Akiva Perlman

so akiva thank you so much and welcome to the show i think it's a great honor to be here thank you for having me so can you help us define what an addiction is so that people have a better understanding of it okay thank you for that question i feel like any time i have the opportunity to share the lived experience of the people i work with to give them a voice in the world because generally speaking their voice is very silent most addicts live a very silent disconnected disenfranchised life so just an opportunity to share a little bit of their story if it's okay i want to share a meeting i had yesterday with a dear client of mine who obviously is caught up in a myriad of addictions suffering a great deal but just to understand his story where he was speaking about the first time he used a drug um and i asked him tell me a little bit about that experience what was it like and and most often we expect to hear you know i was high i was excited it was something new i felt euphoric but when you speak to addicts about their lived experience almost always what they're going to share is what it felt to them in their heart not so much in their body not a physiological or chemical reaction and his answer was when i first used it i felt as though the world was hugging me it was embracing me i felt whole i felt loved i felt lovable and i think if we start looking at addiction through that particular lens we start really to begin to understand what these people are going through there's a wonderful researcher named gabor mate who has a practice out in canada and he says you can't understand an addiction until you start asking the question what benefit does does this person derive from having such an addiction um so looking at it from the other point of view how what are they benefiting from an addiction what are they benefiting from such you know behavior that most of us look at through an appalling lens and for this particular client what he was sharing with me was i am not whole i don't have love in my life i don't have care in my life i don't feel okay as a human being and this experience this drug or this behavior for whatever it is for whatever the reason it gave me a feeling of now i'm whole and now i'm okay and now i'm acceptable and then people get stuck in that so addiction is almost like a replacement of what in theory should be healthy in one's life and they're replacing you with some really harmful maladaptive behavior but for the same goal as anybody else they're trying to feel okay sorry then please that that's it's tremendously old to see it from that lens so i guess the people that are more likely are there people more likely to fall into these behaviors is there something that um we can look at and see individuals that are are more or less prone to this 100 i think the more what i've never worked with an addict or even met an addict who didn't suffer a tremendous amount in their life i've never encountered such a person you know sometimes we read these articles about here's a person that lived a great life everything was okay and they stumbled upon a drug and then life just got out of control um i don't buy those stories my whole experience of my work discourages such stories addiction makes sense when you start paying attention it really really makes sense and it's the antidote to a problem so the greater the pain that a person lives with there's a study i think you'd enjoy this study you might be familiar with it it's called the ace study it's been run hundreds of times over many years it's called the adverse childhood experience study and what they basically did is they asked 10 simple questions yes or no questions and you're left with a score at the end they asked did you were your parents divorced um did you experience anything that was uh harmful did you see people hitting each other um were you raised in a home where there's an addiction or alcoholism and at the end however many yeses you said that's the score that you get and what they've been able to do is that that if people have a score of four and above which means they've experienced four significant uh painful events in their life that those people are hundreds times more likely than the average individual who didn't score that high to develop an addiction to develop depression to really experience some hardships in their lives so the to answer your question the more pain a person lives with in their heart and the more loss of self that they ultimately have the more likely they are to go out looking for things that would provide them with some comfort so we could we could define pain however we'd like but the people who tend to find their way into this world are people who are suffering a tremendous amount for a variety of reasons it could be divorce it could be a learning disability it could be poor self-esteem but but most people who use drugs and then just move on with their lives are generally intact individuals people that we're speaking about are just not it's interesting that as you're saying it i it's dawning on me that the greatest thing that we can give some of these individuals is the love from everybody and it almost feels like they're stuck in that the the potential shame and the silence of it keeps them feeling apart when the community around them and the people around them may maybe part of the solution and the embracement of those around maybe part of the solution a hundred percent yeah when you go if you i don't know if you've ever had a chance to witness like a 12-step meeting but one of the things you'll notice about them which i find to be of the most healing aspects is that they're all holding each other at the end of the meeting they gather around in a circle they hold hands or embrace and they recite together the serenity prayer which is a prayer of hope and and connection and that to me is the healing i once asked one of these guys i said why is there so much like hugging why is there so much embrace that takes place in this room and he said we're making up for lost time wow we just didn't have it in our lives and that is the solution and unfortunately usually we go the other direction i'm not sure if you're familiar