32: Connecting Addiction to a Lack of Human Connection with Jim Thomas
“So attachment-based intervention is about bringing people together.” – Jim Thomas
In a world where no one seems to care, we often choose to be in isolation- away from people and things and situations that hurt. But in reality, nobody wants to be isolated. And that idea of ‘bringing people together’ is stressed by our today’s guest, Jim Thomas. Raised in a broken household, Jim himself struggled with adverse childhood experiences and went through his own recovery journey. Wanting to be a part of solutions, he pursued this course with a burning passion and is now a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, EFT Therapist and director of the Colorado Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy. Well, what can we say? Jim just love his job.
Years can go by but severed family ties never gets healed with time and that is, if the heart of the problem never gets fixed. Healing from the heart is a research-based approach that helps create meaningful experiences for everyone involved. It allows for varied and personalized avenues for the members to draw out their deepest emotions. Learn more about this type of intervention, how to get the family members out of the ‘bystanders’ lane, the role of emotion in relationships, how to foster these vulnerabilities to create an opportunity for family recovery and how to create a secure emotional family environment. Don’t miss all these intriguing topic from today’s podcast!
Highlights:
02:48 The Happy Therapist and Joyful Trainer
09:15 Attachment Infused Intervention
19:33 Healing From Attachment Standpoint
33:14 Fostering Vulnerability
40:02 The Secure Emotional Bond
This week’s episode was sponsored by
It’s #heartsday today! Time to unleash those suppressed emotions and bring back the spirit of #togetherness with @TFRSolution and our guest Jim Thomas. Share on X
Connect With Jim
Website: http://www.jimthomascare.com/
Email: instituteforchange981@gmail.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwvBuGJw8IGmifrNng_11w
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimthomasefttrainer
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jimthomascoloradoeft/
Telephone: (303) 933-9104
Quotes:
07:38 “I think one of the dilemmas that’s there is that intervention is better than not intervening at general. But if we do intervention poorly, we can cause more harm. It can traumatize people and I think that’s a struggle a lot of people have.”- Jim Thomas
09:39 “It’s best to let people decide if they see themselves as an addict or an alcoholic because when we refer to people that way, there’s evidence that is demoralizing and it just triggers shame and it isn’t really that useful.” –Jim Thomas
10:49 “Relationships are reality for people; they’re resource for people and they’re meant to be reciprocal.” Jim Thomas, quotes Mary Ainsworth, Attachment Perspective
11:58 “Life is best experienced a series of these excursions out from a secure base and then back to that safe haven.”- Jim Thomas, quotes John Bowlby, Attachment Theory
16:01 “What about the idea of: When can healing happen together?”– Jeff Jones
17:04 “It’s because of your suffering and watching your suffering that I see my own suffering. And I want you to know that this suffering didn’t begin with me. And it didn’t begin with you. It goes a long way back in our family. And so we have engaged in a healing process and we would very much love for you to be a part of it.” – Jeff Jones
18:29 “Vulnerable sharing and opening up to each other and being there for each other in a vulnerable way is the way out of addiction hell …rather than a hard and kind of recovery where I white knuckle it and I’m like a soldier.” –Jim Thomas
27:59 “So attachment based intervention is about bringing people together.” – Jim Thomas
38:18 “Addiction in the family is an opportunity for everyone to be able to take a look at their situation through a new lens and make new decisions. And a big part of that new lens is learning how can I be vulnerable here with emotions that may not have been okay to feel.” –Jim Thomas
44:26 “If you’re out there using and you’re struggling, you think your family and
everyone has given up on you, and they don’t really care, they probably do care. They just don’t know what to do.” –Jim Thomas
45:49 “…work to connect with each other and foster relationships where we can both share the sadness and pain and sorrows of life and the joys and the loving and the learning of life; in that way that we share much better than we do carrying these things alone.”- Jim Thomas
Got ideas? Perhaps a future podcast? Schedule time with Jeff here: https://meetme.so/jeffjones
Transcriptions
MILESTONE RANCH AD
I’m honored to have Milestones Ranch Malibu sponsor this episode of this podcast. Milestones Ranch is a small 12 bed premier dual diagnosis residential facility that believes that addiction problems in a family do not happen in a vacuum. Everyone has taken on impact and everyone deserves healing from the ramifications of addiction. I’ve experienced milestones myself. I’ve been there, feet on the ground firsthand. Over time of working with this team, I’ve seen the benefit of a group of dedicated professionals supporting families long term positive outcomes, what they call the milestones method. I have the utmost respect for their team and their collaborative model of health. So, check out their website at www.milestonesranch.com.
