, physicians and maybe the nurses that were having problems with alcohol and drugs, began to realize some of these descriptors didn’t fit me – why am I using alcohol or sneaking drugs out of the medicine cabinets and using them? So as they began to see their owns lives taking shape, they said, ‘There’s something else to this.’ Even today, many times many of my clients will come in and say, ‘You know, my doctors tell me go to AA,’ rather than trying to find some ways to really understand the issues about addiction. So even though it’s been many years, I still think there is a sense of a stigma that’s still involved with addiction, which with that stigma comes a lot of shame and guilt, and people just don’t want to seek the help. And I think that is going to be one of the challenges we have. I think a radio show like this will help break the stigma and really begin to help people know this is an illness, no different than hypertension or diabetes, and come get some help.
Jill: Amen to that.
Brian: If we’re touching your lights, call us at 770-226-0920 and we’ll be back here with further discussions. Join us.
Jill: Welcome back to the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour. My name is Jill Mattingly and my co-host Brian Fujii, and we have a guest today, Dr. Lois Dutton, another team member at Breakthrough Addiction Recovery. Thanks for listening to us on this dreary day.
Back to our discussion, we’ve been talking about the history of addiction treatment, and the thing is is there has been change. There has been positive change. In some places there’s been a lot of change, in some places they’re just waking up to the new medical research about addiction, and one of the things that I’m very proud to work at a facility that recognizes the cutting edge of addiction treatment. And Brian, I know you feel very strongly about that also.
Brian: Absolutely. We are hearing so much about what Lois is saying, about where there’s been so much really ignorance, and we are all ignorant about something, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, it’s we don’t know about it. Many, many people come into our treatment program and we tell them about the disease process of alcoholism and other addiction, and when they come to understand how their dopamine levels, which is a neurotransmitter in the brain, is lowered because their constant use of alcohol, when they begin realizing that it’s not something because they have lack of will power, or because it’s a character defect, that it truly is a brain disease with the hopefulness that their brains can heal if they allow themselves the time, 8-12 months of being able to be alcohol-free, that the brain miraculously can begin healing itself and causing those dopamine levels to get back up to normalcy. And so many times they don’t understand the reasons they keep on using is because the fact trying to make up the deficit between what is normal dopamine levels and what is considered abnormal because they use the alcohol. And when they understand that, it’s like light bulbs going off in their brain. They go, ‘Oh my goodness, I never knew that.’ It removes so much of the guilt, the shame, the remorse, they get really, really hopeful.
Jill: And you see that every day, don’t you Brian?
Brian: Every day.
Jill: In that day treatment.
Brian: I want to segue over what Lois said, and so many times people in the past used to get into the 28-day program and they do a great job, but they send them out drug-free, alcohol-free, but for 28 days they had no other choice. Whereas in an out-patient setting like at Breakthrough Addiction Recovery, we’re teaching them skills, we’re teaching them coping mechanisms, we’re teaching them the understanding of the disease concept of addiction. They do get to go home, they go past that bar sometimes, they go past that liquor store on the way home. They have to make a decision – am I going to pull my car into that place, or am I going to use the tools that I have in resisting that and being able to make a choice, and it truly is always a choice.
Jill: And we’re not afraid to medically treat them, and psychiatrically treat them.. It’s all a part of addiction treatment and in your view Lois, I’m sure you saw this change occur some places more than others, and you were going to comment on that just a little bit for us.
Lois: Yeah, I think that the thing that impresses me actually the most about Breakthrough, is the fact that this is aggressive, this is progressive, and this is individualized treatment where individuals are coming in. Whether the drug of choice is alcohol or whether it’s opiates, or the benzos, whatever the drug of choice is, there is a designed program to address that addiction in the person. And we treat aggressively because this is an aggressive illness. It is consuming the person’s life, it is literally taking the person’s life. It has to be addressed as a medical entity, a process if you will, a medical process that has to be treated and viewed aggressively, and we’ve got tools now that are new to us, that have only been around probably for less than 10 years. We know that we’re got medications that we can give individuals so that we can taper them off of these drugs, get then medically free, stop them from being so compromised with their drug use that they can now sit and hear what Brian has to say. Brian is arming them with a toolbox for every night they’re with us, they go back to their own environment, and they go back with yet another tool in that toolbox that they’ve learned in the process of being with us during that day. We bring the families in, we give them the toolbox also.
Brian: I’m so glad you brought that up, because that family education is such a vital part. I know every week, when these family members come in, they share their brokenness, they share their hearts, because they’re dealing with that same issue too, where the person who’s addicted, they have their own issues, but we call it “families in recovery” because they’re carrying their own pain and their own burdens too.
Jill: Right. I’m just exasperated by just the fact that there are treatment facilities that aren’t using all the things in the arsenal, and I wanted you to comment on that. Why are there still places that say, ‘Okay, you can come here. We’re going to help you not drink. But don’t you dare be on the FDA approved alcohol craving medication, Naltrexone, because we don’t know enough about it – it might be addictive.’ That floors me, Lois.