with the show intervention where people who are real addicts so they they bring in a specialist who creates an intervention and basically take everyone who this addict loves in their lives or feels loved by and they get that together in a room and they say well if you don't shape up then we're cutting ties with you we're gonna withdraw love from you and it is the exact opposite of what an addict needs an addict needs that sense of we're here with you because they don't feel lovable inherently i've never met an addict who feels like i'm a lovable person um they hate themselves more than we could possibly be disappointed in their behavior what an incredible thing yeah it's an incredible thing so so take me through if you can when it turns right it feels very much that a person could say to himself i got this score or i had this background or i am in this place um and so really i'm a foregone you know conclusion and and but yet you know i was commenting you know the day how some of the greatest people i've ever met really are people that have recovered from something they there's something about them that are that's so a not only powerful but very much aligned with judaism like very much the idea of renewal the idea of there's always hope so but what if you can share what triggers if you will in the mind of someone who is suffering from an addiction that allows them the strength now to not only they're not they're not even like resisting from the addiction now they have to overcome this now so now they have to really work harder if you will than when they first fell into it so what what's that moment what what's that that understanding ah it's a beautiful moment i wish i could uh just bring you into my office as that moment unfolds but we lose sight of the fact that every one of us like we're all kissed by god we all have a soul that is like fully connected to this divine beauty um and addicts completely have lost sight of that it doesn't exist within them and that moment that you're speaking about is a moment when they encounter their humanity where they realize that there is something in me that hasn't been nurtured there is something in me that had i haven't been able to see i never had this client this is generally not the case but he came in and i said like what brought you here i happen to have seen him the other night it was just so wonderful to just give him a hug i haven't seen him in a few years i said like really what brought you in and because usually most addicts are coming in because they're they got caught or they're in trouble or spouse said enough is enough and you have no choice but to go to therapy and he said like i've been in a binge for the last three years um which means he's just been high basically the entire time he hasn't like landed at any particular point and he said just this morning i looked in the mirror and which i haven't done in around three years and most addicts cannot look in a mirror and most people who are in pain can't look in the mirror but he said i looked in the mirror and i i couldn't recall what the pain was anymore i couldn't recall like what i was running from i was just sort of caught up in this cycle um and in that moment he realized like that there is something in me that i don't even know what it is i don't even i've lost sight of myself i've lost sight of my ability to connect and i'm here to rediscover that again um and that's the journey looks like ultimately it's like you're bringing a person back to who to who they already are because we're all beautiful and we all have hashem in inside of us we all have godliness inside of us so we're just trying to remind a person that hey by the way you've lost sight of this but i haven't i still believe in you i still know that there's something beautiful inside of you last question i thank you so much for your time um for the families around those that are suffering that feel helpless that don't have backgrounds like yours and other professionals that that really are in many cases could be completely overwhelmed by what's in front of them what would you recommend that they do um when they're there's someone in their lives that are suffering from an addiction right well i think our natural tendency the good news is today with certainly within our the jewish community at large um and the world like we've become a lot more comfortable with it with suffering we've become a lot more familiar with what it looks like so there's a lot of help and and don't avoid getting help there's many beautiful organizations amudin does beautiful work in this area relief does beautiful work in this area so reach out to the people that could give you that support but if you could for yourselves hold on to the fact that there's a person inside this individual who's suffering that you've sort of lost sight of and they've lost sight of um if you could hold on to the idea that there's something that's beautiful that i need to hold on to an encounter it just gives us some hope and we we're generally drawn in the other direction you know we're moving away from that and we're moving more towards resentment and disappointment and the more we could remind that individual that they have some some inherent beauty the the more likely they are to come back to that place people addicts need a place to return to uh and what unfortunately happens all the time is that because all the chaos they've created then all the people that in theory they would have been able to return to have moved away um and then they slowly begin to get healthy and there's no there's no home to return to wow so we need to maintain a sense of home maintain a sense of love so that way when they do come around with the right help with god's help then they'll they'll have a place to come that's loving and caring amazing doctor thank you so much for being with us thank you for what you do for for our community and for the world at large and for shining your light on this world thank you it's a great honor thank you for the opportunity thanks so much for watching for more content like and subscribe and be sure to tune in live every thursday at 8 pm eastern at the shabacho.com or right here on youtube