JEFF: Well hi there, this is Jeff Jones on the Podcast Families Navigating Addiction and Recovery. I am here today with Jim Thomas. I am very excited to have this conversation with him. I met Jim probably back in 2005 or something when I was getting my master’s degree. He came into the academic world and talked about marriage and family therapy. What I remember most is his passion, his energy, his enthusiasm. And I saw him again down at the Winter Symposium in Colorado Springs and he was talking about attachment and addiction. And so, yeah, welcome Jim.
JIM: Oh, hi Jeff. Hi everybody out there. Thanks for having me. This is an important topic so I’m always excited to talk about it.
JEFF: Yeah. And so Jim, if you could just introduce yourself however you want to do that.
JIM: Okay. Well, professionally I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I have a private practice. I’m also the director of the Colorado Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy. I’m on attachment based, strength based therapist. I trained people all around the world in relational therapies, helping families, couples deepen and heal and enter into more fulfilling relational connection with each other. It’s such an important part of our existence, the strength of our connections and relationship with others. And I love this work. I love talking about these things and I share an interest with you in that intersection of the addiction and trauma, emotional pain, isolation and shame. How these things can all work to keep us hidden from each other. And I learned about this growing up. So, you know, introducing myself personally, I was the last child I think in the alcoholic families sort of typology. Had a brother who was the scapegoat. I had an older brother who is the perfect child. My younger brother who was the mascot and my parents had a dysfunctional marriage. I grew up during the quiet years. Took care of myself, hung out with friends, learned about life. And then one day when I was about 10, hell broke loose. My parents started having big knock down, drag out fights. A couple of years later, maybe three years later, my father divorced my mother and left us.
I have many adverse childhood experiences related to that and went through my own recovery journey. I was blessed and lucky to meet my wife. We did some good work with like John Bradshaw and our own. Children of alcoholics work and learn to secure, bond with each other and I think that everything that I do, everything I get to channel and share and learn from others, from the couples and families, individuals I’ve worked with are all built on a foundation of sobriety and the foundation of that bond I had with my mother, I mean with my wife. And that’s helped me with the struggles I had with my mother and my father and the friendships and the colleagues out there that live inside me in my work. So that’s how I introduced myself. Today, I am a happy therapist, joyful trainer. I love this work and I think that addiction and the underlying things that are often existing with addiction, trauma and shame and disconnection and isolation and depression and anxiety, these things are undertreated, underrecognized and often poorly treated in our society, like the opioid epidemic. We see it in the dramatic increase in what it looks to be in the last 10 years in the abuse of alcohol. And I want to be part of solutions.
JEFF: Yeah. Well great. I really appreciate you taking the time out today to have a conversation with me. You know, when I saw you speak in Colorado Springs, I mean I have a background in addictions and doing groups and interventions and working with families, and I had kind of backed away from intervention for a while simply because I didn’t feel aligned with the model of intervention that I was doing in what I know and how I’d been trained. And then when I saw you speak, it’s like something happened inside that totally opened me up, gave me new life and that was about the framing of relationships and how important they are and saving them and being able to kind of intervene or have conversations that value and emphasize the importance of the relationship and keep maintaining it. So, that’s kind of what I would like to expound upon in this conversation.
JIM: Oh, I appreciate what you said when you’re talking about not aligned. You know, the interventional philosophy, I think one of the dilemmas out there is that intervention is better than not intervening in general, but if we do intervention poorly, we can cause more harm. It can traumatize people. I think that’s a struggle a lot of people have or just people listening not on therapists that do I gather, you know, resources and I think we often think of it as confront, right? Like a sibling, I’ve got a child, I have a parent or a friend, boss, somebody that I think is lost a personal concern, lost in an addictive process or getting lost in the substance. And how do I do that? And what if I do it in a way that causes more harm than good? All it does is stir somebody up or push somebody away or divide a family or –
JEFF: And there’s plenty of examples of that that has happened many times. And I think you’re right. In our history, confrontation was the only way. And it’s like, is it better to confront and risk problems, traumas or, you know, just go on with it or cut the person off entirely out of your life.
