34: Addiction Impacts the Brain (of Families Too) with JW. Wilson
“Don’t worry about trying to get the whole family to do it. You just start.” –JW. Wilson
Living in an ever-so-busy world keeps our toes tied up in our mundane activities. So getting the whole family to support the healing process can be a little bit short of impossible. But we can learn something different from our guest, JW Wilson. As his words above explains, initiative itself is the key. Does he have the claim for this? Absolutely. JW grew up in a family where most of those he eats with at the table are addicted to one thing or another. And the most painful part is when addiction finally claimed their life. So now, he dedicated his life helping others to understand the neurobiology of addiction. Currently, he serves as the Executive director of Advanced Learning Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The most significant attribute of this institute is their research on genes and gene expression that has a direct effect on human behaviour and predisposition to addiction.
Consequently, before we can get to healing, we must first consider what to heal. This subject may sound complex but we need not be apprehensive because our speaker has made it easy for us to understand. Listen in as he explains the connection of the brain and physiological processes, the biological and environmental causes of addiction, the shifting of our meaningful learning to less meaningful obligatory learning leading to addiction, the network of parasympathetic responses and the value of human connections. Most importantly, learn how JW Wilson can help in your journey to recovery.
Highlights:
04:04 The Executive
12:06 Transforming Your Being
24:06 The Moon Network
30:00 The Flip Flop of Your Own Meaning
37:12 The Root of Addiction
Resources:
The Learning Code Institute: https://www.thelearningcode.com
This week’s episode was sponsored by
Change is more than just talk sessions. Rewire your neural networks and reconnect with yourself in #lesstalkmoreaction #neurorecovery with @TFRSolution and JW Wilson. Share on X
Connect With JW
Website: https://www.thelearningcode.com & http://crackingthelearningcode.com/about.html
Email: jwlearnnow@aol.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jw-wilson-a05431b
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIwG6Fkr1idis86aXeH4pWg
Telephone: 720-841-5897
Quotes:
08:37 “…The systems that we’re using in general aren’t powerful enough to get the family unit to transform their dysfunction into function.” -JW Wilson
09:39 “Real transformation occurs through a process, not events. This is how seeds become flowers, caterpillars become butterflies coal becomes diamonds…You go through each stage, and you transform as you pass through the stages.” -JW Wilson
13:16 “If we can lower people’s stress, malleability; change is easier to happen.” -JW Wilson
35:08 “One of the reasons … they got an addiction problem, or drug problem, whatever the problem is, is because they’re trying to satiate what they’re not getting at a real life.” -JW Wilson
42:31 “Don’t worry about trying to get the whole family to do it. You just start.”
43:15 “Your best thinking as a family got you in the message you’re in. I wouldn’t use that thinking to get out of it.” -JW Wilson
Got ideas? Perhaps a future podcast? Schedule time with Jeff here: https://meetme.so/jeffjones
Transcriptions
MILESTONE RANCE 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: So welcome, this is Jeff Jones with Podcast Families Navigating Addiction and Recovery. Today, my guest is JW Wilson. And so, I am really excited about to be a very interesting conversation. JW, he’s a very unique individual. I first heard his name, I was at a Boulder County opioid advisory board and there was an individual who is speaking about his own recovery and mentioned JW’s name. That was like the third time I’d heard his name and I was like: “Oh my gosh! I have to find out who this guy is.” And so, I have connected with JW of the last, I don’t know, six months or something like that. He brings a lot to the table and I will let him introduce himself. But some of the things that I just find so fascinating with him is one, his unique way, kind of a very simple way for family members to understand what’s going on in the brain with addiction. So he has a lot years background with understanding brain science and making that simple. And actually, he’s been writing a book for quite some time and it’s around education and Cracking the Addiction Code. And from my understanding, yeah, he has numerous other books. One is kind of like Cracking the Addiction Code, which is different than Cracking the Learning Code, which is his thing. So welcome JW.
JW: Thanks so much. You know, before I forget, I’ll just do this at the very beginning even before I introduce myself because I’m afraid I’ll forget. What your listeners can do if they want to see the underlying neurobiology in real simple terms of why their family members or themselves are addicted is they can just go to Youtube and just search Cracking the Addiction Code. They can see like about a seven minute thing. They’ll explain kind of the neurobiology of how some people come addicted and why it’s so hard for him to stop.
