hello everyone welcome to another show of relax with joan joan kaylor and i'm a licensed professional counselor in peters township before we start on today show i just want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all the utility companies for getting us through the horrible winter that we've had some of you didn't have suffer at all and had your power and internet and v on the whole time and some people who don't even get this broadcast lost their power for two weeks so we have been through heck but i wanted to say thank you to all of the men and women of allegheny power and duquesne light and verizon and comcast for working tirelessly for being up in there in the trees trimming the trees at one o'clock in the morning in freezing temperatures so that we could all get our power back i was one of the lucky ones my family and only lost electricity for two days and only lost phone and internet and cable for three days but it was horrible so i wanted to publicly express my opinion and for anybody else who else out there who was also grateful on their behalf to express our gratitude for all your hard work and i know that this is very unusual but thank you any way for indulging me and letting me say that ok now on to today's show today this is the second edition of the truth about alcohol and drug addiction and my guest paul granger who is an outreach specialist with gateway rehab has graciously agreed to be on the air again with me today to talk more about drug and alcohol addiction so paul thank you once again for your the show i'm thrilled that you could be here and it's great to be back this is such an important topic that we wanted to have two shows to talk about this so the first subject we're going to talk about today is and you sent me a very interesting question that i am interested in learning more about in terms of drug and alcohol dependence addiction which is what are the four stages of denial and how do they get addressed and overcome well i think it's a real important topic you often hear people talk about whatever the problem is it's a mental health problem or drug and alcohol addiction or some other problem that a person has all that person's and denial and it kind of gives the impression that denial is one kind of concept and it's really not there's different levels of denial that are pretty normal the people go through and especially very predictable levels of denial that people go through when they're dealing with a drug and alcohol addiction not just for the addict but oftentimes for the family members themselves and first stages and i was just denying that there's any kind of problem and you know what we often see and it's true for you and me and for everybody you know oftentimes it's really easy to blame external factors on problems that we're having with our finances or problems we're having with our relationships problems at work and so there's a denial that addiction is since we're talking about drugs and alcohol have even anything to do with what's going on second level is recognizing that that's playing into the problem but minimizing so the second level of denial is really minimizing knowing that yeah if i wasn't using drugs if i wasn't drinking so much it would probably help but it's not that bad i can still control it and still ok it's to i just have to be careful about it and then the third level of denial is knowing that it's really causing problems in your life and for a family member coming to understand that this isn't just a phase my family members going through this is a real problem that has this persistent that's been around for awhile it's not going to go away on its own but then there's a denial that there is a solution oh well my son is like this he's going to be like this my husband is like this there's nothing i can do is just you know we're going to have to learn how to deal with it and then once someone gets experience with you know what they've they've been to maybe twelve step meetings they've been into drug and alcohol rehab and then they've had the experience of things going well for a while and then they relapse or they find that it's working for them there's that level of denial knowing that there is a solution but not for me i am the one who there's not a solution for i am the one who's just going to have to deal with this and it's going to ruin my life and going to ruin the life of the person i care about there's no hope and so you can see very easily that you know for family members as well as for people who have an addiction and again this goes through with mental health problems or any type of problem that a person might have but very different stages that the people have when they're coming in and getting help very different stages that a family isn't and just because maybe some of the family is at the point where they recognize the seriousness of the problem doesn't mean that the addict recognizes it and way just because an addict recognizes how serious a problem is the families don't because one of the basic things is people don't want problems you know you know and we especially are scared of problems that are crocked and something that we can't just controlled by just taking a pill make it go away or maybe going to the doctor and getting a shot and having it go away addiction is a chronic progressive fatal illness very treatable but it's that doesn't mean it's easy unlike the point you just mentioned about very treatable because i think oftentimes people think as you're suggesting ok i have this problem but on that fourth stage nothing is going to help me yes yes and that's the toughest part that a lot of people who have been in and out of rehab or who have been clean for a while and then they relapse and they just feel like well i'm that person and it doesn't work for and it's not true i mean i haven't been in this feels long as i have having lived as long as i have and you know people in my family close friends of mine going through through this experience there is always hope you know and what i found very humbling haven't worked as a counselor in this field as long as i have is that people who i absolutely in my opinion could never overcome this they were one of those people have often surprised me and i've been astounded by who has gotten it and