JIM: Or wait for some imaginary bottom to be hit or something, you know, and –
JEFF: Right.
JIM: I like what you were saying, you know, saying and talking about. So in that presentation what I did with my colleague Steven. I have developed this attachment infuse intervention model. How can we look at interventions from a relational place. And I think one of the things that we forget when it comes to people that are struggling, people of concern, what we often call addicts or alcoholics, but we’re finding in the literature, the research that it’s best to let people decide if they see themselves as an addict or an alcoholic, because when we refer to people that way, there’s evidence that it’s demoralizing and just triggers shame and isn’t really that useful. Yet there are people that I need to say I’m an addict. The same with an alcoholic. It helps me deal with the reality of this day to day. But just with that –
JEFF: Right.
JIM: -disclaimer, I’m sure we will fall into saying addicts and addict alcoholic and addicted families and all these kinds of things. But often I think what happens out there is there’s this emphasis on boundaries and emphasis on, you know, this person, an alcoholic and addict, they have to do this for themselves. It’s their program and they can only do it for themselves and had to go to work that program and relationships are either used a lot of interventions and I think you could describe this, you know, used as leverage.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: Right.
JEFF: Yap. Exactly.
JIM: If you don’t go to treatment, you will not see us again or, you know, etc. And from a perspective that I’m working from going all the way back to people like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. An attachment perspective says that these relationships are reality for people. They’re a resource for people and they’re meant to be reciprocal. And there’s a give and take. Helping each other out or supporting each other. A care. A real care that comes with close relationships that sometimes in the addiction field that gets complicated by sometime sort of black and white emphasis on boundaries on, you work your program, I’ll work my program. I’ll take care of me, you take care of you. Then at some point we become independent. We can become interdependent again. Attachment theory teaches us something a little different is that from cradle to the grave, the first developer of attachment theory, John Bowlby said that life is best experienced as a series of these excursions out from a secure base and back to that safe haven. And we all can sort of, I think all the listeners out there, if you picture a two year old or an infant or a three year old, it’s clear that they’re dependent on their caregivers.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: Clear that they’re dependent on their parents or their foster parents or step parents, grandparents, whoever is raising them. What’s gets fuzzy in our culture as we seem to think that emotionally and relationally we outgrow that dependence. We’re suppose to emotionally be able to take care of ourselves at some point. And if you or anyone listening or just what was the message you got as a kid? At what age did the society, your family say to you, you know, you’re supposed to be able to take care of yourself emotionally, you’re supposed to be able to manage these things on your own, your emotional struggles and stuff, you know, some people it’s very young.
JEFF: Yeah. Well, I mean, like the big boys don’t cry kind of thing. For some families where emotions, anybody who has emotions, it’s just like, it’s not safe. So people –
JIM: Where there are certain sort of this person can be angry or this family get, we do anger but we don’t do sadness.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: Or we do guilt and shame but we don’t do joy.
JEFF: Right. Right.
JIM: The men can do anger and the women can do sadness or, you know. And we get bound, which is what I learned from Bradshaw, John Bradshaw years ago, that we get these things or get tied up in roles.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: Attachment people in the new science of emotion that folks like Susan Johnson write about and the attachment experts, researchers like Mario Mikulincer and Philip Shaver write about. And I’m sure that we have these important emotions like sadness, joy, pain, fear that orient us to relationally to ourselves and other people. Often in the addictions field, we’re not sure what to do with these emotions. These emotions becomes something to manage, to cognitively think about. And when it comes to interventions in attachment, we want to surface some of these emotions because they’re powerful change agents. When we can work together to gather and, you know, three, four, five people that loved somebody and say: “We miss you. Something’s taking you away from us. And then we’re sad about that and we have some joy that you’re here listening. We want to listen to you because we care about you and we have a hope and that hope is dangerous and scary because you might say, no, that we have a hope that you’ll go to a meeting or you’ll go to this inpatient program or you’ll come to us to see, you know, Jeff and family recovery solution program. Well, we don’t want to leave you alone. We don’t like you being isolated from us and we’ve identified heroin or alcohol or something as this barrier and let’s work together.” When that comes from an authentic, raw emotional connected place, it has a much different impact.