JEFF: Yeah, great.
JW: Real word quick, I’m the executive director of the Learning Code Institute where we’ve been doing neurological and genetic research on the basis of learning, motivation, and behavior change for about 35 years. And what we’ve done is we initially started looking at the brain kind of unwind the neurochemistry of learning and motivation. And then we started to look at the genetic underpinnings and found that there’s about 7,000 genes that controlled neurological function. And if you really want to create change in people, you need to turn those genes on, because those genes are which express proteins and enzymes, they go into your brain and literally changed the shape of your brain. And what learning is, you’re learning only really happens when you turn those genes on. Those genes express the proteins and enzymes and they build new neural tissue in your brain and then your thoughts, your beliefs, and your behaviors change. And one of the reasons that you don’t remember, or most of us don’t remember hardly anything we memorized in school is because it’s fascinating thing is though the whole every educational system of the world based on memorization. Memorization in general doesn’t turn on enough of these genes to allow us to remember the information very well. So we’ve got kind of an educational system that’s built on a fallacy.
JEFF: So, let me backup a little bit. You said a whole lot there and the essence of it. I’ve talked with you about this before, or you’ve mentioned it before, but that is for any outside change to happen for someone, they need to have change happening inside their brain and –
JW: Yes. Their brain and their body, believe it or not.
JEFF: Right.
JW: Yeah. In other words, when you learn something, the brain, the body really got this idea that they’re separate. Descartes said that “I think therefore I am” and that started off this whole thing that’s brain is separate from the body, but the truth is the brain’s just over millions of years from flatworms, you know, starfish to us. Basically, the brain grew out of the body and so the body is very integrated. When you learn something, your blood pressure changes, your heart rate changes, your eye dilation change.
JEFF: Right.
JW: So the body is very involved in this learning process.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah. So, I want to hear more about this, but JW can you say a little bit more about who you are and so people kind of know what you bring to the table?
JW: Yes.
JEFF: Thank you.
JW: So yeah, we’ve been doing this research for at 35 years. I’ve developed about 25 startups to pay for this. Everything from publishing to television to medicine. And really my history, the reason I kind of involved in addiction is one, I helped develop the country’s only holistic treatment center accredited by the Joint Hospital Commission back in the 90s. And at the time we were rated in the top 10% of all treatment centers like Betty Ford and Hazelden. And really my interest in addiction came from my family, both my mother and father were addicted. They both died from overdoses. My son who about a year and a half ago, he died from an overdose of fentanyl or I didn’t know that the fentanyl is in there. But so, and really though I had a pretty successful business career for about half of it, I was drinking a fifth a day. And my sister was addicted to codeine. She worked in the medical industry. So, I got a really very familiar with not only the addictive process but the pain that addiction causes. Our families, in ourselves and in the addict, everybody’s in pain.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: And really, unfortunately, this is one of the reasons that I really enjoyed speaking with you Jeff, is because most of the systems that we’re using to try to get people to transform, we work with a lot of treatment centers now helping them understand the neurobiology of addiction, but what we’ve found is the systems that we’re using in general aren’t powerful enough to get the family unit to transform their dysfunction into function.
JEFF: So when you mean the systems of treatment or engagement or change –
JW: Yes. Yeah, in other words, you know, we’re pretty trapped into, you know, a model of talk therapy. If I talked to you, you will change. And what we need people to do is go out, you know, give them a little bit of information so they go out in the real world and really use that. And you’ve developed a model that’s very interesting. You know, it’s kind of a river model of how you start into this process and you kind of work your way through it. And with the mistake that we’ve made in learning, motivation, and behavior change and even in psychology is we try to turn transformation into event. You read a book, you go to a seminar, you see your therapist, those are events, but really what you really need is to the brain and all biology and all of nature real transformation occurs through a process, not an event. This is how seeds become flowers. Caterpillars become butterflies. Coal becomes diamond. And so, what we want to do is have someone enter in the family to enter a process of transformation that has an effect on their neurobiology, so their behaviors change. And one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed working with you is because you’re using this kind of journey approach, this process approach, where you go through each stage and you transform as you pass through the stages.