who has actually turned their life around in amazing w easy but it's one of those things that you know there is always help for somebody and if you've been through treatment and you know you've relapsed and you're feeling that way and i hear this all the time i've been the treatment i've learned that stuff before  of like anything that really is a lifelong learning process right you're never going to understand completely what you need to do because every page of your life brings new challenges and with every stage of life you have different ways of you know learning how to deal with things and learning how to deal with things in a drug free way is a continual process for somebody who is an addict and limited not excuse me knowledge that i have in drug and alcohol treatment it's an ongoing process just like wellness is an ongoing process so maybe someone might be done with a particular state of the addiction the acute stone perhaps but learning is a lifelong process and i'm older than you are paul so i agree with you that it is a lifelong process and amazing things can happen when a person sticks with treatment absolutely and you know a couple ways that i compared i look at diabetes i think i talked about that last time i was on your show diabetes you don't reach that stage in your life or you no longer have to take care of it right in fact it changes from time to time because your body changes the same thing when it comes to something like addiction you never reach the point where you're done dealing with it because it's a chronic illness it's always there and so you have to deal with that and it's the same thing for anyone who has faith in who finds the going to church every week now is it because you didn't learn enough last week it's because i'm going process and you find as you get older there's always more to learn and you there's always more to connect the dots to see how it's affecting you one of the things we always talk about is that drug and alcohol treatment is not just about learning how not to use drugs that's that's necessary but that's really a symptom of the greater problem that people have who are addicts and this is what people don't understand is that addiction isn't just that physical illness a physical need to have a drug in your body but if it affects a person literally in every other sphere of their life it affects their emotional growth it affects their spiritual growth it affects their ability to be a parent to be an employee  to do everything else that's part of it and so really in getting ahead a little bit talking about the twelve steps you know that's really what the twelve step program ram is about it's not just about learning how not to use drugs is about learning how to live life that's worth living a life that you're grateful to be living because you now have regained those things you've recovered those things that you lost as a result of your addiction it's about the quality of life absolutely and it's about what new thing in my going to learn today and then when i think is really nice is what can i give back to someone else here i am going through my recovery and i have learned this much so far but here's somebody who's brand new what can i do that mentor them what can i do to help them through their recovery process i'm big on giving back absolutely i think that is so helpful this is all so fascinating to me but i do want to move on to another topic here which is not in my backyard how ignorance is literally killing our kids talk to me about that or talk to all of us about well you know it's very interesting i was a star looking over study recently that said that whereas among american families and teenagers the acceptability of tobacco is continuously going down the acceptability of marijuana and alcohol use is more and more acceptable and it kind of it's very interesting when you look at our public policy and how effective anti tobacco campaigns have been over the last twenty twenty five years but in a way it's kind of led to this belief that these other drugs are manageable or somehow don't do the harm that tobacco does and it kind of creates this false sense ability that these are all controlled both things and as long as i teach my kids how to handle this responsibly i don't have to worry about a drug addicts are people who don't have caring family members who go to church or who don't teach their kids the right way to do things we know that's absolutely not true and you know every week we see evidence of this where kids and adults who come from my neighbors you know are coming in because they need help this really can affect anybody and one of the problems that's particularly true in the suburbs is the sense that somehow it's that other school district that has a drug and alcohol problem thank god my kids don't go there or it's in the city were kids have this problem and we know that's absolutely not true we know that the rates of addiction are the same everywhere and in fact we know that they're the only difference is that certain drugs tend to be more popular in different areas and we know that drugs like heroin is pretty much strictly a suburban drug you don't see teenagers in the city who use heroin they're going to sell it but they don't use it and pretty much the adolescents we have com us with her when addictions are exactly the kids coming from families that believe that this could never happen to them saying and so here we are in my backyard ok and when i think about you know even in my generation from the sixty's and how loose everything was fifty years ago or forty years ago with drugs and alcohol and marijuana it's just so sad to me to think that even my generation would absolutely and it's one of those those myths that especially you see an educated homes which is that i can teach my child how to do this in a responsible way you know it's really interesting this study that i just saw recently talked about the fact that in  certain state where they stop funding driver education accident rates actually went down because of the fact that fewer kids were getting their licenses at a younger age and what insurance companies have known for years is that it's not the skill level of a driver that's correlated to accidents it's a huge the older somebody is the more mature their