JEFF: Oh my gosh! Yeah. So Jim, when I heard you speak, you and Steven Wilkins speak down in Colorado Springs. I think it was said a couple times, but it was just the difference between the way things are laid out right now is the healing is, and this may not be the right word, but it’s like siloed, like the individual healing [inaudible] over here. Family healing, you go over here kind of thing. It’s separate. It’s like what about the idea of like when can healing happen together? So one of the things that I have done, and so I’ve drawn from numerous mentors that I’ve had and one is Gabor Mate. I heard him talk about the idea of like the family being able to work together, get on the same page, start to re story some of the way they have seen addiction in the family and engage in a healing process going forward even before their loved one has stopped the behavior or the substance or whatever. And so the message, once the family is on the same page, you know, what I’ve learned, it can be something like: “Thank you. It’s because of your suffering and watching your suffering that I see my own suffering. I want you to know that this suffering didn’t begin with me and it didn’t begin with you. It goes a long way back in our family and so we have engaged in a healing process and we would very much love for you to be a part of it.”
JIM: Yeah. That is beautiful. I think Gabor –
JEFF: Yeah.
JIM: And it’s also what you’re getting at too is underneath that addiction is pain, so often, right? It’s a way to deal with pain, an emotional isolation and shame and the addictive journey further isolates and creates shame and causes more pain for the person in the family and that’s a beautiful image of coming. Just that it’s touching right, to say thank you. You brought me in touch with my suffering, our suffering and our family’s suffering and the suffering of the human experience.
JEFF: Exactly.
JIM: We want you to be a part of this because it’s got us all sharing a deeper way. And this is at the root of attachment theory that the vulnerable sharing and opening up to each other and being there for each other in a vulnerable way is sort of the way out of the addiction hell.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: And even in programs, right? To create treatment intervention and treatment programs and recovery to foster vulnerability rather than a hardened kind of recovery where a white knuckle at [inaudible]. I’m like a soldier, you know?
JEFF: Yeah.
JIM: Yeah, I love that. I think he’s really onto something. And I like what you’re talking about about integrating.
JEFF: Yeah. So I’m just curious Jim, like I think it was you who mentioned, maybe it was Steven, but this thing about healing together, from an attachment standpoint, like I wanted to ask the question down there, so I’ll ask it now. Like what’s behind that? What do you see as far as potential there?
JIM: Well, the experience that I have, so currently it’s interventions for me. I’m doing a lot of intensive work, so people are coming to me for two or three days that come from around the states and Colorado and parachute into my office. And we do some intense work. A lot of those couples, not all of them, but a lot of them are dealing with, sometimes there’s active addiction, sometimes there’s really in recovery and other couples are dealing with the echoes of addiction where somebody got clean but the relationship was damaged. There was injuries and unpredictability. Those things that people lived with active addiction, you know, partners and family members become complicated to be with. And a lot of people who’s sharp elbows and the family and people get bruised and hurt. So there’s that working together to heal, whether it’s been a couple of years, five years, and it just never got dealt with the emotional level, the pain caused and the pain also experience by the person with the addiction. So it isn’t just just one person.
I love the frame of what Gabor is talking about, that we’re all in this together. We’re all suffering. The human is suffering. Part of what’s toxic in our culture, right? That is what’s toxic in our cultures. We don’t do very well with suffering. We’re a very crisis oriented. What’s the cause of the day? Oh my god, there’s been a hurricane. Send some money. If you know somebody perfectly personally impacted you, you feel it more. And then we move on and we tried to get back to normal, back to like, can I just not suffer? We have this idea that we can live life without suffering.
JEFF: Right. And I have heard so many times with families that they send their loved one to treatment or something and they have this idea that their loved one can go and get fixed and then they can go back to normal. Just what you said, back to normal.
JIM: So whether this somebody comes to me and there’s active use and abuse and addiction or it’s very early, you know, just trying not to use and we’re all sort of struggling with that process. Or it says echos, you know, after somebody’s person or persons have been clean for awhile, I am seeking to surface the bonds between people, surface the insecurity and those bonds and connections that come out through fears and pain and shame and loneliness and then turn people towards each other in the family. I did recently, you know, went to a program here in Colorado and went in and worked with a couple or somebody who was just clean like five weeks. They’re inpatient residential type program. And working with them and their partner and, you know, therapist or the staff therapists was in with me and they were just stunned by like: “Wow, you kept going right to the heart of the matter. There was crying and hugging and sharing and vulnerability.” And I’ve kind of thought, no, we have to keep the ball away from that vulnerability and those emotions until they’d been clean for like a year. And I’m like, well that’s not being human.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: And so I’m left in this limbo and so.