JEFF: Yeah. That’s interesting. Interesting the way you kind of frame that out from the standpoint of we try to have events to encourage transformation, but events alone aren’t doing that. That’s what I’m getting, is that right?
JW: Yeah. I have friends of mine that are in the seminar business that have very powerful people come and speak.
JEFF: Right.
JW: And, you know, people, names you’ve heard of, and everybody gets excited, everybody jumped on their chairs, everybody goes to the back of the room and buy stuff. What these guys know is most of the people that do that, they don’t really change.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: It was an event. Seminar was event. You got excited, you go home and, well think about this, you know, we need more than just words. If words work, 80% of the population or what is it? 75% of the population wouldn’t be overweight because we all know too much food makes too many calories, makes you gain weight.
JEFF: And susceptible to diabetes.
JW: And 70% of us are overweight. So, the words don’t do any good. Something else has to happen. We have to allow our being to enter a process of transformation. And without this process, there’s just a bunch of events strung together that don’t make the impact.
JEFF: So, how would a person let their being open up to a process of transformation? What are like some components that would help that to happen?
JW: Okay, so let’s go back to the neurobiology and let’s look at why is it, what’s really happening that allows you to change? Well, it allows you to change is creating a neurological climate in your head that enhances plasticity or, that’s the kind of the neuroscience term for malleability. What is it that allows you to be able to change the structures in your head? What kind of environment do you need to create? And one of the fascinating things is the higher the stress you’re under, when you’re under stress your adrenal gland goes off a hormone called Cortisol. And when you’re under stress, this cortisol is released into your bloodstream and it goes up towards your brain and sends it signals that literally limits your ability to learn. That’s why testing, you don’t remember, you know, two days after the test, you can’t remember what the heck was on the test. Why? Because you’re under so much stress when you took the test. So what we found two things. One, if we can lower people’s stress, malleability change is easier to happen. And two, so we have to look at the environmental factors, their jobs, their families, or you know, what they’re talking to themselves about, their self talk, those kinds of things.
The second thing is we’ve found that when you are not your thoughts and your emotions, but you become the observer of your thoughts and emotions, then you start to release a neurochemical called Acetylcholine that enhances this ability for the brain to change. So, these kinds of spiritual practices of meditation and even yoga or even just being the observer of your own thoughts can enhance two things. They can enhance the increase of this acetylcholine mindfulness, lower your stress levels and at the same time it engages the most evolved part of your brain, which is the prefrontal cortex where really it’s called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. And, you know, sometimes it sounds like I’m making it more complicated, but I’m really simplified it a lot. It’s where your third eye is when you gauge that part of your brain, you become the observer. This allows you to use the most resourceful part of your brain to figure out what to do next or a lot of times, more importantly, what not to do next.
JEFF: Yeah. So I’m like, can you go back and kind of the acetylcholine like can you say what’s a person’s experience or what’s going to happen when they have more or less of that?
JW: Okay. So let’s say you’ve become the observer. You’re doing meditation. I usually start people on meditation there’s a thing called the insight app that have people go to.
JEFF: Right. I love that.
JW: And just start with three or five minute meditation once or twice a day. But anytime you’re in these meditative states here in the observer state, you’ve engaged the prefrontal, but also here’s the deal with Acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is activated when your parasympathetic, the nervous system that allows you to relax, not engage.
JEFF: Yeah. Okay.
JW: So what happens as you go to sleep at night, your body goes, your other neurotransmitters start to turn off like dopamine, serotonin, they start to turn off while you sleep. And the deeper you go into sleep, there’s more and more acetylcholine until you get into REM sleep. And your REM is way high. And so, during at night and during the day, the more acetylcholine that you have, the more relaxed you are, the more your parasympathetic nervous system is engaged.
JEFF: Right.
JW: Literally the more ability you have to change the relationship between the neurons in your brain.
JEFF: Right.