Lois: But Jill, you have to know historically that we’ve got the traditionalists, we’ve got those individuals who are moderate, and then we’ve got the progressives. This is still a relatively new field of treatment. Addiction has been around since Jesus was an alter boy and longer, but nevertheless, the treatment part of it is relatively new, right Brian?
Brian: Very new, in relation to the addiction field.
Lois: We have not known, it’s like the story you and I were sharing Jill, about the old spirituals, Sweet Little Jesus Boy. We didn’t know who he was. We didn’t recognize you. We didn’t know that you were the savior. We didn’t know any of that. The same is true in addiction, that we did not know that there was something going on in people’s brains that separated them from everybody else who used.
Brian: That’s so true. And again, when you take a look at the new studies, the brain scans that are being done, and the ability for us to really see what is transacting in the brain. One of the studies that really still blows my mind Lois, Dhama Progressive Studies. They did a study with rhesus monkey’s brains, they gave them 10 days of normal adult, proportionate use. It took over 2 years for those brains to return to normal. Only after 10 days – phenomenal.
Jill: We’re coming down to the end of the segment, and now that you have rhesus monkey brains on your brain, we’re going to be right back for our last segment. Don’t leave – stay with us. We’ll be right back.
Jill: Welcome back to the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour. My name is Jill Mattingly, my co-host Brian Fujii, and our special guest today, Dr. Lois Dutton. I’m going to read a few things, registered nurse, certified addiction professional, but this is what gave me the most respect for you Lois, is the fact that you were Director of Women’s Recovery Center in the Grady Health System in Atlanta. Let me tell you, I did a lot of time at Grady too, and to know that you cut your teeth and sharpened them in addiction in Grady Memorial Hospital, that says a lot about your tenacity in addiction treatment. And I really do appreciate that you joined us today.
770-226-0920, that’s the number. We’re on our last segment. You can call, questions, comments. We were just talking at the break about the holistic approach, and Brian, I thought I was going to have to tie you down to your seat. You get real passionate when we talk about this.
Brian: I am very passionate about what I do, I love what I do. I keep telling folks, they actually pay me to do this.
Jill: We can take care of that.
Brian: I was just thinking as Lois was talking about how people get out of the 28-day programs, when the finally get through, they get back in the toxic environments, and you were talking about the idea that it’s more than just not drinking. That is really true. People that I work with, every day, it gets me so excited, I’ve see people’s live improving. They come in, they’re initially in detox or they’re being detoxified, they’re very tired, very fatigued, very irritable, which is normal for being in withdrawal, but as the days go on, I really begin to see a brightness in their eyes, a smile on their lips, and they being telling me, ‘I have never felt this good in over 10 years.’
It’s really amazing. So what I’m thinking as we’re talking about it, it’s not just stopping the drinking or stopping the drugging, the program that we’re trying to do is help people enhance the quality of their lives. If we don’t do that, then all we’re doing is giving them their shots and they go home. We’re trying to enhance their quality of their life. And the studies have shown that many times what clients are telling the treatment providers is, ‘I want to have a sense of well-being.’ And when asked the question, what do you mean by well-being, they’re saying, ‘I want to have a sense of enriched life. That my creativity comes back. That I have a satisfying spiritual and sexual life. That I really have a sense of happiness that I’ve never had before.’
The thing that really drives home to me is just this week I had one person, and she just graduated from our program, she said, “Brian, you know, this is the best I’ve ever felt. And you know what really got me excited, the fact that I can remember when I went to bed.”
Lois: Absolutely, absolutely. And to me, the idea if I’m going to need to spend the rest of my life just avoiding taking that first drink, which is what I’ve been told in my treatment program, if I’m just going to spend every waking moment trying not to drink, then my question for me would be, is it going to be worth it? If I’m not going to have a better quality of life, if I’m not going to be able to make it day-by-day-by-day doing the things that are important to me in my life as a sober individual, then why am I going through all of this? Why am I shaking out all of the heebie-jeebies from my detox, why am I sobering myself up to the full reality of where I’ve gotten myself in my life if that’s all there is.
Brian: That’s such a powerful piece and that’s the beauty of our program. We not only tell people how they move into addiction from a very scientific approach, but the beauty about it is we also show them how they will move into recovery, and there are some very specific timetables that they can experience as they move through recovery as long as they stay drug and alcohol free and that’s so encouraging because now they know they have a way out of the woods.
Jill: And if you’re listening to this and you or your loved one need help with an addiction with alcohol dependency or another drug dependency, that’s what we do at Breakthrough Addiction Recovery. We do a free consultation. We take you through and look at it, each individual situation and build the program appropriate for you or your loved one.
If you’d like to call our office, we’re right up in Norcross, we’re at 770-734-8091, and you can check out our website, it’s www.BreakthroughAddictionRecovery.com. We’re available 24 hours by phone. You can call at any time, you might even get Brian if you call – the radio personality.
So I really do appreciate that you all joined us today and think about what we said. Think about it. We’ll be back next week.