JEFF: Well, that’s all your EFT background and expertise, I’m guessing.
JIM: Yeah, it’s Emotionally Focused Therapy of background. And I was doing this back in the day when I was working my first professional position was family therapist in an intensive daydreaming program. And I interned in a residential program and saw early on that behavioral, cognitive and psychoeducation interventions for these families that had these youth that were in really bad straights were not as effective as opening up hearts and deepening connection, feel more secure with each other. They resource each other naturally, because humans want to be seen and loved and cared for and that becomes a joint project. You know, we’re all working on this young person staying out of, you know, going to detention or prison or dropping out of school or moving towards drug addiction or something and we’re doing that together.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: I remember one of my therapists that there’s this wonderful intervention with this young man who was falling fast. He was 16 and in so much trouble going on 17. We were just sitting around brainstorming and I’m like: “Well, what does he like?” And he said: “Well, I do love basketball.” And she said he loves basketball. And I’m like, we’re just brainstorming what can we do with basketball? And she goes, you know, and I got it. Well, she got with some family members and said, what if we throw kind of like a party in his honor? And the kid is, you know, looking at, he’s in trouble.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: He’s not being held, you know. And so they got together. They sent out invitations, we’re going to have a party and we’ll just call him Charlie. You know, Charlie’s honor, who is a young African American kid. Just a great kid but so many things that happened to him and so much, you know, and he’s living in oppression and he’s living in tough circumstances. And all these people gathered and they held it in the park, right by a basketball court.
JEFF: Right by a basketball court. Yeah.
JIM: All these people showed up and they played basketball with him. As they’re playing basketball with him, she said, and then his uncle came up and said: “Look, you know, I haven’t seen you in a long time. We should shoot hoops more often.” And his cousin came up and said: “I haven’t seen you in a long time, how’s school going? I’m good with math. Can I help you with math?” And it was one of these early experiences for me. Then as he came back into the program that Monday, just glowing and walking on foot off the ground because he was accepted, belonged and cared for. By now here in the addictions field, these are lost souls. You know, that’s what people like [inaudible] or teaching us. This is what attachment theory says. These is what Susan Johnson EFT world says. These people they get lost in this or getting lost in this cause it serves some purpose in it. And you know, they moved away from just experimenting and recreational use and then moving on and maturing to getting lost in it because there’s some pain that was being.
JEFF: On some level there is a solution that –
JIM: I noticed it in my own recovery. I was smoking as much pot as I did, doing, gravitating towards substances and doing things with my body. I told myself I’d never do, I’m certainly it’s like a 12 year old, I would have never imagined. And it’s amazing to me, my grandmother basically intervene when I was using one substance. I saw her, you know, I said only vision I ever had in my life I think. I saw my grandmother. I was getting ready to snort another line and she looks so sad. Then she’d just whispered, please no. And that was it. I couldn’t do it. And I look back and I think that was my attachment system. I emotional bond with her. That image of her. So we’re leveraging these emotional bonds way to bring people closer and to be in this together and work in these together. Now there’s still personal responsibility for, you know, doing some of your own work and learning.
JEFF: Sure.
JIM: Learning how to good self care may mean, you know, I can’t loan you any more money because you use it to go buy drugs. All of that stuff has value. A lot of times it takes over and it covers everything else up. So an attachment based intervention is about bringing people together and coming in low and slow, as Steven says, coming in low and slow from a place of love and saying, we got together and we’re here to talk to you because we care about you. We’re not here to confront you. Attachment perspective the basic fundamental messages, that we miss you.
JEFF: Yeah.
JIM: That contact with you. They want that connection with you. And we think this drug or this process or this untreated, you know, whatever it is, is getting in the way of that. And we want to join forces with you to fight that and build up our connection.