JW: So your old thoughts and behaviors are made out of fats and proteins. They’re basically the way you think you do, the way you believe, the way you do, the way you act, the way you do is cause your neurological structures are dictating those thoughts and actions. So, the only way to change your thoughts and actions is to change those fats and proteins. And here’s the problem, those fats and proteins are sticky, gooey stuff. They’re kind of the contested of cheddar cheese. It’s gooey, fixed up. So for you to be able to change, you need to kind of put in the right neurochemistry so that cheddar cheese starts to melt. It starts to dissipate. So, now you can import new information. Now it’s kind of metaphorical speaking, but if you can do that and you’re going to the right direction.
JEFF: Right. So then meditation and slowing oneself down kind of thing, the brain will naturally make more acetylcholine,
JW: In other words it’s interconnected. It’s chicken and egg. You can’t have relaxation without enough acetylcholine and without enough acetylcholine you can’t relax.
JEFF: And is acetylcholine something that you can get like at a health food store?
JW: [laughs] It won’t cross the blood brain barrier. So you’ve got it in your body too. You know, you’ve got it and what it does because then your brain and body, but I haven’t ever seen it like you could just take a pill.
JEFF: Right – right. So are there environmental conditions that a person can set up around them that’s going to give a better chance to build more acetylcholine?
JW: Yeah. In other words, here’s another thing. Let’s look at the research and what helps people relax. So, ritual is one thing. You know, a lot of us go to church or a lot of the us used to go to church. Why don’t we go to church? Well, you know, a week, two weeks after the sermon, you can’t remember what the sermon is about. It’s the ritual of going to church that helps you relax. So, we found the more you can ritualize your life, you know, I meditate for five minutes in the morning. I read some spiritual thing for five minutes, believe it or not. But when you’re doing that, you’re starting the day by upping your parasympathetic nervous system and acetylcholine. When we jumped out of bed and start running like crazy. Now your adrenal glands are on hyper and you just run until you drop.
So, if you kind of start with this more aware state of meditating or, you know, in reading some spiritual stuff, you kind of start the day priming your neurochemistry, how to deal with the rest of the day. And then if you end the same way, even if it’s only 10 minutes, five minutes to read it and five minutes of meditation, you’re in recommend guided meditation for it to start with. Then your life is just gets oh, much more ritualized. This is one of the reasons AA and NA are so powerful. You know, you go to your meetings, it’s a ritual of the 12 steps. You know, I’ve got some meetings where I’m at Boulder, I go see my buddies all the time. You know, there are certain rituals that I do that allows my body and my [inaudible] to relax. That’s really important for us all to have.
JEFF: The other thing I’m curious about here JW and that is like human connection. When a person has ample human connection, like I obviously don’t know the answer to this, but I’m wondering like what happens inside their brain? What does that do?
JW: Well, that’s also part of increasing time of this parasympathetic, you know, response, but it also does another thing. Connection with others increases serotonin. Serotonin is a pretty complex chemical. There’s 15 different serotonin receptor sites in your brain and several of them deal with how you feel socially with others, but also how when you have connection to others, some of the research shows that you have more serotonin activity so you feel more content. You know, one reason that people feel good right when they eat their first bit of carbohydrates or sugars is up serotonin, same thing with the first two drinks, but after that it drives serotonin down, especially with alcohol.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: And that’s why with the addict they do it, and a lot of time they’re trying to chase what they felt in those first few drinks that they had, and it doesn’t necessarily work.
JEFF: Yeah. There was a gentleman that I interviewed months ago and he had been in AA for 35 years. And he was kind of going through the big book again and doing his own exploration. And he realized that one of the most powerful things for him was just being in an environment where people were telling the truth and they were open and connecting with one another. And he was putting more value and importance on that 35 years later than he was the actual, you know, content of what’s in 112 steps.
JW: Exactly, yeah. That goes back to your connection thing. So what connection does is this is why we lived in tribes. We used to live in groups of 25 to 50 and we all kind of hung out together.
JEFF: Right.
JW: Right? Now with social media and some of the other things are all in a hurry or always trying to make their monthly payments for their car, their house, their 50 inch TV, all the things we gotta do. Our connections have gotten looser and our levels of depression, anxiety have raised. So what we want to do is, and that’s what another thing AA bring is it’s groups. You start making connection. You just start to know people that have a like thing. You know, I often wonder how the average schmo gets along without having groups to go to like that.
JEFF: I know. I know. I mean –
JW: It’s really a gift.