brain is the better decisions they're making even if you have a very skilled sixteen year old he is a much higher risk for accidents than somebody who twenty one and just learned how to drive because of what's going on with the brain and when you apply that same type of thinking the drugs and alcohol and what we know so much about brain chemistry and how putting addictive drugs into someone's brain at a young age has a much greater impact on the receptor sites neural pathways and things like that and how it really sets up a brain to be good but this is a part that our community doesn't understand that it's not an issue so much of teaching somebody how to be responsible it's an issue of are you putting these chemicals in your brain that are affecting them and so there's many well meaning educated parents who do not understand this point and who quite honestly don't believe us when we say this kind of stuff i hope some are listening now and that's what's so great about this cable show is that we can get the information out to the community right so that's why i'm so thrilled to have another thing with the myth of teaching my kid how to use responsibly we know that the kids who have permission of their parents to use in the home are also the kids who are more likely to use outside of the home without parents supervision so there's a direct correlation between i'm giving you permission in my house to break the law which means that you now have permission to break the law i mean very you go and you don't have to tell me about it either ok so hopefully this will raise awareness of parents and the community out there so people will start to think twice about not only what's legal but the implications to the brain and the chemical imbalances that could take place from all this right and once those changes take place these are long term one thing that i think is really interesting too is if somebody experiments with drugs oftentimes their brain chemistry will be so disrupted that then they'll take on panic disorder and anxiety disorder and then they'll end up calling me because they don't know how everything was fine until when i say ok when did this all start well i was experimenting with this drug or i did this or i did that and then all the sudden i had this panic attack and i couldn't figure out why it happened and i'm thinking from that moment their brain chemistry shifted so that now they've come to me to help them relax literally so it's like please don't start in the first place and i think that our community has a long ways to catch up with that that when you're putting addictive drugs into teenagers body you're basically doing a chemistry experiment and it's very sad that is that people don't want to you that way and certainly in history i don't want to do a chemistry experiment with my child's brain yes that is fantastic the other idea that we've discussed is the family dynamics of addiction how one person's problem affects the whole family and i am so with you want bad because you know whether it's addiction or whether it's a mental illness i always say this is a family illness not a one person illness so who else would you like to bring into counseling so we can all talk about this together so talk to us about how this is a family illness it's so important and sad as this is a meeting yesterday with my supervisor sam anderson and he was talking about how we hear statistics like two hundred some people died of heroin overdoses in this last year in pittsburgh and you hear that and maybe that affects you maybe it doesn't but it kind of misses the greater point that it wasn't just that person who died that person has a family that person has people in their lives who are going to be wounded wounded the rest of their lives because of what happened to that person so we tend to that when we focus just on the damage it does to the ad if we don't see that's not just that person whose life was damaged and hurt there are people who are going to live with those wounds the rest of their lives because of this and the damage that is done to people who grow up in a family of addiction or who in a relationship with someone with an addiction if it runs just as important as organizations like alcoholics anonymous or narcotics anonymous which are self help groups for addicts to go and learn from other addicts how to deal with their character flaws how to overcome their impulses and how to live a life that they want anality and serve that same purpose for the families and people who are in relationships with someone with an addict so that they can learn how this person's insanity has made them a little insane what often happens is again not just looking at the levels of the nile but the kind of traits that families take on even though it's not logical family members often feel a lot of guilt feeling that it causes a person to go out and get drunk or use drugs they feel that they can somehow if they find the right formula are going to be able to control it that if i just do this if i just don't do that then this person is not going to go out and have a hard time anymore and they want to find some kind of cure how can i get them to this point so we're not going to have this problem ever again they're all myths you can't control it you didn't cause it you can't cure it but you can learn how to cope with it and oftentimes what families try to do to help out someone their family who has an addiction or has a drug and alcohol problem often feeds into the problem so what is usually the first reaction of a parent to help their child who they suspect might have a drug and alcohol problem often feeds into the problem and so these groups are so important go into counseling with people who understand the family dynamics of how family members are affected by this getting on the net and reading about al anon analogy and going through the very scene how much of these traits apply to me and now what can i do about it how do i get my life back how can i still love this person who is hurting me without becoming obsessed with trying to fix them and i see many families that are going through this grief as to what is what is helpful versus what is codependency exactly my loved one my child or my spouse they have this problem i can't fix it so i have i'm