JEFF: Yeah. And you know, I love what you’re saying there. I’m so much in alignment with that than with what I know about treatment centers and after people get out of treatment centers, it’s like, and I just had breakfast this morning with a guy that owns a treatment center. And, you know, I’m asking questions with him about like, how can the treatment and the interaction that the treatment center has with the family? How can this relational emphasis continue? And it’s really, really hard because, I mean, how I see it is that families were kind of helping in a general way. The family was in the role of trying to help. And then when their loved one goes to treatment, they go kind of in a bystander role and the treatment center is now in the helping role. And so it’s like the family can often feel pushed off to the side and treatment centers oftentimes will suggest: “You don’t want to go back into your family.” You don’t want to do that because for one, there’s a lot of unhealed issues, traumas, and they have no new method of communication to problem solving, work things out and they don’t want to just go back to normal cause if they do that then they go back to the same kind of habitual patterns that surrounded the addiction when it grew. So –
JIM: Right, right. So it’s sort of like a tactical solution or something rather than an overall relationship friendly to attachment and strategy of wholeness. So if we take this deeper, I think part of the problem with that, and it makes sense where it came from, right? For this person running a treatment program. Often families are getting a real relief, oh you’re safe somewhere. You’re not in a crack house or on the street or you’re not out till three in the morning drunk or you’re not high all day, so there’s relief. And the hands off thing is both seems to have its own logic and families don’t want to make things worse and they’ll listen to treatment professionals. That make sense.
JEFF: Hopefully they do.
JIM: And programs often don’t know how do we integrate. I come back, you know, from my professional training goes back to people like Salvador Minuchin and probably Montalvo and Harry Aponte that when they took over running a residential program back in the early 70’s for kids that were having trouble, the inner city kids in New York, and this program was a couple of hours outside of the city in a nice little sort of rural setting. And one of the first things they did when they took over was they’ve got an old school bus so they could gather parents, you know, come to like Penn central station and will take you and come visit, come to our weekend program, come be a part of this.
JEFF: Connect.
JIM: Part to this connect. I love what you doing with your family recovery solutions. You’re connecting people. You use internet stuff. Keep the family whether, you know, one person’s in Singapore going to, you know, work and other persons moved to the east coast and most of the families in Indiana and maybe the person got placed in Utah in a wilderness program. Well let’s all stay on the same page and get updated and sent encouragement, you know, see if the wilderness program can help keep us connected with what this person’s doing and send well wishes to them, right? Instead of they go off to the mystery school addiction treatment, you know, engagement program. And then they come back and they’re supposedly cured. And I think I love what you’re doing. You brought Gabors idea like this brings us up to all of our suffering and all of our pain and all of our joy and meaning and connection.
JEFF: Yeah.
JIM: So that’s it. To answer that question, you know, that fundamental question of how do we heal together? It’s how do we bring out the vulnerability in this that we’re all suffering. If somebody you know out there or yourself is lost in opioids, painkillers or if you’re smoking pot like every day. It’s become like the way of life and you kept family members around you saying you’ve changed and we don’t know you anymore. It seems like your relationship was with that or you’re drinking and, you know, this relationship with alcohol and it’s not good for you and it’s pulling you away from the people you love. Whatever that thing is or gambling, and can be on substance that can affect the brain, right? Where we were getting this dopamine rush to go towards something, we get temporary relief. It becomes like a substitute for human connection, right?
JEFF: Right. Exactly.
JIM: The programs need to understand this, that as people there’s this opportunity whether you’re an outpatient therapist working with families and individuals and couples or intensive outpatient or a detox program, sober living, residential, et cetera. When I cleaned up a bit, my heart starts to come back online. I’m going to start feeling again. Emotions. Sadness and grieve about time lost and regret about pain caused. Shame about what I’d done and what I became when I was lost in this. And joy and the possibilities and fears. Fears about whether I can reconnect with people I care about whether they want to care, connect with me. If we ignore those as therapists and families and treatment providers, it doesn’t mean they go away, they don’t go away. And if I don’t have much history with, I don’t have much experience of being vulnerable and I’m early in recovery and I’m trying and nobody asked me about it. And then when I have a partner that I care about or spouse or partner and I loved them and I say I miss them. And then the programs, you know, you can’t think about them. You have to work on your own program. They’re kind controlling or we think you’re a little mesh with them. You know, you need to get more independent. And we deny these basic emotions and we deny these human connections.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: And what Bowlby was teaching us way back in the day is when it comes to emotional independence. As Sue Johnson says, emotional dependence is neither a weakness or immature, it’s our greatest strength.
JEFF: Right.