JEFF: Some people are able to, you know, do natural recovery without group support. And I know that is just a whole lot harder, but some people can do it. So it’s just –
JW: Yeah, well there’s genetic variation. Some of us need some things other than ours. Some of us are natural loners, some of us are more social. But in general we can speak of in general terms that the better your relationships, whether a few or many, the more relaxed and content you’re going to feel because your neurochemistry is allowing you to feel that way.
JEFF: Yeah. So JW one of the things that I want to kind of shift the conversation a little bit to one of the things that I’ve thought about a lot. And I know you bring a very unique perspective too, and that is the whole thing around making meaning and how important that is in the learning process and the addiction process and the recovery process actually. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, making meaning?
JW: This is probably one of the most important things that we discovered at the institute was we have a group of structure called Your Mean Network. And let me go back even a little farther. When you were born, there’s no two neurons in your brain that hookup like anybody else’s brains on the face of the earth. There are 7.5 billion of us on the face of the earth and no two neurons in any two brains are exactly the same. Basically we’re born with a genetic variation that leads to neurological variation. And what this means, this is really a gift that nature has given us or God, however you want to look at it, has given us so that each one of us can see the world through a little different eyes. And let me explain why this is important, when we live in groups of 25-50, somebody had to be born with a neurological structures. They were up in the morning fast running out, looking for the woolly mammoth or something to eat. They had to be up in the morning and gone look in a lot of things at once. We now call those people ADHD and we think what’s wrong with them?
So, there were some of us are a species that had to be like that. The other people had to be kind of like a kind of tactile and introverted and they were the guys that ended up figuring out how to beat/jam two rocks together and you’ve got a spark and you could light a fire. If the first two guys couldn’t find something to eat and put on the fire, then the guy who was spacial dominant, which are your parietal lobe. He could say: “You know, I know where your mapping is. Oh, I remember where we left an old woolly mammoth up on a mountain, you know, six months ago. Let’s go back there and get some, you know, woolly mammoths jerky.” You know, and then somebody had to have some structures that allows them to help the tribe come together. And then, you know, this guy would come and say: “Look, why don’t you, you and you come with me and we’ll go up to the top of that mountain and get it.”
JEFF: Right.
JW: So we have the different structures that allowed the tribe to survive. But really if you look at the human species who are a tribe and the greater the neurological variation, the more opportunity for survival. But here’s the problem, so you’re born with this genetic gift. When you’re a child, you wake up in the morning and all you want to do is stimulate that gift. So, you run around the room or running around your house or your yard and you’re always trying to self stimulate those structures so much so that you really start to talk one and a half or two within about four years. By the time you’re six, you know, somewhere between 25 and 30,000 words. How did you learn so many words? Nobody taught you anything. You didn’t go to class. How would you learn 30,000 words about in four years? Well you learned it because you used the words to get more of what was meaningful to you.
JEFF: It is important to me. Yeah.
JW: Exactly. Meaningful. Yeah. I need, I want, you know, like one son of mine was a musician. And he was always running around beating on pots and pans and playing guitars and everything else. Right? Well here’s the problem, so and the other one was a tactile artist. He was building legos and all of that stuff and doing sculptures and all that stuff. Well now you know your self directing all you’re learning. You’re learning like so fast, but now you’re six, seven years old and we go: “Whoa, wait a minute, Bobby. No more of this self directed learning. No more doing anything that’s meaningful to you. We’re going to lock you in this room for the next 18 years and you’re going to do what’s meaningful to us. And you know what? We’re not even gonna ask you for 18 years what’s meaningful to you. We’re going to tell you what should be meaningful to you and how you’re going to live, what you’re going to do to end up being able to make enough money to eat.”
JEFF: And we’re going to evaluate you and grade you.
JW: All the way through. Yeah. So basically what starts to happen, you get about 20 watts of power through your carotid and vertebral artery that naturally flows to this gift. This gift is represented by an overabundance of neurons in one part of your brain that nobody else has. And what happened was as you were little, you were self satiated, that blood flow is going to that gift and having it grow and have the nourishment it needed, the oxygen and glucose. And that’s where you can learn so many words. Well now all we do is we say: “Okay, no more Amy that blood flow, that energy, that neural energy to your gift. We’re going to shift it to your left temporal lobe or finite math and language are. Very cold, broken [inaidible] morning, for this area. And so we want you to do is just do what we want you to do for the next 18 years and we’re going to shift the blood flow to that part of your brain. You could be able to find that math.”