consumed with guilt or on the other end what i'm seeing are some folks that have grown up with parents who have the disease of alcohol alcoholism or drug addiction and they were never able to be present for their child so that a grandparent raise them or they raise themselves or they were in and out of foster homes and then they wonder why do i have this depression why do i have the sayings i be because they never had the stability and the safety and in their home they were never raised with a parent who could be wholly present for them and so then i get that and of it too when someone comes to see me for depression they don't they can't figure out how this can happen and then when i start to the evaluation ask them some questions about their background then these situations come up the family history comes up and we're able to pinpoint how this could have happened in the first place and then i work with someone to help them through for given this and learning to love themselves even if the parent wasn't able to love them even if the parent did not have the skills the parenting skills or the love to be able to give to their child now they were an adult how can they love themselves and how can they take care of themselves and empower themselves so we we walk in the same world so many times but i'm just so glad the gateway rehabilitation is  to folks to let you know that there's many people who can hear what you just said they can relate to that exactly and there's other people who can hear that and say oh that's just touchy feely gobbledygook but you know it's really worth thinking about because there are some people who automatically will turn off talk like that and it's worse for those people to sink why is it that i can't sit with those thoughts why is it that what she's saying is so on accountable for me exactly because if there is an uncomfortable with that uncomfortable  with those kind of thoughts and being able to recognize that a lot of times it points to that there's some kind of problem there when i tell folks if they're not quite ready to come in for counseling i'll give them information over the phone and without trying to be flip about it i'll say well see me now or see me later or see someone now or see someone later but you need to be able to talk with a professional to deal with these feelings because they're not going to go away absolutely not because that's part of what i'm very proud to be a professional counsellor and we are very touchy feely we're not so touchy feely physically explain that part but i help people heal their hearts heal their hearts as well as their minds and that's what counseling is really all about well let's take a look here we've got about five minutes left so maybe in for  web site that you can go to which has many great things it has points on there that you can get to looking at prevention what are some things that parents can do to be on top of understanding what is their child going through how can they do things to provide an environment where a child is not looking to drugs to have to deal with some of the stresses in their life or difficulties in their life the flip side of that is looking at what are some of the signs and symptoms that their child is starting to have some problems will brief nutshell i would ask people to go and look at that there's also many other really good links on there but i think that one of the most important things to keep in mind you know as i talk to families and as i've worked with hundreds of people over the years i have never once heard a parent or a family member say to me you know i wish we'd waited about six months longer before ok this person had gotten in the counseling never heard that oh he's here you know what we knew that there was a problem but it was going to go away three months ago we saw this six months ago we saw this a year ago we saw this and we drag our feet and it's really important for parents to know that find information if you don't know how to find information talk to somebody who knows how to find information use the resources that are in your community use people like you people like us or gateway who can point them in a direction and say here's something that might be able to help you out with learning more about this and to get you to the point where you're ready to take some action i think that one of the most important things to keep in mind too about parents is that there's there's kind of a hope like i said before that stages of denial that we get some  rehab problems can be over and it's a matter of time perspective that's so important to understand that if someone has a drug and alcohol problem this is going to be a long term problem it's not can be resolved in a month we're a year or two years this is going to be a journey person is going to be going on in their life and it's going to have ups and downs so i think it's a very important thing for a parent to understand at the onset if they're dealing with a child right now maybe he's been through treatment now saying i don't see if that was worthwhile he's right back to the things he was before that happens if someone has cancer again you go back and you get more treatment you know you do what you need to do so just to wrap up a little bit there is treatment available for anyone who thinks they might have a problem or already recognizes that they do have a problem or knows of a loved one who has a problem with drugs and alcohol and it is an on going process it's not just a one time thing or a six week program or a two month program this is an ongoing process so one of the things i wanted to do today was thank paul granger again for coming from gateway to in the lighten us to all these different situations thanks so much and also to welcome and brain thank you god and mother nature and everybody else is listening that the to we're tours are getting warmer and the snow is melting and we're all coming alive again so i wish everybody wellness and peace and happy spring happy easter passover and whatever works for you because i am so thrilled that there is sunshine out there today so thank you for watching relax with joan and feel free to contact me or paul granger or gateway rehabilitation if you have any questions about today's show so thanks a lot and bye for