JIM: Don’t go from dependent to independent, interdependent. When it comes to these emotional relational needs, go from dependent to dependent to dependent to dependent. It’s what we do with that. Do I [inaudible] do that? Do I find effective ways to be connected that are often require more vulnerability and more sharing, more emotional availability to each other in the family or the relationship. Or do I bury or do I get flooded by these emotions and pouring out over the top. So when programs and therapists and families, imagine that we’ve gotta be really careful around this person the first two months, three months, year, two years of their recovery, and then we’ll do the emotional work. What am I to do with that in recovery? What am I doing with that as a parent or a sibling or something that I want to go talk to my brother or my niece or my cousin or my spouse about how much I had missed them.
So attachment lens, starting with prepping a family for intervention or doing an intervention or early in recovery, it’s a longterm work. We continuously aim for the heart. We’re going to the heart of the matter as we resource people. Sure. We want to teach people about healthy eating and getting good sleep. We want to teach people about mindfulness and want to know well resource and figuring out a way to get a job because, you know, if I can’t work and be productive, I’m more likely to start falling into shame that can relapse. All of those things are invaluable. The attachment lens at the root and foundation, they’re all contained in relationship.
JEFF: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I’m hearing kind of as a theme from you is it’s necessary for everyone to be able to feel a range of emotions and accept those emotions and learn to be comfortable with those emotions so that that takes a fair amount of vulnerability.
JIM: Exactly.
JEFF: And so it’s like, I mean, one of the things that I have seen for a while is that addiction in the family is an opportunity and I frame it as an opportunity for everyone to be able to take a look at their situation through a new lens and make new decisions. And you know, a big part of that new lens is, you know, learning how can I be vulnerable here with emotions that may not have been okay to feel or like –
JIM: Maybe this is a little switched topics for just a moment, we’ve been talking about this attachment and intervention lens, but in more general topic that you’re talking about is the power of vulnerability and the fears that come with emotional vulnerability. And I think this does relay my understanding of it has to do with what was your experience when you were younger, when you’re a teenager, early in adulthood, of what would happen if you felt sadness or joy, you felt pain, loneliness, fear. Could you take these to someone? Could you or did some adult or person in your life come towards you with interest in those emotions and then they were safe as a receiver? They didn’t use that to manipulate you or hurt you or-
JEFF: Right, exactly.
JIM: Yeah. Some people with this field come into therapy and say, yeah, the person that seemed to care most about my sadness, you [inaudible] right? So, that’s not a secure experience either. In a secure emotional relationship experience, what the attachment people will call it a secure attachment bond. I can turn towards you and if you invite that like a child to a parent or caregiver. You’re interested in, you want to know if I’m sad. You want to know if I’m hurt. And even can tolerate it if my pain or sadness or anger or something is directed towards you because you hurt me and that you’re willing to come towards me and encouraged me to share and say: “What’s really going on in here? You look sad. You look lonely. You look scared. You look excited and you hid it from me. What’s going on?” And I want to know the joys too, right? And your longings. And when we don’t have that fostered, so if we go back into the addiction world, if part of how I’ve ended up in this place is no one helped me learn how to deal with these powerful emotions. I haven’t felt safe or I haven’t felt safe for a while in this family or in this marriage or this community. I haven’t been seen and I don’t see you, we’re distant from each other. This is exactly what we’re talking about is how do we foster people going down in and getting in touch with these deeper emotions with the help of, you know, needed with therapists and support, learn to start sharing these in a way where we can hear each other.
JEFF: Right. So addiction in the family being an opportunity for everyone in the family to feel their emotions more. And when they realize or if they realize: “Wow, this is hard. I’m not used to this.” They can reach out for support themselves to a therapist.
JIM: Right. And if we imagine in the treatment field, if we go to a program or maybe you could ask them just thinking about doing an intervention and you’re working with an interventionist or a therapist and where are we going to encourage them to go. Which program in our state or area and then maybe you’ll call and ask, do you honor relationships? Do you honor bonds to work with emotions? Will you help all of us do that? What is your family part of your program look like? Is it primarily psychoeducational? You’re just going to teach us some things about addiction is a very intense for a couple of days, but then we don’t know what to do with it afterwards. What is that going to be? And I think this is important because there’s a whole range of programs out there that have different knowledge base attitudes and acceptance of these important emotions and important relationships in people’s lives that come for treatment.