JEFF: Yeah. When you talk about the next 18 years, I just want to, I mean, you’re talking about a child going to school?
JW: Yeah. Right.
JEFF: Okay. Yeah – yeah. Okay.
JW: So, yeah, you know, however many years it is, but yeah, if they go to college. But what I’m really thinking about is, you know, so now what happens? What do you think happens to your gift, that overabundance of neurons that you’d been satiating? If I redirect the blood flow for 12 to 18 years, what happens is that group of structures dictates what’s meaningful to you. So now, I’m in the education system. Those structures start to atrophy. And then I used to be internally directing on my thoughts, actions, and behaviors to get joy, but now I’ve got to get my joy from external things, the trinsic motivation. You know, I feel good if I get an A, I feel bad if I get an F. Those aren’t my rules. Those are [inaudible]. Those are somebody else’s rules.
JEFF: Right.
JW: So what happens is for a long time, 12-18 years, we get our brain cultured to derive meaning by doing things that make other people happy, not us.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: And we get a little byproduct. We get an A, we feel good, but then we freak out to the next step because we got to get another A to feel good. But we’re really not got the A for us, we’re getting the A for somebody else, so they can tell us how great we are. When you were six years old running around doing all of this self directed learning on what was personally meaningful to you, you were driving your dopamine and norepinephrine, your endorphins, your serotonin, you are driving these neurochemicals of joy through the roof.
JEFF: Right.
JW: Now I put you in the classroom, I tell you, you can’t simulate what’s meaningful to you anymore because it’ll disrupt the system or not fit the system, even if it doesn’t disrupt it. So now you start those structures start to atrophy. So here’s the fascinating thing, so that neurochemistry, you know, serotonin, norepinephrin,endorphins, they are the same neurochemicals that get jacked up by drugs and alcohol. So the less meaning I’m able to self create in my life and self directed my life, the lower my neurochemistry is that gives me joy. So I keep looking for things outside of myself. Well it starts with grades and then it starts with the car I drove around over there, but then when it goes to, if I can’t get it fast enough, how do I jack up that neurochemistry or drugs and alcohol, activate the same neuro chemistry.
JEFF: Are available.
JW: Exactly. And they jack up the same neurochemistry as meaning.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: It can like, you know, the home run or the cool house, for a while it can jack up the neuro chemistry, but it’s all always transitory. You have to keep chasing it when it’s outside of you. When it’s short lived, when it’s extrinsically motivated. When you’re extrinsic motivated, it’s long lived. When you’re intrinsically motivated, you’re motivating yourself.
JEFF: Right – right. Wow. This is, I mean this is fascinating to me. And I appreciate the kind of the natural process that this happens with children and kind of the structure like school that we have set up. There’s a very good chance that, you know, children who are not auditory learners or whose brain isn’t really set up for the classroom, like they are told kind of how they need to make meaning, what they need to do and then they’re graded, they’re judge, they’re evaluated. And if they don’t measure up, like that is the only measurement for am I okay or am I not okay. And then all the internal kind of self talk chatter or, you know, comparative judgment or shaming or something like that, that happens. And this isn’t just about kids, but I mean, kids like when they don’t have that internal meaning making and they have access to drugs and alcohol that can stimulate that chemistry to get it going. And it’s like, that’s fascinating. But there’s also –
JW: [inaudible] have been taught to look outside of themselves.
JEFF: Yeah. I’m just thinking about like climbing the corporate ladder and, you know, the next achievement and stuff like that, or what you were saying, like the next big house, or the next new car, or I need this, or I need that, and you know, like we live in a consumerism society. How convenient, right?
JW: Yeah, that’s right. And so it kind of where you’re going here is the interesting thing. The more I chase external motivation, the more I learned the chase external motivation. It’s a learning process.
JEFF: Right.
JW: So it’s almost like that’s why most of us are running around seeing how many likes we have on Facebook rather than how many likes we have of our own selves and our true being of who we are. And why is that? Because most of us don’t know who we are because we entered a system very young that never helps us discover that.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: So really what we’re helping, you know, addiction centers do is help people uncover what is most meaningful to them at this moment in their life.
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: Because when you really start looking at the neurochemistry of addiction when you really recognize it? You asked a lot of addicts what’s meaningful to them. And it’s hard, you know, because they don’t know that’s why they were, one of the reasons, I mean it’s multiple, but one of the reasons they, you know, we’ve got an addiction problem or a drug problem, whatever the problem is because they’re trying to self satiate what they’re not getting out a real life.
JEFF: Yeah. Well, so I want to like what you’ve been talking about here, I want to kind of slip it around a little bit and look at it for through the context of family members watching a loved one who is struggling with addiction. And what I’m hearing is it’s kind of like a natural product, like their loved one means a lot to them. They do not want to see them further go into pain or self destruction. And so, I’m kind of like thinking about it from that context as well on how family members can best shift and divert, you know, their focus and still stay engaged.
JW: Yeah. So here’s another one of, let’s go back kind of the system, you know, I’m a big believer at a guy at MIT called Peter Senge, done a lot of research into systems thinking. And so let’s look at the family system, right? So, what we tend to do is the father or the mother, let’s say it’s the child that’s dealing with the addiction in this interest. So let me ask you a question Jeff, are most of the families you’re dealing with is the children that have the addiction problem?
JEFF: No.
JW: Or not?
JEFF: Not what I see. I mean, if I were to be like located in a school or have a lot of school connections, that’s what I would see. But I see kind of across the board.
JW: Okay. So what happens is you’ve got an outlier in the family that’s not behaving the way everybody else in the family is, right?
JEFF: Yeah.
JW: First of all, what we need to do is look at why. Well, there’s two ways you could become addicted. You can be born with some variation of what’s called the D2 receptor site, the dopamine of receptor site. There’s five dopamine receptor sites, but you can be born with a variation of one. They’re really after several drinks, or a few drinks, or maybe a lot of drinks, this variation of the gene turns on and you become an addict. It’s genetically implanted. Then you have other people that because of low meaning, high stress, or other things, they use alcohol in excess to deal with their life. They get a little more joy. They get a little more relaxation. But because if they overuse, then we’d go back to that cheddar cheese analogy. They then build up these structures that they really need to continue to drink, to feel alive and so there’s the environmental factor that drives you. Even this environmental factor can eventually turn on genes called epigenetics that have them act as if you were born with the variant of the gene. But what happened is whether through genetic you are born with a malfunction of the gene or a function of the gene that doesn’t serve you. And then, or if you do it through environmental uses, either way you become an addict. The question is, or the problem that you see all the time is this, is like throwing a grenade in a family unit, so the family members don’t have or don’t perceive they have. And you’ve seen this I’m sure, don’t perceive they have a drug or an alcohol problem. Can’t understand why Joey or Alice or whoever’s using the father can’t just stop. Why can’t mom just stop? Or why can’t my son just stop? I can.
JEFF: Right.
JW: Why isn’t he use willpower? So because, yeah, and the reason I did that video on Youtube Cracking the Addiction Code was because this really helps people get, oh, I see what’s going on with my son or my father or my mother or whatever.
JEFF: Right.
JW: And so it really helps the level of understanding and compassion we can have. So, but what happens is when this outlier isn’t performing the way the family union wants him to behave or and then everything that the family. And if it’s, you know, the son tries to get the father to change, I mean, that was in my family, that was the big thing I tried to do, which did work or the parents tried to get the kid to change and you know how hard that is.
JEFF: Right.
JW: There really a lot of the times, the ways that we are trying to get people to change exacerbate the problem and caused the addict to want to even drink and use more. Why? Because we were raising their stress hormones, because they don’t really feel seen. They don’t really feel connected. They feel ostracized and they feel like they’re letting everybody down. And so what do you feel when you feel like a turd? You feel like drinking.
JEFF: Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that I’m thinking as I’m listening to you JW, is that for family members, for them to be able to calm their own nervous system and create an environment of calm around their loved one who’s struggling with addiction, that just calm environment can make a change.