JEFF: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So Jim, I’m aware of the time here and wanting to wind this down and leave enough time for you to say how people can get ahold of you. But before we go there, I’m wondering if there’s anything else that you want to share. Anything that we haven’t touched on that is poignant right now for you?
JIM: Well, you know, I just sitting here opening, I’ve been clearing up and useful because really who I want to speak to is anyone out there that’s impacted directly through your own relationship to a substance or process that feels like it’s gumming up the works and getting in the way of your wellbeing and your connection with other people. To the people out there, spouses and family members, and loved ones and siblings, and parents, and children, and adult parents. And all these things where people are impacted by the use of someone else and therapists, professionals, don’t be passive about intervening. We do have these tools like the attachment infuse and intervention model. We so have people like Jeff that understand this and care about and honor your bond with your loved one. And if you’re out there using and you’re struggling, you think your family and everyone is given up on you and they don’t really care, they probably do care. They just don’t know what to do. And maybe you take that risk of reaching out to someone yourself and saying: “I’m alone here. I miss my family. I don’t want to be doing this. I need a bridge.” That family member, you can go and contact someone like Jeff or myself and we can work on an intervention. And if you’re a therapist and you hear, you know, an individual talking about their cousin, their brother, their wife, their father is really struggling with addiction. You have to support them in that and help them process that. Put introduced the idea of have you and the family thought about intervening?
There are loving interventions out there that aren’t confrontational that are based in that we care about each other and we want to be accepted and belong and be cared for by family and loved ones that you can utilize. And let’s all maybe just step up our game a little bit in the face of increasing alcoholism rates, the opioid epidemic, the addiction to our damn phones. I mean, come on. How many of us walk around the park with our phone and we are all subject to these things. And let’s work to connect with each other and foster relationships where we can both share the sadness and pain and sorrow as a flight and the joys and the loving and the learning of life in that way that we share much better than we do carrying these things alone. So I hope I said something that’s of use to someone that can help them not just be lost in the darkness or not leave a loved one lost in the darkness. And I’ve personally experienced this in my own recovery and some people in my life, they’re very dear to me over the years who I’ve taken the risk and stepped up and I have sadness about every situation where I didn’t take that risk. So if nothing else to minimize regrets, it’s worth considering reaching out to somebody you care about even if it’s just to write a love letter saying: “I don’t know where you are son or daughter. I don’t know where you are, brother, sister. I don’t know where you are friend, but I want you to know I was thinking about you. And if you want to come home, if you need help, call me.”
They want to get ahold of me. JimThomas.care www.JimThomas.care I’m happy to answer questions and connect and help people get to resources. I’m available. I’m here in Colorado for couples and family therapy and I do interventions. Primarily my focus is on intensives where people are coming from around Canada, the US and in here in Colorado to my Lakewood office. And we work hard for two or three days and get to the heart of the matter. I do that work not just with addictions. I worked with couples that are dealing with affair recovery, couples on the brink of divorce, couples lost in conflictual cycles, patterns, couples that have grown apart, couples dealing with step family issues and sandwich generation and retirement that didn’t work out the way we thought it would have. Like somebody said to me the other day like the foreign legion for struggling relationships. We come here because we had nowhere else to go. And I said, well I’m glad you’re here. So if you’re interested in that, that’s JimThomas.care. And I train and do trainings for therapist. I’m doing a training on shame with a colleague Cindy Wander, March 8th and 9th here. And then October 4th and 5th here in Colorado, I’m doing two day workshop on attachment and addiction and emotionally focused therapy for couples and family therapist, like a masterclass. I’ll be off in Sweden in April. So if you’re in Sweden, Finland or something, you have to be listening to Jeff talk. You want to come to loons, I’ll be there doing three days of training. And one of the days it’s on addiction, one’s on healing childhood wounds in relationship and one’s kind of getting to deeper emotions. So that’s a bit about what I’m doing and –
JEFF: Great.
JIM: – I’m just really grateful for you Jeff, and what you’re doing in your commitment to following your passion and developing resources for people that utilize new technologies and things to help people have a guy, Jeff’s a great guy for a family that’s wanting to navigate the waters of the tricky waters of recovery. So thank you for that and for this podcast.
JEFF: Yeah. Well thank you very much Jim. I appreciate that very much. And it’s JimThomas.care. Thank you.