JW: You’re just sitting there and that’s why, why am I spacing? You know, the people that are helping addicts. What are the program people go to, I don’t know why I’m spacing the name of it.
JEFF: Oh, Al-Anon.
JW: Al-Anon. That’s why Al-Anon for some people work so wonderfully.
JEFF: Right.
JW: Because just by going to Al-Anon they started enhanced their own neuroplasticity. They’re relaxing their stress hormones. They’re increasing their acetylcholine, and if they add to it the same thing we talked about before, the meditation, that ritual, the spiritual reading, then they become more up shifted. We call that up shift, when the blood flow shift from the lower structures, who would stress drives it. But the upper structures, when you are up shift, then you become more resourceful, more calm around the crazy train that your family might have turned into.
JEFF: Sure.
JW: When that happened, here’s another fascinating thing. When one of us starts to do that even if everybody else doesn’t, have you ever taken a tuning fork and you bang it and put it next to another tuning fork? Did you notice what happens?
JEFF: The other one vibrates as well?
JW: Yes, exactly. So really what you’re atoms are just a bunch of vibrations. You’re made up of these atoms. You know, when you hang around depressed people, you feel depressed. You hang around happy people, you feel happy. Now there’s some neuro biology here, but there’s also this kind of at a quantum level. Don’t worry about trying to get the whole family to do it. You just start and then you’re like the tuning fork of the family.
JEFF: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. You know JW, this has been a fascinating conversation and I have, you know, a sense that we could just go on and on and on kind of thing. I’m wondering like before we bring this to a close, is there any, you know, takeaways or lessons learned, anything that you wanted to communicate directly to family members before we close.
JW: Well yeah. First of all, your best thinking as a family got you in the mess that your in. I wouldn’t use that thinking to get out of it. In other words, and this is what we do, I’ll try harder, I’ll be tougher. You know, we come up with these ideas that works in other, this addiction realm is not like, you know, having a winning football team or having a company that makes money or being a great writer or it’s not putting necessarily putting your nose to the grindstone kind of thing. This is kind of very kind of an area that you need expertise to guide you through. The most important thing that I can have people get is a mentor. Somebody like in your world that is a mentor. And somebody that also has a process of transformation like you’ve got this river model you use of how people can transform.
So there’s things that I would look for out there. I would look at going to Al-Anon. It may not work for you. Some people love it, other people can’t deal with it, but you can always find a meeting. You know, if you go to one and don’t like it, then go to another one, but find community that is also dealing with the same thing you’re dealing with. I work with a lot of people in NAMI that for people that deal with mental disorders. And boy, their life is so much better when they get around other people that have people in their family with mental disorders. They can share. They’ve got community. It’s those kinds of things.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah – yeah.
JW: I guess the most important thing I could say in this, and the truth is that I don’t even know if people are listening to this that aren’t trying to go it alone, but I would not enter this field alone. It is fraught with pitfalls. It’s like learning to fly an airplane, running a family with an addict in it. And you can’t teach yourself how to drive, most of us can’t teach ourself how to drive a 747. So, I would get a mentor as quickly as possible that understands, you know, this process and has been successful at helping other people build their family environment.
JEFF: Yeah. So I think of the Albert Einstein quote, “you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that was used when it was created”, some like that. And so yeah, that’s really nice. And so, you know, one thing that I want to ask is how can people get ahold of you? I know you have that video Cracking the Addiction Code by, you know.
JW: Well, the truth is I’m pretty, I’m launching something to 50 million teachers and we have new 20 verticals coming and I will have online programs for people that are dealing with addiction and other things in the future. But right now, I mean, I’m not really helping onesy, twosy people but for addiction centers, I’m always interested in helping them leverage what they’re doing with some of the neurobiology. So, you know, you can go to our website, crackingthelearningcode.com and you can message me there or go on to Linkedin to JW Wilson and then in Boulder, Colorado. And you can message me there also.
JEFF: Great.
JW: And I’d be glad, you can go to our website. Our website into this is deals mainly with education at the moment, but we’re changing all that. And so I’ve got myself locked away in North Carolina at the moment. I hope another hurricane doesn’t come, I’m fine. [laughs]
JEFF: Well JW, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
JW: Thanks, Jeff.